THE FLOOR SHOOK VIOLENTLY UNDER LOGAN’S feet, its rug jumping and sliding in short, stiff bursts. The window to his side rattled, and he wondered if the whole door might soon fall off.
Logan leaned forward to the driver’s seat in front of him, peering over Peck’s tense shoulder at the fuel gauge, which jittered so much that the after-image of its soft green glow showed only a blur.
But he could still see the needle, pointing with certainty.
Empty.
“Can’t this thing go any faster?” Hailey asked from the passenger seat.
“Not if we want it to stay in one piece,” Peck said, but he pressed harder on the gas pedal even so.
Lifelessly, Erin bounced from her spot on the backseat and slid to the floor.
“She all right?” Peck asked, unable to take his eyes off the road.
Hailey turned to look over her shoulder. “Not stirring,” she said. “Keep driving.”
“Low on gas,” Logan warned, hoping not to spark an explosion of new frustration from up front.
“It’ll stop when it stops,” Peck said. “’Til then, worry about what’s behind us.”
So Logan turned to peer out the back window, where behind them a drone plane appeared low on the horizon.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Logan said.
“Nope. Very serious. As predicted.”
Not far off and closing in fast, the running lights of the drone glowed bright red, green, and white against the night sky. It flew silent and unwavering in the steady hands of its remote pilot. And on its side, branded proudly in big white letters, was the single, horrible, menacing word:
DOME.
Most of the way to Sierra by now, Logan had hoped that the four of them might enter the sprawling city undetected, that the protests they’d stirred up back in Beacon might distract authorities enough to provide some cover. But the team had made a critical mistake, and they knew it.
About twenty miles back, along the first patch of run-down outskirts near Sierra’s eastern city limits, along the forgotten road that decrepit signs called “Highway 66,” Daniel Peck, Hailey Phoenix, Logan Langly, and Erin Arbitor decided to make an emergency stop. Erin’s fever had gotten worse, her shivering violent and her words increasingly delirious. Everyone knew she needed medicine—anything to lower her temperature, even if only for a day or two. Anything to buy her some time.
So the team decided to take the risk.
“They’ll know she was here the second we buy this thing,” Peck warned as Hailey stepped toward the corner store counter with a handful of nanomeds. “They’ll trace her scan instantly. You know they’ve been watching for it.”
Erin nodded in detached agreement. She was standing, but barely, and only because Logan held her up. He had his arm around her back, bouncing it now a few times, trying for a better hold. “We’ll be miles away by the time they get here,” he said. “And anyway, there’s no way around it.” If they wanted the goods, they needed Erin’s Mark, simple as that. So Logan snapped his fingers in front of Erin’s eyes. “Look alive, Erin. This part’s all you.”
And the four of them walked to the counter.
“Evening,” said the store clerk. “Find everything all right?”
“Just fine,” Hailey said, not looking at the man. She handed him the nanomeds and held her breath while he scanned them under the counter’s Markscan.
“Your friend’s not lookin’ too good.” The clerk nodded at Erin.
“She’ll be all right,” Logan said, propping her head up with his own. He grabbed Erin’s hand and waved her Marked wrist under that same scanner. It beeped and flashed green. “Just fighting down a fever. These cold winter months and all, you know . . .”
“You making her pay for those meds herself?” the clerk asked, scolding him a bit.
“She insists,” Logan said, but he quickly shoved his own Unmarked wrist into a deep pants pocket. And Peck and Hailey did the same.
“Well . . . bed rest,” the clerk instructed. “Plenty of water.” Then he pointed to the nanomeds. “And one of these pills twice a day. They won’t cure anything, but they should keep the fever down.”
Erin nodded distantly. Logan readjusted his hold on her. And the group hustled out without another word to anyone.
“We’ve sealed our fate,” Peck said. “They have us now.” He put the car in gear and peeled out before the store clerk could notice that these three Markless teens and their dying Marked friend had somehow gotten their hands on the last combustion vehicle in the entire Global Union.
Logan shook his head. “We’re out. We’re safe. That drew less attention than a robbery.”
“A robbery’s anonymous,” Hailey said. “Markscans are not.”
“No stealing,” Logan said. He opened Erin’s mouth and gave her two nanomed pills at once. She didn’t protest. “She needed this. We had no choice. We’ll deal with the next crisis when it hits us.”
