Thin Lines (The Child Thief #3)(27)

Jace shot him a murderous glance. “Do you actually think I’d be any good as a salesman?” he asked. “Stop clowning, Jack. We need to get some of these up and running and get out of here.”

“Up and running?” Ant sputtered. “In that case, I hope you have keys for them. Because I don’t think the owner of the lot just left them running for us.”

There was a crash from somewhere behind us, and my heart leapt into my throat. Ant slammed the door shut behind us, and then we all darted farther away from it. Jace ducked behind one of the pillars that supported the ceiling, motioning madly for the rest of us to do the same. Kory got on the other side of the closest pillar, and I went with him. He inched his head around the structure to stare back into the parking lot, then turned to look at Jace, who was behind the pillar next to us.

“How exactly do you expect to pull this off?” he hissed. “Do you have the keys for these?”

Jace shook his head roughly. “No, but I assumed…” He held up the lockpicking device he’d been using up to this point, and I almost cried.

Of course he thought that would work. Of course. Jace was probably the most technologically challenged person I’d ever met, courtesy of his caveman upbringing, and that must include mechanical stuff. After all, I doubted his schooling had included a shop class, and I knew they hadn’t had mechanical devices in the commune where he grew up. Hell, one of the first times I dealt with him, he’d had to call someone else to tell him how to fix someone’s problem with the OH+ portal, and he was supposed to be a full-fledged admin.

“Oh, buddy, are you lucky we all love you,” Ant murmured. “Because if we didn’t, that would be enough teasing material for the rest of your life.”

“That won’t work,” Jackie said quickly. “Like, not even close. If you don’t have the keys for these things, we’re not going to be able to use them. Unless you happen to know how to hotwire an engine. Given your idea of how to start a car, I’m guessing the answer to that is no,” she said, waving in the general direction of the lockpicking device.

Jace looked crushed, but he got over it quickly and peered hopefully at Jackie. “You said you used to fix a lot of things when you were a kid. Do you know how to hotwire an engine?”

She shook her head. “No. We didn’t have anything that high-tech when I was a kid, so I never had anything to practice on, and once I got older and did have access to cars, I had a lot of other things to think about. Like paying rent and staying alive.”

The hope fled from Jace’s expression, and he turned toward the rest of us, looking as though he was on the verge of panicking. We could hear shouts coming from behind us in the tunnel, now, which didn’t help matters. Jace moved quickly past us to double check that the door was closed, and threw a deadbolt from the outside, then whirled around again.

“Anyone?” he asked firmly. “Does anyone know how to hotwire an engine? Because if not, we’re going to have to get out of this parking garage and figure something else out.”

No one said anything for a long moment, and the silence was beginning to grow heavy when I finally decided to speak up.

“I can do it,” I said begrudgingly. “At least, I think I can. It’s been a long time since I’ve tried it, though, so I’m not making any promises.”

Jace gave me a surprised look, and I could hear gasps from Jackie and Ant, which I ignored, and then an audible gunshot came from inside the tunnel. Jace started quickly toward me and shoved his arm under mine, then towed me toward the first scooter in the row.

“I don’t know how you can do it or why, but if you think you’ve got a shot, I’m all for it,” he breathed. “We need seven scooters, and we need them quickly. What do you need from me to get this done?”

I dropped to my knees in front of the first scooter and started giving him a rough list of the things I needed—not much, really, just scissors to cut and then strip the wires—and then got to it, praying this would actually work.





11





The moment my hands were on the casing that enclosed the scooter’s starting mechanism, a memory of my last year at summer camp flooded back. I’d just turned seventeen, and I’d gone to camp with the threat of adulthood hanging over my head, my mother’s words about graduating lower-level schooling and moving on to more specialized classes ringing in my ears. I’d known that I didn’t have much of my adolescence left, and I’d known that my parents had high expectations of me. Expectations that the society I lived in pressured me to fulfill.

My response had been to rebel against everything I’d ever been taught in terms of being a nice girl. Try on life without responsibilities for the last time. Or at least, that was what it had felt like back then. Henry had been the start of it all. Dating a boy from the wrong side of the tracks, whose parents were living proof of the brokenness of our society. Daring to fall in love with him. Going to see bands my parents wouldn’t have liked. Learning to hotwire a scooter had been one more thing on the list of activities that summer by the lake, along with staying out too late, seeing movies we were still too young to get into, and getting free ice cream from the friend we’d made at the ice cream shop. And then sex. Taking that one final step into the unknown, thinking that I had loved the boy, and feeling, somewhere inside, that it was proof of my ability to exist on my own, without my parents. Of course that had been the thing that eventually got me caught.