The Child Thief 3: Thin Lines Read online

  “That won’t work,” Jackie said quickly. “Like, not even close. If you don’t have the keys for these things, we’re not going to be able to use them. Unless you happen to know how to hotwire an engine. Given your idea of how to start a car, I’m guessing the answer to that is no,” she said, waving in the general direction of the lockpicking device.

  Jace looked crushed, but he got over it quickly and peered hopefully at Jackie. “You said you used to fix a lot of things when you were a kid. Do you know how to hotwire an engine?”

  She shook her head. “No. We didn’t have anything that high-tech when I was a kid, so I never had anything to practice on, and once I got older and did have access to cars, I had a lot of other things to think about. Like paying rent and staying alive.”

  The hope fled from Jace’s expression, and he turned toward the rest of us, looking as though he was on the verge of panicking. We could hear shouts coming from behind us in the tunnel, now, which didn’t help matters. Jace moved quickly past us to double check that the door was closed, and threw a deadbolt from the outside, then whirled around again.

  “Anyone?” he asked firmly. “Does anyone know how to hotwire an engine? Because if not, we’re going to have to get out of this parking garage and figure something else out.”

  No one said anything for a long moment, and the silence was beginning to grow heavy when I finally decided to speak up.

  “I can do it,” I said begrudgingly. “At least, I think I can. It’s been a long time since I’ve tried it, though, so I’m not making any promises.”

  Jace gave me a surprised look, and I could hear gasps from Jackie and Ant, which I ignored, and then an audible gunshot came from inside the tunnel. Jace started quickly toward me and shoved his arm under mine, then towed me toward the first scooter in the row.

  “I don’t know how you can do it or why, but if you think you’ve got a shot, I’m all for it,” he breathed. “We need seven scooters, and we need them quickly. What do you need from me to get this done?”

  I dropped to my knees in front of the first scooter and started giving him a rough list of the things I needed—not much, really, just scissors to cut and then strip the wires—and then got to it, praying this would actually work.

  11

  The moment my hands were on the casing that enclosed the scooter’s starting mechanism, a memory of my last year at summer camp flooded back. I’d just turned seventeen, and I’d gone to camp with the threat of adulthood hanging over my head, my mother’s words about graduating lower-level schooling and moving on to more specialized classes ringing in my ears. I’d known that I didn’t have much of my adolescence left, and I’d known that my parents had high expectations of me. Expectations that the society I lived in pressured me to fulfill.

  My response had been to rebel against everything I’d ever been taught in terms of being a nice girl. Try on life without responsibilities for the last time. Or at least, that was what it had felt like back then. Henry had been the start of it all. Dating a boy from the wrong side of the tracks, whose parents were living proof of the brokenness of our society. Daring to fall in love with him. Going to see bands my parents wouldn’t have liked. Learning to hotwire a scooter had been one more thing on the list of activities that summer by the lake, along with staying out too late, seeing movies we were still too young to get into, and getting free ice cream from the friend we’d made at the ice cream shop. And then sex. Taking that one final step into the unknown, thinking that I had loved the boy, and feeling, somewhere inside, that it was proof of my ability to exist on my own, without my parents. Of course that had been the thing that eventually got me caught.

  Then kicked out of my parents’ house.

  Suddenly two objects appeared in front of my face, and I jerked back from the scooter, staring at them.

  “Screwdriver and knife combined,” Jackie hissed. “And a pair of scissors that I grabbed from Jace’s apartment on the way out.”

  I stared at the combination tool she was holding, vaguely recognizing it as something called a Swiss army knife, then turned my eyes quickly to the scissors, before looking up at her, surprised.

  “Where did you get these?” I asked.

  She gave me a cheeky grin as she shoved the objects into my hands. “I’ve always found that scissors come in handy when you least expect it. I saw a pair just sitting on Jace’s counter and figured they’d be better off with us than with whoever was coming after us, so…”

  I huffed with laughter and then turned back to the scooter, my hands flying up to its plastic casing. The casing right next to the ignition will be what you want to remove, I remembered Henry saying.