And Logan was right, Hailey knew. The truth was, they didn’t have a choice. The truth was that they’d made their choice already, when each of them—Peck, Hailey, Logan—refused the Mark on each of their thirteenth birthdays, refused citizenship, refused to Pledge allegiance to General Lamson and Chancellor Cylis. They knew then what the consequences would be. They knew then that they’d never have rights. That they’d never in their lives be able to buy or sell anything, hold a job, vote, own a house, sign a contract, see a doctor, finish their education, start a family. . . . Those quaint hopes dried up the moment the world broke into its Total War; the moment it realized that Unity was necessary, that fractured cultures and incompatible views could never keep the peace. The kids knew all of this at the time.
But each of them knew something else too. That the Pledge was a trap. Much more than a ceremony of citizenship, it was a system designed to weed out those who didn’t fit in. Flunkees were rare, maybe one in ten thousand—few enough that no one raised a fuss. DOME let families believe that their children were dead, victims of infrequent and unavoidable complications in the Marking procedure—an allergic reaction, an infection, or an unfortunate error, perhaps.
But this was not the truth. The truth was that once identified, flunkees were simply removed, thrown into the secret prison known only as “Acheron,” where they were converted, brain-washed, crafted into soldiers . . . into the International Moderators of Peace, the IMPS, hidden enforcers of the Mark system.
Under this program, the rest of the world was free to be Unified. Protected by the very peers who otherwise might one day have betrayed them.
Logan, Peck, Hailey . . . they knew this because Logan’s sister, Lily, had Pledged herself . . . and had never returned. They knew this because Peck spent the next five years piecing together what might have happened, had even warned Logan that it might happen to him next.
Peck was right. But Logan escaped.
And with all his worst fears finally confirmed, Logan had gone on to break into Acheron, had seen it with his own eyes, and had managed to break back out.
It wasn’t safe for him in Beacon City any longer. It wasn’t safe for any of them.
Peck, Hailey, and their friends known only as “the Dust” had used Logan as a symbol—as a martyr, willing to die in his fight against DOME. And among Markless everywhere, that symbol took hold. The news spread countrywide, through renegade radio stations and secret airwaves, and the Dust spread right along with it. The Markless were banding together. They rose up; they fought back. They brought the IMPS out of hiding. And Logan became a hero.
Erin, until that time, was as loyal to DOME as anyone, Marked and diligent and proud of it. Her father worked for DOME, after all, was an operative for them, and until recently he and the Department had given Erin no reason to doubt their intentions. But then last month she discovered Project Trumpet . . . and everything in her world changed forever.
Erin now lay on the floor of the group’s cramped car, contorted and barely conscious. The drone plane behind them encroached.
Peck pushed the pedal harder, gliding dangerously across the icy, broken road, and Logan said, “It hasn’t shot us yet. It could have by now. It’s close enough.”
“DOME’s not trying to kill us,” Peck said, gripping the wheel with white-knuckle force. “They’re trying to track us.”
“Not very subtle about it,” Hailey said. The plane blinked menacingly as it lowered to car level and followed maybe a hundred feet behind.
“They don’t have to be. We’re cornered.”
Logan looked out over the wide-open land and the Rocky Mountains in the distance. It was a funny word, cornered, spoken in the middle of so much empty space.
“How could DOME even know we’re the ones in here?” Logan asked. “They can’t scan Erin’s Mark from that distance, can they? Even if they’ve already traced her to the store, as far as this car goes, they’d only be guessing . . .”
Peck laughed. “Logan, they know Erin was with us in Beacon less than a week ago. And now they have her Markscan on file in a store two thousand miles away, without a single logged magnetrain ticket in between. As far as we know, this is the only private car driving on any road between here and Europe. What other conclusion could they reasonably come to? Of course we’re in this car.”
“So how do we hide?” Hailey asked, very nervously now. “We can’t outdrive it.”
Already, Logan was hunched over, grabbing at Erin’s shoulders and sliding her up into the backseat. She groaned once, and her head lolled to the side. He buckled the seat belt around her. “We can try.”
Hailey turned to Peck uncertainly. “Hey,” she said. “Guys, seriously—”
Peck shook his head. He sighed. “Hold on,” he said, and he pushed the gas pedal to the floor.
