Thin Lines (The Child Thief #3)(19)

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.