Thin Lines (The Child Thief #3)(24)

He deserved it for betraying Jace—and Nathan—the way he had.

When I turned around, chest heaving, I was momentarily distracted by the deep, earthy smell of Jace’s apartment. That smell of wet soil and wood, closed into an indoor space, was something I’d come to associate with warmth and safety, and being here under such tense circumstances made my mind reel.

But this wasn’t a time to start having a panic attack. We had to get whatever it was Jace needed and get the hell out.

That sleeping gas would only last for so long, and I was positive the enforcers—or Authority agents with them—would come with gas masks. The fumes might not slow them down at all.

I looked around the apartment for Jace and panicked when I suddenly couldn’t see him. He had come in right in front of me, and then run back with the bombs. Where on earth could he have gone after that?

A door I’d never noticed over by the kitchen part of the studio shot open—right into Ant, who had been standing in front of it. He jumped, his arms wind-milling and the stacks of paper he’d been carrying flying all over the place, and then whirled around and glared at Jace, who had ducked out of what looked like a closet.

“What were you doing in there?” I asked, shocked.

“Getting our escape route ready and making sure it’s clear,” Jace replied, slamming the door and moving toward the kitchen.

He flipped open one of the cupboards and pressed a switch inside, and the inner surface of the door turned into a monitor. The view was split into five different windows, each of them showing what I assumed was a different perspective of the sidewalks outside the coffee shop.

“I told you I had security on this place, didn’t I?” he asked, grabbing my arm and hauling me toward the cupboard. “I might not believe in alarms, like Zion, but I’m a firm believer in knowing what’s coming for you—and how it’s approaching. Watch the monitor. Shout if you see anything that looks suspicious.”

I stared at the monitor, horribly aware that I might not know an Authority agent if they approached, given the fact that the man who had tried to arrest us before we got to the library had been dressed in normal business clothing. Evidently, they didn’t all wear the blue jumpsuits.

“They’ll send officers in uniform,” Jace said from right behind me, and I jumped and turned to glare at him. “They’ll want to make a big impression on anyone watching,” he clarified.

He already had two duffel bags out on the table and was stuffing personal items and electronics into them, not bothering to pack efficiently.

“What is all that?” I asked.

“Eyes on the cameras, if you please,” he returned, though there was no anger in it. He darted to another cabinet and threw it open, then began rifling through the things inside. Once he’d found what he was looking for—some sort of address book, I figured—he heaved a sigh of relief and turned back to me. “This is everything that I don’t want to leave behind, and anything that might get me identified,” he said. “Anything that could be traced back to Nathan. Anything that has sign-in credentials on it. We don’t want to leave OH+ stuff lying around. I realize the Ministry and Authority already know about us, but there’s no point in helping them.”

“What else do you need?” Jackie asked, coming toward the kitchen and looking around. “What can I help with?”

The others appeared behind her, each of their expressions asking the same question.

“Gather up anything that looks like it might be important,” Jace said. “Anything technological that I might be missing. Anything that has my personal writing on it. Not the plants. Not the candles. We’ll leave those for the Authority.”

I heard the hitch in his voice and thought that it cost him more than he was willing to admit, having to leave those plants behind. I’d seen how much he cared for them. Maybe because they’d earned his loyalty, or maybe just because they reminded him of home. Either way, I made a silent promise to him that we’d come back for them if we could. It was stupid, and everyone would have laughed at me if I’d said it out loud, but it felt… important.

We were all in the midst of losing an awful lot of personal property, thanks to this idea that our homes were no longer safe. If I could save something of Jace’s history, I was going to do it.

“Is this why you’ve always kept this place so empty?” I asked, staring intently at the monitor on the cupboard door. Nothing that looked out of place yet. There were several bodies on the sidewalk, though, courtesy of Jace’s gas bombs. “So you could pack in a hurry?”

“Are you asking why I haven’t decorated the way Zion did?” he teased, his voice breathless with his hurry. He darted to another cupboard, yanked it open, and started pulling stuff out and tossing it at his bags. “The answer is no. We always assumed that these houses were safe, with all the security and the people we had watching our backs, so although I knew that I might have to leave in a hurry at any time, I didn’t design with that eventuality in mind. If we’d been prepping for running, I can’t imagine that either Zion or Alexy would have put as much time into their apartments as they did.”

“Well, if you all assumed they were safe…” Ant said. Then he suddenly stopped and turned to me.

“Oh my God,” I breathed, coming to the same conclusion. Jace, Zion, and Alexy had all been told their apartments were safe by Nathan. And we’d just seen how quickly and easily those security measures could go awry, if they depended on human error or prejudice.