In their headlights, the broken road cast shadows on itself long into the distance. Its potholes, jutting concrete, and black, wintry ice rushed in fragments and patches toward the run-down car. Peck weaved fast between frosty cracks and scattered debris, and the drone shrunk smaller in the window behind them. For miles, it seemed they were succeeding. But Peck couldn’t avoid the road’s obstacles forever. Coming off a tight swerve, their back right wheel caught an old blown-out tire, and Hailey yelled, “Hold on!” as the whole car lurched forward with a panicked force.
It spun faster than it could turn. Its back wheels came up along-side its front. The driver’s side plowed ahead with an ear-piercing squeal of its tires, the left wheels leading the charge against an unforgiving road, front and back together hitting a street-wide crack, catching and stopping all at once. In one continuous motion, the passenger side reared up, getting ahead of itself, flipping end over end at a staggering speed. Metal on concrete. Glass shattering. Gravity shifting. The world rolled hopelessly outside. A car full of breathless screams.
They tumbled from the road.
In Beacon, the citywide protests had reached a stalemate.
For weeks, Markless had marched, and chanted, and camped out on the streets. For weeks, they’d demanded rights, representation, respect, all spurred on by the truth the Dust had revealed about flunkees and Acheron and the kids who were swiped.
DOME’s darkest secrets were in full view now, its Markless prison finally identified, its once-covert IMP troops forced to line the streets, make arrests, curb unrest by any means necessary . . .
For years, the Markless in Beacon had stayed mostly underground. They’d lived below the surface, huddled into communities inside an abandoned nuclear fission reactor that rested below the city, coming up only to scrounge for food or catch a glimpse of daylight. Some of them had spoken up, sure; some of them had held signs, had shared thoughts with the Marked that passed by, or gave food, or dared to stop and stare. But never before had a Markless rocked the boat. Never before had any of them surfaced with the intention of challenging the system. For years, the Markless in Beacon had been silent.
No one was silent anymore. For the first time, Markless were fighting. They were Dust. And they were not afraid.
But for each huddle that made its way street side, for each Unmarked who yelled or blocked the road, a squadron of IMPS was lying in wait. And the IMPS were fighting back.
From his quiet spot on the sidewalk hundreds of feet above, Blake leaned over, carefully considering the showdown below him. In Beacon, a five-tier system of streets connected most City Center skyscrapers at forty-floor intervals, and currently, Blake stood at the edge of Tier Two, peering over the railing at the ground level below.
From here it looked like the top of an open box of crayons: dots of colors all pressed up against one another, each one a person, each one a Markless protester. Each one Dust.
Surrounding them, completing the crayon-box likeness, were barricades—rigid right angles of makeshift hurdles and fences, put in place by IMP forces and guarded by the IMPS themselves.
Blake sighed deeply, appreciating the brief reprieve from the noise and violence down below . . . and yet Blake was on no break. He wasn’t resting. He wasn’t relaxing. He was preparing. And he knew the chaos would come to him soon enough.
In fact, he was counting on it.
“This one’s filled with ketchup Meg swiped from the huddle, and this one here . . .” Tyler held a balloon in each hand, and he raised the right one now. “Well, I’m honestly not quite sure what’s in this one. Some sludge Rusty found in the gutter between Barrier Street and the power plant, I know that much. But beyond that . . . I really couldn’t tell ya. It’s green, I think.” Tyler frowned. “Sorta chartreuse-green.”
“Chartreuse?” Jo stepped forward from behind Blake. “I wager a punch to the face that you have no idea what color chartreuse is.”
“Sure I do. It’s the color of what’s in this balloon. You know, greeny sludge color.”
“Look, will ya just drop the thing already so we can get on with this?”
“I’m trying to decide which to drop first. I’d rather see the gutter sludge splash . . . but, see, I also kinda wanna save it.”
“Tyler—” Jo motioned to grab the balloons herself, but Tyler ducked quickly out of the way.
“Okay, okay—gutter sludge it is.”
Tyler leaned over the second-tier railing, forty stories up, his whole torso hanging off the side, feet dangling in the air just above the sidewalk, balancing himself precariously over the ledge. He closed one eye for aim, his tongue sticking out just slightly to the side, like a master in full concentration.
