Thin Lines (The Child Thief #3)(20)

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 that 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.

We turned up the next street, not having the time to care which direction we were heading in, and then hung a sharp right into an alleyway. I could hear the agent behind us, still screeching at us to stop in the name of the Authority—as if we were going to just give up and turn ourselves in—but his voice was far enough behind us that I thought if we could just get one or two corners ahead of him, it might work.

If he was there alone, it might work. I started praying that he didn’t have any backup in the region. That he’d been out on his own, searching for us or going about his business, and that he wouldn’t radio for backup before we got away.

This alley was a short one, and we sprinted over the dirty pavement and reached the other end of it within seconds, then turned left again and dashed up a wide-open street to another alley. A smaller, darker, dirtier one. Halfway through this one we ducked through an open door… and found ourselves in the kitchen of an Italian restaurant.

The chefs and servers turned to stare at us, their mouths hanging open, and I took a moment to glance at the pots of sauce and pasta on their stoves, and the loaves of bread in the oven.

My God was I hungry.

But we weren’t there to eat, and we shot out of the kitchen and into the main dining room, then through the front doors to an entirely different neighborhood. This was all small markets and food stalls, and though the sidewalks were crowded, everyone here looked happy and satisfied, having either just come from dinner or making their way toward a restaurant.

Jace slowed to a quick walk to match the rest of the traffic and threw a glance over his shoulder. I watched his eyes turning quickly back and forth and saw the moment when he decided that we hadn’t been followed.

“Safe, I believe,” he murmured. “At least for now. I don’t think he saw us duck into that restaurant. I think… I think we lost him.”

I turned around and limped backward, my eyes scanning the road behind us, my mind praying that he was right. After several moments of watching, I could confirm that I hadn’t seen the man who had been chasing us.

It looked like we had, incredibly, gotten away.

“The coffee shop is only about a block from here,” Jace said, taking my hand and turning me around to face front again. “Let’s get in there and see whether Allerra is still waiting for us. And whether she has the information we’ve been searching for. We’ll just have to pray that Ant and the others show up soon—and that we’re the only ones who ran into an agent from the Authority.”