The Child Thief 2: Deep Shadows Read online

  They also didn’t know Jace as well as I did, and they had very little reason to trust him.

  I, on the other hand, found myself conflicted. On one side, Nathan was once again letting us down. He had gathered us all together, yes, but he’d also been horribly absent whenever we were in trouble.

  Of course, I didn’t know him or what his ultimate plan was, but I didn’t feel much like trusting him as our leader.

  On the other side, his messenger was Jace, and I couldn’t help the way the boy made me feel. I couldn’t deny the way my blood raced when he looked at me with his lids slightly hooded, or gave me that crooked smile he used when he found something funny but wasn’t sure he wanted to give it a full grin. It had been only weeks since we’d first met, but he’d started trusting me almost immediately—something I hadn’t thought I deserved at the time. Still, that trust had grown until I shared it, and now…

  I owed him a chance to at least explain what was going on. Jace had allowed me into his home and kept me safe. We were… well, he made me feel more than anyone ever had. It might have been selfish, but I didn’t want to risk that. I wanted to believe that my heart was leading me in the right direction.

  “So?” I asked quietly, lifting one eyebrow in question. “Are you going to tell us what exactly is happening here? Convince us that Nathan isn’t actually pulling out at the last minute and leaving us on our own—again?”

  “Because it’s starting to look like that’s what he’s best at, honestly,” Ant added, his voice also quiet, but in a way that promised violence.

  He isn’t going to pull any punches, I realized. Not when his brother was in jail, or worse, and Nathan’s plans were at least partially to blame.

  Jace put up both hands, asking for peace, and paused for a moment, gathering his thoughts. Finally, he let out a sigh and started talking.

  “First of all, you guys have to understand my position.” He looked up at me, his eyes asking for patience and understanding. “You know that I’m walking a fine line here. When I first came here…”

  He frowned and tossed a glance at my friends and back to me.

  “He’s the one who gave us homes, gave us a way out of the situation we were in. He gave us… well, he gave us our identities. All of us. Jack, Boyd, and our other friends. And me, of course. We wouldn’t have had anything without him. My sister—her safety depends on him, but it’s more than that. It’s a lot more than that.”

  He stopped speaking, and the rest of us stayed quiet. I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, I really did, but he was going to have to give us a better foundation. When he didn’t continue, I reached out and traced one finger along the edge of his palm to get his attention.

  “And?” I asked. “You obviously trust him. Are you going to give the rest of us a reason to do the same?”

  I realized we needed to trust him. I’d been so quick to judge over the past day, so quick to assume that he didn’t know what he was doing, that he didn’t have our best interests at heart.

  But I didn’t know Nathan from Adam. I had no idea what his past was or what his ultimate goals were. For better or worse, he had become our leader. He was the man who had all the connections, and the one who had been strong enough to put two portals together. He wanted people to discuss what was going on in our country and do something about it. He’d gathered us all together, and that meant he was doing something right.

  Maybe it was time I started looking at things from Jace’s perspective and gave the guy a chance. Maybe there was a good reason for him to be ducking out of this mission at the last minute.

  The problem was, Jace wasn’t being quick enough with the explanations. If he kept dragging his feet, we weren’t going to get into the portal anytime soon.

  “Out with it, Jace,” I said gently. “We need to know what we’re up against. I want to save our friends, but to do that we have to have those addresses so that we can start searching for the techs, and to get them we need Gabby doing her job. Us sitting around here waiting for you to tell us what you know isn’t going to make that happen.”

  He gave me a shy smile and nodded once.

  “The point is, I would trust Nathan with my life. I do, every day that I’m here. And though I realize you guys don’t know me that well, I hope you know me well enough to understand that I would never put the group in danger. If I thought Nathan was leading us the wrong way, I’d tell you guys immediately. This thing with hacking into the portal… well, what I told you before was the truth. It makes Nathan nervous because we don’t know who or what’s in there. We don’t know if they’ve laid any traps or if they’re sitting in there like some sort of spider, just waiting for the first person to sneak in.”

  “Which was why Nathan didn’t want to go in by himself,” I continued for him. “He didn’t want to take the chance. That’s why we were bringing Gabby in. Now he doesn’t want to go at all because…”

  “Because he really does think it will be better if only one person goes in,” Jace said. “He really does believe that it will be quicker and quieter that way. Less chance of being discovered and less chance of stepping in any traps. If there are snares in there, having two hackers will make it more likely that one of them falls into one.”

  I nodded slowly.

  “That much does make sense. So, he’s back to not wanting a partner. Why doesn’t he just go in himself? Surely, he’s a better hacker than Gabby. She’s got like three months of experience or something.”

  This time Jace gave a long sigh, as if he really didn’t want to have to say the next thing he was going to say, and shook his head.

  “Gabby’s a safer option. It’s as simple as that. She’s right about her position—floating that far out from land makes her more secure. The satellite aspect is an additional safety measure. No matter how good the Ministry’s bugs are, they’ll have trouble following her through the maze of satellite signals. It would be even more difficult to track one signal back to a boat that doesn’t have a dependable location. They might be able to get a bug into her physical system, but even then, what good will that do them? The chances of them being able to use any sort of tracking software are slim, given how much she moves around. And she’s right about the submarine.”