“Third IMP from the corner,” Tyler said. “The one with all those stupid extra badges. Don’t think we’ve hit his squad before.”
“Me neither,” Blake said. “I say we go for it.”
“Good game,” Tyler said. So he grinned wide, and he let go of the balloon.
Blake, Tyler, Jo, Meg, Rusty, Shawn . . . these kids were the Dust. The original Dust—Peck’s Markless gang—before Peck left them all to head west. Blake, fourteen years old now, had become a bit of a ringleader in Peck’s absence. Joanne, fifteen, used to be Peck’s right-hand girl; now she was more the enforcer. Meg, thirteen, was autistic, rescued by the Dust last July after Peck realized she was at risk of flunking her upcoming Pledge. Rusty was an orphaned six-year-old, picked up by Blake back when DOME made its raid on the Dust’s old home, Slog Row, last September. Shawn was the Dust’s newest member, a Markless hacker from Beacon who fell in with the rest during their Acheron breakout a month ago. And Tyler . . . well, Tyler was just a troublemaker. He grew up an orphan too, never knowing or fully comprehending life outside of Markless huddles. Then one year ago, right around the time when he could have Pledged, Tyler just sort of glommed on to the Dust for fun—and never left.
And until recently, there was Eddie, Tyler’s best friend and now a painful hole in the Dust’s once-inseparable group. Just a few weeks ago, Eddie was captured along with Logan and Joanne by DOME during the Dust’s attempt to break Logan’s sister, Lily, out of Acheron. Unlike the others, Eddie never escaped.
He was gone now.
Eddie was an IMP.
“Bull’s-eye!” Tyler yelled. He jumped up and down as he did, pumping his fists in the air and soliciting high-fives from the rest of the group. “Did you see that?”
The balloon had hit with astonishing force, and the resulting scene down below was chaos, rapidly growing violent.
The IMP’s first response, of course, had been to assume that the balloon had come from the crowd he was guarding. The sludge slathered his helmet and shoulders with a greasy green, his face smeared with goop and his uniform now looking something like pickle relish. Immediately, he’d spun around, eager for someone to hit or arrest or worse. But no obvious culprit had emerged.
Finally, the IMP’s squad looked up. They stared in disbelief. They tapped their leader on the shoulder. “There,” they seemed to say.
Forty stories above, Tyler stood in plain view, grinning, laughing, and waving happily as he tossed down the second balloon.
It took two and a half minutes for the IMPS to call in their underground backups and coordinate a response. This was longer than the Dust was expecting. So for about thirty seconds, Tyler was bored again.
“It better be because they’re gathering extra reinforcements,” he grumbled.
Jo sighed. “I’m sure it is.”
“You ready?” Blake asked. He trained his eyes on the nearest elevator tube. It flashed red as the doors slid open. “Because here they come.”
More than thirty Moderators flooded out, four full squads in total, each uniformed with precision nanocamo that flickered as it adjusted to the new environment, blending seamlessly into the colorful advertisements on the building behind them. Each sported utility belts and shoulder straps that held all types of guns, magnecuffs, gadgets . . .
The leaders—the Coordinators—wore helmets with visors that came down past their eyes and shadowed their identities. But among the rest, it was easy enough to see faces, scowls, grinding teeth, and of course, the telltale branding of an IMP—the Mark, uniquely tattooed in nanoink across each forehead.
“Freeze!” yelled the first squad’s Coordinator, his uniform still goopy with Tyler’s sludge. “In the name of General Lamson, we order you to stop!”
But already, the kids were running. Tier Two was the densest of Beacon’s four sky levels, and the street they’d chosen as their perch was especially well connected. Blake, Tyler, Jo, Rusty, Shawn—all of them knew the plan, memorized their routes, choreographed their responses, and they moved now with the same swift certainty as the Moderators chasing them.
“Like we planned!” Blake yelled, and at the nearest intersection, he, Rusty, and Jo zigged left while Tyler and Shawn zagged right, buying valuable seconds as the squad leaders shouted commands to their troops to split in half and form two chase groups. To the left where Blake led Jo and Rusty was a narrow pedestrian walkway leading to a rare public entrance on the fortieth floor of a commercial retail building. The group sprinted straight into a multilevel clothing department store, knocking over t-shirt racks and pants and shoes as they dashed through the mazelike floors. Behind them was a trail of fabric and cloth and accessories strewn about wildly, and for all the IMPS’ fancy gadgets and training, the kids managed to outrun them.
