The Child Thief 4: Little Lies Read online

  “We’re not trying to kiss up,” Gabby said, indignant. “Why would we do that? We’re just… efficient,” she finished lamely.

  Alexy fixed her with an unbelieving smile, and Gabby turned away, blushing.

  “I notice you’re not running late,” I said, seeing she had also packed a bag and changed clothes.

  She acknowledged the point, but then shrugged. “I’ve worked with Corona before. She has no patience for people who don’t show up on time. She’s kind of strict.”

  “Fair,” I answered.

  “As we all should strive to be.”

  I turned at the sound of Corona’s voice and found her watching us closely. She gave each of us a onceover.

  “Everyone got their things? Everyone in practical shoes?”

  She glanced down at the shoes everyone was wearing, which I thought strange, considering we were all wearing shoes Little John had provided, and I hadn’t seen anything like stiletto heels in my closet.

  “Perfect,” she said. “And away we go.”

  Suddenly, I remembered a loose end we’d yet to deal with. “Corona, wait,” I said. When she turned to me, her eyebrows rising up toward her hairline, I took a deep breath and plunged in. “We brought someone with us. Henry. He wasn’t on your lists or anything. Is he… Is he going to be okay here? Should we…” I stopped, not quite knowing what I meant to ask, and the older woman nodded.

  “He’s a friend of yours?” At my nod, she tipped her head. “We know of him. We’ve done some research on his history. If you and Jace are speaking for him, we’re willing to let him stay. He’s not the most questionable person we’ve ever let into the organization.”

  She gave me a crooked grin, which set my heart at ease, and I put Henry out of my mind. Nathan and Corona knew about him. They’d done their research. Jace and I had vouched for him.

  From here on out, I could stop worrying and leave it up to Little John to keep an eye on him. Thank goodness.

  We marched out of the Hall, Corona in the lead, and turned right toward the townhouses we’d walked through with Alexy on our first day in Edgewood. I looked left and right, once again overwhelmed by the sheer amount of color around me. Were we going to one of the places we’d already visited with Alexy? The garage, maybe, to get a ride? Or was there some sort of secret train station hidden in one of those houses? Was there something even more fantastical? Some sort of… automatic transport machine? Something that could beam us right to wherever we wanted to go?

  Oh my God, Robin, get a grip. No matter how fantastical Little John’s world was, they still had to obey the laws of physics.

  I really needed to get hold of my imagination before I said one of these things out loud.

  “Hey, uh, Corona, ma’am?” I asked, rushing to catch up with her.

  She didn’t slow or look at me as she answered. “No need to call me ma’am.”

  “Okay. Can I ask why we’re in such a hurry to start our training?”

  She spoke loudly enough that the others could all hear, too. “As I’m sure you’ve heard mentioned, Little John has a very large goal, and for that goal to be met, we need other things to happen. Things out of our control. Things controlled by the government. We’ve received notice that the Ministry is prepped for one of those things to happen, which means we need teams ready to take advantage of it. We’ve been waiting for this for a long time.”

  “Now.” She stepped delicately around a pothole filled with muddy water. “We have many small teams prepared for each mission. The problem is, we have one lead team, a team that will be tackling a very important mission, that doesn’t yet have a matching team of backup soldiers. We need those backup soldiers. Soldiers who understand what the holding centers are. You’d be surprised how many people don’t really understand what the Ministry does there. If you’ve never had a child taken, the Ministry is something you might have ignored for your entire life. Having people who have personal experience with children being taken, and also have experience with trying to get them back, is invaluable.”

  She paused and wrinkled her nose in distaste.

  “Our information says the… well, the event we’ve been waiting for… Let’s just say we’re prepared for it to happen at any time. There’s no guarantee, of course, but we can encourage certain actions to make sure it does in fact happen sooner rather than later. Nathan doesn’t think your team will be ready in time. I say you will, and I’ve pulled rank to be allowed to train you. I believe your experiences make you uniquely suited to the job, and that you’re our best chance at success.” The corners of her mouth creased in a smile she was trying to contain. “I may or may not have made a bet with Nathan.”

  “And you said we were going as support, rather than the lead operatives,” I clarified. “That means…?”

  “That means you’ll be there as support. Your sole responsibilities will be to do what the lead operatives need you to, while they’re undertaking the more sensitive work. We need you to know what the holding centers are and your way around them. Nothing more than that.”

  There was a lot she wasn’t telling me, but just as I was trying to collect my thoughts for another question, she pointed at a bright blue building. We were back at the Theater.

  “Here,” she said, climbing the steps to the front door.

  I grinned at my friends and started after her. “Disguises!” I said over my shoulder.

  We marched up the steps to the door, at which Corona had stopped, and heard her speaking into the intercom in the entryway.

  “Corona Montague, team leader,” she said.

  Evidently, she didn’t need an operative number like Alexy. Although, I was somewhat surprised that Montague was truly their last name. It seemed odd for Nathan to have used it when we met him; that had been incredibly risky. At the same time, I respected the idea that he’d been so rebellious.

  Right now, I wanted to get my disguise and move forward with getting to the holding centers. Hope’s files were beckoning, and that siren call of more information about my daughter, and where she’d been taken, was impossible to ignore.