  I got to work, and once I had traced through the wires of the engine and found the one that connected to the headlight, I sliced right through it with the scissors to create a free piece of wiring. This, I shoved at Jackie, along with the combination tool.

  “Strip it!” I said. “I need clean wire!”

  She grabbed the pieces and hurriedly went to work while I stumbled to my feet and moved on to the next scooter.

  “Jace, how many scooters do you think we absolutely need?” I asked, taking the plastic cover off the next scooter and digging for the cap.

  “Seven, if you can manage it in time,” he replied, following me. Then another gunshot sounded out from the other side of the door, and he dropped to his knees next to me. “Scratch that. We don’t have time for everyone to get their own. Get us at least four.”

  I heard footsteps and shouting from the tunnel, and almost choked on the wire I was holding in my mouth, but managed to keep it together, and moved to the next scooter to go to work.

  “Oh my God, they’re going to shoot right through the lock—or the door—and get us,” Abe stuttered.

  “Can’t,” Jace said. “That door and the locks in it are bulletproof. They’re going to have to use something a lot bigger and more impressive than a gun to get past them, and unless they have some sort of laser to cut through the door, I don’t think they’ll be able to risk it. Even if they have bazookas, they would have to be completely insane to use them in a tunnel like that.”

  “Laser cutter sounds like exactly what they’d have with them, actually,” Ant muttered.

  “Which is exactly why we have to hurry. Robin, I’ve got your wire,” Jackie said quickly, back at the first scooter.

  I motioned her toward the second while I moved to the fourth. “Follow after me and do the same with the wires I’m leaving on the ground,” I said. “I’ll go back and use them after I’ve got the scooters prepped.”

  That would be the moment of truth, I thought tensely, because prepping the scooters was going to be a waste of time if what I had in mind didn’t work. Another stupid idea. Just added to the list of things I’d tried so far this week that hadn’t worked.

  “Stop thinking about it,” Jace said quietly. “If it doesn’t work, it’s my fault, not yours.”

  I glanced up from the tangle of wires, surprised, and he gestured at my face.

  “You’d make a horrible gambler.” He smirked. “Your face goes through about fifty expressions a second when you’re thinking about something important. The fact is, I’m the one who chose to escape via this tunnel. I’m the one who assumed we’d be able to use the scooters. Not you.”

  I just nodded, too preoccupied to respond, and a second later, I was done prepping the scooters.

  I shifted back to the first one and knelt down, holding my breath against the pain from the bruise on my leg before taking the cap in my right hand. I glared at the wires, then rotated the box to see the openings at the back. Each opening exposed the ends of the wires going into the front, and those openings and connections were what I needed. If I could use them correctly, it would fool the scooter into thinking that there was a key connecting everything together, and all we’d have to do was hit the gas. I just had no idea whether it was going to work or not.

  I grabbed the wire Jackie had prepared for
me and cut two small pieces off, then threw the rest away, realizing now that I could have cut only one wire and used pieces of it for all the scooters. Well, live and learn, I guessed. Next time I was trying to hotwire four scooters at once, I’d know a more efficient way to do it.

  But my God did I hope I never had to do anything like this again.

  I jumped as someone banged on the door behind me, my heart leaping into my throat, and hurriedly shoved one end of the piece of wire in my hand into the opening that connected to the red wire and snapped the catch on the side shut. Next, I moved the other end into the opening that connected to the black wire and repeated the process with the next catch. As soon as they were as far into the holes as they could go, I repeated the process with the other piece, connecting the two holes that held the pieces of green wire.

  And that was supposed to be all there was to it.

  I exhaled and moved toward the machine, ready to jump it into life.

  Only to be cut off by Ant.

