Thin Lines (The Child Thief #3)(46)

Jace examined my leg and nodded grimly to himself, as if he’d already been expecting what he saw. Then he glanced up to meet my eyes. “See all that swelling and bruising? It’s from blood that’s running down your leg, and there’ll be edema to go with it. We’re going to drain all that out to give it a chance to heal.”

I immediately thought of him slicing my leg open and the blood spurting up into the air, and nearly gagged.

“What?” I asked, shocked. “What are you going to do, cut me open?”

He laughed and shook his head. “Not even close, but I don’t think you’re going to like it much. Give me ten minutes.”

And with that ominous line, he turned and left the cave, walking like he knew exactly where he was going.

The rest of us watched him go, our mouths hanging open in confusion.

“What the…” Ant started.

“I have no idea,” Nelson said, her voice mystified. Then she suddenly became all business. “But I also don’t think we have a lot of time to sit around staring after him and wondering. We’ve got a lot of stuff to get through, and like he said, we have no idea how long we’ll be safe here. Let’s start with the simple stuff. Has anyone gotten back to you guys? Any of the rest of the team?”

We all grabbed our phones and began checking our message apps and text boxes, and a couple seconds later, we all shook our heads.

“Still nothing,” I said. “I don’t have read receipts from Julia or Marco, and I don’t even have delivery receipts for Alexy, Zion, or Boyd.”

“I’ve got the same,” Ant said. “I also tried Austin, but I’ve got nothing from him.”

“I have a read receipt from Allerra,” Jackie said softly. She looked up at us, frowning. “But no response. So…”

“So they’re alive,” I murmured. “Or at least she is. But definitely not answering us.” That didn’t make any sense. “Either that or someone has her phone, somehow knows how to unlock it, and read the message. But why…”

“And the others aren’t even looking at their phones,” Nelson concluded. “I’ve texted every one of them at least three times, and I’ve got nothing. Not even from Julia. And she always answers her texts.”

“But she wouldn’t be able to answer texts if the Authority had already found her,” I said, horror dawning on me like a ton of bricks. In the rush to get to my house and then back out of it to find safety, we’d forgotten what we’d thought of in Jace’s apartment—namely that we’d seen how quickly Nathan’s contact had turned on Jace, and that if the same thing had happened when it came to Alexy’s apartment, and Zion’s…

“We might have left them for those agents to find,” Ant said, smacking himself on the forehead. “I’d completely forgotten that!”

I almost slapped myself as well. We’d thought we were leaving our friends in a place where they were going to be safe. Instead, we might have left them in a trap just waiting to be sprung. And now that our friends weren’t answering their texts…

That reminded me of all the messages I’d had from Gabby, and the fact that she was probably thinking the same thing of me, and I quickly dialed her number.

“Robin?” she gasped after half a ring. “Oh my God! Why did it take you so long to call me? What’s been going on? I’ve been having a heart attack all day thinking that you guys were found by the Authority and arrested! You didn’t even answer any of my texts!”

I closed my eyes, feeling intensely guilty at having put her in that situation, and then shook my head, trying to figure out how I was going to explain everything that had happened in the shortest way possible.

“Things went badly,” I said. “We dropped most of the techs—and Winter, Julia, and Marco—off at Zion’s, but we didn’t find Zion or Alexy. What we did find was a huge crowd of people having their IDs checked outside of Alexy’s house. We also had a run-in with an Authority agent who had the scariest badge ever, and definitely knew our faces. So the secret’s out about who we are.”

“I know,” she answered. “I saw the public bulletin. Terrorists, really? I tried to call you, but—”

“I wasn’t exactly in a position to answer,” I replied, wondering if it was worth putting my phone on speaker so everyone else could hear her. I hadn’t planned to call her yet, though, and didn’t think now was the time to talk about anything else she might have found out.

I had asked her to research Nathan before the prison break, and I wanted to get an update on that. But I also wanted to have a look at the timeline before we started talking about him. If we were right about him being connected to Little John…

I shook myself out of that thought process and came back to the conversation. Right now I just had to catch Gabby up and let her know that we weren’t arrested or dead. “We had to get out of town,” I told her. “And on the way out, we went through a huge part of the city that was just… deserted. It was like all the people had been kidnapped or something.”

“Where are you now?” she asked. “Your voice sounds scratchy and far away. Are you okay? Is everything okay?”

Well, there was a question without an easy answer. “Noooo,” I said, drawing the word out to give myself time to think. “And yes. We’re safe. At least, I think we’re safe for the moment. We went to my house—which is outside of town,” I added, remembering that as close as we’d become, I’d never told her where I lived. “We figured it was the safest. But the Authority found us there too, and I think that means they’re probably searching that list of five hundred addresses. We got away from them, and now we’re in a… cave.” I finished the speech with a stumble, realizing how bizarre this must all sound.