  Corona walked through the building like she owned it, only pausing at the front desk to nod cordially at the man working there, and then striding past him without saying anything. She led us through the corridors, and though I tried to remember where we’d gone in this building before, I ended up lost in the maze of hallways and elevators we took.

  Then, quite suddenly, we were in the room holding the mask printer.

  I gulped, my heart racing with nerves and excitement.

  “The printer,” Alexy said, with the satisfaction of a cat who’d just been told it was getting cream for dinner, and Corona nodded.

  “I thought it best, considering.” She gestured in our direction, and it didn’t take a genius to know what she meant.

  Considering we’d been labeled terrorists, our faces put on posters in every public building across the country. The Authority wanted us, and the Ministry would know about it. We couldn’t risk going into one of their buildings without the best disguises possible.

  I firmly stilled my hands of their nervous shaking. If they were putting that much faith in us, then we had only one choice: show them their faith was warranted.

  “How does it work?” Kory asked, and I was somewhat relieved to hear that he sounded as nervous about the process as I felt.

  “Simple,” Corona said. “You stand on the mark,” she pointed to a small platform in front of the printer, directly in line with the tube-like attachment I could see protruding from the front, “and close your eyes. The printer will project the material onto your face, using your own features as a base to construct an entirely new face, and laying it right onto your skin. You just stand there while it happens.”

  “And that’s it?” Gabby asked, her eyes shining with excitement and possibility.

  I wondered whether I was going to be able to keep her from trying to develop one of these herself, once she’d figured out ho
w it worked.

  “That’s it,” Corona confirmed. “With the caveat, of course, that the masks only last for a set amount of time. After five hours, they begin to melt. We have to be in and out before then.”

  “Okay,” Kory murmured. “No problem. Five hours and our faces start to melt off. That won’t cause suspicion or panic or anything.”

  Corona favored him with a sharp grin. “It gives us plenty of time to do what we need to do. Now, who’s first?”

  “I’ll go first,” Jace said immediately.

  I cringed. I should have known he would volunteer. Though Corona had said it wouldn’t hurt, and I trusted her, I also worried about the person I cared for so much volunteering to have his face altered first.

  Not altered, I reminded myself. Just printed over. In five hours he’d look like himself again. And it wasn’t like this was going to change who he was on the inside.

  Jace must have felt my cringe. He turned toward me and lowered his mouth until it sat against my ear.

  “I’ll be fine,” he whispered, his breath tickling my ear and making me squirm. “Just promise I’ll still be allowed to hold your hand when I have a different face.”

  I laughed. “Pinky swear,” I told him firmly.

  To my surprise, he looked at me like I was speaking Greek. “What?”

  I sighed, reminded myself he’d grown up in a cave, and promised him I’d teach him how to pinky swear later.

  With a nod, he walked toward the platform, stepped up, and turned to face the printer.

  “Just close my eyes?” he asked.

  Corona, who had moved to the keyboard behind the printer, gave him a nod and started typing quickly.

  Barely ten seconds later, the device in front of her shot a bright blue beam at Jace’s face and started printing over his skin. It began at the top of his forehead, where his hair stopped, and ran across his face in horizontal lines, moving slowly downward.

  I could hardly tell the difference between his skin and the print, at first, though I guessed that was the point. And how different could one forehead look from another, really? The color of the printed skin was almost exactly the same. Then it got to his eyes, and somehow changed their shape by adding additional texture and making the ridge of his brows more defined. It ran down over his face, giving him higher cheekbones and then rounder cheeks, then somehow reducing the size of his nose and changing its shape. His lips became thinner, his chin pointier, his jaw weaker, and his neck fuller.

  And then suddenly the blue light disappeared.

  “You can open your eyes now,” Corona called.

  And there on the stand, the person I knew was Jace opened his eyes… and looked at me as a complete stranger.

  The color of his eyes was still the same. And the expression there. But everything else was different. He lifted his eyebrows, the movement natural, the printed material moving with his facial muscles. He smiled questioningly, and it looked… normal.

  “Good grief,” Kory murmured. “That’s terrifying.”

  I nodded in agreement, fascinated. The mask-building technology was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. If Little John had equipment like this, it was no wonder they’d gone so long without being caught.

  Gabby moved onto the platform next, barely able to contain herself long enough to wait for Jace to step down before she jumped up. Jace made his way to me while Corona programmed the printer to take care of Gabby’s mask.

  “So how do I look?” he asked.

  I pointed to a mirror on the other side of the room. “I’m pretty sure that mirror exists to answer that question.”

  Jace gave a sharp laugh when he got close enough to see himself.

  “I would never recognize myself,” he said, pushing at the new face he was wearing. Then he pulled his fingers away with a look of horror. “Corona, can I touch this thing, or am I going to ruin it?”

  “Nothing will ruin it,” she answered as she watched Gabby. “You can get it wet, get it dirty, even pour honey all over it and it will stay on your face. The only thing that breaks it down is time itself. It’s sort of like an oxidation process. It starts breaking down as soon as it’s printed. It will become less precise the longer you wear it. But we’ve found it’s believable until five hours run out. That’s when you start to look melted.”

