Thin Lines (The Child Thief #3)(77)

We weren’t too far from the outskirts of town, and once we hit the main highway, it would be a fairly simple ride to get back to the forest. I just hoped we could get out of there before the Authority picked up our trail. We might be riding something a hell of a lot better than the scooters we’d had, but something told me the Authority soldiers would be on bikes—or in cars—that were even faster. They did, after all, have the government’s money at their beck and call.

I didn’t want us pitted against them when it came to speed. As long as we got out of town quickly enough, we shouldn’t have to.

I stopped myself there, not wanting to think about the fact that we had to come back out into the world tomorrow—and hope that Corona was still alive to keep her word that she would get us to safety.





30





The ride back toward the area that I’d come to think of as my forest was both less eventful than those last twenty minutes at Corona’s house and incredibly tense at the same time. Tense on a very basic level, given the fact that I was now driving my own bike and couldn’t just gaze at the scenery as we passed it, and tense because what I was looking at constantly was my rearview mirror to see whether we were getting out of town without someone on our tail.

We sped through the rest of the residential area and hit the borders of the town within a couple of minutes after leaving Corona’s house, the bike engines screaming with effort, the seven of us crouched over the handlebars in our need to both hide and try to make ourselves more aerodynamic. Jackie was leading us, glancing at her phone every so often and, I assumed, giving those with headsets updates about where we were going and what we were doing. We were already in territory I remembered from when we arrived, though, and I was guessing that we were going out the same way we’d come in.

It would lead us right to the main highway, and from there we’d have a straight shot to the forest. Which was good, since it meant we wouldn’t have to worry much about lots of turns that could separate us. But it was also bad, because it meant that we were stuck on a straight highway with little in the way of camouflage. We wouldn’t be going through any towns, and we wouldn’t be going through any forested areas. Just enormous fields of nothing.

And that meant, in short, that there would be nowhere to hide if the Authority agents suddenly showed up behind us.

I did my best not to think about that and leaned forward a bit farther, trying to enjoy the feel of the fresh air around me, the wind whipping against the visor in front of my eyes. Thank God Corona had thought to leave helmets for us, and thank God even more that they fit. I didn’t know how we would have pulled this escape off without them.

Even better, they were now acting as masks for us.

That brought up the thought that we were currently riding along the highway on motorcycles that we’d just stolen—borrowed?—from the basement of a secret contact within Nathan’s organization. An organization, I told myself, that I needed to start calling Little John, because there was almost zero chance that they were anything other than one and the same. They’d both shown up in our lives around the same time, and it was virtually impossible to believe that they were separate entities. If they were, they were almost certainly working together, and both far better funded than OH or even OH+ had been.

That begged the question, though, of why Nathan had bothered to start OH+ in the first place. It was obviously some sort of recruitment technique, but why? Why not just ask those of us he’d chosen to join Little John, outright? And that led back to the question I’d been asking myself almost nonstop since that morning in the meadow—was it yesterday?—when we woke up alone and far from civilization: Why hadn’t they just taken us to their headquarters when they had us?

Mystery after mystery, and none of it was going to get any clearer until we had someone who could answer those questions for us. Which meant, I supposed, that I had to be patient until… Well, until we got to the next step. The step where Corona took us to the refuge, whatever that meant, and we slowed down enough for me to start asking questions other than what we were going to do next.

“What do we do next?” I shouted in Jace’s direction, wondering if he’d had more success figuring that out than I had.

He glanced at me from his hunched position on his bike and shook his head. “Don’t see that we have many options!” he yelled back, his voice straining over the sound of the engine underneath him. “Get back to the forest and find a new place to hide. Get the supplies. Do some research and try to get a jump on where we might be going and what we might see there. Wait.”

More waiting. Terrific. The Authority was actively searching for us, and sitting around waiting for someone else to do something about it felt wrong in a million ways. I also didn’t like the idea of going back to the forest, but Corona had been certain that it was the safest place for us.

Certainly safer than the cities. Safer than any of our houses. At least in the forest we had more places to run if the Authority found us.



When we arrived at the spot where the road into my forest broke off from the main highway, we skidded to a halt, took off our helmets, and stared at each other for a long moment.

“Should we just go in?” Jackie asked hesitantly, her voice loud in the silence that had encased us once we cut the engines.

Jace nodded, his expression equally tense. “Yup. Less risky in the trees than standing in the open, close to where we recently shot down a bunch of agents. We look for a new spot as far away from here as possible. Somewhere to hide the bikes and then ourselves. Let’s move.”