The Child Thief 3: Thin Lines Page 12

  She gave me a grim smile, jumped to her feet, and turned to face back toward the cottage.

  “Where are the others?” she whispered.

  I shook my head, listening closely. I couldn’t hear anyone shooting anymore, but that didn’t mean anything. Or rather, it could have meant anything. Maybe Jace, Ant, and Kory had managed to kill the Authority agents who had been shooting at us, but surely they couldn’t have killed all of them. Maybe the Authority agents hadn’t realized we’d have guns, and decided to regroup at the front of the cabin to figure out how to handle us. Maybe they were bringing in something bigger.

  Maybe Jace, Ant, and Kory had been captured. Maybe they’d been shot. Maybe the agents were already on our trail and were right on the other side of the tree.

  I swung wide and checked the other side of the tree, just to be sure, and then retreated to where my friends were standing—and nearly screamed when I found the three men I’d just been thinking of standing there, hands resting on their knees.

  “Shot three of them,” Jace huffed. “The other two ran back toward the front of the cabin. No idea if there are more in the woods, but we didn’t see them. Either way, we gotta go.”

  He took a deep breath and threw his backpack at Abe, then scooped up the duffel bags he’d dropped, turned, and started sprinting away from the cabin.

  I dashed after him, adrenaline pumping through my veins and my heart pounding in my ears.

  “Where do we go?” he huffed. “Where else can we find cover?”

  I shook my head, drawing a complete blank as I tried to think of where else we could get to in this forest—quickly, before the Authority agents were able to regroup and follow us.

  I knew that my cabin was the only structure for miles around here. It was one of the reasons I’d rented it, for heaven’s sake. I had no idea why the owner had built it out in the middle of nowhere, and I’d never bothered to ask, but I’d hiked through these woods enough to know that it was indeed all by itself.

  Which meant that there was nowhere else for us to take cover. When it came to places to hide, we only had the trees to count on.

  At that moment, Ant and Abe both pulled even with us, carrying two boxes each and somehow managing to make it look easy, courtesy of their long arms and torsos. They must have grabbed the boxes Jackie, Nelson, and I had dropped, I thought vaguely, because they certainly hadn’t gone back into the house to get them. Abe was also wearing Jace’s backpack.

  “What’s the plan, guys?” Ant huffed, glancing at us out of the corner of his eye as he kept his face straight ahead, eyes scanning the forest. “Do we have a plan? Please tell me we have a plan.”

  “You mean we didn’t come in here with a plan B?” Abe replied from our other side. “You guys haven’t, I don’t know, taken this into consideration or something?”

  “Believe it or not, Abe, we kind of spent the entire last three days figuring out how to get you guys out of the mess you were in, not thinking about what was going to come afterward,” Jace answered curtly. “That’s why we spent all morning looking for Alexy and Zion in the hopes that they had.” He vaulted over a branch that had fallen across the path we were on, landed with a thump, and kept running. “Robin?” he asked again. “Thoughts on shelter around here?”

  I opened my mouth to answer, noticing with relief that Jackie, Kory, and Nelson had surrounded us as well at that point, but snapped it quickly shut at the sound of more gunshots from behind us. And bullets whizzing through the leaves around us.

  “Oh my God, they’re shooting at us again,” Jackie snapped. “Of course they’re shooting at us. Why the hell are they always shooting?” She ducked down and started running lower to the ground, and Nelson, running next to her, mimicked the movement.

  “They’re shooting because they don’t care whether we live or die, and I suspect they’d prefer that we just die so we stop being such pains in their asses,” Ant replied, starting to duck and weave as he ran, as if that was going to make the soldiers behind us miss.

  I didn’t think it was going to matter. The bullets were coming harder and faster now, and I could hear the shouts of the agents behind us. Not that far behind us.

  “Stop, or we’ll shoot!” one screamed.

  “You’re already shooting, jerk!” Jackie shouted back.

  “We’ve got orders to take you in!” another shouted.

