Thin Lines (The Child Thief #3)(22)

“The group calls themselves OH+,” the newscaster was saying in a monotone voice, “which we believe stands for Operation Hood. Not all of the group was involved in the jailbreak, but certain members were, and those members are now considered to be enemies of the state. The Authority has requested that the public help bring them in for questioning regarding a possible terrorist plot.”

“Oh my God,” I breathed. “They’re calling us terrorists.”

“Surest way to get the public to turn you in,” Jace returned. “Make them think they’re in danger, and they’ll become your best officers.”

We all put hands up over our faces in whatever way we could and stared at the TV in shock.

“We do have photographs of almost all the criminals,” the newscaster continued. “Those who escaped from Authority prison are lined up along the bottom of the screen now…”

My eyes dropped to the bottom of the screen, and there I saw pictures of my friends—stills taken from the video the Authority had sent us. They were right there on TV, for all the world to see.

We weren’t going to be safe in public at all. Not unless we wore disguises at all times. They were making sure of that.

“And these are the men and women who perpetrated the crime,” the newscaster continued.

And there, sitting right in between Jace’s picture and Jackie’s, was my own face. It was in black and white, and had obviously been shot at night, but there had been a neon sign over me at the time and my features were well lit. I remembered exactly where I’d been at that moment, and even how the air had smelled. We’d thought that we had put on our masks early enough, that we had been careful.

My God, had we been stupid.

“Holy crap,” Ant breathed, staring at the screen. “They got us on the traffic cams. We never even thought to disguise ourselves against them at the time, and we had used the things! We were such idiots.”

He was right. We hadn’t considered that we were on camera twenty-four hours a day, if the government cared to look. And that we’d been on more cameras during the jailbreak than we ever would have been during regular life.

We just hadn’t thought about the fact that there would have been cameras on the streets too. Although, even if we had, what would we have done about it? We’d approached the compound’s gates thinking that we might be able to go through in disguise as two agents and their group of prisoners, and we couldn’t have worn our masks at that point. They would have immediately identified us as suspicious.

We hadn’t bothered with masks until we’d known we couldn’t go with plan A and had found a different way into the compound.

“Right, well, we can’t go out in public, then,” Jackie said, her voice cracking a bit. “Jace, any suggestions?”

“My apartment,” he said firmly, already standing. “I have better security than anyone else, and we can get food from the coffee shop. It might not be ideal in terms of space, but it’ll give us a safe place to hide until we can figure out how to get out of Trenton.”

We all turned toward him, listening, and at that minute, I heard from behind the bar, “Yes, they’re sitting in my coffee shop right now. One of them has been living below me for months. I never suspected a thing.” There was a pause as we all swung around to stare at the man who was calling the cops on us.

“Walter?” Jace asked, stunned.

The man simply gave him a cold look that said Jace belonged in jail and then turned his back on us.

“Yes, I’ll try to keep them here,” he said.

“Oh my God,” Jace breathed, and I felt a twinge of sorrow for him. He’d trusted Nathan so much, and though I never had, I’d stayed quiet, not wanting to disturb Jace’s respect for the man.

It seemed, though, that we’d come to the edge of Nathan’s powers. This man was supposed to be beholden to Nathan, loyal beyond compare. Yet he’d just called the enforcers to turn us in.





9





“On my God, we’ve got to get out of here,” Jackie gasped.

I cast my gaze around the room, trying desperately to catalog our position, but I already knew the coffee shop—which meant I knew exactly how stuck we were. This wasn’t a large shop, and though it wasn’t crowded with furniture, we’d also fallen right into this guy’s hands by taking the table farthest from the front door. There were bathrooms in the back corner, but I wasn’t stupid enough to think any of them had a convenient back-door exit we could use.

“Hux, what do we do?” I asked, turning my gaze on him and finding his face tenser than I’d ever seen it. Even when we were in the midst of the raid on the warehouse, he’d looked mostly in control of his emotions. Right now, though, his face looked… fragile. Or maybe too intensely affected. I wasn’t sure, but it was an expression I’d never seen him wear before.

He wasn’t used to being betrayed, I suddenly realized. Jace had grown up with family and a close community, and I was willing to bet he’d rarely experienced people selling him out or betraying him for their own purposes. He’d probably never experienced one of Nathan’s people turning on him like this. Every time I’d asked, he’d made it seem like he thought Nathan was infallible. For someone who valued trust and loyalty so deeply, this had to be an extremely deep wound.