Thin Lines (The Child Thief #3)(55)

“They just up and left? How? How would they have managed that?” Nelson asked. (Of course, I noted to myself, she was probably doing research.)

“A real-life caveman?” Abe asked, leaning forward. “Cool!”

Jackie, of course, just snorted—and she put all of her attitude into that snort, so that it seemed to say not only, “Of course you’re a caveman; that explains so much,” and also, “You’re lucky we even let you hang out with us.”

Ant frowned, though, and leaned back, considering. “Well, that explains a whole lot,” he noted quietly.

Jace, for some reason, chose to answer Ant’s comment rather than any of the questions. “Meaning?”

Ant tipped his head to one side and then the other. “Well, your apartment, to start with. No one could have gone into that thing and thought you’d been raised in the city. It was underground, and there were no windows! The ideas you had about computers and how to work them. The disconnect in how you explained things when we found out that OH+ was down. Trying to start scooters with a lockpick. But mostly the way you walk. It’s so quiet it’s almost creepy.”

Jace laughed and shrugged at that, accepting it as the truth. “I guess you learn to walk quietly when you grow up having to hunt for your food,” he allowed. Then he turned and grinned at his friend. “Right, Jack?”

Kory lifted one eyebrow at Jace. “Jack, eh?” he asked. “If we’re coming clean, seems like it makes sense to come all the way clean.” He turned to the rest of the group and gave a mock bow. “I’d like to officially introduce myself. My real name is Kory, second name Albertson. I did indeed grow up in the forests and mountains. My parents were best friends with Hux’s.” His face fell into a frown at that, and his voice died out a bit.

Ah, I thought, my heart breaking a little bit at the change in him. So, his parents had been killed during the raid as well. It made sense, but I’d never really considered it. Now I wondered if he carried that scar as deeply as Jace did, and if he’d managed to save anyone. Could it be that he had a sibling at the convent as well?

Ant looked from one of them to the other, his eyes narrowed in thought. “And where are your parents now?”

“Dead,” Jace said bluntly. “All of them are dead. Most of the people we used to live with are dead, actually. Only a few of us survived.”

Then, much to my surprise, he dove right into the story he’d told me—with some additional details now, like where Kory had been when it all happened, and the fact that Denver and Cloyd had also had families in the area.

“That’s how we ended up… well, in Trenton, at least,” he finished quietly, his eyes on the ground. Then he looked up at everyone else, bringing himself out of the story and back into the present. “And that’s how we ended up with Nathan. He brought us to town, gave us our papers, got us places to live…”

“Wait, what about Zion and Alexy?” I asked. “He got them places to live too, and we know how important they are to him. Were they up there with you guys as well?”

It made a certain sort of sense, given the relationship between Alexy and Zion, and Nathan’s attachment to them. From what I knew, Nathan treated Jace and particularly Cloyd as if they were his family, and the only other people he seemed to care about that much were Zion and Alexy—though Zion and Alexy definitely got more toys than Jace did. But that much affection… surely it was because they all fell into the same group.

But Jace shook his head firmly. “No, I’d never met them before I moved here,” he said. “I got to know them better when we were planning the jailbreak, same as you, and I got the idea that they were part of a circle even more important than mine. We were in on the same meetings, but they… Well, they were definitely higher up on the food chain than I was. Maybe even higher than Boyd, though you can never tell him I said so, because he’ll hate it. They’ve certainly known Nathan longer than we have.”

“I thought you were one of the inside guys, though,” Ant said. “You go to all his private meetings.”

“I’m still an outsider,” Jace responded. “True, I’m on the inside meetings, but only because Cloyd… well, you guys would know him as Boyd… has told Nathan that I have value. Cloyd is the inside man there, not me. He’s the one who knew Nathan first.”

“I guess that explains quite a lot as well,” I murmured, thinking through what I knew of Cloyd. The man had a chip on his shoulder a mile wide, and particularly when it came to Jace’s interactions with Nathan. Or Jace making a decision that didn’t sit right with him. “So if he knew Nathan first, is he the one who coordinated everything?” I asked, my mind jumping to all sorts of conclusions. How had he found Nathan? What sort of deal had he made? How was it that he’d just happened to have friends who were people Nathan had been interested in?

The conspiracy theories were virtually boundless.

Jace just shrugged, mostly disinterested. “Cloyd arranged the whole thing, made the introductions, and gave us a way out,” he said. “At the time, I was mourning my family and trying to take care of my sister. I really wasn’t thinking about much else. I’d known Cloyd my whole life, though, and had always respected him. It didn’t take much more than that for me to agree to the plan. I just knew Nathan was a godsend. We didn’t have any idea who to turn to or where we were going to go. We knew that our settlement wasn’t safe anymore, with the CRAS after us. Nathan gave us an… option.”