The Child Thief 3: Thin Lines Read online

  Ant dug out his phone and started typing, while my heart sank. No Alexy and no Zion meant that if they’d had an escape route, they’d taken it and left us behind.

  Plan B it was.

  I fished my own phone out of my pocket and thumbed through the pictures I’d taken of the timeline in the Authority prison. All still there, thankfully. All completely clear, thanks to the advanced tech of the camera.

  If we were lucky, they would give us something—anything—that would show us a clear way forward. A way toward figuring out who Little John was and where we could find them.

  6

  We rushed back down the spiral staircase, but before we could go any farther, Abe and Nelson tumbled through the front door of the building, panting.

  We stared in surprise at their entrance, before Ant and Kory bent down to help them up.

  “What, you can’t get through the door like a normal human being?” Ant scoffed, yanking Abe to his feet.

  “You guys are right on time,” I said, brushing past Ant’s snark. “We were just about to get out of here. Zion and Alexy are missing, which means we’re moving on to plan B.”

  “The library,” Nelson said, and turned to look at Jace. “Right. So how are we getting there?”

  Kory glanced out the window at the street outside. “That’s a good question. The crowd is still out there, and we don’t want to get mixed up in it again if we can help it. So that adds another level of difficulty here.” He frowned at Jace. “You’re sure there’s not a back exit out of here?”

  Jace exhaled. “I’m pretty sure. I’ve been to Alexy’s a number of times.”

  Kory stared at him, then looked past him, past the stairwell, and into the hallway that stretched toward the back of the building. He looked from right to left, up and down, and narrowed his eyes.

  “Follow me,” he announced.

  He shot past the staircase at the back of the building and made a sudden turn to the left into a doorway that I hadn’t even noticed. The door led to another set of stairs, which descended into darkness. Kory pounded down them, followed by Jace and me, then the others. After one flight, we found ourselves in some sort of basement. It was almost pitch black, and I stifled a grunt of fear. I’d never been a big fan of the dark. Particularly when it came with a side of creepy. Suddenly there was light, and Kory smirked at us from under a swinging single lightbulb.

  Behind him was a door. Through its window, I could see stairs leading upward. Outdoor stairs.

  “You were saying?” he asked with a cocky grin.

  Jace ignored him and strode right to the door in question, looking up through the window.

  “Looks like it leads to the alley behind the place,” he murmured. “How have I never found this before? I never even thought to look for a basement.”

  “That’s because you’re always too busy trying to keep your nose clean.” Kory replied, pushing him gently to the side and lowering to his knees in front of the door. “You’d never think of something like this because you’re too good. I, on the other hand…” He winked, then inserted his own lockpicker into the doorknob.

  I silently thanked whatever beings watching over us that Kory was a trickster rather than a good boy. If we could avoid the crowds at the front of the building, we would get out of here faster, with less risk of being found by the enforcers controlling the masses.

  The lock on the door clicked, and Jace went through it a second later, not even waiting for Kory to stand. I grinned at the show of rivalry between them before shutting my eyes against the glare of the sun.

  The alley was completely deserted, courtesy of the enforcers keeping the crowd on the other side of the building, and I was grateful that we’d managed to come up into an empty street rather than a crowded one. We didn’t have time to stand around staring, though, and Jace turned toward Jackie as soon as she reached the top of the stairs.

  “Jackie, map your way to the library from here,” he said. “I have to admit it’s not a trip I’ve ever taken. We’ve got to enlarge those pictures.”

  “What exactly are you hoping to find in them?” Abe asked. “Didn’t you guys get a good look at whatever’s in those pictures when you took them?”

  Jace looked as if he wanted to snap at Abe but then shrugged. “Yes and no. We weren’t exactly in that prison to do research, and I doubt any of us committed those timelines to memory. They’ll show up too small on a phone. Plus, we’ll want to look at them all spread out, each photo next to the other, so we can get the full picture of the timeline. Thanks to Zion and Alexy being MIA, whatever secret escape plan they might have had is gone, along with our connection to the higher powers. Nathan isn’t responding to my texts or calls, and he’s not on the encrypted app, so no one else has any way of trying to get in touch with him. We can’t hang around on the streets forever or squat permanently in Zion’s apartment—or Alexy’s. We need those pictures to figure out who Little John is and where we can find them.”

  “And the Authority or the Ministry or whoever has given us a head start.” I added, picking up on his line of logic. “They’ve been looking into them for years. If we’re trying to find them, that’s the most reasonable place to start. But we have to have the timeline in a format that works.”

  Abe was still frowning. “And if the Ministry or the Authority or whoever has been looking into them for however long still hasn’t found them, what the hell makes you think that we’re going to be any better at it?”

  Silence met his statement, and I frowned too. None of us had actually thought about that—partially because we’d been hoping that we wouldn’t have to count on the timeline to give us any immediate answers. But now that Abe had brought it up…

  “Well, they didn’t have me, did they?” Nelson interrupted. “And they didn’t have Gabby. And they certainly weren’t as desperate as we are.” She held out her hand to me. “Robin, give me your phone. I’ll forward those pictures to everyone else so that we all have them. I don’t want our potential future safety depending on you being careful with that one phone. And while we’re there, I’ll try to get onto a computer and do some quick searches for the events we have on the timeline. Untraceable searches, of course.”