  “The chances of the Ministry having anyone in her immediate vicinity are pretty small,” Jackie said suddenly. She looked right at me, her eyes noncommittal. “He has a point, Robin. We’ve seen how quickly the Ministry can move and how good they are at what they do. Nelson’s been doing this a lot longer than any of us and is a ton smarter, but she still got caught, proving the Ministry is even better. Now we’re all on their radar, one way or another. Even if we’re not, we’re within their realm of influence, courtesy of being in the country and on land. Of all of us, Gabby is the most out of reach for them.”

  “It makes it a lot safer for her to do anything that could be construed as illegal,” Jace continued, nodding. “It would be incredibly dangerous for Nathan to do it, because he—”

  “Might get caught,” I finished, finally coming around to his side. “If he were captured, it would put us all in a lot more danger.”

  “Exactly,” he said, giving me a slight smile. “Because the Ministry has caught on to the fact that we exist. Nathan seems to be the only one smart enough to sort out how we can avoid them. If he’s caught…”

  “There’s no one around to keep us out of their clutches,” I murmured, understanding dawning on me.

  That changed things, and if I hadn’t been such an idiot, I would have seen it all before. Nathan, whoever he was and whatever he’d been in some previous life, was the only one of us who seemed to know what was going on and what to do about it. If we lost him, we’d be losing the one person who could get us out of the mess in which we’d found ourselves. I might not like or understand him, but I had to get on board with him.

  Because our lives depended on it.

  I pressed my lips together and tipped my head to the side.
/>   “In that case, I guess it’s time we call Gabby back and see how she’s doing with her preparations. I don’t know about you guys, but I’d like to get this done. The sooner the better.”

  Three nods met my question, and I reached for the phone to get Gabby back on the line.

  “So, it sounds like Nathan’s out and you will be doing this alone,” I told her the moment she answered the phone.

  She laughed. “Better than going in with him, I’d say,” she said. “I always did prefer to do things on my own.”

  Ant huffed. “Aren’t you sixteen? Don’t people your age like other kids?”

  “You try growing up on a tiny ship with twenty other people breathing down your neck and then tell me how much you like other kids,” she shot back. “I’m the oldest here, and that’s always meant that I had to take classes on my own if I wanted to learn the more advanced stuff. I chose it. Every. Single. Time. Screw working with other people. I’m telling you, I’m better by myself than I am working with someone else.”

  Well, that was good enough for me. And I could relate; if I were given a choice between doing something on my own or doing it with a group, chances were, I’d choose the solo option as well. Besides, it wasn’t like we really had a choice.

  “So, what exactly is your plan?” I asked. Was there such a thing as having a plan when you did something like this? I wasn’t sure, but I thought it would probably be a good idea to have some sort of general idea. At least a concept of what she intended to do.

  “What exactly do you need from me?” she asked. “I have to know details. What are we looking for? What should I keep my eye on? Do we want reports about what’s going on in the background of the portal? Want me to go in and have a look around? Or is this basically a smash and grab—get in, get what I want, and get back out again before anyone has time to do anything about it?”

  I turned to Jace, hoping he had some answers about that. This was way beyond my expertise level.

  Jace glanced at his phone, pulled something up, and read it. “We’re looking for a folder that’s kept in the main database of the portal. You’ll need an admin sign-in to get to it, so you’ll have to use mine. With luck, no one is… I don’t know, watching out for it? Ready?”

  “Ready,” she answered.

  “Username is Mr. X,” he said, spelling it out letter by letter. “The password is MrX154638.”

  “Right,” she said after a moment. “Got it. What exactly am I looking for?”

  “You’ll be signed in under my account, so the dashboard will look slightly different. I’ve never gone to that part of the site, but I have the steps here, from Nathan. You need to get into the main database. There’s a hidden sub-database that very few people know is even there. Nathan has… well, that’s where he stores the information.”

  “And he never thought that was, I don’t know, stupid?” Ant asked. “How much personal information does he have in there? Does he have our information in there? It never occurred to him that the portal might be hacked? That someone else might gain access to all of this?”

  Jace grimaced. “I guess you could say that Nathan is the type of confident that doesn’t allow room for doubts like that. He had faith in the security of the portal. He thought he was storing things in the safest possible location. After all, he did spend a lot of time on the security around it.”

  “Confident? I think you mean arrogant,” Ant replied.

  I agreed, but I felt the need to come to Jace’s rescue at that point.

  “Don’t know if there’s ever been a leader who didn’t cross that particular line,” I said. “And it’s beside the point right now. Gabby, you got all that so far?”

  “Got it and got it,” she said.

  “Any idea how you’re planning on doing this?” I asked.

  “Easy,” she said with a sass that I remembered from my life before everything went sideways. “I’ve got a sign-in that will give me access to an entirely different aspect of the site. I just need a way to use it without getting caught, without tripping whatever froze the site. I’m going to have to go in sideways, more or less.”

