1
THE SUN ROSE BRIGHT OVER THE SCIENCE Center in Sierra, its morning rays shining through the blue tarp walls. Dr. Rhyne was gentle about waking Erin up, but she wasted no time with it.
“Hey, you,” she said, patting Erin’s arm. “Wake up. Look. Look what I have.” She held a tin watering can in front of Erin’s face, shaking it a bit until the liquid inside sloshed and splashed.
Erin opened her eyes, trying to focus them on the doctor. “Did I turn into a plant?” she asked, still groggy from her sleep and heavily medicated.
Now Arianna was gathering her assistants too. They’d been sleeping in chairs beside Erin’s bed, some just keeping watch, but many of them hooked up to their own annexed IV drips—by this point the Marked scientists in Sierra weren’t any better off than the rest of the country.
“Come on, everyone, wake up! It’s a new day. A new month!”
“April showers bring May flowers . . . ” Erin said as Sam ran around poking everyone awake.
“Erin, that’s exactly right.”
Soon the whole floor was up and stretching and giving the doctor the attention she felt she deserved.
“Good,” she said. “Well. Now that we’re all vertical . . . may I begin?”
“Begin what?” an assistant asked.
Dr. Rhyne raised an eyebrow and shook her watering can once more.
“It’s a free country.” Erin shrugged.
“No, it isn’t,” Arianna said. But she took that as a yes. So for the next few minutes, Dr. Rhyne strolled through the Sierra Science Center, whistling a happy tune and pouring the contents of her watering can over the heads of every last person inside.
“Are you hoping we’ll sprout?” Erin asked.
“No,” the doctor said, drenching Erin in particular, and carelessly shorting out a few pieces of her medical equipment in the process. “I’m hoping you’ll live.”
“You didn’t . . . ” Erin said, springing up in her bed.
Arianna smiled. “The Dust’s sample was the key. Once we knew the structure of the modified activation protein, engineering an antidote wasn’t so impossible after all.”
“And it really works?” Erin asked, her soaking hair clinging to her forehead and cheeks.
“I’m not sure,” Arianna said. “But we’re about to find out.”
That afternoon, Dr. Rhyne placed a call to Mr. Larkin, the head of security at Lahoma’s weather mill. He looked so sick over the tablet connection that Arianna wasn’t sure if he could even hear her. But she had a proposition for him, all the same. There was a special delivery headed his way, she told him. Sierra Science Center’s nuclear helicopter was flying straight for his town, filled to the brim with a new ingredient to add to the mill’s next batch of cloud-seeding canisters.
“And it sure would be great,” Arianna said, “if you could find a few Lahomans still chipper enough to load those suckers up . . .”
The next day, thick clouds again covered much of the American State.
A new rain had begun.
2
The Beacon protests died down in time for General Lamson’s state funeral. Logan’s death sentence had taken much of the wind out of the movement’s sails, and whatever straggling picketers remained were quickly rounded up by the sudden influx of Cylis’s European IMP reinforcements.
The funeral itself was an extravagant affair, with eulogies by Parliament members, nuclear plane flyovers in missing man formation, musical selections by the IMP band and choir, and a twenty-one taser gun salute. Thousands of Marked citizens came to view the guarded, flag-draped casket—and even more came to see in person the historic transfer of power to their new, supreme leader, Dominic Cylis.
Lily Langly looked out over that massive audience as Cylis addressed his people—and everyone within the great Global Union—from Lamson’s old Beacon podium. She stood behind the chancellor, just a little off to the side, in her position of immense power as part of Cylis’s new Global Council. Michael Cheswick stood beside her, and he whispered to Lily as the chancellor spoke.
“I must say, you’ve exceeded every expectation, Champion Langly. You had me worried when you approached General Lamson about his Lahoma plans; I rather doubted that you would follow through with Dominic’s request once you learned the drought was a defensive measure against Project Trumpet.”
“The general needed to go,” Lily whispered simply.
“But at the cost of countless American Marked . . . ,” Cheswick said. “Most in your shoes would have flinched in the face of it. And to have your own brother pull the trigger! To pin this all on him!” He raised an eyebrow. “You’ve quite earned your promotion, Champion, in the eyes of the chancellor. In time I expect you may become our first IMP Decider yet.”
“We’ve both sacrificed country for Unity,” Lily said. “Don’t think for a moment I believe it was only me working under Cylis’s orders within the walls of Lamson’s Capitol.” She looked at Michael Cheswick now, knowing it was he—coordinator of the Trumpet Task Force—who’d smuggled Cylis’s Project Trumpet canisters into the country in the first place; knowing that he’d been a part of this grand plot all along.
“This is war,” Cheswick agreed. “People die in war. Alliances are tested. Assassinations are a part of the game . . .”