  “You have to be careful, though, because we know that the library here got us on camera when we were researching city plans—the day before someone broke into one of their jails,” Jackie said. “Ant, Robin, Jace: we’ll have to keep our faces hidden somehow or they might recognize us.”

  I nodded, then fumbled for my phone, pressing my thumbprint against the screen to unlock it before handing it to Nelson.

  “I think it’s unlikely that they would have put those two seemingly unrelated things together already, but we’re just going to have to take that risk,” Jace replied impatiently. He turned to face Jackie, who was hopping from foot to foot. “Jackie, you have your GPS loaded up and ready to go?”

  She whipped out her phone like it was a weapon. “You can count on me, Captain. I don’t know this area of town well, but I’m good at GPS.”

  “Okay. I’m giving us an hour to get this done. But this is going to be extremely dangerous. So we leave this alley in two separate groups in order to be less obvious. You four…” Jace glanced at Ant, Abe, Nelson, and Kory and shook his head at what I now saw as completely ridiculous—and painfully conspicuous—outfits.

  “You look like the misfits from some sort of play, so try to keep your heads down as much as you can. You’re going ahead of us, but only by thirty seconds. Nelson, I’m putting you in charge of GPS for that group. Get to the library and wait for us just inside the front doors.”

  He frowned then, as if something else had occurred to him. “Robin and I are taking Jackie. If we get separated, or if you look behind you and don’t see us, just get to the library and get as much done as you can before going to the coffee shop above my apartment. We need to check for Allerra, and I need to get to my place. I just hope she’s still there. Ant, do you remember how to get th
ere?”

  Ant nodded, and Jace went on. “If we get separated, we’ll have to make our way to the café separately. If we don’t arrive within an hour, though, and you haven’t heard from any of us, don’t wait. It will mean that something’s happened and that you might be in danger. Get Allerra, get back to Zion’s house, and make sure that you’re not followed. See if Allerra knows how to reach Zion or Alexy through some top-secret route—she’s always seemed closer to them than the rest of us, so maybe she knows more than we thought. In fact—” He paused and glanced down at me. “There’s a chance she knows anything that they knew. Maybe that’s the reason Zion left her behind. Maybe she’s our treasure map!”

  He looked back up at Ant. “If we don’t meet you, take her and make her tell you everything she knows. You’ll need to contact Julia or Marco—but do not call or text us if you haven’t heard from us. I don’t want any of you leading the Authority to your door by trying to get in touch with us if we’ve been captured. Understood?”

  Several heads nodded, and Ant’s eyes grew wide. He took Jackie by the arms and bent down to stare into her eyes.

  “I’ll take care of them, but only because you have something else you need to do. You be careful, you hear me?” he said. “Bad things happen to us when we get split up, and I’m not ready to deal with that. I don’t want to have to rescue you from some jail somewhere because you let your mouth run away with you when you shouldn’t have.”

  Her face went from stubborn to sappy, and I blinked at the quick change. When I looked again, though, her features had returned to their normal stoic expression, and she was nodding at him.

  “And the same goes for you. Don’t do anything stupid. Don’t do anything brave. I’m not going to be there to be impressed, so there’s really no point.”

  Kory was having trouble keeping the grin off his face, and a quick glance at Abe showed me that he had been rendered completely speechless. He obviously hadn’t realized that Ant and Jackie had grown closer during the last week. He’d probably never even considered that his brother could form an attachment to anyone else—much less the mouthy girl who had always bossed them around during missions.

  Jackie lifted a hand to his face to quiet him. “Ant, it will be fine. I’ll see you in an hour, okay?”

  Then she gave him a push, Nelson tossed me my phone, and she, Ant, Kory and Abe sprinted toward the mouth of the alley, and the library. I watched them go, praying that they would make it safely and that we would be there right behind them.

  7

  We waited for about thirty seconds before we started walking after them.

  When we reached the end of the alley, we skidded to a halt, and Jackie leaned up against the corner to peer around it.

  “What’s going on?” I whispered. “What do you see? Is that crowd still here?”

  “Sure is,” Jackie replied. “And it’s gotten bigger, if you can believe it. Plus, it looks like there are a lot more enforcers than we realized. Like maybe fifty of them. Makes sense. If they wanted to stop all the traffic to do an ID check, would they really have sent just those three enforcers? That would have been beyond stupid. The question is, what are they even doing?”

  “They look like they’re rounding them up,” Jace murmured hesitantly, having moved around her to see. “If they were checking IDs and then sending them on through, there wouldn’t be a buildup of people like this. They’re actually holding them here. What I can’t figure out is why. I’ve never seen enforcers rounding so many people up before.” Then he shook himself and straightened. “Still, if they’re focusing on that, it gives them less opportunity to focus on us. Jackie, where are we going?”

