Sneak (39 page)

It took him several minutes to know whether or not any of them were real.

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Where
is
the lake?
Logan thought briefly.
Wasn’t I freezing just a
moment ago?

But as soon as those thoughts had come, they had gone. Logan

lay on the ground, delirious . . . but Markless.

“So what was the punishment?” Tyler asked, running over to

him and trembling from the excitement of leaving so much de-

struction in his wake. “Was it cool?”

Logan frowned, lost in his memories of it. “It was . . . agony . . .

but Cylis . . . Cylis would have saved me . . .”

“No, Logan.
No
. Cylis would
not
have saved you.” Logan could feel Peck’s hands gently patting his face, but it was as if through a bubble, as if they were very distant and as though Peck himself were speaking from across a wide canyon. “You’re Dust, Logan—

you’re Dust; do you hear me?” The words were muffled at first, barely audible, barely registering. But as Peck repeated them, again and again, their meaning began to take shape. Logan could feel that canyon closing up, could feel the bubble as it broke. Slowly, he pulled himself up from out of his BCI-induced delirium.

He
had
been saved. But not by Cylis.

“Found Jo!” Blake called from just out of sight in the dim,

sterile space.

“That’s good!” Peck yelled. “Keep an eye out for Eddie.”

“Uh . . . guys,” Hailey said. She pointed toward the edge of

the darkness at the opposite end of the vast room. A Moderator had appeared.

“Intruders!” the Moderator yelled. “Traitors!” He ran straight for them, stumbling a bit, arms out.

And yet, in the moment, the Dust could not bring themselves

to flee. Meg watched with her hands to her face. Tyler fell to his knees. Blake stood stoic and numb.

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“Ed . . . ,” Peck mumbled as the group fled, finally, toward

the elevator. “Forgive us.”

The Moderator was Eddie.

6

“Shawn! Shawn,” Erin said. “Look—they’re coming back out.”

Erin pointed to the Moderator’s exit at the side of the vestibule.

Peck, Hailey, Blake, Meg, and Tyler led Logan and Joanne out by the arms. “Let’s get outta there!” Erin said to Shawn. “Logan’s safe. I can see him, Shawn! Logan’s safe! Jo too!”

“Can’t move yet,” Shawn said. “Whoever set this security

loop in motion, I’ve gotta find their Markscan trail. I’ve gotta delete it.”

“Why? Who cares if some tycoon Moderator gets in trouble

over this?”

“My job is to cover our tracks,” Shawn said. “Completely. I’m

not about to cut loose just because of a surprise along the way. I don’t
work
like that.”

And Erin looked at him admiringly. From one hacker to

another.

“Besides,” Shawn said. “I don’t like free rides if I don’t know who’s driving. You wanna know who’s helping us, don’t you?

Don’t you think it’s just the tiniest bit suspicious?”

“You’re right. Just go—go, already,” Erin said. And she waved

him along impatiently.

Shawn was digging deeper now, much deeper, into Acheron’s

immune system database. Surely, there must be some clue, some-

where, as to who this mystery hacker was. Acheron’s systems were
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as secure as systems got. There was a heavily firewalled Intranet within its walls, but no Internet, to be sure. No way to hack into the prison from the outside. For anyone to loop the security feeds, that person would need to sit at this very desk, hacking this very tablescreen. But who besides Erin could have done that?

“Seriously, can’t you go any faster?” Erin asked after just another thirty seconds. The Dust had made their way across the vestibule.

“Checking scan logs—that’s, like, your area of expertise, isn’t it, Mr. Tech Wiz? So make it happen already.”

“Hey,” Shawn said slyly. “As I recall, you couldn’t hack this

thing
period
.”

And sure enough, after several more seconds of searching,

Shawn found it. The lone node in the database, stamped with precisely the same time as the footage pulled for the security loop. The condemning evidence. The person who’d compromised Acheron’s

computer security before Erin ever even had the chance. The person who’d enabled the Dust’s escape.

Except the cell was wiped clean. Whoever was responsible,

they’d already covered their tracks.

And yet, in what must have been the haste of the hack, one

detail did remain.

Shawn could hardly believe it.

The hacker was an IMP.

7

“Where’s Eddie?” Erin asked when she and Shawn joined the Dust down below.

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Peck was unscrewing the air duct grate in the corner, work-

ing fast, concentrating hard.

“Hey—guys.
Where’s Eddie
? He coming or what?”

Hailey was the only one willing to respond. She looked over

at Erin. She frowned. And slowly, silently, she shook her head.

8

Once Logan and Joanne stabilized, the Dust moved above

ground, out of that empty turbine room, out from under

Beacon’s shadow. And it didn’t take long for them to find the

Beacon protests.

The protests were everywhere.

The Dust—the larger Dust, thousands and thousands of

them, co-opting that name—were entirely above ground now,

visible, deliberately lining the streets at every level, blocking traffic, making noise, camping out at the DOME headquarters, on

the Capitol steps . . .

But while the protests were peaceful, the scene in Beacon

was not. Erin looked on, horrified by the violence she’d stirred.

All around them, IMPS marched through the streets, revealing

themselves, pushing back against the protesters with all means of force, magnecuffing everyone they could grab, dragging them away, not caring about the Marked onlookers or the disturbed

faces they made.

