Thin Lines (The Child Thief #3)(43)

I nodded, glad for the reassurance, and turned the end of the phone forward so that the light shone ahead of us to break up the darkness. Several steps took us to the mouth of the cave, and I could see that, although the ceiling was relatively low, the cave was also deep, traveling farther back than the beam of my flashlight. The walls were rough with stones and soil, and stalagmites and stalactites peppered the edges, dripping down from the ceiling and rising up from the ground, almost meeting in some places. It was beautiful and spooky; exactly what I would have thought a cave would look like.

Not that I’d ever spent much time thinking about caves, or what it would be like to sleep in one.

“Okay,” Jace said, moving ahead of me into the cave. He took the backpack from his chest and the duffel bags from his back and dropped everything he’d been carrying on the floor behind a column of rock. Then he turned to us. “Anyone with supplies, take them about twenty feet into the cave and stack them there. We want them far enough from the mouth of the cave that the wolves aren’t tempted to claw into them. Abe, get some blankets out of whichever box has them and make a nest here. Nelson, find the medical supplies. Everyone else, keep track of anything you use and keep everything in one place. We’ve got limited supplies and can’t afford to waste or lose anything. We don’t know how long it’ll be before we can get somewhere we can restock.”

We all got to work quickly. The boxes were inserted between two columns rising from the ground, along with Jace’s bags, and packed in a way that made it relatively easy to get to each of them, and a second later Nelson was rifling through my meager medical supplies, looking for anything we might be able to use for the small bumps and bruises we’d come up here with. And, I suspected, for the bruise on my leg, which was now starting to swell a bit. Jace had stepped outside the cave to listen for signs that anyone might have followed us.

I wouldn’t have believed it if you’d told me this was where we’d end up, but it looked like—for the moment, anyhow—this was our new home.

By the time the rest of us arrived back at the mouth of the cave, Jace had appeared with an armful of wood—which meant, evidently, that he’d been multitasking—and was stacking it in a rough pyramid shape, then stuffing smaller twigs, leaves, and dead grass into the spaces between the larger branches. He glanced up at the roof of the cave and nodded to himself, apparently satisfied with where he’d put the wood. When he noticed me watching him, he indicated the stack of kindling.

“We’ve got to have the light to take a look at anyone who’s injured,” he said casually. “And for warmth once the cold sets in.”

I nodded, feeling grateful that the universe had at least provided us with the perfect guides for this situation. I was dead positive that the rest of us didn’t know the first thing about living in the wild, but, having been cavemen for their entire lives, this had to feel like going home to Jace and Kory.

Jace looked past me, and I turned to see that Kory had gotten into the food stores and was handing out a bottle of Nurmeal to anyone who wanted one.

I watched, then remembered what we hadn’t brought, and turned back to Jace. “I don’t suppose you have some sort of magic water-finding technique? It’s the one thing we didn’t bring, and something tells me we’re going to need it soon.”

He smirked. “As a matter of fact, I do. It’s called using my eyes. We passed a small spring on the way here, and it had a pool attached to it. Give me five minutes.”

I nodded and got to work with everyone else, helping to unpack the bags and boxes so that everything was within easy reach. I was just going through the first duffel bag, when I came across the prints of the timeline, and paused.

The timeline. In the rush to get away from the Authority, I’d forgotten about it, and I suspected everyone else had too.

But this could be our ticket out of here. It was, I suspected, a big part of the reason we were in trouble, since it seemed to connect directly to the raid we’d done on the warehouse, which the Authority seemed to think was somehow the work of Little John.

Little John, the organization that seemed to have been both helper and unintentional enemy, given the mess they’d managed to put us in.

In that way, I guessed, they were a lot like Nathan himself. Constantly getting us into scrapes and then failing to get us out again.

I shook my head and put the timeline to one side. We could deal with that later. I knew that it would be a main goal tonight. Right now, I wanted food and water, and maybe even some sort of bath.





17





I turned around, planning to get myself a bottle of Nurmeal and maybe some of the veggies, and jumped when I found Jace standing right behind me, a serious look on his face and two bowls constructed out of large leaves in his hands.

“What are you doing standing right behind me?” I asked. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

He grinned sheepishly. “No. But I do want to have a look at your leg. I’ve seen you limping, and if there’s anything we can do about the bruise, we need to do it before it gets any worse.” He set the bowls of water down on a flat rock near our feet.

“Wait, what?” I asked, surprised. My leg had been the last thing on my list of things to think about. Well, maybe not the last, but certainly not in the top ten. “We need to get food and water, and then we have to look at the timeline, see if we can come up with anything! Plus, I need to get in touch with Gab—”