The Child Thief 2: Deep Shadows Read online

  I’d hit my head. Ant must have been the person closest to me at the time.

  He must have stopped for long enough to pick me up, rather than leave me there, as he could or probably should have done. I knew without asking that the soldiers were gaining on us. Ant hadn’t had the luxury of time and effort to lift my dead weight.

  Which meant he’d put his life on the line to save me.

  God, I could have kissed him right then—and hit him immediately afterward for being so stupid. Why would he risk himself to save me like that?

  “Put me down, Ant, I can run for myself!” I shouted back, starting to squirm. It didn’t make sense for him to keep carrying me if I could hold my own.

  He immediately tightened his hold on me and barked in frustration. “I saw what happened to you, and if you think I’m putting you down so that you can run right back into the ground again, you’re crazy. Sorry, kid, but you’re stuck with me for the time being. I just dropped the damn camera to save you, and I’m not going to make that sacrifice and then watch you die.” His eyes narrowed and his eyebrows dropped down, making him look more intense than I’d ever seen him before.

  I didn’t know how to argue with that, and I turned and stared ahead of us, trying to see where we were going. It was no use. The forest was somehow darker here than it had been, or at least it seemed that way to me. Had I damaged my vision in the fall? All I could see was a wall of trees, vines, and shrubs in front of us, with occasional clear spaces. Two large figures were at the head of our small pack, Jace and Zion, and a tiny figure darted after them, somehow keeping up with their longer legs, leaving Ant and me to bring up the rear. From what I gleaned, the rest of our team was still MIA. No one had miraculously found us while I was unconscious. I bit my lip at the thought. Where were they, then? Would we find them somewhere ahead of us?

  The questions blew right out of my mind as the soldiers behind us started shooting, and for a moment everything around me slowed, my brain taking the time to notice the smallest, stupidest details. The smell of the wet earth and crushed greenery around us. The feel of the night’s cool mist on my face. The sound of Ant’s grunts of effort with each footstep. The pounding of my heart against the walls of my chest.

  And then the small, horrible pings as several of the bullets hit the back of Ant’s suit.

  Air exploded from his mouth in something that wasn’t quite a scream but was close enough to scare me, and then I was somehow jumping out of his arms, knowing for certain that I had to carry my own weight until we found shelter. I landed on the ground and registered with a complete lack of emotion that my ankle was definitely damaged, but hoped that it would still carry me for the time being.

  I grabbed Ant’s arm. He was on his way down already, though I didn’t think the bullets had actually gone through the suit, and I yanked with a power I’d never realized I had, pulling him up and after me. I prayed that he kept his feet moving.

  “Ant, don’t you dare give up on me!” I screamed. “You keep running, or I swear on everything I own that I’ll kick your skinny ass myself!”

  He grunted in pain, but then his feet started moving and he was coming with me rather than fighting me. We raced into the darkness ahead, my eyes scanning the trees as I tried to figure out where Jace and Zion had gone.

  “You don’t own anything worth betting,” Ant huffed, and though it should have been a line laced with humor, all I heard in it was desperation and pain.

  “That doesn’t matter,” I snapped back, increasing my pace and yanking him after me. “If you think I’m letting you go down here, you’re absolutely insane.”

  He let out a quick, dry laugh, without mirth, and I didn’t waste any more breath on conversation. If the bullets whizzing past my head were any indication, these Ministry soldiers weren’t interested in making conversation. They wanted us dead, with no questions asked.

  We rounded yet another tree, and I almost collided with someone’s back, before skidding to a halt. Ahead of me, to my shock, was a large, grassy clearing, at least three times as big as the tiny place I called home. I never would have known it was there if we hadn’t run right into it. The trees that surrounded it were solid, the spaces between them filled with vines and shrubs, making the place almost feel like a room with walls.

  Strange, my mind suddenly said. If we couldn’t see it until we were right on top of it, how did Zion know it was here?

