Thin Lines (The Child Thief #3)(99)

It sounded like a horrible way to live, in my opinion. Which, I guessed, was probably why a lot of trucking companies had been turning to self-driving trucks, of late. In fact, it seemed that truck drivers themselves were a dying breed.

But we had to hope with every ounce of our beings that there were real live truck drivers here. Because we needed human error if we were going to manage to steal a truck. If we got one that knew how to drive itself, it would probably undermine us the second we were in it.

I took a deep breath and slid closer to Jace, taking some comfort in the fact that we would be doing this as a group. At least with the seven of us—five, I amended, as we’d left Ant back in the trees with Jackie—we would have a lot of brainpower going for us.

The plan was relatively simple. “Simple” meaning that there weren’t a lot of steps involved. Those steps, though, were fairly… complicated. And success was going to require more than our fair share of luck.

“Maybe our lack of luck over the last week means that our luck was saved up in some universal savings account to be used today,” Ant had joked when I’d said so this morning.

I closed my eyes in prayer that he was right.

“Stop thinking about it,” Jace suddenly murmured from beside me. “You’re shaking like a leaf, and you’re not going to be any good to us if you’re too nervous to do what you need to do.”

What I needed to do. Right. Of course, it wasn’t just going to be me, but if any member of the team screwed this up, it would take us all down.

We’d spent half the night researching the things that Nelson had outlined in her short speech and had managed to come up with a pretty straightforward plan. To our surprise, we’d found that there was a distribution center/truck wash/truck stop location just outside of Trenton, which meant we hadn’t had to go into the city at all. Which had been terrific news, since the city was basically a giant hornets’ nest as far as we were concerned. Of course, we’d known that getting to the distribution center might be a problem—the Authority had to know that we were on motorcycles of a certain description by this time—so we’d decided immediately to cut down on the number of bikes, to avoid the picture of five or six motorcycles traveling together.

Instead we’d come on two motorcycles. And boy, had it been difficult. I’d been sandwiched between Nelson and Abe, while Jace had somehow managed to ride with Kory. The other bikes were still back in the forest, with Ant and Jackie.

And with a little bit of that aforementioned luck, we would never need to use them again. Though, it broke my heart a little to think of them being left behind. I’d never owned anything that nice in my adult life, and if I could have held onto mine, I would have.

Eyes forward, Robin, I lectured myself. I could get a new motorcycle when this was all done. If I managed to live through it.

I felt in my pocket for the set of instructions I’d written down—the directions from our forest to a rough guess at where we’d left the airship, near the small town of Starkston. We would need these once we had the truck and had gotten to the forest to pick up Ant and Jackie.

I stared ahead of us, watching the people moving back and forth across the huge asphalt parking lot, going about their business of getting food and gas, visiting with old friends, discussing the best routes, and no doubt checking their own delivery schedules. We just had to find a truck that wasn’t being guarded by an alert driver. A truck whose driver was, preferably, asleep in their bunk in the back of their cab.

A truck that was far enough away from anyone else for our coming actions to be hidden. Because if anyone caught us, we’d be sent right to the place we never wanted to see: an Authority jail.

But it was the only way to do this. The only way to get enough gas for the airship, while securing a source of transportation to the airship itself. The Authority might be looking for a group of bikes, but they almost certainly were not looking for a fuel tanker.

“See any likely options?” I asked of no one in particular.

Around me, Kory, Abe, and Jace were towering over my head, each of them able to look above the bush rather than through it, while Nelson and I were stuck spreading the branches with our hands.

“There are a couple of trucks on the outer edges,” Jace murmured. “Those are going to be the best, I think. If we just all walk up to a truck in the middle of the parking lot, people are going to start asking questions.”

“Oh come on, we’re just a group of kids strolling through a fuel tanker distribution center and… truck-wash thing,” Abe said. “That’s got to happen all the time around here.”

“Maybe so,” Jace replied fairly. “But I doubt the kids who do that have been labeled terrorists by the Authority. We have to assume that our pictures are plastered up inside every one of those buildings, to catch the attention of people who travel often. I don’t know how closely truck drivers will be looking at them, but…”

“One of the outside trucks it is,” I cut in, already tired of all the waiting. I was nervous as hell about this, but I also wanted to get it over with, already. Sitting around having a stupid conversation wasn’t going to save Jackie or get us to the convent. “Which one are we trying first?”

We stared for a moment longer before Ant finally said, “Why not the one right in front of us? It seems like the easiest, right? Just get out of the bushes and go for it.”