Thin Lines (The Child Thief #3)(82)

I glanced at him, surprised at this. He’d sounded so sure of Corona when he first decoded the message from Nathan—and even after, when we were on our way to her house. Now that I’d met her, I could see exactly why he was so confident in her abilities, especially if her attitude was a reflection of Nathan himself, like I believed it probably was.

Which was why it took me aback that he was admitting there might be a hole in their protocol.

“You don’t think Corona will show?” I asked.

“I think she’ll do her very best,” he replied fairly. “I know she’s important to Nathan, and I knew he was saving her as a last resort. Which means he trusts her to save the day if everything goes wrong. I’m not questioning her loyalty to him. I’m questioning her ability to evade the Authority agents that are already searching for her.”

He pulled the piece of paper she’d given him out of his pocket and stared at it for a moment.

“She’s given us a location that sits in the forest outside the city,” he said. “There’s not even an address. Just a set of directions. And she wrote it down, which was the smartest possible thing. If the Authority somehow bugged her house or something, writing it down means they didn’t hear where we’re going to be meeting.” He looked up at me, his eyes full of determination. “Still. I’m not saying that Nathan doesn’t have everything planned out perfectly, but he can’t guarantee her safety, and that means we don’t have a guarantee that she’s going to show up when we need her—or that we’re going to get there before she has to leave. We have to have a backup plan. It’s the only sensible thing.”

Well, growing in leaps and bounds, I thought wryly. There was a time when Jace had put too much faith in Nathan, and though I was sorry to see him compromising that level of faith, I was in total agreement.

“Backup plan it is,” I said, shifting to make myself more comfortable in the bed of leaves. “So, what are our options?”

There was a long moment of silence, and I glanced around at the members of my crew, my mind rushing through anything that seemed like it might be an option. Going back into Trenton was out, and I didn’t think we could risk another trip into Samsfield, either, since our escape on the bikes. The Authority would be searching that city more carefully now, especially given what they already seemed to know—or suspect—of Corona’s alliances.

Staying here wasn’t an option, either. We needed some real security. Preferably a location that had walls. Maybe even carpeting and real beds.

“Little John is our only option for a path forward,” Nelson said. “We have to do the same thing we were trying to do before: figure out where we can find them. We know—or at least we suspect, if we follow the Nathan-is-part-of-Little-John theory—that Corona is part of that organization, and that would mean that Little John’s offices or headquarters or whatever are where we’re going to end up. Surely if Corona is willing to bring us in, that means Little John has finally come for us. Or, at least, we’re going to them. Right?”

I frowned. “I still don’t understand why, though. Why make us go through all of this if we’re just going to end up back with them, eventually? What is this, some sort of test? A test where they throw us into the wilderness blind, and don’t bother to get in touch with us afterward? That’s like some sort of insane hazing ritual!”

Jace coughed and held up his phone, the shattered screen glinting in the light that filtered down through the leaves of the tree. “Well, we know why they haven’t gotten in contact with me. As for the rest of you, Nathan wouldn’t have your numbers. He was never on the group texts between us, or even in the encrypted app. Made sure to keep himself separated from all that. So, he wouldn’t have any way of getting in touch with any of you. Cloyd would, but there’s no guarantee that Nathan is with Cloyd, or that Cloyd still has the phone that had all that information on it. We ditched those burners pretty often. It doesn’t explain why they didn’t keep us when they had us, but it does explain the radio silence.”

“And without your phone, and with us so far off the grid, they might be searching for us and failing,” I finished. “They might not have meant to leave us out in the cold at all. They were just waiting for us to figure it all out and get to Corona.”

“Then I guess that leaves us no choice, right?” Jackie said. “We don’t know whether Nathan is trying to save us or not. We can hope that he is, but he’s going to fail. Because we’ve hidden ourselves so well that even he can’t find us. And we can hope that Corona’s going to come through, but we’re smart enough to know that it might not happen. Which means we have to help ourselves. That’s the only option.”

I nodded, agreeing with her on all counts.

Standing up, I moved toward Jace’s duffel bags, where he’d put the timeline. I grabbed the papers out of the bag and marched back toward the group. There, I started laying the papers out in order again, thankful that we’d stacked them that way to make the line easier to reconstruct. It still seemed like an impossible task, but if we were going to find a way to safety, we needed some sort of direction, and the timeline was legitimately the only thing we had going for us. When I was done, I stood up and glanced across the faces in front of me.

“Well, then,” I said, “let’s get to work. This timeline is still our best and only clue to what Little John is doing and where we might find them. We just have to find the right piece of evidence. This time, though, I say we call in some help.”