Thin Lines (The Child Thief #3)(72)

27





“Let’s go!” Kory hissed, grabbing my hand and scooting out from under the bed.

I scooted out after him, and saw Jace emerging from under the bed on Kory’s other side. In front of us, Nelson was appearing again from behind the desk, and Abe, Ant, and Jackie were already standing near the door, bouncing on their toes as they waited for us.

“How are we going to get down into the basement without the Authority catching us?” I hissed, coming to a stop right up against the wall that bordered the door.

Jace came to a stop next to me, his breath coming fast, and gave me a quick shake of his head. “I don’t know the layout of this place. Never been here before. I’ve never been in a house this big at all. I have no idea how they operate or where stuff is.”

I narrowed my eyes at him, making a mental note to have a talk with him later about rushing into places without adequate planning, and then realized that I was probably the only one of us who had been in a house this big before. Jackie had been born poor, and though Ant and Abe had grown up in a well-to-do house, their adoptive father had just been a doctor. They wouldn’t have been able to afford anything in this sort of neighborhood, no matter how many kids they’d had. Nelson’s family was middle class, and Jace and Kory were legitimately no more than cavemen.

My father had worked for the government. We’d lived in a mansion. It hadn’t been as large as this one, but I figured all of the large houses were probably built along the same basic lines, and if that was true…

“The basement will probably sit right below the kitchen,” I said, remembering. “It might not be as big as the whole house, but it will definitely be connected to the kitchen in one way or another. They were meant for storing things, originally, and were cold enough to store food, back in the day. We have to get to the kitchen. From there we’ll find a door into the basement.”

“And how do we get to the kitchen?” Jackie asked. “That’s great to know where the basement might be, but I’m sort of more concerned about the steps we have to take to get there.”

I nodded, thinking furiously about the layout of the house in which I’d grown up.

“I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing that this house is laid out in the same basic manner as the one my parents owned,” I murmured, one ear still on the crashing and banging coming from below. The soldiers had evidently decided to sweep the first floor before they came upstairs—which might actually work in our favor. If we could manage to avoid them when we went down and they came up…

“In our house, the kitchen was toward the back of the house,” I remembered. “And if the government is in charge of all construction…”

“Then it makes sense that they’re reusing the same design,” Jace said. He slid over to the door and peeked around the corner, then turned his eyes back to me. “No one up here yet. I think they’re searching the first floor right now, and I’m betting most of them will come up to the second floor at the same time. They might leave one or two people downstairs, but they’ll be guarding the doors. Which should give us a window of time when we can be on the first floor without getting caught. As long as we get there without passing any of the doors that lead out of the house. Robin, how do we get down there?”

There would be multiple staircases, I realized, especially in a place this big. Hell, our house had been half this size, and we’d still had three staircases leading up and down between the stories. In a house this big, where they must have expected there to be housecleaning crews and maids…

“There will be a back staircase,” I breathed. “At least one of them, probably more than that. We have to find them before any of those soldiers get to this floor. They might not know about them, and they might not be able to cover them all.”

I moved toward the door and slid my head out far enough that I could look one way down the hall, and then the other. I saw exactly what we’d seen before: long hallway, big bay windows on both ends, lots of gorgeous artwork, lots of doors.

No soldiers. Not yet.

I didn’t even stop to tell the others what I was doing. I just ducked through the door, turned right, and ran for the end of the hall, praying that the soldiers didn’t choose that moment to come up the main staircase.

The hall was impossibly long, and I was positive that we were going to be caught before we got to the other end. I was also positive that we were going to be in big trouble if we got there and I’d been wrong. There should be another staircase there, though, and I kept my mind on that. The houses had been built with the assumption that there would be maids in them, and the rich didn’t like to see the help. They’d insisted on—or at least taken advantage of—a setup where the maids could come and go by different routes than the people who actually lived in the house. In our house, the kids had used those staircases as hiding places during hide-and-seek.

I’d used them when I was coming home after curfew and didn’t want to be caught by my parents.

Now I needed to find one for a much bigger and more important reason.

I slid to a stop right up against the window, my heart hammering in my chest, and turned to my left. Nothing there but a blank wall, and I frowned. That couldn’t be right. Then I whirled in the other direction and saw… not a staircase at all. Not even a room where we could hide. But a door, nonetheless. It was just a lot smaller than I’d been expecting.