  It was a terrific question, but it would have to wait until I had the time and liberty for thinking. Unfortunately, there was no one waiting for us in the opening. If the rest of the team was still alive and was in the forest, they hadn’t yet discovered this clearing. Though, there was no telling whether this was the exact location we’d agreed on in the first place.

  A moment later, Jace (whom I had almost hit when I came into the clearing), Zion, Allerra, Ant, and I were rushing forward again at the sound of the soldiers crashing through the bushes behind us.

  It was stupid to have stopped in the first place, even for a few seconds, no matter how surprising the clearing had been. We had lost precious time, and if those soldiers caught us in the open like this…

  I didn’t manage to complete the thought. The clearing abruptly became a cyclone, the air whipping around us and bringing up leaves, sticks, and grass, which flew right into our faces and mouths, blinding and choking us. Then came a sound unlike anything I’d ever heard before. It was a roar, but at the same time… it wasn’t. More of a sucking of sound, like there should have been a ruckus but the absence of noise was a sound unto itself. I’d never heard anything like it. I tried to clear my eyes, terrified of what was going on.

  What happened next jumbled together like time had forgotten how to run itself.

  The wind died down as suddenly as it had started, and the debris spun from the air down to the ground. In front of us, to my surprise, was an airship, and though I vaguely recognized it as our airship, something was noticeably different about it. It was sleeker, and a deep, reflective purple, and seemed far more aerodynamic than any of the airships in which I’d ridden in the past. Certainly more aerodynamic than ours had been. The circular structures that contained the propellers were somehow… moving? As if they were adjustable rather than set. And there was…

  There was a girl hanging out of the door in the side of the ship, gesturing madly at us. Julia.

  Not five minutes ago, I’d been terrified at the idea that she and her air team were dead. Now here they were, having circled back around to save us, as I’d prayed they would.

  “Get on the ship!” Julia screamed, waving her hands and pointing to the ladder she was dropping through the door. “Run!”

  We didn’t wait for further invitation. Bullets were flying through the clearing now, and a ship from above seemed to be raining fire down on us. Before Julia could scream anything else, we were flying toward the ship, the five of us moving as one amidst the shower of bullets—and Pincers of Death—following us.

  Marco appeared suddenly, reaching down to grab hands and yank us up into the ship, the ladder be damned. Allerra went first, then he was grasping my wrist and pulling me up with one move, as if I didn’t weigh anything. A bullet slammed into my back, knocking the air from me, but I barely paused to feel it because I could see safety in the ship. Nothing was going to keep me from getting there. The moment my feet were on the ground again, I spun and put a hand out to Jace, who had been on the ladder when Marco grabbed me. I wasn’t nearly as strong as Marco, but I clutched Jace’s wrists and tugged with all my might, scooting backward over the floor on my butt and dragging him with me. Someone had grabbed Ant—I didn’t see who—and then the ship was lifting quickly up into the sky, away from the shouts of the soldiers below us, Zion still dangling from the ladder.

  As soon as we were in the sky and in some sort of relative safety, I had a chance to look around the ship in more detail.

  The first thing I realized was that Marco wasn’t piloting. He was still hanging halfway out t
he door, grabbing Zion by whatever handholds he could find and towing him up into the ship. I frowned hard. Marco was our pilot. He always flew the ship. If he wasn’t at the helm…

  I spun, my already-panicked brain leaping from one terrifying conclusion to another, thinking for a crazy moment that perhaps there was no one at the controls of the ship. But that couldn’t be true. We were ascending rapidly, up into the clouds. The ship hadn’t suddenly become a self-propelling miracle.

