Thin Lines (The Child Thief #3)(31)

After the crowds we’d just come through, it was downright eerie.

Granted, it was the middle of the day, and all the able-bodied adults were probably in the factories, shuffling pieces of merchandise from one conveyer belt to another, or some other mentally stimulating sort of job, and that might account for some of the emptiness. But there should still be people here. People who had called in sick for the day. Children who weren’t yet old enough to work and had somehow managed to stay with their parents. People who had retired but still lived in this low-income housing, unable to afford to move to a nicer area.

There should have been life here. Instead all I saw was emptiness. Scooters parked on the sidewalks as if their owners had just gotten up and left them. Cars sitting in the street with their doors open. Apartment doors standing ajar, radios still on… and not a soul to hear them.

“Where is everybody?” I whispered, mystified.

“Gone,” Jace murmured, his head turned so that he could speak to me over his shoulder.

I turned back to the buildings, frowning. It made no sense for this neighborhood to be completely deserted like this, and it frightened me in a way I couldn’t explain, making me feel hollow and afraid.

Then Jace put a hand to his ear, and the comm, and veered suddenly left—toward the edge of town and the end of this neighborhood—and I put the strangeness behind me, remembering that we had plenty to think through without worrying about the fates of the workers from one neighborhood. For all I knew, there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for the absence.

Stop with the conspiracy theories, Robin, I told myself firmly.

Only, the command didn’t hold much weight. Because after everything that had happened over the past week, I was starting to realize that the conspiracy theories were truer than anyone had ever known before. And that there was way more going on behind the curtain than we common citizens had ever thought there might be.

I just wasn’t positive that knowing about it actually did us any good. Knowing was, after all, the reason we were currently running for our lives.

We zipped through the narrow streets, the high-rises towering over us, and then into the neighborhood that catered to the working class, where stripped-down versions of grocery stores and other services did business.

It was a poor neighborhood, nothing like the area where Jace had lived, and I cringed again as we drove along the streets. There was no one here, either, but I could remember what it had looked like the last time I’d been here. Hungry children had crouched on the sidewalks, and people had been haggling with the owners of the grocery store I was in, trying to get an extra scoop of rice. It had been horrible. Even worse because I hadn’t been in any shape to help them. I’d been just as pathetic, honestly, on my lunch break from the factory and trying to find the cheapest sandwich in the cooler.

I might have thought that I wanted to go back to my old life… but it actually wasn’t true. I never wanted to go back to that life. Never wanted to feel that shadow of desperation hanging over my head again. I didn’t like that the Authority was after us, or that we were facing prison, or that we were being publicly touted as terrorists, but at least we were doing something. At least we were fighting, rather than caving in to a government that was working so hard to knock us down.

A moment later we were free of the shops and businesses and moving onto wider streets and then the highway that led out of town—and right to my bit of forest.

Jackie and Ant had slowed down to wait for us, and Jace slowed as well. Once Kory and Abe caught up, we all leaned forward to streamline ourselves, and I shifted a little to try to take some weight off my leg. Finding a position that worked, I closed my eyes and reveled in the feeling of the wind on my face and the fresh air in my lungs. I rested my face up against Jace’s back, breathing in the warmth and safety of his presence, and prayed that leaving the city behind also meant we were out of danger. At least for a short while.



Jackie’s mapping system stopped working about ten minutes from my house, at the start of the trees, as I’d expected. Modern mapping systems were extensive, but they were also efficient, and they didn’t really bother with areas that didn’t contain buildings to track.

“There’s not much to it,” I called. “We’re on the one and only road in the forest. Just take it straight up. It literally ends at my house.”

We started up what I’d always thought of as the driveway, and I took a deep breath of the pine-scented air, realizing how long it had been since I’d been home. It felt like years, though it had actually been less than a week, and the thought that clean clothes and some of my own things lay at the end of this track brought a sudden smile to my face.

Then the realization that we might find nothing but rubble and a burnt-out foundation erased it, and after about five minutes of driving, I poked Jace in the ribs.

“Don’t you think we’d better leave the scooters here and walk the rest of the way?” I asked, leaning closer to his ear. “What if there are Authority agents at the house?”

He gave me a quick nod and revved the engine to catch Ant, who was only a foot or two in front of us.

“Pulling over!” he called, motioning to the side of the road.

Ant nodded and obeyed, and we were followed to the shoulder by Kory and Abe a moment later.

“What’s going on?” Kory asked.