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The homes in Old District were only two or three stories tall, but they were huge. Each sat on nearly an acre of property, and they stretched out over a good bit of that land with many adjacent rooms and hallways and wide-open space inside them. Dane's house was built in what was called the Tudor style, which Dane didn't much like talking about. In fact, Dane didn't much like talking about Old District at all, and Hailey guessed that his flashy jeans and high-tech black t-shirts, whether Dane realized it or not, were a certain kind of disguise. But not even cyberpunk clothing could hide the fact that Dane came from money.

Inside, the place was even showier than Hailey had remembered from her visits as a kid. Dane led her quickly through the bigger rooms of the house, with their sculptures in the corners and paintings on the walls, and he didn't seem at ease with himself until they'd reached a small den in a far corner where he kept his music gear. Posters hung sloppily on the walls, and food wrappers cluttered the corners.

Dane reached down and picked up his new pair of wailing mitts. They were a sleek red that sparkled a little in the light, each one of them a hemisphere, like a high-tech turtle shell, with a strap on the bottom for a wailer to put his hands through. Dane handed the pair to Hailey, and she tried them on. The straps closed tightly on her palms, and her fingers and thumbs slipped into ten rings on the underside of the shells.

“You turn them on here,” Dane said, and he flipped separate switches on each. Immediately they hummed a musical drone. “Now, um . . .” Dane seemed a little nervous. He moved her hands so that they were held out horizontally from her body, his palms a little sweaty on hers. “This is standard position. Hear the sound it makes?”

Hailey nodded.

“Now, if you move your hands up or down, notice what happens.” The drone raised in pitch as she moved her hands up and lowered as she moved them down. “If you tilt your hands, that affects the timbre.” Hailey tilted her hands out so that her palms faced up, and the drone became distorted and much harsher. She tilted them back and it went gentle again. “The farther you hold your hands out to your sides, the louder the mitts'll get. Those rings on the inside, they'll play your notes for you. There's a lot of different combinations, so the mitts have a pretty wide range, once you get the hang of it.”

Hailey pulled her fingers against a few of the rings, and notes rang out like a cross between an electric guitar and a keyboard synthesizer.

“That's pretty much it,” Dane said.

“You try.” Hailey handed the mitts over to him.

“Well, I'm still learning,” Dane said sheepishly. But as soon as he'd strapped on the mitts, Dane was moving, watching for Hailey's reaction. His arcs were jerky at first, stilted and nervous, but as Dane played, he seemed to forget she was there. He closed his eyes. His movement smoothed. It became dance-like and intricate— real music, and beautiful. Dane was a natural. When the song ended, he looked at her.

Hailey nodded curtly. “You don't suck,” she said.

“Whatever, weirdo.” It was the happiest Dane had been in as long as he could remember.

8

“It's getting dark, Logan. Can we admit this was a failure yet?”

Logan and Erin had walked most of the way down the Row at this point, and everyone they met was either too decrepit or too defensive to know or say a single thing about Peck. But even Erin had to admit—everyone recognized the name . . . in some cases, seemed to revere it.

“I wanna try one more place,” Logan said. He stared at the Fulmart ahead. “Just one more, and we'll go home.”

“I'm holding you to that.”

Logan shrugged. “Either way, we've reached the end of the Row.” Beyond the Fulmart, the road ended, and a hill with young, thin trees led off to nothing. Logan's tablet rang. He looked at it and saw it was his dad calling. Logan declined the call.

He and Erin stepped between boards covering the front window of the big-box store. The only light inside was natural, coming from windows and holes in the ceilings. Nothing inside the store seemed to work anymore—none of the lights, vents, or security cameras, or the displays that, years ago, must have lit up and made noise and moved around for attention. But the store wasn't empty. Packaged food still sat here and there on the shelves, and remnants of toys, hardware, furniture, house supplies, and outdoor equipment still dotted the shelves in a couple of places.

“Hello?” Logan called. “Is anyone in here?” With all the aisles, it would have been easy to hide.

