Thin Lines (The Child Thief #3)(87)

I glared at her, annoyed that she was making it sound like I was some impatient little kid… but then relented. She was mostly right. I just didn’t have that much patience when it came to things like this. Especially when we might find safety on the other end of the journey.

Instead of answering, I ducked a bit lower over my handlebars, told myself to be patient, and started counting the mile markers as we passed them, trying to keep my brain busy with something other than ideas of how everything could possibly go wrong.



Jace took the lead as soon as we got off the highway outside of Samsfield. He was, after all, the one in possession of the directions Corona had left. No address, he’d said, just a set of directions. And looking around, I could see why. Because we weren’t in a place where there were any addresses. Instead, we were driving right into a forest—one that looked completely different from the one in which we’d been staying, outside of Trenton. While that forest was made up of old, stately trees like oaks and pines, this one was much… lighter. The trees around us were sycamores and beeches, their leaves small and musical, their bark light. I frowned at that, going back to my schooling years, and tried to figure out why there would be such a big difference in the tree population when we were only a couple hours from where we’d started out.

Ah. This was a manmade forest. It must have been, for the trees to be so different. And these were definitely landscaping trees. The ones people planted in the front yards of enormous houses—houses like the one where Corona had lived, which had to be less than five miles from here, on the very outskirts of the city. This was a decorative forest, then, built for the rich who lived in this area.

It made me like the forest a little less, and I crouched down, trying to protect myself from a fear that came out of nowhere. If this forest had been planted for the benefit of the rich, it meant it had been done by the construction companies that were owned and operated by the government. And that made the trees seem immediately suspicious. As if they were somehow spying on us.

Add that to the fact that we were so close to Samsfield again, and I started feeling distinctly worried.

“Get it together, Robin,” I breathed out to myself. All of this running around and hiding was making me downright paranoid. Now I thought the trees were spies for the government? I was officially losing it.

“What was that?” Jackie asked sharply.

Dammit, I’d forgotten about the comm.

“Nothing,” I said quickly. “Just talking to myself.”

Suddenly, Jace made a sharp right, swerving off the road and directly into the trees, and slowed to a crawl, then stopped entirely. He hopped off the bike and turned toward us but didn’t take his helmet off.

“This is where we go into the trees,” he said, the visor across his eyes making it feel strange to be listening to him. Whenever we’d worn masks in the past, we’d only been able to see the person’s eyes, and though it hadn’t been ideal, it had at least given us something to judge them by. A way to tell what the person behind the mask was thinking.

Losing that was more disconcerting than I’d thought it would be.

“Everyone keep your helmets on,” he snapped as Ant moved to take his off. “I don’t want anyone seeing our faces. We know the Authority is looking for us with facial recognition, and though they shouldn’t be in this forest—shouldn’t even know to be in here—we can’t take any chances. Helmets stay on, and we’re walking the bikes from here.”

It was solid reasoning, and we all fell into line after him, our helmets still on and our bikes turned off but left in neutral so that we could roll them through the forest by hand. As we walked into the trees, I began cataloging the differences here. The possible escape routes and the things that would make escape harder. Because we might hope that the Authority didn’t know about this meeting, but I was way past the point of no return there.

I’d started assuming that the Authority knew about everything. Particularly when it came to people they were hunting—and people who were connected to someone they seemed absolutely desperate to catch.

We walked for about ten minutes, our eyes on the trees around us, and then Jace allowed his bike to roll to a stop in a small clearing. He glanced at the compass in his hand and then my phone, which I’d loaned him for GPS and mapping. He frowned at both gadgets, then looked up and around us, and then looked at the readings again.

“What is it?” I asked softly.

“The directions end in this spot exactly,” he said, his voice just as soft. “But I can’t figure out why she would have chosen it. It’s completely illogical. There’s no good cover here—no place to hide, if anything goes wrong—and it’s too far from the roads for any safe or quick getaway. There… If I was choosing places to meet, and I knew the Authority might be coming after me, this spot would never occur to me.”

“Maybe this is the start of some super-secret tunnel that leads to the safe spot, or something like that,” Ant answered. “Maybe she’s meeting us here because this is how we get to her refuge.”

I looked quickly around us, wondering if Ant was right. Was there the start of something here? If there was, would we be able to see it? Could it be that she would walk right up out of the ground, smiling at how surprised we were? Or would we receive some message that told us how to progress from here? The thought of a warm bed and safe walls had me turning my eyes from left to right, trying desperately to find her, positive that she would come with the news that her hideout was secure and that we were approved to move forward. Positive that she would give us direction once again.