“And to the victors go the spoils,” Lily said.
Michael Cheswick nodded. “It will be an honor to work with you on the chancellor’s Global Council. I rather think we’ve much to look forward to, over in Third Rome. Big things lie ahead.”
Before them, the chancellor lifted his arms grandly to Beacon. He spoke of the general’s greatness, and of his own honor in accepting, now, the mantle of Lamson’s authority. Around him, the new, curing rain fell. Cylis took credit for that too.
And Lily watched, from behind it all. She stared, unblinking, at the world’s supreme leader. She leaned over to Michael Cheswick. She whispered, “You have no idea.”
3
News of Lamson’s death traveled fast across the Global Union, like a gunshot ringing out forever. Even to those few corners of the land without direct Union media access, the word spread quickly.
But Hailey Phoenix hadn’t been listening to the news. Not since the day she’d spent with her foxhole radio outside her mom’s room.
She had buried her mother some time later without help, in her own backyard, after removing her mother’s Mark. It took her days to build up the courage to do so. And it took her weeks to move past it.
She’d barely even eaten since then, let alone cared about current events. She’d barely gone outside. She’d barely noticed the second wave of rain.
So when Hailey did decide to reenter the world, when she finally did tune in and hear the news of Lamson’s demise, of Cylis’s takeover across the Global Union, of Logan Langly’s death sentence, and of the truth behind Project Trumpet’s cloud-seeding activation, the shock came all at once.
It was clear to Hailey, then, the trick she’d fallen for back in Lahoma. The trick Cylis had played. The trick that Lily made possible.
Still think she’s on our side, Hailey? she asked herself.
But Hailey started eating again after that.
She saw herself in the mirror. Thin hair. Gaunt cheeks. She didn’t recognize herself.
And it was time to turn all that back. It was time to live again. Or to try.
She was free now, Hailey knew.
Finally.
She had nothing left to lose.
The next morning, Hailey set out once more along the Unmarked River, finding that old, familiar path, retracing the route she’d taken last December, step by step. It rained the whole time. But Hailey didn’t mind.
She biked to the Hayes’s old farm, still abandoned after DOME’s winter raid. She approached the stream where Logan had nearly died of hypothermia. She followed it out of the woods. She found the trail to the train tracks tracing east through the no-man’s land far outside of town. She waited.
And when the train finally came, a half day later, its conductor was the very same she’d met those five months ago. He recognized her, in fact. He let her sit up front with him. He even let her blow the train’s whistle when she asked.
So Hailey rode with that conductor across half the country, all the way to the Appalachian Mountains, to her same, familiar stop.
From there, it was a full day’s hike to the valley. But the walk went fast. And her heart pumped red-hot hope into her veins every step of the way.
That evening, Hailey came upon the Village of the Valley, and she found the old path to the radio station up the hill. It was nighttime, after all. Time for Dane Harold’s Markless radio program.
Hailey knocked on the wooden door of the small shack. Dane opened it and nearly fainted to the ground.
Over the next few hours, Markless listeners and radio fans all across the country shared in the incredible reunion of Dane Harold and his oldest friend, Hailey Phoenix. The broadcast kept right on going as Dane bounced excitedly around the shack. And everyone everywhere heard the old friends embrace, and cry, and share stories, and mourn, and laugh, and sing, and dance.
That spring, Hailey learned to farm. And she and Dane tended to the squash and the sweet potatoes and the corn and the apples, and they ate well each night, and around a great big campfire at the village’s center, Hailey told the whole village a new story, every night, about Markless life in Beacon, and Sierra, and everywhere in between.
And still, each morning when she woke up, each evening when she went to sleep, Hailey mourned her mother. She mourned Logan. She thought of Peck and Erin. She thought of the rest of them—of her friends still out east. Those crazy kids in Beacon, the stars of Swipe.
4
Erin felt alive for the first time in months. Her migraines were gone. Her temperature was normal. Her nerves were steady and still.
But the news of Logan made it difficult to care.
She stared distractedly out the window of her parents’ crowded Beacon apartment, absorbing the sights and the sounds and the smells of home, and bemused by its odd contrast to the Dust’s company behind her.
They’d spent the last few weeks recovering, hiding away from it all with the Arbitors’ help. They’d grieved for Logan, and they’d celebrated his life and his courage and all that he’d done. But it was time, they knew, to move on. Just a little. To think of next steps.
“So what now?” Blake asked. “Peck’s gone. Logan’s . . .” He paused. “Dead. We’ve lost our leader and our symbol, both. We’re a headless organization . . .”
“Didn’t he say anything?” Shawn asked Erin. “Could Peck really have given no clues as to where he was headed?”