  Ant snorted, then ducked around a tree and came veering back toward us. “Do they also have orders to state the obvious? Do they think we don’t know?”

  A bullet hit the tree we were passing, and the bark exploded around us, leaving us rushing through a cloud of tree pieces.

  We reached a large clearing, then, and though it made us easier targets, it also gave us more space to run. Almost immediately, the pace picked up and we were flying over the grass, running faster than I could have imagined possible. Even Jackie, who was so much smaller than everyone else, was keeping up, and ahead of us the forest grew thicker, the underbrush denser than it had been in the trees around my cabin. More places to hide, I thought, relief washing through me. Less visibility for the agents with their guns.

  We were going to make it. I had no idea where we were going, but if we made it into that part of the forest—

  A roar of sound broke the momentary silence as the soldiers hit the clearing and started shooting more frequently, and a split second later, Jace suddenly disappeared from beside me and I was sent flying through the air.

  15

  I hit the ground with a resounding thud that drove every thought from my brain. I tried my best to roll through it to lessen the shock, then turned on my side and dragged in a lungful of air.

  I didn’t know what had happened, but it had been bad. We’d been running, and then the ground beneath me had suddenly exploded. What was that? What had happened?

  My panicked thoughts stopped short when I heard someone crying out hoarsely, and I shot to my feet with horror at the sound. Looking up, I realized it was Ant. He’d been tossed to the ground as well, but now he was back on his feet and sprinting toward the tree line.

  He never even paused to notice that I was on the ground, hidden within the grass. I couldn’t blame him—not really. I had ears attached to my head, and I could hear exactly what I assumed he’d seen.

  The Authority soldiers were gaining quickly, given how close their shouts had become. They sounded like they were more rabid now that they’d taken some of us down. They were screaming at this point, their voices even stronger and more demanding than they had been.

  “Get on your knees!” one hollered. “Hands on your head! Drop your weapons, or we’ll shoot!”

  Shoot at us. My brain came slamming right back into my body at that, and I whirled around, my head on a swivel as I tried to figure out where Jace had gone. I’d been so concerned about my own body at first that I’d forgotten about the man who’d been running right next to me. God. He must have been shot, it was the only possible answer, but where was he? Where had he fallen?

  The grass around me looked as if it would reach my knees, maybe even a bit higher, and was a stunningly beautiful green, but it also hid any bodies that might have been lying in it. I couldn’t find him to save my life, and now that everyone else had carried right along to the next stand of trees, I was suddenly completely isolated.

  Completely, utterly alone. With Authority soldiers heading right for me, hollering their heads off and ready to shoot anything that moved.

  I was done for.

  I closed my eyes while I tried to figure out whether my leg, which suddenly felt much worse from the fall, would respond to me asking it to run. Maybe the agents who were after us would run right by, completely ignorant of my presence. Maybe—

  I didn’t have time to finish that last thought because I was yanked up from the grass and thrown over someone’s shoulder. I found myself staring at the world upside-down, stuffed between two duffel bags, watching the grass I’d just been sitting in rush right past my he
ad.

  I started to panic anew, but then I realized that I recognized the pants that were now one of the only things I could see.

  “Jace!” I gasped, too relieved to see him to worry too much about what had happened or how he was somehow, magically, back in the picture.

  “No time!” he huffed. “Keep your mouth shut and try to think light thoughts, Robin. We’re going to have to see if we can hide from those guys behind us, because I don’t think any of us are going to be able to outrun them for much longer.”

  I closed my mouth quickly and tried very hard to turn my brain off and let Jace do the running—and the thinking—for us.

  Once we were in the woods again, we kept running forward, all of us silently agreeing that we definitely weren’t in the clear yet. I propped myself up against Jace’s back and stared at the Authority agents slowing at the tree line—but not looking like they were planning to stop. They were trying to decide on their route, but they were going to end up coming in after us.

  “What’s happening back there?” Jace asked, feeling me squirming.