“Nobody here but us chickens!” someone called out, and suddenly Logan was being pelted from several directions with Nerf darts and tennis balls.

Two boys popped out from their hiding spots, laughing hysterically, but when they laid eyes on Logan and Erin, they froze so suddenly that it seemed all the life in them had just spontaneously dropped out from a trapdoor under their feet. The room was silent and tense.

“Who's the visitor?” a girl called from a few aisles over. “What's going on?” And then she, too, stepped out into the greeting area where Logan and Erin stood, and went silent and white.

“Can we help you?” the girl asked. She was bigger than either Logan or Erin by thirty pounds, pretty, not dirty or famished like the other Markless on the Row, and with a deathly cold stare.

Logan cleared his throat, uneasy. It was the first time that afternoon he'd truly felt scared. “We're looking for someone,” he said. “Just want to talk to him, and we thought someone on this block might know where he was.” Logan held his arms up.

“Put 'em down,” the girl said. “I know you're not Marked.” She looked at Erin, who held her hands in her pockets. “And I know she is.”

Logan looked from boy, to boy, to girl. “Anyway,” he said finally. “The name of the guy we're looking for . . . is Peck.”

The girl before him didn't blink or flinch or move in any way. “Sorry,” she said. “I don't know anyone by that name.”

“Pack? Did you say Pack? Maybe he said Pack,” one of the boys said to the other.

“We don't know any Pack,” the second boy said.

“Okay.” Logan nodded. “Okay. Sorry to bother you, then. We'll be going now. You have a good night.” And he and Erin backed away slowly until their heels pressed up against the storefront doors. They stepped outside and ran quickly across the parking lot toward home. The girl watched them through the window the whole way.

9

“They're the ones,” Erin said. “They know everything about him.”

“Them?” Logan said. “They were scary, but . . . just 'cause they threw a couple tennis balls at us doesn't mean—”

“I could care less about that,” Erin said. “I'm talking about Peck.”

“What about him? They didn't even know the guy's name. Of everyone we talked to today,
those
are the kids you single out?”

“They're the only ones who had something to hide.”

“I don't know,” Logan said. “We were trespassing. That could have been all it was.”

“I don't think so.” Erin shook her head. “They're trespassing too. They don't own that store. They don't own anything. They're Markless.”

“You don't think . . .” Logan thought of something new. “You don't think Peck could be . . .
working
with anyone, do you?” He had never considered that the boy he'd chased to Slog Row might have been anyone else. If that was true . . . he and Erin were even further from cracking this case than they thought.

“That's exactly what I'm thinking,” Erin said. The sun was setting. They were almost running now, back to the main part of town. “I think he's working with them.”

“It's a stretch,” Logan remarked, but he didn't dismiss the idea.

“Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't.” Erin shrugged. “Either way . . . I know how to find out.”

“I don't think I wanna hear it,” Logan said.

“You don't,” Erin agreed. “I'll tell you when I'm done.”

10

“Well, that didn't go well,” Tyler said.

“Could've gone better.” Jo sat, expressionless, on a lawn chair near the beach section of the store.

“You think they saw us last night?” Eddie asked.

“It's possible,” Jo said. “But I don't think so. They didn't seem to know who we were. At least not when they walked in.”

“But now . . . ?” Tyler said.

Nobody answered him.

“He's smarter than we gave him credit for,” Eddie said to Jo.

She sighed. “What he is—is fearless.”

“And the girl?”

“She knows way too much.”

“So what now?”

“Blake's left for the warehouse to discuss plans. We'll see what he comes back with.” Still reclining, Jo kicked a beach ball into a shelf of Tupperware and knocked a half dozen plastic containers to the ground. A couple of them hit Meg, who growled.

“Stop it!” Eddie grabbed Jo in her chair and shook her. “You don't do that in here! This is our home!”

“Not anymore it's not,” Jo said. And she shattered a sand castle display with a volleyball. “Pack your stuff. We're moving on.”

