Thin Lines (The Child Thief #3)(53)

“What if they were raiding it at the same time as us, and using us as… I don’t know, involuntary backup? Or a decoy?” Abe offered.

I shook my head. “It just doesn’t make sense. If that was true, why not coordinate with us? And how were we the only ones who ended up being caught?”

“We weren’t,” Jace said suddenly from behind me. “Those two men we gassed down in the camera room were also caught and taken to jail. And we never found out who they were. They disappeared after we rescued them.”

“Either way, the conclusion seems clear,” Nelson said. “That raid should have been something between Little John and the government. And we were arrested because we were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“And after that, they started researching who we were,” I said, quickly coming to some conclusions of my own. “Then we up and raided their jail to save our friends. And now we’re on the Most Wanted list with Little John. Who I’m starting to really distrust.”

“So how exactly are we supposed to trust them to help us find a safe location?” Ant asked. “If they’ve gotten us into this much trouble, why would we ever go to them voluntarily?”

“Because we don’t have much choice,” Jace said, dropping to sit down next to us, Nelson’s phone and his address book in his lap. “And because they’ve gotten us out of trouble in the past. We know that they’re fighting the same government we’re fighting, and that makes us unintentional allies. My enemy’s enemy is my friend, and all that. And finally, because I suspect that Nathan is in charge of Little John, and I’d trust him with my life,” he finished.

Several of us shook our heads, unconvinced. Whoever Little John was, and whether or not Nathan was involved with them, the picture we were putting together was less than complimentary. Sure, they seemed to be fighting the government, and if the government’s obsession with them was anything to go by, they were getting a lot closer than the government liked. But they also seemed to have thrown us into the mix, and I didn’t appreciate being used in that way.

Not without having a say in it myself.

“Nathan isn’t infallible, either,” I reminded Jace. “Remember what happened at the coffee shop?”

He brought his hand down in a chopping motion and shook his head. “That wasn’t Nathan’s fault. He trusted the wrong person, and I think we’ve all done that once or twice.”

I guessed I couldn’t argue with that, given my experience with Henry… and my adoptive parents.

“Besides,” he continued, “if we’re going to get out of this, we have to trust someone. We don’t have a choice. I don’t know how much longer we can stay here, and we know that we don’t have Zion or Alexy to lean on. Nathan… Well, he left me a getaway option. And I didn’t know for sure that it would work—I never even thought to check it before, because I never thought I’d be in this position—but I’ve just done some… research, and I think it will give us a way out. So, unless any of you have a better option, I say we trust him one more time. It might be our only shot at getting out of here alive.”

“He gave you a getaway option?” Jackie asked, her voice harsh with shock. “Why did you get one? And what about the rest of us?”

I reached out and took Jace’s hand, feeling that he needed someone to back him up right now, and that Jackie was looking at this the wrong way. The timeline hadn’t told us anything. All it had done was open up new questions. Which meant we still didn’t have a plan. If Jace was offering one…

“If you have a plan, I say we take it,” I said firmly. “Because the timeline is a complete bust. There might be a lot of information in there, but it’s not going to do us any good right now. There’s no helpful address, and we don’t have any way of finding one that I can see.”

I looked around the circle, daring anyone else to disagree—and hoping they’d see the logic in what I was saying—and saw a range of expressions, from shock to frustration to anger. Gradually, though, they melted into acceptance, and then agreement, until Ant finally spoke up.

“You’re right,” he said quietly. “And we can’t stay here. If there’s a chance at finding a way out, I say we take it. So, what’s the move?”

Jace laid the address book out in front of him, open to a page that had several lines of writing on it, and I saw one sentence: Code Name Corona, Samsfield. And then a full address I didn’t recognize.

“Nathan had a plan B worked out for me,” he said. “It was the first thing I thought of when we woke up in that meadow, because it was specifically labeled a plan I was to use only if the worst happened. I wasn’t supposed to even think about it unless I was in absolutely the worst possible position. At first, I thought that Zion and Alexy would be in their apartments, and that they’d be a better option. But then we couldn’t find them, and when Allerra went missing and I couldn’t get ahold of Boyd or Nathan, I knew we had to do it. The problem was that he left it in code, so that anyone who found it would think it was just gibberish, and I had to access certain parts of the web to decode it. Once I did, I realized what it was.” He looked up at me, his expression going back and forth between surprise and relief.

“What?” I asked. “What is it?”