Slowly, Logan approached Erin. He put his hand on her shoul-

der. She turned to face him. “I’m told this was you,” Logan said.

“You started this.”

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“I . . . I guess I did,” Erin said, sounding shell-shocked and empty. “But Logan.” She looked at him. “They did this for you.”

9

The new year came. The G.U. treaty was signed. And across what could now only be called the Global Union, the Markless protests continued. The IMPS remained a constant presence.

By radio, the Dust heard nightly reports from Dane about

the situation out west. Like a giant game of telephone, he relayed, without fail, everything he’d heard, passed on straight from the mouths of Mrs. Phoenix and Grandma, out from the little, un-assuming town called Spokie, suburb of New Chicago.

The story was the same everywhere. Markless rising. IMPS

crashing down on them.

A new era had begun.

It was another week before Logan or Erin or Peck or any of them could tell up from down. They mourned Eddie. They mourned

what they had done. They wondered, hopelessly, what was next.

Slowly, Logan warmed back up to Erin, and Erin to him.

She hadn’t gone back home after that night she left. She imag-

ined her parents were beside themselves with worry. But she

feared that if she left Logan’s side, she would never find him again.

It wasn’t safe enough to set a meeting place and simply hope

for the best. Not anymore. The IMPS had made sure of that.

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10

It was clear, with protests continuing all around them, that it wasn’t safe for all of the Dust, the original Dust, in Beacon any longer. Not for Logan. Not for Peck. Not for Erin or Hailey.

The rest of them were determined to stay, to be a part of the

community they’d found in the city. To be a presence there. To help with the movement blossoming all around them.

And Peck agreed that this was for the best. But for him, for

Logan, for Erin and Hailey, everyone knew it was time to move on.

They’d been planning to leave, to head for the countryside,

when Erin came down with the first signs of a fever.

“You can’t deny it any longer,” Peck said to her. “You have to come to terms with this thing. There must be something we can do.”

“What thing?” Logan asked. “Peck, what are you talking about?”

“I’m sick,” Erin said simply. “All the Marked are. Or will be, anyway. I think.”

“How?
What?
Why?”

Erin took a deep breath, and she asked Logan to sit down.

Over the course of that night, Erin told Logan everything she’d found out. About Project Trumpet, about how it had led her to

Acheron, to her plan with the IMPS . . . and she told, too, of the truth she had learned. About what was coming. For every last

Marked in the G.U. It didn’t always kill quickly, she said. But it did kill.

She told of the vaccination. She told of the shot at the Pledge.

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And throughout that whole story, Logan looked at his own

empty wrist. He remembered his own Pledge.

He remembered the shot he’d received.

But he didn’t speak up.

Because it couldn’t be, could it? Logan
wasn’t
Marked.

Was he?

11

Another week, and Logan, Erin, Peck, and Hailey were ready to

part ways.

“Do you think you’ll find the cure?” Jo asked. “You think

there’s any cure at all?”

“We don’t know,” Logan said. “But we have to try. Or else the

Global Union’s about to get a whole lot messier.”

It took until that night, their last night all together, for them to talk about what had happened the day Logan tried to sneak Lily out of Acheron. Periodically, Erin would ask about it. The betrayal.

About how he was doing. About what he was thinking. But each

time, Logan would close his eyes, and he’d shake his head, as if brushing off some thought too big and painful to wear just yet.

And then, finally, with Logan and Erin and Peck’s Dust all

sitting atop the fifth-tier Beacon grid, in a moment of rare peace, looking out over the crackle of rebellion and the distant noise from half a mile below . . . with all of them listening to Dane strum his
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guitar on the nearly-busted speaker of Hailey’s latest foxhole radio, Logan opened up.

“Here’s the thing I can’t get out of my head,” he said, un-

prompt ed. To no one in particular. To himself, almost. “What if she didn’t betray us? What if it was the only way?”

The Dust just stared.

“The only way for what?” Erin asked.

Logan smiled, bemused. “What if Lily didn’t need saving?

What if Lily has her own plans?”

The Dust all looked now, intently, respectfully, waiting

eagerly for Logan’s next words.

“Lily. She’s ascending the ranks of Cylis’s army. A faithful servant.” He shook his head. “She’s close, now, to Lamson. To Cylis.

Closer than any of us ever dreamed we could get.”

“Yeah, because they broke her,” Joanne said gently. “Because

she’s been brainwashed. Like Eddie. Like everyone else in that awful place.”

Logan frowned. “Maybe. Or maybe she’s been five years ahead of us all along. Maybe the reason she was so angry to see me was because I’d gotten in the way. Because she figured
she
was going to have to save
me
. Maybe she worried that doing so would blow her cover.”

“Cover?” Peck said. “Logan, I’m sorry, but you’re grasping at

straws here . . .”

“She was surprised that you were there, Peck. She said that it changed things. It was as if . . . it was as if she revised her plan once she learned that I had backup.”

“Revised it so that it included
betraying
you?” Hailey said incredulously.

“Well . . . yes. As if suddenly it seemed worth the risk to turn
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me in. Because with all of you on my side, I still stood a chance of escape, even without her help.”

“So you think Lily turned you in on the
chance
that you might escape, because somehow that was preferable to the idea of ruining her big plan?”

“That’s right,” Logan said. “Maybe the stakes here are higher