The Child Thief Read online

It would be a lie to say, though, that I hadn’t been convinced I would break—more than a few times. The days had been dark and long after my adoptive father banished me from home. I had no choice but to move in with Henry and his family, and it was there that I experienced what life was like outside of my comfy little bubble for the first time. I experienced what life was like for the unprivileged.

  I was forced to quit my private school, with no means of affording the tuition, and wound up getting a job at the same clothes factory in which Henry worked during the week. The pay there was a pittance, just enough to cover living and travel expenses, given that I was still under eighteen and had no prior work experience.

  And then, when I could no longer work due to my pregnancy, it became a waiting game—waiting for the day my baby was born, and a member of the Ministry for Welfare arrived to inform me that unfortunately, I was not eligible to keep my child.

  I became a victim of the same system that had punished my birth parents, all those years ago, when they were forced to give me up. The Child Redistribution Adoption System, the CRAS, aimed at the poorest of society. President Burchard’s genius idea to solve the Great Crisis our country found itself in, which was, if we were to believe the news channels, precipitated by the spike in family welfare costs over the past century, thanks to our country’s deteriorating morals. When it reached the point where taxes rose to unprecedented heights to meet the expense of welfare, his regime swooped in to solve the problem by instituting the CRAS, whereby only those who could afford it—the wealthy of our society—would shoulder the “burden.” They would take in children under the age of three, which allowed for an easier adjustment period than older kids, thus relieving the government, and everyone else, of the expense. The system would work particularly well, they argued, because many upper- and middle-class families with career wives tended to have few or no biological children anyway, and wanted to adopt.

  I lit up as a bright red flag on the Ministry’s audit system, labelled as someone who would sap too many resources from the government because I didn’t have adequate means to support my child. I became part of the bottom 20 percent of the population—those who were in danger of being targeted. In fact, I was probably closer to the bottom 5 percent.

  And so a minister arrived the day she was born. My beautiful baby girl, whom, during those few precious hours I got to hold her in my arms, I named Hope.

  Because she was my Hope, on that bright, sunny morning. That someday, things would change. That someday, I would live in a world where I could see her again.

  I cried and whispered to her that I would find her, though it was a promise that was virtually impossible to keep, given that it was illegal for parents to seek out their children after they had been resituated, and detailed adoption records were kept in cyber vaults.

  It was the same reason that my birth parents had never found me—because I was sure they would’ve sought me out if they could.

  If they had experienced anything like I had, that day I gave birth, then it was a certainty. I had never thought I’d be the kind of girl to have a baby before her mid- to late-twenties, with the academic path carved out for me by my parents. But when I held Hope, it felt like a huge piece of my life had been missing until her arrival, and I didn’t know how I could’ve lived without her. Couldn’t bear even imagining a life without her.

  But I had to.

  The tears stopped after a week, once the Ministry took her away, and numbness settled into their place. The ordeal took its toll on Henry and me, as a couple. Although, to be honest, I’d felt the beginnings of a crack in our relationship when my father shot him in the leg.

  Not that I could blame the poor boy. He was probably afraid to have anything more to do with a governor’s daughter after that—even an ex-governor’s daughter. And the time he spent with me during the pregnancy and birth was more out of duty than anything else. Henry would never admit it, but it became clearer to me in the months that followed that my father had been right about one thing: he hadn’t been intending to commit to me anytime soon. We’d both been caught up in the passion of a first-time, forbidden summer romance, and had let it go too far. I’d thought that maybe our relationship could survive it, but after the baby was taken away, it became clear that she had been the only thing holding us together. Once she was gone, Henry announced that he had accepted a job transfer to another factory up north, and left.

  I guessed different people reacted differently to trauma. Some people drew closer together, while others drifted apart. Our relationship was never as deep as I had thought it was, in my naïve seventeen-year-old mind, which was why he hadn’t proposed until he’d been guilt-tripped into it.

  In any case, we lost touch, and if he’d started seeing another girl in his new town, I honestly couldn’t say I would have minded, or even felt the smallest twinge of jealousy.

  Hope’s absence ate at my soul, and I could barely even think of anything else.

  I moved out of Henry’s parents’ small apartment as quickly as I could, to get away from the memories it held, and managed to get another job in a factory—as I had given up my previous one to have the baby. I found a little cabin in the woods to call home, and it was where I lived to this day.

  The sound of barking outside my window made me start, and I turned away from the mirror. I padded out of my little five-by-seven bedroom, over the rough wooden floorboards, and into my only slightly larger living room, toward the front door. I pulled it open with a creak and switched on the lantern outside. The beams illuminated a small pack of local wolves I had befriended, standing in the darkness of the late evening. They had basically become part-time pets—ever since I’d allowed them to sleep in my living room last winter, during a particularly bad storm.

  “No food today, boys,” I muttered, bending down to stroke their silky fur. They nuzzled against my face, and I kissed them each gently on the nose.

  “Nor for you, girl,” I added, my eyes falling on the female. I felt particularly bad about having nothing for her, as she was heavy with pups.

