Thin Lines (The Child Thief #3)(86)

I agreed with her on that. I just wished that these guesses gave us a little more to go on.

“What does any of this tell us?” I finally turned my eyes to the timeline on the forest floor. “How does that help us with our current situation?”

Jace frowned deeply, staring at the timeline as well, and for a moment I thought he was going to come up with something. But then he shook his head. “It doesn’t,” he said. “It doesn’t give us a damn thing. Just a bunch of dead ends, and that doesn’t help us at all.”

The unfortunate truth was that he was right. Because we still didn’t have any real locations. No convenient and new addresses that might offer us shelter if Corona didn’t show up in the morning.

At that moment, Gabby called me again.

“Yes?” I answered quickly.

“Robin,” she said. “I’ve got an address for you.”





34





The next morning found us on the bikes again, tearing toward Samsfield once more, the seven of us hunched over the handlebars of the motorcycles as we sped through the mist of the early morning. We’d spent the night planning and planning again how we thought this would all go—including what we would do if Corona didn’t show at all—and at this point I thought we could probably all have recited the plan by heart, if we had to.

And if any one of us didn’t know it by heart, chances were the person next to them would.

It had been a completely sleepless night, between moving to a new location, the ensuing drama of retrieving the supplies—and finding that the Authority had discovered the cave—the confusion of all the new questions regarding Little John, Corona, and Nathan, and the combination of stress and excitement over what we thought could happen this morning. We’d walked through the timeline at least one hundred times, trying to come up with any way that the points on the line could have connected back to either Nathan or Corona—the only two high-level members of Little John we knew of—or how they might have led to any of their offices or hideouts. As the only one who had ever met Nathan in person, Jace had been called upon time after time to act as judge on some point or another.

We’d set lookouts, to be changed every hour, to watch for any Authority agents creeping through the forest. We’d hoped that the Authority was on the other side of the forest, but we couldn’t count on it.

Which was why we’d also been researching the address Gabby had given us. Trying to decide whether it was something we could use, or something that would end up being completely useless.

It was the location of a house; we’d known that much. But it had been a house in a different city, and not a local one. It was another residence and had been used as a guarantee for the loan on the house in which we’d met Corona. We’d been right about the record still being open to the public, though Gabby’d had to dig a little bit to find it, because no names had been attached to it. Not Nathan’s. Not Corona’s. Not another man who may have been her husband. Instead, she’d found that a Samantha Molin had been listed as owner of the property—but that it was very definitely connected to the enormous house in Samsfield. Which was also in the name of Samantha Molin.

We had no idea what it meant. But we had the address, and it had quickly become our plan B. If nothing else, it gave us something to shoot for. Another possible location. Because we were all tired of sitting around waiting for something bad to potentially happen. We all wanted action.

I revved my engine, shot up to drive even with Jackie, and glanced over at her, taking in the small hunched form, the dark clothing, and the helmet that hid only the top half of her face. The girl rode the motorcycle like a pro, and I couldn’t help thinking that in another life, she would have been one of those girls that built and rode her own motorcycles, maybe even had her own brand.

In this world, though, that was a pipe dream.

“How much longer, Jackie?” I asked, using the comm in my ear so I didn’t have to shout. I’d taken mine back for this trip with the promise that if anything happened, every one of us with a comm would make sure we grabbed one of the team members without one. I was tired of not being able to communicate with my team.

And it had been my comm in the first place. A very large part of me thought it unfair that I’d given it up and not gotten it back.

“Half an hour, max,” Jackie’s voice said directly into my ear. “We’re eating up the miles at this pace, and as long as no one notices us doubling the speed limit and pulls us over, we’re going to get to Samsfield in record time. Well ahead of when Corona asked us to get there.”

I swallowed heavily and wondered if we should consider slowing down. The last thing we needed was to get pulled over, and going so fast was almost inevitably going to get us noticed. Then again, we were going so quickly already that anyone else would have trouble catching up with us.

I hoped.

I dropped back a bit and left Jackie alone at the front of the pack, so that she’d be able to turn more quickly if anything came up. When Jace drew even with me, he turned his helmet to look at me and gave me a single nod.

“Anything important?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Jackie answered for me, via the comm link. “Robin just gets impatient on long rides. Has to constantly be asking when we’re getting there. It’s nothing new—she was like this when we were running missions with Nelson, too.”