The Child Thief 4: Little Lies Read online

  I had no doubt that, beneath the swagger, her heart was beating as hard as mine, the blood acidic with rage. Because I remembered how furious she’d been when we left Gem. How her hands had shaken with anger at what we’d seen—and what she remembered of her own experience with the Ministry. And I knew she must be dreading going into another holding center. Especially one where we didn’t have many people to cover for us.

  I just hoped she knew what the hell she was doing. And I hoped that whatever they expected us to do—or find—at Smally, it was worth this risky side trip into Asus.

  The inside of Asus was identical to Gem, except for an intimidating increase in size and scale. This foyer was done in the exact same colors, which was, again, the same as the Authority prison: white marble and concrete, black accents, mirrors, and a Ministry logo here and there, just in case we’d forgotten whose building we were in.

  Right in the center, I saw an enormous white desk with a black marbled top hiding several receptionists. Corona marched up to it, the rest of us scuttling along in her wake.

  “I’m looking for Myrna,” she said imperiously. “I’m Esther Samuels, here for a tour of the facility.”

  The receptionist scowled up at her, as if this was the last thing he wanted to hear—or as if he didn’t believe her at all—then turned back to something on his computer and scanned the screen. A moment later his expression cleared and became respectful and appreciative, the change happening so quickly it was almost comical.

  “Of course, Ms. Samuels!” the man said, his voice overly polite. “For the tour of the facility, correct? We’ve been expecting you! Hold on one moment while I contact Myrna.”

  About five minutes went by with us waiting in the foyer, trying not to look tense, before an older Filipino woman appeared from the hallway behind the reception desk. She had a harried, overworked look about her, but her face cleared a bit when she saw Corona.

  “Ms. Samuels,” she said grandly. “I’m Myrna.”

  The two of them shook hands.

  “How good to see you,” Myrna said. “Thank you for visiting our humble center. Come, I know your time is valuable, so we’ll begin right away.”

  She led us all back into the hallway, the seven of us following closely. Almost immediately, we entered a space with windows running down both sides of the hall. Windows looking out into warehouses as large as fields, it seemed. The walls were so far away they were just blurs on the other side of hundreds and hundreds of plastic compartments. Instead of giving the rooms high ceilings, they’d dedicated the space to larger floor areas. More floor, more boxes. More boxes, more children.

  As we walked onward, I could see that in this holding center, the compartments didn’t only hold infants. Gem had contained older children as well, given what we’d seen in the schoolroom, but we’d never seen where they’d slept. We hadn’t even really known why they were there.

  Here, all the children were held in the same large rooms. Some of the boxes contained infants in cribs; others had older kids in bunk beds; a few I saw had teenagers in regular beds, housed two to a room.

  There were hundreds of boxes. I tried to count the labels next to the doors but couldn’t keep track. So many kids. So many kids.

  My mind shuddered as it tried to understand how there were so many of them—and then tried to guess where they might have come from—but I couldn’t, too overwhelmed by the sheer monstrosity of it.

  I could hear Myrna mumbling something to Corona ahead of us, and assumed she was giving some sort of actual tour, but I didn’t have the heart to listen to her. It took us fifteen minutes to get from the start of that hallway to the end of it. We didn’t see a single empty box on either side of us.

  When we got through the door at the end of the hallway, we found ourselves in an oblong room, the space spreading horizontal to the hall like the top bar of a letter T. Along those walls were banks and banks of monitors, just like I’d seen in Little John’s own control room. Between and under those monitors were more stacks of computers, and in the main space were three rows of plain metal desks. There were people rushing around in here, typing and taking notes and speaking in low, intense voices, but Myrna rushed us through, mumbling something about how this wasn’t what we were here to see, and that we shouldn’t disturb the people who worked here.

  Within moments we were through the busy room and in another hallway, and I started to see the pattern. It was relatively simplistic, despite this center’s size. Hallways branched off here and there, probably leading to other entrances for the rooms we were passing, but for the most part the building seemed to be set up on a plan that was basically one line. There was the hallway, and there were the rooms that broke off from it.

  Maybe the blueprints Little John had found weren’t as incomplete as they thought. Maybe the government’s lack of artistry in design went beyond their building materials and color selections and into how they actually built the centers. Or at least the larger ones. Gem had certainly been more complex than this. Getting up to the suspended walkway alone had made it more interesting.

  If the larger centers were all this simple, it was going to make getting around Smally a lot easier.

  “And here we have our school,” Myrna was saying. “Of course, none of the children stay here very long. They’re here short term while their paperwork is finalized and their new families are contacted. But, while they’re here, we try to make sure they keep up with their studies. We can’t have the future leaders of the country falling behind in their acquisition of knowledge.”

  Well, that answered my question about whether kids were in the holding centers long enough to grow up, which confirmed the Ministry was taking kids old enough to go to school.

  Another direct contradiction of the rules they’d published when CRAS first began.