  “Go do the others, Robin,” he said. “I’ve got this. If those Authority agents have a laser cutter, we don’t have much time. It might take those things a bit to warm up, but once they do, nothing is safe.”

  I nodded and ran to the second scooter. I cut the wire more quickly this time, located the openings, and started stuffing the ends of the wires into the spots where I hoped they would do some good. I’d just finished when I heard the roar of an engine.

  I turned, my face stretched in a wide grin, and saw a matching grin on Ant’s face.

  “Never in a million years would I have expected that from you,” he said, and laughed.

  He handed off the scooter to Jace, gave him a strong recommendation to not let it die, and then followed me from one scooter to the next, starting them when I was done with them and handing them to their riders when we were finished.

  “Don’t. Let. It. Die,” he told Abe sharply. “You know as well as I do that this might not work again.”

  Abe gave him a quick nod. “Not my first time, bro.”

  We then divided up into pairs and climbed onto the scooters. Abe had one to himself, Kory and Nelson took one, and Ant already had Jackie settled behind him on another. Jace was on the first scooter—colored bright red—waiting for me, and I darted toward him and threw my leg over it just as the door into the tunnel behind us started to melt and crumple.

  A moment later, it exploded out of the jamb.

  We sped out of the parking lot, tires squealing under us as our drivers hit the gas on their scooters, and I grabbed onto Jace with all the strength I had in my arms, praying that we would get out of there in time.

  I feared we wouldn’t be able to outride them. Not using secondhand scooters that were in danger of conking out at any moment. I’d been on scooters that had a tendency to stall whenever they slowed too much, and there was no doubt in my mind that these would give us the same sort of problem if we were for any reason forced to let up on the gas.

  We zoomed out of the parking garage in a cloud of dust and debris, coughing, and zipped onto the road in front of us.

  “Jace, do you even know where we are?” I shouted, my mind flying ahead of us and trying to find a way out of this mess. I’d been working in this city for over a year and knew my way around, but I didn’t recognize the neighborhood we were in, which frightened me.

  “I have a basic idea!” he shouted back over his shoulder.

  Still, he looked to our right, where Ant and Jackie were driving too close, their knees almost touching ours, and shouted at Jackie, who had become one of our resident GPS experts.

  “Jackie, can you get on your phone and figure out the quickest and easiest way out of town?” he yelled.

  She fumbled in her pocket for her phone. “Where are we going?” she shouted back.

  “My house!” I screamed.

  I quickly gave her the address and watched her type it in, and then twisted to look back in front of us as she started shouting directions.

  “Ant, you take the lead!” Jace said, easing off the accelerator a little so that we fell behind them. “That way Jackie’s only shouting at you!”

  I glanced back and saw Abe right behind us, his face set in grim lines, and on the next scooter back, Kory leaning over the handlebars as if he could make the scooter go more quickly that way, with Nelson clinging to him, her green eyes narrowed in concentration.

  Behind them, Authority agents started tumbling out of the parking garage, all blue jumpsuits, masks, and guns. Guns that were pointed right at us.

  “We have to turn!” I screamed, shaking Jace’s shoulder. “We’re going to get shot!”

  Ant heard me and swooped a quick right at the next intersection, the tires on his scooter jumping and skidding. I held my breath at the thought that we were going to be making the same turn and tightened my grip around Jace’s waist as we skidded into it, our scooter tipping so far toward the street that our knees almost touched the concrete, gravity trying to pull us all the way over. I glanced over Jace’s shoulder to see the far curb of the street coming up way too quickly and knew that we were going to hit it. We were going to hit it and go flying, and if the crash itself didn’t kill us, the Authority agents behind us would. They’d be on us before we could do anything about it.

  Then Jace, the picture of cool, manhandled the scooter back into position on the street and shot forward as if the entire thing had gone exactly according to plan.

