Thin Lines (The Child Thief #3)(80)

“Oh.” He stepped back, his face flushed, and I wondered briefly if he’d felt the same heat I had at how close we’d been standing to each other.

“I… uh… Yes, it’s where we put most of the remaining Nurmeal,” he said, finishing in a rush.

I frowned at him. “You didn’t think the cave was safe enough to stay in for more than one night, yet you left the supplies close to where you suspected the Authority would be searching?” That seemed uncharacteristically shortsighted.

Which certainly explained the flush.

That flush now deepened, and I felt the corners of my mouth drawing up into a smile at the realization that he was actually blushing.

“I didn’t want to go too far from the cave because… Well, honestly, I wanted to get back and make sure you were okay,” he said. “I didn’t want to leave you for long, okay? And I figured the Authority might find the cave, but that if they were up there, they wouldn’t be down here, and that would make it safer to retrieve anything I left down here. Look, I’m not perfect.”

He finished the statement defensively, and now I couldn’t stop the grin on my face from growing. I realized abruptly that we were in the middle of the forest, all by ourselves, and that there was no one around to see what we did—or hear what we said to each other—and that made me suddenly braver than I’d been before.

“So, you wanted to come back to the cave to see me, huh?” I asked, my voice quiet.

His eyes softened into molten honesty and his head dipped toward mine. “Well, I was worried,” he said quietly. “About all of you, of course,” he added firmly. “But mostly—”

A shout from about twenty feet away interrupted whatever he’d been about to say, and all the romance fled right out of my head, to be replaced abruptly by absolute, ice-cold fear.

“What was that?” I breathed.

Jace’s hands, which had flown to my shoulders and tightened until they were almost hurting me, slid down my arms, one of his hands taking mine.

“Someone is very close to us,” he breathed back. “Come on.”

We crept forward, moving from tree to tree, my feet trying to mimic Jace’s as closely as they could. The man was an absolute marvel at being able to move silently, quick and quiet as a shadow, and before I knew it we had progressed all the way to the sheer wall of stone in front of us. We still hadn’t seen whoever had shouted, but now that we were up against the cliff, we could certainly hear them.

“What do you have?” a man asked gruffly.

They were on the cliff’s ledge, I realized. We weren’t at the start of the ledge, thank God, but about twenty feet to the side of it, still in the trees and still hidden. The men sounded like they were about ten feet to our right. They were either climbing the ledge or going back down it. Which meant they were either on their way to finding the cave or had already seen it and were on their way back down into the forest.

Jace gestured to the tree right in front of us, and then mimed climbing the tree itself. I scowled at him, not wanting to believe that he actually expected me to climb the tree with him.

Then another voice sounded out from where I assumed the ledge started, and I quickly nodded. Up the tree, then. Less chance of being discovered up there than down here.

It was an oak, luckily, which meant that there were branches relatively close to the ground, and all it took was one boost from Jace—his hands firmly planted on my butt, and me blushing furiously the entire time—and I was on the first branch and reaching for the second, using the trunk to push my body upward to the next branch, and then finding another one.

Meanwhile, the men on the ledge kept talking.

“Several caves up there,” another voice said. “This ledge opens up onto a wide plateau, and that leads right to another walkway, which leads into another valley. Easy enough to navigate. Caves in the side of the valley up there.”

“Any sign of them?” the first voice asked again.

“Yes, sir. Lots of litter in one of the caves, and we’ve found their footprints in the sand right outside the mouth of it. Definitely the group we’ve been searching for. There are seven of them. Three women and four men.”

My heart dropped, and my hand slipped from the branch I’d been grasping at the mention of us all.

“And have they been back?” the other voice snapped.

“No, sir.”

“What makes you think they’ll be back at all, then?”

“What else are they going to do? These are kids from the city. They don’t know what they’re doing out here. They’ve found shelter, and their instincts will tell them to stick with it. I don’t think it takes a rocket scientist to see that these kids aren’t the smartest, sir.”

There was a smirk in his voice as he said it, and it made chills run up and down my spine—and fire spark in my veins.

How dare they? These men had been hunting us for who knew how long and had been actively trying to kill us. They’d captured our friends, done who knew what to them, had ruined our lives, and burnt my house! How dare they stand around insulting us like that? How dare they think they knew us—or what we were capable of?

My eyes narrowed, and I could feel my fists curling up with the need to do something. The need to hit something. Suddenly, all the fear and horror I’d been feeling coalesced into a solid ball in my stomach, and I realized that it had changed. Something had changed.