  But if it wasn’t Marco…

  I gaped when I spotted her. If the ship had changed since the last time I saw it, the same could be said of Alexy. The glasses were gone, and the shoulder-length black hair had been pulled back into a messy bun, highlighting her sharp cheekbones and huge eyes. She was still wearing the sleek black catsuit in which I’d last seen her, and her hands were still covered with what seemed to be leather gloves. Gone was the mousy girl. Now, without the glasses and with her hair pulled tightly back, she looked like nothing less than an assassin. An assassin who was handling the controls of the ship as if she’d been born to them, barely having to look at the various knobs and switches and gears, her hands—and feet—flying through motions that were taking us away from the chaos below. We were propelling forward at a more rapid rate of speed than I’d realized this ship was capable of.

  The girl was flying this thing like she’d ripped the training wheels off and exposed capabilities of which we’d never dreamed.

  I was further shocked to realize that the inside of the ship had been altered as well. There were more screens on the walls, for one, and there were also guns on pedestals, inside the doors.

  I paused and rewound several steps.

  Guns? Guns? Our ship had never been equipped with firearms before. It had also certainly never moved this quickly or this smoothly. I could barely hear any sound around us, which meant that the noise-canceling machinery was working. It seemed enhanced, as if we were moving more quietly than we had on our missions for Nelson.

  I was just opening my mouth to ask what in the world was going on, and how it had happened, when Alexy whirled around in her chair, gave us all a shot of her enormous—and yet somehow completely calm—eyes, and started screaming at us.

  “Get down and cover your heads, people! We have an enemy ship coming in fast, and I’m gonna have to take evasive action!”

  4

  I threw myself to the ground between two rows of seats and grabbed the leg of the chair in front of me. Then I reached past it with my other hand to grab Allerra’s arm. She was so small, and I was terrified by the idea of her flying out of the ship if anything—

  Before I could complete the thought, the ship suddenly turned on its side and shot forward. A scream tore from my throat. I couldn’t escape the feeling that this was all some sort of nightmare that I just needed to wake up from. Surely this was all a dream. The world didn’t just turn on its side like this for no reason.

  I reminded myself that it had, in fact, turned on its side and gone pear-shaped on me numerous times, so I probably shouldn’t have been so surprised. The thought did nothing to calm my nerves.

  The ship abruptly tilted in another direction. There was an explosion of flames just outside the door across the ship from me. A wave of heat swept over me, and I instinctively held my breath, not wanting to breathe in that dry, searing air. I squeezed Allerra’s hands, trying to communicate to her to do the same, before grunting at the futility of the action. The suits might be good for a lot of things, but I wished we were able to feel each other through them. Trying to give confidence or comfort through a layer of metal was like beating my head against a wall.

  I turned my face away from the heat and caught Allerra’s eye, though, and saw her lips pressed tightly together. Which was a good sign—she was holding her breath. It seemed that the suits had another upside; they protected us from heat.

  At least momentarily.

  The ship must have been bathed in flames at this point, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if they were actually coming through the open door, but I wasn’t even breaking a sweat. Aside from my face, which was still exposed, I didn’t feel the heat at all.

  Of course, that didn’t mean we couldn’t boil alive in these things if we were exposed for long enough. I was deeply relieved when Alexy yanked at the controls again and spun the airship away from the flames and back down toward the forest. I turned to glance through the door where the flames had been, and could see ships shooting by up there, some of them seeming to pursue others. Which brought me again to the idea that there were ships that were somehow fighting the Ministry’s vessels. But how? Who would they be?

  Minutes later, Alexy had turned our ship back toward the melee and reacted to the attack aggressively and with rapid machine gun fire. This was odd and should not have been happening, because our airship had never been armed with guns outside either. We had never been concerned about that, since we weren’t exactly in the business of shooting anyone up. Gunfire would definitely have ruined the secrecy we required, and besides, it wasn’t like we were ever trying to kill anyone. We’d been trying to save kids, not kill the people who took them.

  So why the hell did our ship suddenly have guns? And if it did, why hadn’t we ever been told about them? Even if we didn’t want to use them, it seemed like the sort of thing Nelson’s contact would have mentioned.

