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

Julia gave him a quick nod, but then frowned. “Easier said than done, I’m afraid,” she said. “We have no transportation. The airship was basically running on fumes by the time we got here, thanks to all that unexpected flying around we had to do. So we have no way of getting back out again, other than walking. We’ve done our best to hide the airship, and for now that’s about all we can do.”

“Okay. Walking it is.” Jace was already moving forward. He turned and shouted at the others as he swept through the meadow. Ant, Jackie, Julia, Marco, and I moved along in his wake, pausing every so often to shake someone awake and tell them to get on their feet. Several of the people we’d rescued from the Authority jail were stiff and sore, though no one seemed to be badly wounded. The healthy people quickly went to work helping those who weren’t as mobile, and within ten minutes, we were in a ragtag group and heading toward the tree line.

I glanced at each of them, then stopped my roving gaze and went back to one face, frowning. He looked familiar. Of course, I would have seen him on the video that the Authority had sent us, but it took my brain a moment to place him in the daylight.

His expression, both condescending and prideful, as if he knew better than Jace and was resenting being given orders here, helped with that. Even more so when he caught my gaze and glared back at me.

“Robert,” I muttered. I’d had a negative opinion of him from the moment I’d laid eyes on him, to be honest.

He cocked his head and pursed his mouth but didn’t answer, and I liked him even less.

I started to dart after Jace, knowing that I didn’t have time to get into any kind of conversation with Robert. At least Gabby would be relieved to know that he was safe, and I knew that we weren’t missing people.

Then I realized that we were.

“Alexy,” I gasped, coming to a stop at the tree line and looking around at the group.

Where was that girl? I’d known her for less than a week, and I already knew that she almost always made herself obvious within five minutes of appearing on the scene. Yet I hadn’t heard her voice bossing other people around, wisecracking at Ant, or even casually bickering with Zion.

I started turning in a circle, my eyes scanning the people we had with us, my mind immediately going to the worst possible conclusion.

“Jace, Alexy’s not here,” I said. “Where is she?”

Jace turned back into the group, and everyone else stopped as well.

“Alexy!” he shouted.

We all waited for a moment, gazing around the clearing, but there was no answer. My eyes scanned the group, picking up Nelson, and then Winter, and then Austin—and then I realized that Alexy wasn’t the only one missing.

“Zion is missing as well,” I said.

There was a sharp intake of air from around me. Two of our strongest team members, gone. The two team members with the best abilities to come up with materials and plans. We hadn’t known them well until right before the raid on the warehouse, but when they had been two of the three team members we had rescued in that forest, they’d become part of our family.

There was a third, I remembered. Allerra, the other member of their unlikely little trio. We’d also saved her in that forest, and she’d been part of the planning for the raid on the jail, but not the mission itself. Zion had insisted that we leave the young girl behind, to keep her out of danger. With any luck, she was still sitting in the twenty-four-hour coffee shop above Jace’s apartment, waiting for us.

Please dear God, let her still be sitting in the coffee shop, waiting for us. At least that way I would know the girl was safe.

As for Zion and Alexy…

“Where could they have gone?” Jackie asked. “They got on that airship with us. I saw them. Hell, I dragged Alexy onto it myself!”

Jace whirled around and started walking again, and the rest of us fell in behind him. I increased the length of my strides, desperate to catch up with him and hear what he was thinking.

“Should we stay to look for them?” I huffed, doing my best to ignore the dull twinge in my leg and hurrying to keep up with his longer steps.

“No,” Jace said. “We know that they were on that airship with us, and that means the Authority doesn’t have them. So they either went with the men in black, which means that they’ve deserted us, or they went back to town without us, also essentially deserting us.”

“Why would they have done that?” Ant asked. “That would make them pretty bad teammates.”

“I don’t know,” Jace replied. “If anyone knows what we’re supposed to be doing next, it’s them. They had more access to Nathan than anyone but Boyd, and they were in charge of planning. I had assumed that included an idea of what we were going to do after we waltzed into an Authority prison and stole some of their most important prisoners.”

I nodded in agreement. I’d thought the same. We’d all been so busy planning the jailbreak and so concerned with getting our friends back that none of us had dedicated much time to considering what we were going to do afterward. We’d been relying on Zion and Alexy to have a plan. They’d been the ones in charge of recon. In charge of everything.

Now here we were, having broken into an Authority prison and having stolen our friends right out from under the Authority’s nose. We had no sure route to safety, and the people who might have had that route were missing.