  I looked left and right, seeing two classrooms with about thirty kids in each, the kids all of similar age. These kids were older than the ones we’d seen in the schoolroom at Gem, but not quite high school age. On the boards, I saw identical sets of information: points on the history of the Burchard Regime, and a list of improvements the government had made to the country and the world itself. Pretty standard stuff, I remembered. The school I’d attended, while more elite, had spent much of its time touting how terrific the Regime was, how the country had been a mess before they instituted their changes, and how we were all better off now.

  These days, I realized it hadn’t been an education. Not really. It had been propaganda. And all the parents had supported it, partially because they probably didn’t know any better… and partially because they probably didn’t have a choice.

  The poor class didn’t have much say in whether they got to keep their children. The more I knew about the Burchard Regime, the more I wondered whether the rich were any better off, when it came to rights.

  As I watched the room to my right, wondering about the anger I could see in the teacher’s face, one of the girls in the front row met my eyes. She was about twelve, I guessed, with auburn hair and a sweetly upturned nose. But her blue eyes burned with fury and rebellion, her mouth drawn into a tight rosette. Her gaze held an anger unlike anything I’d ever seen.

  I stared back at her, my mind putting the pieces together. If she was in this place, she’d been taken from her family recently. She’d been old enough to know what was going on. And old enough, given the look on her face, to have fought it.

  She’d been kidnapped. And she knew it. And judging by the way she was looking at me right now, she was doing her best to figure out how to escape.

  She also obviously thought we were part of the problem. Which made sense, considering we were touring the center like we owned it, with one of the employees. That broke my heart almost as much as knowing what had happened to her.

  I shook my head slightly, praying I could somehow convey my support of her and my hatred of this whole situation. I couldn’t stand the thought of her believing I was part of the problem. Not when that
same problem had already taken so much from me.

  The girl narrowed her eyes, the rage burning colder, and turned away, leaving me feeling both drained and horribly angry. I stalked after Jace, Myrna’s guide chatter blurring into white noise.

  If we were going to start rescuing kids from these centers, we needed to start with the ones who were old enough to know what was going on, the ones who were good and angry about it.

  23

  The hallway suddenly ended in a door with a keypad to the side of it. We had seen keypads before this point, but this was the first one that Myrna had stopped and looked at doubtfully, her brow crinkling in worry and indecision.

  “What is it?” Corona asked, her voice icy. “What’s on the other side of that door?”

  “I… I’m not sure I’m supposed to show you,” Myrna said slowly.

  Corona pressed her lips together, and when Myrna’s gaze shot over her shoulder and toward the rest of us, we all bent studiously toward our pads, our fingers tapping as we recorded everything we’d seen during the tour.

  To my surprise, when I looked up again, it was to see Myrna glancing up at the corners above us, and then bending toward Corona. As the “assistant” standing closest to them, I shifted slightly, straining to hear what she said.

  “The hospital,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “I’m not sure whether I’m supposed to show donors or not. It’s not… pretty,” she finished hopelessly.

  My heart broke for just a second. She was a Little John agent, if I was reading Corona’s “friend” comment correctly—which meant, I assumed, that this woman had experienced a run-in with the Ministry at some point in her life.

  It had to make working here torture. And if a hospital was on the other side of the door, then I could think of only one reason for the location of this holding center.

  They were stealing children from that hospital, bringing them directly to the holding center here. And Myrna had seen it happening.

  “What do you mean you’re not sure?” Corona spat. “I’m a major donor for this center, and a good friend to the Burchard Regime. I requested a tour of the center I’m helping to fund. And I expect a full tour, not something that only takes me halfway.” She glared at Myrna, waiting for her will to be obeyed.

  She was using the tone that would be expected of her, I knew. As a major donor, she would insist that Myrna follow her every order. Acting any differently might have tipped off those watching—made them think Corona was being too easy on Myrna.

  Only I was standing close enough to see how upset Corona was about having to do it—she’d gone even paler than usual beneath the broad brim of her hat. Only I could see the pulse pounding in her throat.

  And only I could hear the last thing she said.

  “We have to get through that door,” she murmured, her voice barely a sound in the echoing hallway. “It’s what we came for.”

  Myrna cast one quick glance behind our group, then looked at Corona again. “This could mean my life,” she said quietly.

  “You know we will do everything we can to make sure that doesn’t happen,” Corona answered, her tone just as quiet.

  Myrna gave her one nod, and then turned to the door, punched in a quick code, and threw it open.

  “Hurry,” she said. “We’re not supposed to let any outsiders through this door, and these cameras are always on. Security will already be on their way.”

  We didn’t need any further encouragement. I was already terrified of what we were going to see on the other side of that door, but this was what we’d come for. There was no turning back now.

  We rushed through the door in single file, exiting into a different hallway, and Myrna slammed the door to the holding center behind us.

  This hallway was done in cheap yellow linoleum, though it might have been white at one time, with dingy off-white walls to match. Ahead of us, set into the walls, was door after door, each a faded blue. The old-fashioned strip lights running along the ceiling were dull and sickly.

  “Nurse Fields to room 315,” a voice shrieked from above, making us all jump.