  More gunfire sounded, and there was another quick jolt to the right that sent Jace and Zion—who had for some reason not gotten down on the floor—flying against the side of the ship.

  Suddenly, all was silent. That is, until an enormous explosion from the ground below shook the ship. Allerra and I screamed, and after a moment of attempting to collect myself, I whirled on Alexy, my mind feeling as if it were about to explode with all the questions I had for her.

  “Well, that’s one down and about ten to go. Not a bad way to start, eh?” she asked, turning around and giving us a shrug as if she did this sort of thing every day.

  Okay, so the girl had ice water in her veins, apparently. Noted. She definitely wasn’t the mousy computer tech I’d taken her for. So, who exactly was she?

  A second later, we were right back in the middle of the air fight. The ships that zipped past us and into the night, shooting at us as they passed (using some sort of fire cannons that shot a stream of deadly flames), were noticeably sleeker and more refined than even the enhanced version of our airship. The enemy crafts seemed somehow more evil and competent and definitely more expensive.

  Not that it would have taken a genius to figure that part out, I thought as I tried to shove myself farther under the row of seats I’d found for cover. Allerra was on the other side of the row, trying to do the same thing. I had the brief but very distinct thought that we weren’t both going to fit. Though, that wasn’t going to matter at all if we found ourselves falling from the sky in a ball of flames, which I was starting to think we should expect.

  Those could only be Ministry planes on the other side of this fight. And whatever else they may or may not be, they had a ton more money than we did. We’d known from the start that our ship was an older military model, which they’d decided was of no use to them anymore. That was how we’d ended up with it, through a contact of Nelson’s. I was guessing that the Ministry wasn’t using military hand-me-downs like we were.

  No, if the suits their warriors were wearing were anything to go by, it meant they had the most expensive version of airship they could find. And we already knew they were shooting to kill.

  I cast a desperate glance at Alexy, wondering how she was handling all of this, and was shocked to see her looking casual, almost relaxed. Her hands were set on the steering mechanism of the ship, her fingers settled around it but not tense. Her movements were smooth and practiced. In fact, if I hadn’t known any better, I would have guessed that this was something she’d done a thousand times before. But that couldn’t be true, since I knew for a fact that we were the only group that had a ship like this. It was why w
e’d volunteered it. We’d had to do quite a bit of explaining about why we had it and how we could use it. If anyone else had had anything like it, surely they would have spoken up.

  Surely, if she’d flown them before, Alexy would have raised her hand at some point and said as much.

  As I watched, one of her hands quickly let go of the steering wheel and darted to the left, where it punched a bunch of buttons in quick succession. Seconds later, we had fire cannons as well, and they were shooting right at one of the ships in front of us. It only took seconds for the ship to catch fire and then explode. When it did, the other ships seemed to disappear, maybe to fight with each other somewhere else. Or maybe they didn’t want to take us on without a better plan.

  I had no idea, and I waited for a moment to see whether we were going to be attacked again, relishing the bit of peace we’d been afforded.

  When nothing happened and the ship seemed to remain stable, I climbed slowly to my feet, ready to find Jace and tell him that Nathan had done a really crappy job of checking backgrounds for OH+. Whatever parameters he’d used to research people’s histories, they hadn’t been enough.

  Alexy wasn’t who we’d thought she was.

  Then the girl in question swung the captain’s chair around and glared at us, one at a time, one eyebrow raised elegantly up toward her sharp black bangs. She gave a moue of distaste, almost a pout, as if she wasn’t quite pleased with the gang of misfits she’d ended up with. Then, much to my surprise, she grinned, showing a row of white, very even teeth.

  “Those fancy suits you’re wearing should have tracking devices implanted in them,” she said shortly. “They’ll be picked up on the movement trackers in the X-ray software you’ve been using. Marco, you got that drone I asked for keyed up and ready to go? Get it into the air and start the feed. The rest of you, get to the screens and tell me when you see blue dots on the ground.”