  “And no one can really pull off melted,” Kory guessed.

  Corona nodded and turned to the rest of us as Gabby stepped off the platform.

  “Which is why we have to hurry,” she said. “Gem is only half an hour’s drive from here, and we shouldn’t need more than an hour in the holding center itself to show you what I need you to see. But we don’t want to dawdle. Who’s next?”

  I glanced at Gabby, who now looked like an eighty-year-old woman, and took a deep breath.

  “I’ll go next,” I said, trying to keep the waver out of my voice.

  Gabby got down off the platform, and I took her place, then closed my eyes and clenched my fists.

  “You don’t have to act like you’re going into a fight, Robin. It doesn’t hurt,” Gabby shouted from the back of the room.

  I pressed my lips together and forced myself to unclench my fists.

  “And relax your mouth,” Corona added. “Otherwise the print will come out wrong.”

  Right. Relax my mouth. I focused on that part of my body, trying hard not to think about the fact that there was going to be a layer of something glued to it soon. Ten seconds later, I felt the heat of the printer’s beam starting to run over my skin, beginning at my hairline and working its way down in stripes.

  It was like having a flashlight held too close to your skin, so that you could feel the warmth of the bulb. Not uncomfortable, exactly; more like an itch, and I fought hard against the need to scratch at it. It moved over my forehead, then my eyes, then my cheeks and nose, and finally past my lips and to my chin. The whirr of the printer stopped, along with the heat, leaving my face feeling overly cool.

  My eyes popped open, and I looked at Corona, who nodded her approval.

  “You’re done,” she said with a grin.

  I jumped off the platform and made my way to the mirror, wondering what I would see. When I arrived, I saw the rounded cheeks and chin of a girl who hadn’t yet lost her baby fat, with a flat pug nose and lips much fuller than my own had ever been.

  It was the face of a sixteen-year-old girl who hadn’t yet seen the world. Except for her eyes, she was a complete stranger to me.

  17

  Within fifteen minutes we all had new faces, including Corona, who had allowed Alexy, humming with excitement, to run the printer for her.

  My friends were all unrecognizable now, and Corona had also donned a blond wig to cover her telltale streak of white hair. I didn’t know whether the Authority or Ministry would be looking for her in the coming situation, but it stood to reason that if they’d invaded her home, they had a record of what she looked like.

  Once we were all settled, we moved on to the garage several houses down. There we went through a similar process, with Corona using only her first and last name this time, and then throwing open the doors. We didn’t even bother with the front desk here, but walked immediately into the elevator and took it to the second floor.

  “This place has floors?” I asked, surprised. How the hell were we supposed to get any sort of vehicle down from the second floor?

  “It does,” Corona replied calmly.

  Alexy just gave me a wicked grin.

  We exited on the second floor and walked quickly through an enormous parking garage, finally coming to a stop in front of a gigantic SUV-type vehicle that looked… normal.

  “Looks like any car you’d see on the street,” Kory observed, frowning.

  “What did you think? We rode unicorns and traveled on magic carpets?” Alexy drawled. “It has to look normal, or it would be too easily identified as ours.”

  A moment later we were piling into the car, Corona at the wheel.

 
“Everyone buckle their seatbelt,” she commanded. “I don’t want anyone flying around in the car if I have to take a sharp turn.”

  A quick laugh from Alexy was her only answer, and the rest of us hustled to make sure we were secured in our seats.

  The moment Corona started driving, I saw why she’d insisted on seatbelts. I didn’t have a lot of experience, obviously, but when I had driven, I’d been a cautious driver. Corona was the exact opposite. She tore through the aisles in the parking garage, tires squealing at every turn, taking the spiral ramp down to the first floor at what had to be double the recommended speed. I was thrown to my right, up against Jace, who caught me with a chuckle and then didn’t let me go for the rest of the descent.

  When we hit the bottom of the ramp, Corona increased the speed even more, and we burst out of the garage with a roaring engine and squealing tires as she accelerated up to street level.

  We bounced once and were then roaring up the street toward where I assumed the city of Edgewood ended and the real world began again.

  The drive lasted maybe half an hour, though I wondered how long it would have taken someone who respected speed limits. As it was, I was surprised we weren’t pulled over and given a speeding ticket on the way to the holding center.

  Driving like this couldn’t be the smartest way to avoid detection when you were on a top-secret mission for an organization fighting the government. We hadn’t seen any highway enforcers on the way, though. Perhaps Little John had a way of detecting and then avoiding them?

  The holding center, it turned out, was on the edge of a city I’d never been to, though that wasn’t much of a surprise. We’d traveled several hours to get to the convent, and then come several hours from there to Edgewood. We were far from where I’d once lived, and definitely beyond the outermost reaches of my travels.

  I didn’t know what city I saw on the horizon, but I could recognize the skyline of bare, boring apartment buildings. Whatever the city’s name, there were factories there, and where there were factories, there were a large number of the poorest class. Hence the holding center. The Ministry was most likely taking children from those factory workers as quickly as it could, shuffling them into the holding center to await the first rich couple able to pay for them.