11

It was nighttime when Blake arrived at the warehouse, and even the moon had sunk far below the horizon, so Blake moved carefully under pinpricks of starlight in the blackened sky.

By necessity, Peck had become more than a little reclusive in recent months. In the early days, he'd been the linchpin of the Dust. He'd shepherd them, rile them up, calm them down, teach them games, make them feel at home—wherever that home happened to be. He'd feed them and clothe them, he'd moderate disagreements, he'd make them think and teach them tricks about life without the Mark. . . . To the boys especially, he was more than just the leader of the Dust. He was the father.

And now he was a ghost. Only Jo saw Peck with any regularity ever since Meg's abduction prompted the DOME investigation. Tyler and Eddie hadn't seen him at all, and even Blake, Peck's right-hand man, had met with him just twice—first to receive his new set of responsibilities while Peck was away (watch over the boys, make sure Meg doesn't escape or kill anyone, and spearhead the intelligence effort on Logan while Joanne tended to other things), and second to discuss the plan of attack against Logan that was supposed to have played out last night. That attack having failed spectacularly, tonight would mark Blake's third visit to the warehouse, and for the first time, he wasn't looking forward to it. Twice along the way, he even turned around to head back, unsure if he could handle Peck's disappointment—but Blake pressed forward. The Dust was all he had.

The warehouse was well outside even the outskirts of Slog Row, in a sort of no-man's-land far beyond Spokie but just before the next town over. It was an old building, back from pre-Unity days, Blake guessed, judging by its bizarre architecture, with once marble-white stone walls and an ash-colored roof. Now graffiti and a thick layer of dirt made it seem dull and gray. The facade sloped up to a high point in its middle, with spires at each corner and a tall steeple to the side. The walls around the building were filled with colored windows that had pictures in them—of people and shining stars and scenes as if out of a story—at least the ones that weren't broken. The large double doors should have led, welcoming, into what must have once been a pleasant space inside, but instead they stood shackled, boarded shut and padlocked, the building around them closed and forgotten.

But not to Blake.

On the side of the big building was a bush, behind which was a small grate that led into a crawl space under the floorboards of the building's basement. Blake entered it, thanking the darkness for shielding him from seeing the spiders and rats and the confines of the claustrophobic space. He inched across the dirt until he came to a trapdoor outlined in pale light from above.

When he emerged, Blake stood inside a cavernous space, filled floor to ceiling with crates and boxes and the glowing of distant lights through those colored windows, and from candles at the room's end.

“Peck,” he whispered, though he could see no one there. “It's Blake. Jo sent me.”

“Come in, my friend, come in.” The voice echoed across the space, bouncing off the high ceilings and through the maze of crates stacked fifteen feet high in haphazard rows.

“It's hard to see,” Blake said, and as soon as he had, Peck appeared from between the boxes, holding a candlestick in one hand and a book in the other.

“You'll get used to it,” Peck said, and he tucked the book under his arm to shake Blake's filthy hand. “You look hungry. Let's eat.”

At the edge of the room was a podium on a raised stage, and beside it was a row of chairs. Blake sat in one, brushing the dirt off his clothes and skin, and Peck brought him a loaf of bread, which they split.

“Jo brings me plenty of food,” Peck said. “From all over town. So eat as much as you'd like.” The way Peck said it made Blake glance down at himself and wonder how much weight he'd lost since they last met.

“The new girl—” Blake began.

“I know,” Peck said.

“I heard her conversation with Logan last night—well, part of it. Before everything went down. They just met, Peck, but she's dangerous.”

“We'll keep an eye on her too,” Peck said.

Blake took a deep breath. “That's the thing, Peck. I'm not so sure—”

Peck stopped him right there. “Eat first,” he said. “We have all night to talk.” And Peck opened the book to a page his thumb had held and read while Blake ate.

“Where'd you get that?” Blake asked, chewing the bread. You couldn't buy printed books anymore in Spokie, and everyone just read on tablets and screens, if they read at all.

“From here,” Peck said. “These crates are filled with them. All pre-Unity, from what I can tell.”