Thin Lines (The Child Thief #3)(49)

“You have no idea what it’s been like,” Ant said, his voice turning serious. “What it was like. Running through that forest outside the warehouse, not knowing where you were or if you were even still alive. Then getting on the ship with Alexy and Zion and picking up team member after team member—but none of them was you. We saw Winter captured, did she tell you that? We saw those soldiers jump her, pin her to the ground, and take her away. And all I could think was that they might have done that to you. That you might have been stupid and fought them, and they might have killed you…” His voice broke.

“They got me right away,” Abe said simply. “Right outside the warehouse, in the parking lot. I didn’t have time to fight them. Didn’t have time to think of anything clever to say—which was probably what saved my life, now that I think about it. But do you think it was any easier for me? I was locked up in a plastic box for a week, Ant! A week of not knowing where you were or what had happened, thinking maybe you were dead, or maybe you’d been captured and they were just keeping us apart. We had no idea what they were going to do with us. They just threw us in those boxes and then left us there. No information, nothing, until the day they decided to make those videos. Nelson figured they were making them to show who they had, and we figured they were sending that to someone, but we had no idea who might be on the receiving end.”

He paused and turned to his brother.

“I was sure you guys were dead until you showed up in the prison last night. And it almost killed me.”

My heart broke for the two of them, and I realized abruptly that I hadn’t even asked any of our friends who’d been imprisoned what they’d gone through. We’d just woken up in the meadow that morning and immediately started running. This was probably the first time Ant and Abe had had a chance to talk about it.

I couldn’t begin to imagine what the two of them were feeling right now. And though Ant had talked to us about it while we were working on ways to rescue our friends from jail, I hadn’t thought too hard about what he’d been going through. I definitely hadn’t thought about whether our friends in prison had wondered about us. I’d been too busy trying to figure out a way to get them out of there.

It must have been torture for the brothers. And I didn’t want to watch any more of their reunion scene. It was a huge invasion of the privacy they deserved.

I was about to attempt to start moving again when the sudden crack of a twig made me jump. It took me a moment to realize that it wasn’t my foot that had made the sound, but Jace’s. He was striding right toward Ant and Abe.

“You guys seen Robin?” he called, giving them a rather wide berth, but obviously intent on entering the trees.

Ant straightened abruptly and started wiping at his face, while Abe stepped protectively in front of him.

“Nope,” Abe said quickly. “You sure she’s out here? We were just… getting some air,” he finished lamely.

Jace, bless his soul, acted like he believed them, and let it go. “I figured,” he said. “Yeah, I saw her walk out here a while ago. Pushing her leg to the limit already, no doubt. She’s probably off running with the wolves or something.”

“Wouldn’t put it past her,” Ant replied. “Her faith in them is downright creepy.”

Jace laughed. “Got us to shelter, didn’t it? I’m not going to complain about her methods.”

Ant and Abe nodded, still seeming as if they were uncomfortable at having been nearly caught in the midst of showing their emotions, and stood shuffling their feet, until Jace gave them the excuse they were obviously waiting for.

“You two must be exhausted,” he said. “Why don’t you go in and claim a couple of blankets? We need to go over the timeline tonight, and I have some other research to do, but there’s no harm in getting comfortable before we start.”

“Yeah,” Abe said. “Ant, I think he’s right. We should, uh, rest.”

“Rest, of course,” Ant said, and though he was trying to hide the smile in his voice, I could hear it leaking through. Abe might not know Jace well, but Ant did, and he most certainly saw through the ruse.

The twins began a quick walk toward the cave, passing Jace and leaving him in the darkness behind them, and once they were out of earshot, Jace turned back toward the forest.

“You can come out now,” he called softly. “And I don’t want to know any of what they were saying out here in the dark.”

I laughed softly, surprised that he’d been alert enough to know where I was, and walked quickly toward him.

“Just the stuff you say to your brother, I guess, when you’ve been separated from him for a week, and when you didn’t know until last night whether he was dead or not,” I murmured.

Jace nodded. “If I thought my sister was in danger, it would kill me.”

“And they both spent the entire week not knowing,” I replied. “I don’t know how they stood it.”

He shrugged. “Probably harder for Abe than for Ant. The one good thing about being kept constantly on our toes by the Authority is that none of us had a chance to slow down enough to think about how it made us feel.”

I sighed. That was absolutely the truth. For the most part, we’d all been so busy running for our lives that we hadn’t had a chance to parse through the emotion of it yet. Survival was the only motivation. Emotions had been put to the side, to be dealt with later.