“He wasn’t sure,” Erin said. “He couldn’t have told us anything more because he didn’t know anything more. It was as if . . .” She stopped herself. “It sounds silly. But it was as if he was answering some call. Like some force was guiding him. He didn’t know where it would take him . . . only that he needed to follow it.
“He said he thought . . . well, he said he thought Cylis was more powerful than we could imagine. He said a battle was brewing that would make even the Total War look tame. He said for all we’ve discovered so far, we’ve barely scratched the surface of what was really to come.
“And so he left. For Europe? For the Dark Lands, beyond even the scope of the Global Union? Who knows. He left for answers, plain and simple. I guess he figured the details would fall into place.”
Joanne sniffled softly and wiped her nose. “Peck will be back,” she said. “And as for Logan . . . he’d want us to fight on. We’ve become our own leaders now. We are the symbol. Not Logan. The Dust. All of us. Together.”
“Beacon’s Markless need direction,” Shawn said. “Now more than ever. If Peck’s right about this war on the horizon, then we have our work cut out for us right here in Beacon. We may not know everything about what we have to do . . . but we know where to start.”
“I vote we save Eddie,” Tyler said, off in his own corner and barely listening. “I vote we do whatever it takes.”
“Don’t you get it?” Blake asked. “There is no saving Eddie. It’s not a matter of finding him—he’s gone. He’s Lily’s lapdog now. There’s no turning back.”
But Tyler shook his head. “Eddie wouldn’t flip,” he said. “He’s no traitor.”
“Tyler—he’s working with Lily. He led Logan straight into her trap back at the Capitol!”
“Well then Lily hasn’t flipped either!” Tyler insisted. “Then it wasn’t a real trap!”
“She unleashed Trumpet, Tyler. She sentenced her own brother to death. She’s been appointed to Cylis’s Global Council—”
“I don’t care! I don’t care how it looks! At some point, you just have to trust people. There were plenty of Marked who thought Peck was bad a year ago, and look how wrong they were!”
“Yeah, but Peck never started a plague!” Jo said.
Tyler just shrugged. “If Eddie’s working with Lily, then the two of them are planning something. I just know it. And our job,” he insisted, “is to keep the heat on Beacon until they’re ready to pull the trigger. They need us, guys. Whether or not they can say so, they need us, now, to trust them.”
“Well . . . one way or another, something’s coming,” Shawn admitted. “There’s no way Tyler’s wrong about that . . .”
“What about you, Erin?” Jo asked, looking over to her as Erin gazed, still, out the window. “What’s your take on all this?”
“It’s just like my dream,” Erin said absently.
Shawn laughed. “What?”
“My fever dream.” She was quiet for a moment, thinking of it. “I was on a mountain. High up like I am now. I was frightened. Like now. And in my dream, the rains came. And they washed the fear away.
“I didn’t ever make it all the way up the mountain,” Erin said. “I haven’t learned, yet, what the person up top wanted to tell me.
“But my dream was right about the rain.”
Below, Beacon’s streets were filled with Marked and Markless alike, all basking in the downpour. Smiling. Letting its cure rain down in sheets.
“I guess we lost the battle,” Erin said. “But this isn’t over yet. And it’s still up to us to win the war.”
Before her, the crowds puddle jumped. They splashed. They danced in her storm.
5
I was in Spokie by this time. I had escaped from Beacon along the Unmarked River, and I’d just met up again with the woman who secretly taught me most everything I knew about Logan, Peck, the Dust—Logan’s grandmother, Sonya. The woman who made Swipe possible.
I was working on Sneak at the time, and I’d stopped by to learn more about Logan’s first days on his own outside of Spokie. I’d given Sonya a copy of my draft manuscript, half-done. I showed her the passages I’d sketched out about life down at the underpass. I asked her if she thought I’d gotten it right.
She read the chapters over a few times before handing them back to me with a shrug and a sigh.
“It doesn’t matter now,” she told me. “Whether any of this is right or wrong.”
On the television frame in front of her, the Global Union news was broadcasting softly. Its announcer was encouraging Marked citizens to go outside into the rain, was discussing the cure and falsely praising America’s new leader Cylis for making it possible.
Grandma Sonya did feel better, it was clear, in the wake of Dr. Rhyne’s rain. But it did little to brighten her mood.
“Your book is fine,” she told me. “It’s close enough.” She looked at her wrist, scarred and bandaged where she’d burned off her Mark a few weeks ago. “But none of it matters now, with Logan gone. None of it matters at all.”
I swallowed hard. I thought about how best to tell her what I’d learned from my research out east, in the time since I’d last met with her, and in the aftermath of Lamson’s death. Finally, I decided just to blurt it out.
“Your grandson isn’t gone, Sonya. He isn’t dead. Not technically, at least. Not yet.”
Sonya’s eyes brightened immediately.