  “Excuse me?” I asked, confused.

  “Robin,” she said, adopting a voice that would have made me laugh if we weren’t facing a life-and-death situation. “It’s simple. I go to the site, open it up, find the source file, and adjust it to erase any record of me having been there. Then I save the entire site to my desktop—or at least a version of it. It’ll allow me to get into it and have a look around without anyone being the wiser.”

  “You’ll have the whole site?” Jace asked, staring at the phone in shock. “Will you just be able to sign in to it like usual?”

  Gabby sighed.

  “No, of course not. If there are traps and snares set up in there, they’ll still be there. I’ll just have… kind of a copy of the site. Not the real thing. It will still be attached to the real site, though, which will mean that if I set any alarms off, they’ll go right to whoever set them. So I’ll still have to be careful. Still, it’ll give me more freedom to look around, and hopefully more time.”

  I shook my head and put all of that to the side as something that I didn’t need to understand. The more important question was safety.

  “How are you going to keep from getting caught?” I prodded.

  “Pandora’s Box,” she said. “Robert’s program. I’ve already got it up and running on my computer, so I don’t have to prepare anything there. It will highlight any snare protocols for me before I hit them. Sort of. If the code of the portal is all in numbers and letters, anything that’s a trap will light up and be obvious. In short, I’ll be able to see them long before they see me, and be able to avoid them.”

  I took a deep breath and let it out. That sounded way too easy… and easy meant dangerous. “You’re sure that’ll work?”

  “Of course it’ll work.” She scoffed. “Robert invented it.”

  I was really starting to get tired of this Robert fellow, and I hadn’t even met him. I was glad he’d taken Gabby under his wing and taught her so much—he probably wasn’t actually a bad guy on his own—but I wasn’t certain I approved of the effect he had on her.

  “Ah, young love,” Jackie murmured, and I almost laughed at how exactly her thought process had followed mine. This was obviously Gabby’s first crush, and she had it bad. I could only hope that Robert was as good at software programming as she seemed to believe. We had a lot riding on something he named after a Greek myth.

  Jace shook his head, caught between a grin and a frown of concern.

  “Right. You’ll be looking for a file called TechNoTouch,” he said. “No spaces. Once you’re in the portal or the copy portal, I’ll direct you through the steps to get to it. But if you get there and think you can figure out a quicker way to get to it—safely—you just give me a shout. Whatever we can do to get this done quickly and easily. You might not be playing in the real website, but that doesn’t mean we have a lot of time. I want this done within five minutes, got me?”

  “Okay, got it.” There was a pause before she spoke again. “I’ve found the entrance to the portal. I’m looking at the site right now. I’m searching for a file called TechNoTouch, which is in a top-secret sub-database that you’re going to get me to. I’ve got your sign-in credentials right here. And… here I go.”

  I stared at the phone, my heart hammering, and listened to her clicking away at her keyboard, signing in to the website that could get us all caught.

  20

  We stared at the wall and each other, waiting in the silence that followed. It was every bit as horrible as it sounded, the seconds creaking by agonizingly.

  “Do you think it’ll work?” Jackie muttered. “Do you think she’ll actually get in?”

  “She has to,” I replied. “The Ministry has our friends, and we have no way of getting them. They might have our addresses, too, and we have no way of knowing unless Gabby gets in. We need her to get in there and tell us what�
�s going on.”

  “I hate to be the bearer of bad news here, but needing her to get in there and her getting in there successfully are two different things, Robin,” Ant whispered.

  “Why exactly are we all whispering?” Jace asked suddenly, and I turned to stare at him.

  “I hadn’t even realized we were,” I replied, but it made sense when I thought about it. There was the distinct feeling that we were all being watched, being heard. The Ministry had managed to track us down during our raid and had quickly shown us how outclassed we were. They’d beaten Nelson. They might have been in the very website that we’d used to plan a rebellion.

  Yes, it definitely felt as if they might be listening to us right now—which was why I continued whispering.

  “What if they’re watching us right now?” I asked. “What if they’ve seen everything we’ve been doing? What if they know everything we’ve said?”

  Jace shook his head.

  “Very unlikely. They probably didn’t even know OH+ existed until the night of the raid. Nathan thinks they reverse-hacked Nelson’s computer through the snare protocol and got in that way. She must have had the OH+ server open at the time. Once they had the address, it was probably short work for them to hack in.”

  “Seems like it would have been pretty stupid of her to have the portal open at a time like that,” Jackie said, eyes narrowed. “That wouldn’t have been like her.”

  “Well, she wasn’t expecting to run into any sneaky Ministry spiders, was she?” Ant answered.

  “Even if they didn’t get the information that way, they might have actually taken her computers when they invaded her offices,” I added.

  “Why wouldn’t she have hidden any access to the portal?” Jackie asked.

  “Again, I doubt she was expecting the Ministry to show up at her door,” Ant said. “She didn’t have a reason to hide it when it was just sitting around her office, did she?”