  “They’ve paused at the start of the trees, like they’re regrouping,” I said.

  “Okay,” he replied. Then he raised his voice just a bit. “Guys, we have to find someplace to hide.” He cast his voice toward the rest of the team, who I assumed were just in front of us.

  “There’s a pretty tightly packed group of trees ahead and to the right, with lots of underbrush,” Abe’s voice said from ahead of us. “If we get in there and cover our tracks, it might give us a chance to catch our breath, at least.”

  “That works,” Jace returned. “Lead the way.”

  We turned sharply to the right, and within moments I was trying to hide my face between Jace’s duffel bags to escape the whip of bushes and leaves rushing past me. I’d just found the ideal position to do so when we came to a sudden stop.

  Jace pulled me up over his shoulder and set me on the ground, and though I wobbled a bit when he let go, I managed to keep my balance and look around me. We were in deep, deep cover, the canopy above us so full that almost no sunlight filtered in, and I couldn’t see back to where I thought the Authority agents were.

  I hoped that lack of visibility went both ways, because I could hear them as they stomped through the forest, talking quietly among themselves.

  They were also getting closer to where we were hiding. I didn’t think they realized we were there, but I also knew that we hadn’t been careful enough with how we got into the trees. We had almost certainly broken branches and plants as we ran in this direction, leaving a trail a mile wide for those soldiers to follow.

  Which would lead them directly to us.

  I held my breath and stared at my friends, seeing them come to the exact same conclusion.

  Then a snap sounded out from several feet to my left, and I jumped and turned, then grew abruptly still, trying to take back any gasp or sound I might have made. If the Authority soldiers had already gotten that close to us, we were in big trouble. We wouldn’t have time to get away if they found us—not when they had more guns than we did.

  But when a head poked through the underbrush, startling me so I nearly screamed, it was, to my utmost shock, not human at all. It was canine.

  It was a wolf. One that I recognized immediately. I’d spent a lot of time feeding this particular wolf any of the Nurmeal I had left over, when he and his friends came around.

  I gave a hoarse laugh, relieved, and went toward him. I heard a choked sound behind me and turned to see my friends looking at me like I was completely crazy. I grinned at them and tried to figure out how to indicate through signs only that this wolf was my friend, and when I turned back around, I was stunned to see that the entire pack had somehow melted out of the shadows and surrounded us.

  Ant took a deep, panicked breath and started backing up quickly, only to run into the wolf that had come up behind him. He came to an abrupt halt and stared at me, his eyes bugging.

  Another sharp spurt of muttering from the Agency soldiers in the forest, about ten feet away from us now. At my sudden movement the wolves grew tense as well, and whirled—as one, in the way that only wild animals seemed to be capable of—and dashed into the forest. Away from the Authority agents.

  They started running, weaving through the trees as quickly and silently as shadows, and I realized that they would do everything they could to avoid the agents, whom they must have mistaken for hunters, due to the guns. And within a split second, I knew exactly what we were going to do.

  “I think we’ve got some direction, at least for the moment,” I hissed at my team. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “Where are we going?” Jace asked, already striding toward me to take my hand.

  I grasped it gladly, thankful for the support, and shook my head. “I don’t think it matters, for now,” I replied. “The wolves are running from the soldiers, and that’s exactly what we need to do. They know this forest better than anyone, even me. Our best shot at safety is to follow them to wherever they’re going.”

  Everyone gaped at me, except Jace and Kory, who turned without a word, understanding my logic immediately. The rest were forced to follow as we raced into the forest, after the wolves and away from the Authority soldiers, who were still bellowing for us to give ourselves up.

  16

  We rushed after the wolves, my body tucked as tight against Jace’s as I could manage without our legs getting tangled, my eyes dead ahead, on the forest. The wolves clearly knew where they were going, but they weren’t exactly intent on waiting for us.

  That said, they quickly fell into a single-file line, as I’d seen them do in the past, which meant they were at least moving more slowly now as they wove between the trees.