  Right. A hospital. And an old hospital, given what I was seeing. Which meant this was a hospital for the lower class. The upper-class hospitals were done in pleasing colors like taupe and soft rose, with modern lighting and beautiful music always playing in the background. They looked more like spas than hospitals. I’d been in more than one when I was a child, courtesy of the number of scrapes and bruises I’d picked up from playing with my younger siblings.

  I’d given birth to Hope, though, in a hospital that looked exactly like this. The realization made my stomach churn.

  “This might be the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen,” Alexy said, sidling up to me and taking my hand in a gesture of support… or a sign she needed support herself. “What do you do if you have a warehouse where you keep the kids you steal from the lower class? Why, build it adjacent to a hospital that caters to the lower class, of course. Easy access.”

  The words contained her usual snarky humor. The tone, however, was bleak.

  Myrna was already rushing us forward, away from the door into the holding center and toward what looked like the central desk on this floor of the hospital. When the nurses at that desk looked up and saw us, their faces lost all color.

  “Oh my God, they know where we came from. They think we’re here to take children,” I murmured, my hand still clenched together with Alexy’s.

  “Just a tour,” Myrna assured the head nurse quickly.

  The panic faded from the nurse’s face, to be replaced by a look of sheer hatred, directed at Myrna, and then Corona. Yes, the nurse knew what the people who came through that door wanted. She knew what they did. She’d probably seen it a thousand and one times, and she’d probably fought it once or twice.

  I added another set of potential allies to my list and turned my eyes toward Corona and Myrna.

  We already knew what happened in hospitals like this. Many of us had experienced it personally. So why were we here?

  We passed the nurse’s station and walked toward the hall on the other side, which was labeled “Deliveries.”

  “This is where the women are brought to deliver their babies,” Myrna said, her voice having changed from the easy, casual voice she’d used within the holding center to something lower and more intense. “Many times, this is where the Ministry agents come to take the children. Most of the women who give birth here don’t leave the hospital with their babies. They’re doomed from the start. And though they may know it coming in, that doesn’t make it any easier when the children are taken.”

  We passed the first room, and when I looked in I saw a couple sitting on a bed together, sobbing. Beside them, an empty crib. On the bed next to them, a baby girl’s outfit. An outfit without a child.

  The next room held a woman slumped in the bed by herself, staring listlessly out the window. The next room seemed unoccupied until I looked to the corner beyond the bed and saw a girl only a little older than me sitting on the floor in the corner and staring at her feet. Each room was a heartbreaking variation on the last, all of them containing parents without children.

  Each of them held people who had been hurt by the Ministry, who had lost pieces of themselves to that government’s policies. And each of them, I thought, held a parent or couple who might become an ally against the regime that had hurt them.

  That was the last thought I had before alarms started going off and lights started flashing around us.

  We began to walk quickly back toward the door into the holding center, doing our best to look as if we had every right to be there, but were startled and somewhat worried by the alarm itself.

  “Stay together,” Myrna said quietly. “But watch out for any of the Ministry security officers. They’re easy to spot. They wear blue.”

  Blue. I almost started laughing in my panic. If they were wearing blue, they weren’t Ministry. They were Authority.

  “Why are
we going back?” Alexy whispered to me. “If we’re in trouble, shouldn’t we be finding some other way out of here?”

  “Especially as there’s not going to be any place to hide in a building that consists of one hallway,” I replied.

  “I’m not positive we’re going to be hiding,” Jace muttered, drawing even with us. “This isn’t our fault. Or… at least they can’t assume it is. We’re only here for a tour, remember? Myrna is the one who’s at risk of paying for this mistake.”

  We hurried past the nurse’s station, drawing a mix of confused and hostile looks. Above us, I could hear a voice over the intercom telling everyone to stay calm and remain in their rooms.

  Were any of the hospital employees also employees of the Ministry? Could it be they were in on all of this? Would they stop us and wait for the Authority agents to get there and arrest us? Or were they all independents in here, truly part of the public? If they were, would they help us get out if we ran for one of the other exits? Because I wasn’t on board with Jace on this one.

  True, Myrna had taken a risk to bring us in here, though she’d been given the order to do so by Corona. But I didn’t think that would hold much water with the Ministry. If we weren’t supposed to be in here, and she’d bowed to Corona’s demands, she was going to be in trouble, no matter how airtight Corona’s disguise was as a rich donor.

  I began to wonder how airtight that persona was. She’d said we didn’t want people looking into us too closely. Well, we’d done something which was going to garner attention. And as Henry had said once, the Burchard Regime wasn’t inclined to assume innocence of anyone. Rich or not, Corona had instigated this particular side trip; they had the camera footage to prove it.

  Corona had stressed that we couldn’t afford to make trouble while we were inside the holding center. I wasn’t sure whether she’d expected this to go more smoothly than it had, but we were unequivocally making trouble, and they were going to investigate our identities if they caught us. We might be able to protect Myrna, but it was far more likely we would end up going down with her.