Thin Lines (The Child Thief #3)(66)

I couldn’t deny, though, that it had been nice to feel powerful for once, and I put the thought into my memory banks as one worth keeping. Maybe I needed to stop taking orders so often and start being more proactive in our actions.

A moment later we were skidding to a halt at the main highway, and Jace was turning around to grin at me.

“Amazing!” he said. “I couldn’t have done it better myself!”

I grinned and blushed, and tried to hand the gun back to him, but he shook his head and motioned for me to keep it.

“We don’t know who we’ll run into on the road to Samsfield,” he said. “I don’t want to be caught unprepared.”

When Ant and Jackie pulled up, Jackie was grinning from ear to ear. “Robin!” she cried. “I never knew you had it in you!”

“Nice shootin’, Rob,” Ant agreed.

At a sign from Jace, he yanked his own gun out of the front waistband of his jeans and handed it back to Jackie, who took it quickly, checked it for ammunition, and slammed the clip home like a pro.

Ant pretended to be horrified but actually looked proud, and I laughed at the moment of levity between them.

On the other side of them, Kory was handing Nelson his gun, so she could fend off anyone who got too close to them, and then we were off again, speeding down the highway toward our next stop. As a lone rider, Abe didn’t have anyone to shoot for him, so the rest of us would just have to keep an eye out for him.

“Do you know where you’re going?” I shouted, leaning close so that Jace could hear me.

“Of course!” he shouted back, his face turned so I could hear him. “Samsfield is where I met you for the first time, remember? I know it like the back of my hand! It’s where Nathan held all his meetings.”

I shook my head, surprised at myself. In the rush of learning about Jace’s plan B, and having just gone through the timeline, I hadn’t paid attention. Now that I was, I remembered Samsfield distinctly. It was a very industrial city, or at least one side of it was. The other side was made up of big, beautiful houses. The sort that the upper crust lived in.

The places that housed people who could afford to adopt the kids the government stole from the poor class.

That day when we met him now felt like forever ago. Our first contact with OH+. Back then we’d known Jace only as Mr. X, an admin for OH, and the one who had invited us to a special meeting to discuss something bigger.

Something bigger, indeed. His mission had been to recruit us into OH+… only, I was starting to think that the real mission had been a lot bigger than that. Because Nathan went a lot deeper than just OH+, and if people like Zion and Alexy had seemed to have access to too many expensive toys, I suspected it was because of that deeper level.

Which begged the question: Why hadn’t he told Jace what he was into? If Jace was so important to him, why hadn’t Nathan let him in on his larger secrets?

The landscape flew by me, a blur of greens and blues and purples, and I turned my face to the side, leaned my cheek against Jace’s back, and tried to turn my brain off. I’d been asking myself the same questions over and over again, and it hadn’t gotten me anywhere. It was high time I stopped doing that and started thinking about what we were going to do, rather than what we didn’t know.



An hour later we arrived at the outskirts of Samsfield, our ears ringing from the noise of the scooters and our hair in knots from the wind. Jace pulled over into a small residential park and turned the scooter off.

“Remind me never to use scooters for any long journeys again,” he muttered, reaching out and stretching his arms to the sides. “I miss my motorcycle.”

I stretched as well, agreeing wholeheartedly, and then turned to watch the others pull up. Ant and Jackie looked about like I felt, and the other three looked little better.

But we’d made it to Samsfield without the Authority getting hold of us, and that had been our main goal.

“What’s next?” Ant asked. “If she’s not who she’s supposed to be, or she’s not going to carry through on Nathan’s promise, I want to know about it sooner rather than later. So we can start working on our next plan B.”

Jace gave him a long, level look, and then shook his head. “Have some patience, Ant. If this was Nathan’s plan for the worst-case scenario, I have faith that it’ll work.” He turned to Jackie and held up the palm of his hand. “832 Winston. Can you map it?”

She stared at him. “You wrote the address on your hand?” she asked scornfully. “How do you know it’s even right? How do you know it didn’t get smudged into different numbers or something?”

“Because I also memorized it,” he said. “Now, can we stop with the questions? We sort of have a meeting to get to. We don’t know how safe this city is, and they’ve got to be looking for these scooters. They must have seen them in the forest. Let’s stop acting like we have a lot of time here.”

She gave him another look that told him exactly what she thought of him bossing her around, but got onto her phone and punched the address in. A second later she nodded.

“Looks like it’s on the outskirts of the city,” she said. “I guess that’s a good thing, seeing as how we didn’t bring any disguises with us and don’t know whether people in this city have been told about us or not.”