Thin Lines (The Child Thief #3)(98)

I stared at him, my grin widening at his sudden swing from hopeful to pessimistic—and the fact that I had the perfect answer. “Actually… I think that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”



Half an hour later, it had gotten colder and darker outside of the tree’s shelter, but we’d had a quick dinner of Nurmeal, and I’d used the time to further formulate my idea. We were seated once again in a circle around the fire—with one change: Kory had gone outside of the tree’s branches to walk the perimeter of the small grove, as lookout.

He was our designated alarm system and had two of the three guns with him, just in case.

“What I’m thinking,” I said, leaning forward and stretching my hands toward the flames, “is that we actually just find a fuel tanker. It’s the easiest and most logical source of moveable fuel.”

Nelson stared at me, frowning, but then nodded. “And it might not be as difficult to come by as you would think,” she said.

She grabbed my tablet computer from the ground next to her and started typing something in. A moment later she held it up to the rest of us.

All I could see was a weird graph, though, with a bunch of red lines and icons on it, and I shook my head in confusion.

“What is it?” I asked. “Words, Nelson. We’re not living in your brain.”

She snorted. “This is a map of Trenton. All those little signs are locations that require fuel. Any gas station, obviously. Any large building that runs on gas power. The large distribution centers that fuel the gas mains that power all the houses…”

“And?” I asked, wishing she’d get to the point.

“And,” she said, giving me a narrow look, “that gas has to get into the city somehow. It’s not just piped in from some big gas manufacturer. Trenton is far too isolated for that to be an option. There’s only one way to move enough gas to power an entire city, and that’s by tanker.”

“Meaning that there should be a line of tankers coming into the city at least every couple of days,” I said, catching on to her train of thought.

“And those tankers would be… open for new drivers, if we caught them in the right situation,” Ant said, grinning. “But where do we catch them?”

“Simple,” Nelson answered. “I do some research on the trucking companies, what their routes are, and when they make scheduled deliveries to Trenton. Robin and Jace, you two get to work on their possible routes, any distribution centers, and a map to where we left the airship. A little research and we’ll figure out where we go for the gas. Then we just have to sort out the small detail of how we’re going to get the truck itself into our possession.”

“And what about us?” Ant protested. “What are we supposed to do, sit here twiddling our thumbs?”

“You’re going to get Jackie awake, give her some water and some food, if she’ll take it, and ask her… I don’t know, if anything is getting any worse,” I said. “We need to keep her as comfortable as we can for as long as we can, but we also need to know how she’s holding up. Abe…” I turned to him, trying to think of something for him to do, but he was already on his feet.

“I’m going out to help Kory,” he said. “The last thing we need right now is for the Authority to catch us sleeping.”

I was shocked at this willingness to leave the inner circle, which the Abe I remembered would have fought against, tooth and nail, but nodded to him solemnly. Abe, it seemed, was catching up with his brother in terms of sudden-onset maturity.

And at exactly the right time.

I watched Ant moving toward Jackie, spared a glance for the girl, who was starting to look a little blue around the edges, and turned quickly away from them. I was terrified about her condition, but thinking about it wasn’t going to do me or her an ounce of good right now. I couldn’t do anything for her, as much as that killed me, without any medical knowledge or experience.

The best thing I could do was to find a truck full of gas and figure out a way to steal it, so that we could get to the airship and get it into the air.

Once we did that, I was positive that we’d be free. Positive that we’d be set. It was just a matter of figuring out how to get there.





39





I stood on my toes and stared through the row of bushes in front of me, my heart hammering in my ears at what we were about to try to do—and my brain asking me how the hell we thought we were going to pull it off, and why we’d thought it was a good idea in the first place.

Ahead of us lay twenty square acres of asphalt surrounded by a huge swath of gravel, to form two squares, one wrapping around the other. And on that asphalt, I counted at least thirty trucks, each of them attached to an enormous silver canister of fuel.

There were other structures, of course: gassing stations, and a couple of buildings around the perimeter where the truckers could get food and drink and use the bathrooms and showers. Trucking, I’d learned during our research the night before, was a somewhat strange occupation, full of people who hadn’t quite fit into regular society and had decided to live their lives on the road instead, without a home base. They didn’t have houses, many of them, and so took their food and bathroom breaks wherever they could. They also spent way too much time awake and counted on places like the one in front of us as safe spots, where they could climb into the mini-bedrooms they had in the backs of their trucks and sleep.