Thin Lines (The Child Thief #3)(110)

Both doors open while people were firing at us was about the stupidest thing possible.

I rushed to the one on my side, grappled with the handle while fighting to keep my balance, and managed to yank it shut. I threw the bolt, then turned and staggered to the other side of the swaying ship to do the same, sparing a glance at the forest below us, which was now engulfed in flames. The truck itself was just a memory, and the helicopters that had surrounded it didn’t seem much better off. Not all of those three choppers might have landed—my recollection of the last few seconds before the truck blew was fuzzy—but I couldn’t see any airborne ship through the smoke right now, and though it probably made me a bad person, I prayed that the explosion had killed them all.

Taking a deep breath, I pulled myself back into the ship and yanked the door shut before turning directly toward Jace and Henry. Those two had some explaining to do.

“What the hell was that?” I asked, caught between being angry at them and grinning outright at what they’d just managed to pull off. “You guys set up an explosion and didn’t think it would be a good idea to tell us first?”

Henry did grin at that. “Sure did. I had a lighter in my pocket, and when Jace and I realized that we needed some sort of distraction, preferably one that would take out anyone who was coming after us…” He shrugged as if it had been the most natural thing in the world, and I almost laughed.

“Jace?” I asked, turning to him.

“Well, it worked, didn’t it?” he asked, one corner of his mouth turned up in a smile.

“And it was incredibly dangerous,” Nelson said grimly. “We could have all been killed!”

“But we weren’t,” I noted, knowing that Jace and Henry—a completely unlikely pairing—had probably just saved us from arrest. Or death. “But we also can’t count on that being the end of the Authority. What else is in the sky? Anyone see anything?”

“The drone’s still there,” Abe said, his voice cold and serious. “Dead ahead. And I’m betting it’s relaying updates back to home base.”

I turned to stare out the window at where Abe was pointing, my heart hammering against my ribs. I’d forgotten about the drone.

We’d just set off an explosion that had destroyed an entire tanker and possibly all three helicopters, not to mention a number of Authority agents. But we still weren’t safe from them.

Outside the window, the drone was about fifty feet from our ship, no doubt taking pictures as quickly as it could—red and green lights on the lens blinking like eyeballs.





43





I yanked myself around and stared into the ship, trying desperately to think of what we could do about the small machine. We needed to get rid of it, ASAP, but how? What did we have in here…

Then I saw them. The pieces of tech that we often seemed to forget about, mostly because we never took them out of the airship.

The drones. Our drones. We had two of them.

I darted toward them, trying to remember everything I’d ever learned about flying them. Marco was our best drone pilot, and after him came Abe and Ant, but Marco was currently missing in action, and the twins were both otherwise engaged.

I’d trained on them, and I’d played a lot of video games that incorporated flying when I was younger. How much different could this be?

I grabbed one of the drones, hit the power switch, snatched up the remote that went with it, and turned and ran for the side of the ship. There I threw the door open once again. I needed a good view of what I was about to do, and unless that drone had guns attached to it, I didn’t need to worry about bullets anymore.

“Kory!” I shouted, calling out the name of the only other person not doing anything right now. “Grab my belt! Hold me!”

The man came rushing to my side and snagged the back of my belt without asking, and I leaned out of the ship into the open air, threw the drone into the sky, and put my hands to the controls.

It took me approximately 2.5 seconds to figure out what was what, and that watching the drone itself was way more important than watching the screen attached to the remote. The controls were simplistic, and the joystick and the crosshairs were all I needed to worry about for the moment. The drone was sensitive to my every move, and the fact that the remote was almost the same as every gaming console I’d ever seen made this a whole lot simpler.

I got the drone steadied in the air, made sure it was facing the right way, and then sent it diving right toward the Authority’s drone. I had no idea what I was going to do, exactly, but it had to be something that would take that evil thing out of the sky. We couldn’t have it figuring out which direction we were going.

The government’s drone, unfortunately, was far quicker and nimbler than ours. It zipped out of the way before my drone could even get there. Then it turned around to face my drone and started firing at it.

Okay. Definitely guns on that thing, then. But they seemed to be smaller guns than normal, which meant that they might not be able to damage the ship itself.

Unfortunately, they could damage my drone. I hit the controls and started moving the drone to the left and right, and up and down, trying to avoid the bullets the Authority’s machine was sending at mine.

I realized that I was going to have a big problem here. I could just about keep from being shot out of the sky, but I couldn’t damage the other drone as long as I was on the defensive.