  Jace dropped my hand and pulled ahead of me to take the lead, and the rest of our group silently fell into single file as well, mimicking the wolves running in front of us. We all stayed deadly silent, hyper aware that there were Authority agents behind us. They might not have known which way we went, but all it would take was one wrong move or too-abrupt step on a branch to alert them.

  Which was the one thing we absolutely couldn’t afford. Several of us were operating at less than full power by this point, and I still hadn’t had a chance to ask Jace what had happened to him back there in that meadow. He seemed to be moving well enough, but we’d both been thrown into the air by something, and I wasn’t stupid enough to think he’d come through it without any damage. Some of us were also carrying extra weight, thanks to the boxes and bags we had brought. Nelson, I suspected, was holding her own, but she’d been weakened by her time in the prison, and I didn’t know how much farther she could go.

  I didn’t know how much farther any of us could go.

  We needed shelter. Now.

  I could only pray that the wolves would somehow lead us to a safer area of the forest. An area where the Authority wouldn’t think to look.

  Ahead of me, I noticed the wolves starting to increase their pace, and the trees growing thicker and taller as we went. I realized then that we’d entered some sort of large gorge situation. We seemed to be running down a path that led us between large, sheer rock walls, and although the walls were twenty feet to the left and twenty feet to the right at this point, they were getting closer together. Which meant, I feared, that we were running toward a dead end. This was also an older part of the forest—a part I’d never ventured into—and the underbrush was thinning out with the increased tree population. Not as much light for things to grow down here, I thought. At least it made running easier.

  “If they speed up any more, we won’t be able to keep up with them,” Jace huffed from beside me, and I gulped, realizing he was right.

  The wolves were better equipped for running than we were, and they weren’t going to slow down to allow the two-legged beings behind them to catch up.

  Behind us, I could still hear the shouts of the agents from the Authority, though they seemed to be calli
ng instructions to each other now, rather than trying to talk us into doing anything cooperative. Maybe they were working on another trap, or maybe they’d somehow seen the wolves and decided that caution was better than rushing right in. Whatever the case, they seemed to be a bit farther behind us than they had been.

  But we couldn’t count on that lasting.

  “What are we doing?” Kory asked, appearing on Jace’s right side, his arms loaded with boxes. “We can’t just keep running! What’s the plan?!”

  “No plan but to follow the wolves,” Jace replied between pants. “They’re running from the same thing we are. If we’re lucky, they’ll know a way through the forest that the agents behind us don’t… Perhaps a way those men won’t be able to find on their own.”

  Kory grew quiet at that, and I cast a glance at his face as he considered it, compared it to his background experience, and then nodded.

  “Solid reasoning,” he confirmed. “I’ve known enough wolves in my time to know they’ll head for safety. It might work, but only if we can manage whatever path they’re about to take.”

  Jace grimaced. “Either we manage it, or we fall prey to the Authority.”

  My chest grew tighter. If only I’d tried following the animals before, so I knew what to expect! But we were far outside of my realm of experience now. I had known there were hills—or mountains, depending on how you wanted to label them—within this forest. I’d seen them from Trenton, when I was driving toward my home, but I’d never been near them. I’d never bothered to come this deep into the forest because I never in a million years would have thought that I’d need to!

  Which meant I had no idea how to get there or whether they would offer us any true shelter.

  But my gut was telling me that those mountains were where we were going. It made sense for the wolves to make for high ground.

  I just hoped we would find something there. Hoped we could be safe for at least an hour or two, to give us time to get back on our feet and figure out our next step. I was incredibly tired of running for my life from people who were after us for reasons I still didn’t entirely understand—and even more tired of not knowing where we were supposed to go or what we were supposed to do. Before, when we’d been breaking into a warehouse or a jail, the guards and bullets had been expected. We’d been engaged in something entirely illegal, and though I hadn’t enjoyed the experience of being shot at, at least I’d understood it as a consequence for what we were doing. Anyone who had broken into a government jail would have been shot at. It was nothing personal.