  But I was earning just enough to support my lifestyle, with only the occasional money to spare, which I tried to save up. I did occasionally give them treats, but it wasn’t something I wanted them to get into the habit of expecting.

  Besides, my day-to-day diet wasn’t suited to them, anyway. I grew potatoes and greens in a small dirt patch round the back of my cabin, and those, along with grains and milk from the local farmer, were basically what I ate. Except when I was in a rush. Then I resorted to Nurmeal, a meal-replacement drink. But I preferred real food in my mouth when I had the option. Living alone didn’t exactly motivate me to cook fancy, either way. I just consumed what did the job and kept my food bill as low as possible so I had more flexibility in my budget for other things.

  After a couple minutes of back stroking, I closed the door on the animals and retreated back inside, gazing around my little cabin with a sigh. It contained only three rooms: my bedroom, the living area—which was combined with a kitchenette—and the bathroom. It had taken a while to get used to living in such a raw environment, but the months I had spent holed up in Henry’s parents’ apartment had gotten me accustomed to small spaces. By comparison, I had more room to myself here.

  Still, the first few months I’d spent in this cabin had been the hardest of my life. The dark and cold seemed to seep out of every nook and cranny, and it was the kind that no amount of cozy lighting or fur rugs could drive away. The depression had come close to consuming me, and the only thing I had to look forward to every day was work at the factory, to take my mind off things. Not that the mind-numbing work was ever really a distraction…

  But then, seven months ago, things had changed. The darkness was still never far away, lurking in the shadows of my mind like a waiting monster, but the bad days were far fewer, the motivated, optimistic ones the norm now. Seven months ago, I found a renewed purpose in life…

  The sound of my phone ringing broug
ht me back to reality—and told me that I had been spacing out. I hurried to my bathroom counter, where I had left the small device, and picked it up. After checking that my phone’s encryption app was running and the line was secure, I accepted the call and pressed the speaker to my ear.

  “Hey, Nelson, what’s up?” I said.

  “Coordinates have changed for tonight,” a low, crackling voice replied, only barely distinguishable as female. “You need to head to the Roundhouse, and we’ll launch the mission from there.”

  “Oh. Everything okay?”

  “Yup. Just a slight, unexpected shift of target. So we’re gonna have to approach from a different angle. Get over there and you’ll get a briefing.”

  “Okay. I’m leaving now,” I replied, and then she hung up.

  I hung up too and slipped the phone into my pocket, then hurried to tie my hair back into a tight bun and slide into my jacket. After pulling on my backpack and grabbing my keys, I left the cabin and swung onto my motorcycle, kicking it into gear.

  As I drove out through the woods toward the road, I breathed in the crisp evening air, taking a moment to just… feel the mix of emotions coursing through me. They came whenever Nelson got in touch, and while I looked forward to her calls, they didn’t exactly fill me with light or happiness. Nor could I even say with excitement. No, it was with something much darker than that. Something deep and burning, almost primal… Perhaps the kind of thing only a broken mother can feel.

  If there was one thing I had learned in these past two years, it was that pain can make you hard. But it can also mold and shape you into something you never thought you could become.

  And that, I hoped, was what had happened to me.

  By day they still called me Robin Sylvone (as much as I disliked the surname now, I had no other to which I could subscribe). Factory worker and upper-class reject.

  But seven months ago, my nights had gotten a whole lot more meaningful. Now, by night, they called me Robin Hood.

  2

  As I rode through the countryside toward the nearest city, where my meeting with Nelson was due to take place tonight, my eyes rested absentmindedly on the hulking shadows of factories that loomed beyond the fields. They were the first signs of the industrial estate where I spent most of my day, sitting in front of an assembly line, quality-checking fabrics.

  Our country hadn’t always held so many factories. That was another thing that had changed toward the latter part of the last century, due to a push by the government to create more jobs for America’s people.

  The increase in factories had definitely opened up a lot of jobs… though I had yet to meet a single person who was actually happy working in those cavernous metal shells. Still, the work helped pay the bills. Just about. And that was all most people aspired to in this day and age.

  Having been brought up in a prosperous family, where my parents had funded everything in my life, from my hobbies to my education, I had never realized just how good I had it—until I lost it. Back then, I had the world at my feet, by comparison. I could’ve gone after any career, even in the arts, and my parents would’ve backed me (although their preference was that I go into politics). The world would have basically been my oyster, with all the opportunities that had been open to me.

  Did I sometimes regret what had happened? Yes. I couldn’t deny that, on more than one occasion, I had wished I could turn back time. Stuck by my parents’ training and withstood the sultry gaze Henry had given me, that night we’d made love by the lakeside.

  But being out of that privileged bubble had also taught me things about the world that I never would have realized otherwise. It had woken me up to the reality of the majority. The reality most people in the world woke up to every morning, the daily grind of keeping food on the table and fuel in the tank. The stress of paying bills and keeping a roof over your head. And while it had jaded me, to a certain extent, I also felt like a wiser and more compassionate person for it.