  Behind us I could hear gunshots, and Abe and Kory both shouting, though I couldn’t make out what they were saying, and then we were shooting right through a crowded intersection, not even bothering to stop, the scooters grouped so closely together that my knee was shoved in between Kory and Nelson. Cars screeched around us, brakes squealing as they tried to stop before they hit us, and two vehicles hit each other, the ensuing crash drowning out even the gunshots behind us.

  We roared away from the crash, the scooters’ engines whining with effort, and wound up in the next alley over. At that moment I started breathing again, not knowing when I’d actually stopped.

  “Single-file line!” Jace shouted. “Ant, you and Jackie take the lead! Robin and I are next. Abe, you and Jack fall in!”

  He ducked down lower, and I ducked with him, positive that bullets were going to start raining down on us at any moment. Why hadn’t Jace built the tunnel to a lot that sold fast cars? Anything that would have put a layer of metal between us and the world outside would have been better than scooters!

  We tore through the alley, swerving around litter and the occasional cat, and hit the next street at the scooters’ top speeds.

  “Jackie, where are you taking us?” Jace shouted.

  She had to turn her head to shout over her shoulder so we could hear her over the roar of the engines. “To a neighborhood where I hope they don’t expect us!” she cried. “And from there, out of the city!”

  I just prayed she knew what she was doing. If the Authority agents had vehicles, I hoped they’d have to go back to the front of the coffee shop to get them, and that they would have lost our trail by then. But I also knew that there were traffic cams on practically every corner, and that it wouldn’t take much for the Authority to use them to track us down.

  I opened my mouth to tell the others to hide their faces, but then realized that was completely pointless. All the Authority would have to look for was four scooters going far too quickly and taking alleys instead of normal streets. They’d find us immediately.

  We had to get away from those cameras and onto country roads so we could get to my house. It was dangerous, because we knew that the Authority had the address, and that they would likely be, at some point, checking it. But it was also our only choice right now. The city had suddenly become far too big a liability, with Authority agents everywhere and our faces plastered up on TV screens as terrorists. We needed a place outside of city lines, where we could at least regroup and try to get our feet back under us. Maybe get some supplies. Check the news sit
es. Even touch base with Gabby.

  I exhaled heavily, trying to catch my breath against the wind whipping my face. We’d gone up against the government before, but now it looked like we were real live outlaws.

  12

  “We should split up!” I shouted in the next alley, after we were out of the rushing traffic of the previous street.

  Jace turned his face a bit. “What? Why?”

  I gestured upward. “The cameras. We know the Authority can monitor them, and they’d be stupid not to. They’ll spot us in no time, and we’ll be completely screwed!”

  He nodded immediately and shouted for everyone to slow a bit. Four scooters came swerving closer, and five pairs of eyes snapped to us, panicked and questioning.

  “I hope you have a good reason for slowing us down when we’re in the middle of running for our lives,” Ant sniped. “We can’t afford for these things to stall.”

  “I concur,” Abe added in exactly the same tone of voice.

  “The cameras,” Jace said shortly. “They’re going to pick us up if we stay bunched up like this. No matter how much traffic is out there on the road, four scooters in a group is going to be a red flag. If we split up…”

  “They might overlook us,” Jackie said, huffing. “You’re right. We have to go on separately.” Her gaze shot to me, and she tucked her hand into her pocket and pulled something out, then shoved it into her ear. “Robin, you still got your comm?” she asked.

  I nodded and pulled mine out of my ear, where it was still sitting. “Got it,” I said.

  I turned and tossed it to Kory, who caught it and popped it into his ear. Ant slid his out of his pocket and threw it to his brother, while Jace fitted his into his ear again, and the moment all our drivers were on the comm link, Ant and Jackie sped toward the mouth of the alley and then out into the street, Jackie shouting coordinates into the comm link as they went. Jace repeated them to me, and I punched the coordinates into my phone’s mapping system and let the GPS do the work for us. Within moments, Jace and I were speeding along, my map taking me in the direction Jackie had indicated.