Thin Lines (The Child Thief #3)(25)

“The others,” Kory snapped. “Hux, how secure are those other apartments?”

Jace turned around, his mouth open to answer, but I was already dialing Julia’s number, my fingers shaking. We’d thought Jace’s apartment was safe, but we might have been wrong. What if we’d made the same mistake with Zion’s place—and left our friends in a trap that had been set off by that public newscast?

I swung the phone up to my ear and listened. Ringing. More ringing. Further ringing.

And then the line went dead. No voicemail. No busy signal. Just a dead line.

I hit the end call button and then redialed, almost in tears at this point. Why would the line just have gone dead? That wasn’t how phones worked. When I brought the phone to my ear, though, I heard the same thing. Five rings, then one more, and then… silence.

“She’s not picking up,” I murmured. “And there’s no voicemail. The line just goes dead.”

I hung up and swung toward Ant, who was still rushing around the apartment with the others, all tearing the place apart in their hurry to find things that might be important. “What does that mean when the line just goes dead? Why wouldn’t her voicemail have picked up? Her voicemail always picks up!”

Ant shook his head, his mouth working silently. “It means the line’s been cut,” he said. “The phone’s been turned off.”

What? What did that mean? I yanked my phone up to my face and started searching through my contacts to get to Marco’s number, but then Jace was next to me, bringing his hand down abruptly on my wrist.

“We don’t have time,” he breathed, motioning toward the cameras on the inside of the cupboard.

I looked up to see that there were additional people in the frames, now. People on their feet and in uniforms. They weren’t looking at Jace’s door yet, and I breathed a quick prayer of thanks that Walter was passed out on the sidewalk. It meant he couldn’t point the enforcers toward it.

But it wouldn’t be long before they found it. And we had to be gone before that happened.

Kory and Nelson started rushing through the apartment again, gathering up the papers Ant had sent flying around the room, while Jackie and Ant helped Jace in the kitchen. He didn’t have much in the way of furniture in his apartment, which meant that he didn’t have many hiding places, and within moments we were finished and he was throwing the duffel bags over his shoulders and turning back to us.

“Okay,” he said. “Where are we going? Now that the Authority has authorized a manhunt, we can’t be sure that we’re going to be safe at all if we’re in town. Even at Zion’s or Alexy’s, because I can’t guarantee that those apartments are safe, either. We can’t be seen on the streets. The Authority obviously has undercover agents as well, and spies, and we need to avoid them at all costs. I have… another possibility, but it’s going to take some research to figure it out. I need a safe place to do that. Where do we go? Who do we know who’s actually outside of town, and away from anyone who might recognize us?”

My hand shot into the air. “Me,” I said quickly. “My cabin is in the middle of nowhere, up north of town. Literally surrounded by forest.” I’d rented the place because it was dirt cheap, and I enjoyed not having to deal with neighbors, and now it seemed that being so far outside of city limits might actually save us, at least for the moment.

Granted, we thought the Authority might have the address. It had been on the larger list of five hundred addresses they might have stolen from the OH+ portal. But if we were lucky, then they hadn’t reached mine yet. If we were lucky, we could get into that house and back out of it before they did.

He nodded. “Perfect. The plan is to get to Robin’s, though we can’t stay there for long either, since we know they might have the address. They know your name and that you’re one of the people who broke into the jail, and it’s not going to take them long to put two and two together and get up there as well. But it will give us somewhere to head from here, which is all that matters right now.”





10





Jace turned and started walking toward the closet I’d seen him come out of when I first arrived in his apartment.

“Getting out of here won’t be the problem,” he explained. “It’s what we’re going to do once we’re on the other side that has me concerned.”

“Wait, what?” Jackie asked, her face screwed up in confusion. Confusion that I, quite frankly, shared.

Jace opened the door to the closet and threw it wide. “We’re going to escape through this tunnel that Nathan had built for me,” he announced.

I stared past him, hardly daring to believe what he was saying, and saw something so unexpected that it took my words away for a moment. It was a tunnel dug right out of the earth, so that it gave off a wet-soil smell that was almost overpowering. And I realized, quite suddenly, that this was the smell that was permeating Jace’s apartment. True, the plants and their potting soil had probably added to it, but if I’d been thinking, I would have come to the conclusion that the smell was too big, too powerful, to come from plants that were in pots.

“This place actually is a cave,” I murmured, impressed despite myself.

Jace grinned. “I guess you could say that,” he said. “Now, let’s go.”