  She ducked back into the alley and glanced at her phone. “The closest library is right in the town center,” she breathed. “I don’t like going back to the same one, but it’s the closest and the biggest. Too bad we won’t—”

  “I don’t need the breakdown of how and why,” Jace cut in. “Just tell me how far we’ve got to go.”

  “So-rry,” Jackie muttered. “About fifteen blocks. And then after that, about ten more to get to your coffee shop.”

  Fifteen blocks. Well, that didn’t seem too bad. As long as we could get around the crowd and escape the notice of the enforcers, we should have a clear route. I didn’t know this area, but I knew that the roads which led into the town center worked more or less like the spokes of a wheel, all heading for the same spot.

  If my knowledge of the city was anything to go by, we needed to get on that road and run like hell for the library without making any turns.

  We started forward without a word.

  “What’s our route?” Jace asked quietly as we left the alley.

  “Turn right,” she said. “The easiest way is back to the main street, but I think we’d better stay off that until we’re farther away from the crowd. There’s no reason to put ourselves in a situation where we might be noticed if we don’t have to. If we turn here and head toward the main street, then we’ll come to an alley heading to the left. That’s our destination. It travels in the same direction and will take us where we need to go until we can get back on the main avenue.”

  We ran in that direction, speed more important than subtlety at this point. As long as we were in the back alleys of the city, anyone who saw us running would just put it down to business that they didn’t want to be involved in.

  The next ten minutes were a haze of dashing through alleys, around trashcans, and over garbage, my eyes constantly roving between the road ahead of us and the glimpses I had of the street to our right. We didn’t see anyone, but that didn’t make me feel any better. I couldn’t get over the feeling that we were being watched by someone—or the thought that cameras might catch us at any moment.

  Hell, we might not even know about all the cameras the government had in this city. They could have them in every single wall! If that was true, then it wouldn’t matter how much we kept our faces down or brought our hands up to our mouths to cough whenever we passed an intersection. We would have been on camera from the moment we stepped onto the street. If the Authority was as good as we thought they were, they might already be waiting for us around the next corner.

  I didn’t say anything about my fears, knowing that it wouldn’t do anyone any good, but every time I heard a clatter of something falling or the screech of a rat in the garbage, I jumped, positive that we’d been caught.

  By the time we finally got back out onto the main road and started walking rather than running, we were in a completely different part of the city, and the crowds were from normal lunchtime traffic rather than enforcer-directed lines of people waiting to have their IDs checked.

  It was a relief to be away from that crowd. But I also knew it had already taken too long for us to make this journey. The bruise on my leg had slowed me down, and after the night we’d had, we were all suffering when it came to endurance.

  We also hadn’t seen any sign of Ant and the others. But maybe that was just because we’d been in the back alleys. Maybe they’d been braver than us and had gone right out to the main road.

  “Jackie, how much farther?” I asked, breathing heavily.

  “According to the GPS, we only have two blocks left,” she replied. There was a pause as she looked around us, and then: “Yes, it is. Look, there it is right there. It… Uh-oh.”

  “What?” Jace asked.

  “That man. The man right in front of us, at the end of the block, do you see him? He’s staring right at us. He looks… He looks like he recognizes us.”

  At that, the fog of pain that had been hovering between me and the real world fled, and reality came rushing right back in. On the list of things we couldn’t have happening, someone recognizing us was absolutely at the top.

  My eyes flew to the road before us, desperately seeking the man Jackie was talking about. Where was he?

  Then I saw him. He looked like any other relatively successful businessman. Nothing about him stood out. Except tha
t he was staring at us, like Jackie had said. Staring at us like he’d found a prize. As I watched, he took out his phone, glanced at it, and then looked right back at me. One more glance at the phone, and then a direct stare at Jackie.

  “Keep walking,” Jace said quietly. “Act like nothing’s wrong. Act like we haven’t noticed him.”

  “Kind of hard when he just saw us staring at him while he was staring at us,” Jackie said out of the corner of her mouth. She fell into step beside Jace, but I could see that her shoulders were set at a stiff angle, her body tensed to start running at any moment.

  “Maybe he’s mistaken,” Jace replied. “Maybe he thinks we’re someone we’re not. If we stop and run, it might confirm that we’ve got something to hide.”

  I was staring at the man, trying to look like I wasn’t staring at him. But it was hard. And Jace was definitely wrong. That man didn’t think we were anyone else. I could see in his eyes that he knew exactly who we were—and what we’d done.

  That thought was confirmed a second later when he quickly pulled something out of his pocket and held it up in front of him.

  I’d never seen an Authority badge before, and I never wanted to see another. The X was a stark, horrible black on the white background, and the snake around it was blood red. Even worse, it somehow expanded out of the leather into which it was branded, so that it jumped out at us, highlighting our bodies in red and black as if it was coloring us for all the world to see.

  Branding us as the people he was searching for.

  Or at least, that was how it seemed. Though, it might have just been the paranoia of knowing that we were being hunted.

  I was sure of the fact that he started screaming at us.

  “Compliance Authority!” he shouted. “Stop in the name of the law!”

  We didn’t stop. Instead, Jace, Jackie, and I whirled and ran.