Thin Lines (The Child Thief #3)(37)

It didn’t sound like there had been many enforcers behind the cabin, and that meant the bulk of the team had been up front. And were bound to be on their way.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” I panted. “Those agents are going to be on us in a second.”

I reached up, grabbed the comm device from Abe’s ear as he ran, shoved it into my own, and hit the button to turn it on. The biggest problem with this exit was that we’d been split up, which meant I had to figure out where my friends were before we went much farther. I didn’t want us scattered in the woods. If we were running for our lives, we were running together.

“Get behind a tree and stop,” I told Abe.

He gave me a shocked glance, but then nodded, found a large tree, and pulled up behind it, his back to the trunk, his chest heaving for breath. I jerked to a stop next to him, dropped the box I’d been carrying, and leaned up against the trunk as well.

We waited for a second, and when a body came hurtling past us, I reached out and snagged them by the back of the shirt. Jackie fell at our feet, the box she’d been carrying dropping to the ground and her face drawn up in a scowl as she got ready to scream her head off. The moment her eyes met mine, she shut her mouth and nodded, and I turned back in the direction from which we’d come. I could hear more crashing from the underbrush, and with luck…

Yes. Another body. I stuck a hand out before she got to us and knocked her right off her feet, then dragged her around the tree to take shelter with us. Nelson. With another two boxes.

She gave me a grim smile, jumped to her feet, and turned to face back toward the cottage.

“Where are the others?” she whispered.

I shook my head, listening closely. I couldn’t hear anyone shooting anymore, but that didn’t mean anything. Or rather, it could have meant anything. Maybe Jace, Ant, and Kory had managed to kill the Authority agents who had been shooting at us, but surely they couldn’t have killed all of them. Maybe the Authority agents hadn’t realized we’d have guns, and decided to regroup at the front of the cabin to figure out how to handle us. Maybe they were bringing in something bigger.

Maybe Jace, Ant, and Kory had been captured. Maybe they’d been shot. Maybe the agents were already on our trail and were right on the other side of the tree.

I swung wide and checked the other side of the tree, just to be sure, and then retreated to where my friends were standing—and nearly screamed when I found the three men I’d just been thinking of standing there, hands resting on their knees.

“Shot three of them,” Jace huffed. “The other two ran back toward the front of the cabin. No idea if there are more in the woods, but we didn’t see them. Either way, we gotta go.”

He took a deep breath and threw his backpack at Abe, then scooped up the duffel bags he’d dropped, turned, and started sprinting away from the cabin.

I dashed after him, adrenaline pumping through my veins and my heart pounding in my ears.

“Where do we go?” he huffed. “Where else can we find cover?”

I shook my head, drawing a complete blank as I tried to think of where else we could get to in this forest—quickly, before the Authority agents were able to regroup and follow us.

I knew that my cabin was the only structure for miles around here. It was one of the reasons I’d rented it, for heaven’s sake. I had no idea why the owner had built it out in the middle of nowhere, and I’d never bothered to ask, but I’d hiked through these woods enough to know that it was indeed all by itself.

Which meant that there was nowhere else for us to take cover. When it came to places to hide, we only had the trees to count on.

At that moment, Ant and Abe both pulled even with us, carrying two boxes each and somehow managing to make it look easy, courtesy of their long arms and torsos. They must have grabbed the boxes Jackie, Nelson, and I had dropped, I thought vaguely, because they certainly hadn’t gone back into the house to get them. Abe was also wearing Jace’s backpack.

“What’s the plan, guys?” Ant huffed, glancing at us out of the corner of his eye as he kept his face straight ahead, eyes scanning the forest. “Do we have a plan? Please tell me we have a plan.”

“You mean we didn’t come in here with a plan B?” Abe replied from our other side. “You guys haven’t, I don’t know, taken this into consideration or something?”

“Believe it or not, Abe, we kind of spent the entire last three days figuring out how to get you guys out of the mess you were in, not thinking about what was going to come afterward,” Jace answered curtly. “That’s why we spent all morning looking for Alexy and Zion in the hopes that they had.” He vaulted over a branch that had fallen across the path we were on, landed with a thump, and kept running. “Robin?” he asked again. “Thoughts on shelter around here?”

I opened my mouth to answer, noticing with relief that Jackie, Kory, and Nelson had surrounded us as well at that point, but snapped it quickly shut at the sound of more gunshots from behind us. And bullets whizzing through the leaves around us.

“Oh my God, they’re shooting at us again,” Jackie snapped. “Of course they’re shooting at us. Why the hell are they always shooting?” She ducked down and started running lower to the ground, and Nelson, running next to her, mimicked the movement.

“They’re shooting because they don’t care whether we live or die, and I suspect they’d prefer that we just die so we stop being such pains in their asses,” Ant replied, starting to duck and weave as he ran, as if that was going to make the soldiers behind us miss.