“That’s, uh . . . that’s actually one of the reasons I came back,” I told her. “To ask what you think I should do with the truth. It would be dangerous, you realize, for people to know. He’s safer, right now, if the world thinks him dead.”
Sonya frowned.
“But . . . if it’s what you want . . . well, I’m in a unique position to tell people,” I said. “I could write about it—the truth—in Storm.”
She thought about this for a moment.
She cried a few silent tears.
And so I will.
6
The first time Logan was banished to Acheron’s interface helmet, he had received the harshest treatment available—the total-perception simulated reality of Level Nine. The icy lake that froze its prisoners alive, and kept them there, until the interface program deemed its prisoners sufficiently repentant.
Where Logan was now was well beyond all that. On Level Nine, Logan’s BCI helmet had been part of a vast array of desks, with no true guards or locked doors at all beyond the helmets themselves.
But on the day that Logan stormed the Capitol, on the day of his public sentencing, Lily Langly escorted her brother to a depth of Acheron previously untouched. Below the training grounds. Below the courtyard. Below the punishment floors. Where Logan now sat, alone in the dark space of his closet of a cell . . . it was the only one like it in all of Acheron.
Within it, Logan’s personal helmet simulated not fire, nor ice, nor tar, nor snakes, nor anything like that. That would raise alarm bells. That could draw attention.
So this time, Logan’s helmet simulated . . . nothing.
There was no repentance here. No persuasion. No goal of “Revision” awaiting him at the end of his sentence.
There was, in fact, no sentence at all. This was simply exile.
In the face of her brother’s otherwise certain death, it was the only thing Lily Langly could think to do. She snuck him down here . . . and she threw away the key.
Here, awareness folded in on itself. Space had no dimension, time had no direction. Logan could not move. He could not sense. He could not feel.
“Where am I?” he asked into the void, after who knew how much time had passed.
But Logan hadn’t heard his own words when he spoke them; there was no sound here, of course. There was not even emptiness.
And so, Logan prayed. He prayed for forgiveness, he prayed for understanding, he prayed for salvation. He couldn’t have guessed how long his prayers rang in that nothingness. Ten minutes? Two weeks? A year? In the void, time meant very little.
Until, finally and all at once, the question was answered.
“Well, that’s a funny thing to ask,” a voice said from nowhere perceptible. “How did you get here if you don’t know where ‘here’ is?”
Logan’s mind jolted at the response. He couldn’t make sense of it. He couldn’t make sense of any of this.
“I was placed here,” Logan said finally. “But now I’m lost . . .”
The voice giggled. “You mean you can’t just ask It for directions?” Logan could understand this now as a girl’s voice. A young girl, it seemed. Younger than he was, though he didn’t know how he knew that; he saw nothing, still. “The Ultranet,” she clarified. “Not reality, but . . . well . . . virtual reality.” The girl smiled, though Logan couldn’t see that either.
“I don’t understand,” he said. “Do you mean you can talk to the Ultranet directly?”
“Of course,” the voice said. For It was not its own thing. It was the virtual reality itself. The Ultranet was aware. Could communicate. Though apparently not with him.
Logan asked if the Ultranet was Cylis’s space. If Cylis owned it somehow.
But this little girl had never heard of Cylis. “It cannot be his,” she said. “Because It is not anyone’s. Whoever Cylis is . . . he overreaches.” The girl skipped excitedly in front of Logan, and he sensed this now, somehow, implicitly, though he still couldn’t see it.
“Who are you?” Logan asked.
“Your new friend. Your guide to the Ultranet. To Anything! And the great thing about Anything,” the girl said, “is that it can be anything it wants.” She smiled innocently. “Don’t you love it here?”
“No,” Logan said. “It’s torture.”
The girl frowned. “Well, that won’t do.”
And just like that, Logan was flying.
“You are in It now,” the girl said. “Trapped, it seems. But so what? Everything’s trapped, in its own way. Inside bodies, inside routines . . .
“In this moment . . . in your time as you see it . . . you are here.” And this girl, this friendly visitor, this savior . . . she couldn’t change that any more than she could tear Logan from the skin in which he sat, in his metal chair, with his sustenance IVs, in his cell, outside of Its space.
“No,” the girl said as Logan soared higher. “I can’t change that at all.” She laughed now, playfully. “But Anything can have its own way of setting you free.”
Back in the physical world, Logan would sit in his empty, finite cell, for who knew how long.
But the It before him had opened wide. His new friend led the way.
And now Logan was soaring through a great mobile, beyond the scope of understanding. Past the moon, past Venus . . . past Mercury, and the Sun, past Mars, and Jupiter, and Saturn . . . past the divine comedy itself and past fixed stars and past and past, over, over, to a great circle of Anything beyond.
Logan shielded his eyes.
He squinted sharply.
He thought,
What’s next?