  Besides, I had brought a beautiful human being into the world. Wherever she was now…

  I veered to the left as my opening in the road came up, and trundled across the industrial estate, past the factories, which were practically a town unto themselves, and then through the surrounding residential area for the workers—skyscraper apartment blocks, all designed to fit as many people into as small a space as possible. I’d lived in one of those with Henry and his family, and I knew, after being packed up in their little matchbox of an apartment, that any other accommodation would be better.

  I was grateful that I had managed to find my little hut in the woods, via a contact I had made at the employment office. My landlord let me stay there for a pittance. It was more inconvenient to have to travel so far to work each day, but it was also a journey I enjoyed. It helped to clear my head on my way to and from the factory, allowed me some space to think about more than just keeping the clothes on my back.

  I entered a commercial area filled with storefronts, which marked the beginning of a more affluent quarter of the small mountain city. Opulent mansions sprawled less than seven streets away, mostly belonging to landlords and factory owners, and were quite the contrast to the rest of the town.

  I passed along a few more roads, and then stopped at the end of Fraser Avenue, in front of a large, round pub, whose official name was announced on the big, bold sign hanging above the front entrance: the Foxtrot. Raucous laughter and chatter spilled out through the bright, open windows. It was packed, as usual at this time of night, and the noise and general commotion about this place were exactly the reasons that Nelson had a habit of choosing it. That, and the owner was one of her contacts.

  I parked my motorcycle and then entered through the main door. Heading toward the bar, I made brief eye contact with Cianna, the porky, middle-aged owner of the place, and she gave me a knowing nod, then gestured toward a door at the back of the pub.

  I gave her a brief smile and a nod back, then picked my way through the crowd toward it. Stepping through, I was met with a staircase, which I scaled quickly, finally stopping at the fourth floor, where a small landing connected to a single door. I walked up to it and then knocked three times in quick succession, followed by a pause, and another three quick knocks.

  I heard the sound of the lock drawing back, and then the door opened, a pair of bespectacled green eyes peering through the crack.

  “Ah, glad you made it, RobinHood21,” Nelson “Nelly” Peters (or NellP, per her handle on the shadow web portal where we had first met) greeted me with a grin.

  She was a short woman of five feet, four inches, with a shock of curly brown, shoulder-length hair and olive skin. She looked to be in her late twenties, though I couldn’t be sure, as we had never exchanged real details about ourselves—for security reasons. Because with the types of missions we ran, the fewer personal details we knew about each other, the better. Fewer details meant there was less we could spill, if any of us got caught.

  She stepped back, allowing me through to a small meeting room with a circular table in the center, and I realized our five other accomplices were already waiting.

  “Oh, hey, guys,” I said, plopping into a free seat beside Julia Caesar (aka Juicy1), a quiet, pale-skinned girl with bowl-cut auburn hair and dusky gray eyes. She was around my age, and was assistant to Nelson, who was the mastermind and ringleader of our little group. “Sorry to hold up the meeting.” I glanced at my watch to see that it had just struck midnight.

  “Oh, that’s fine,” Abe Lincoln (AL1) replied, kicking back in his chair and crossing his arms over his chest. “It’s not like we’ve got anything important to do tonight.” He was a tall, lanky young man who looked about twenty-three, with a mop of sandy blond hair and warm brown eyes.

  “Yeah, I was just gonna bring up some drinks,” his twin brother Ant Lincoln (AL2) added with a wink. He was identical to Abe, except for a rather stupid-looking pencil moustache, which he claimed he maintained solely for the benefit of helping others distinguish be
tween the two of them (and I hoped, for his sake, that it was the only reason).

  Jackie K (JK007), a girl with Asian ancestry, and in her early twenties, scoffed. “You’re hardly late, R. Most of us only just got here.” She narrowed her eyes at Ant in a death glare (which, for the record, given the girl’s combat abilities, was genuinely unnerving). “And you know what I’d do to you if you drank before a mission.”

  Ant shrugged, his face deadpan. “How would I? It’s not like you’ve ever threatened me before.” He leaned back in his chair in a motion that mirrored his brother’s, and put his feet up on the table.

  Jackie pursed her lips, tossing her long black braid over one shoulder and then sweeping his feet back to the floor in one swift move of her forearm. “Don’t mess with me.”

  “Speaking of drinks, anyone want a hot chocolate?” asked Marco L. King—a slightly chunky boy with light blue eyes and russet-brown hair, who I figured was in his early twenties, too.

  Everyone’s hands immediately rose, including mine and Nelson’s. We still had a little time before we had to leave this place and it was growing chilly outside.

  The boy’s round, freckled face fell. “I was just being polite,” he muttered.

  “Your handle’s CoCo-King for a reason,” Nelson said with a wink.

  “Yeah… that’s not what I meant by it.” He sighed, then ambled over to the kitchenette in one corner of the room and begrudgingly began setting out seven cups. “This kettle’s tiny,” he grumbled to himself. “The things I do for you people.”

  I smiled, looking around the room and taking a moment to appreciate the people who had played such a major role in turning my life around. In the short time I’d known them, I’d come to feel closer to them than anyone in my former social circle, even though I barely knew anything about them, other than the personalities that spilled through from behind their fake personas. Without them, I honestly didn’t want to think about where I would be.