Meanwhile, Tyler and Shawn ran full-throttle through a wide alley that dead-ended against the private doorway of a skyscraper apartment building. The building was locked, but not for them. In one swift motion they ran up the wall together—one, two, three steps in quick succession—and they each grabbed with both hands onto the ledge of an open window several feet up.
“It’s us!” Tyler shouted to the Markless sympathizers inside. “But the IMPS aren’t far behind!” And as Tyler and Shawn pulled themselves in, the owners of the apartment darted to the window, slamming it shut and locking the latch behind him.
“Run!” they called, keeping watch through the glass, and the boys didn’t stop until they were in the hallway outside and on an elevator headed for Ground Level, into the crowds, into anonymity, into safety.
Through all of this, Meg watched, focused and sentry-like, from a Tier Three sidewalk suspended even higher above. She looked on through binoculars, following all five of her friends through the streets, but paying particular attention only to the IMP troops behind them. Meg scanned each face, one by one, scrutinizing every last detail.
This was the Dust’s new routine. Seven days a week, morning, noon, and night. Tyler had made it his full-time job to torment the International Moderators of Peace. Any way he could think of, so long as he hit a new squad each time and made them call for plenty of reinforcements.
The rest of the Dust, they made it their job to keep Tyler alive.
But this wasn’t just a pastime.
This was business.
“You see him?” Tyler asked Meg after the whole ordeal was over. “Anywhere?”
Meg frowned. She shook her head.
“Sorry, Buddy,” Blake said, turning to Tyler. “Really—I’m . . . I’m sorry . . .”
Tyler closed his eyes. “Okay,” he said, stoic and resolute. “Next time then.”
Blake smiled. “Yeah, Tyler. Next time.”
Because one of these days—if not this chase, then the next one, if not the next one, then the one after that . . . one of these days, the squad that they baited, or a squad called up from Acheron for reinforcement to catch Tyler . . . one of these days, that squad would include Eddie.
It had to, right? The Dust had already scanned each above-ground IMP troop they could find, and Eddie hadn’t been anywhere. The only explanation left was that he was underground, out of reach but still on call for emergencies—which the Dust was more than happy to create. Because Eddie was an IMP now. He was one of them. And it was the Dust’s job to pull him out.
The plan would work, they were sure. It had to. Because there wasn’t another way to get him back. And because losing Eddie for good simply wasn’t an option the Dust was willing to accept.
“Right?” Tyler asked. His eyes were red, but he refused to cry.
Blake patted his back. He smiled sadly. “That’s right, buddy. We’ll find him next time.”
3
Logan Langly wiped the sweat from Erin’s forehead. She lay wrapped in a tattered blanket, shivering in her delirium, below a small cover of rock halfway up the side of a desert ridge.
“How’s she doing?” Peck asked.
Logan frowned. “Fever just broke. For the night, at least. The nanomeds helped.”
“Any injuries?”
“Not that I can tell.”
“I’m fine, by the way,” Hailey said, rubbing her lower back and standing off to the side. “Thanks for asking.”
“I’m very glad,” Peck said. He smirked, and Hailey made a face.
In the distance, the group’s old car lay upside down and totaled, a good ways into the desert brush off the main road, while DOME’s drone plane circled above it, lower and lower with each pass.
“It’s trying to get a better look,” Logan said. “Whoever’s piloting that thing’s not gonna be too thrilled with what’s left inside.”
Peck laughed. “All that tumbling, and not a single dead body. Hardly the outcome DOME could have hoped for.”
“Congratulations,” Hailey said sarcastically. “So we managed to trick it. For, like, five minutes. Now what?”
“Now it looks for us,” Peck agreed. “It should start sweeping the area soon enough.”
“We can’t stay still,” Erin grumbled, sitting up slowly. “We need to move.”
“You need to rest,” Logan said. “End of story.” The hike here from the car had taken enough out of her already, and that was with Logan and Peck carrying her the whole way.
“I can walk,” Erin said.
Logan laughed. “Yeah, right.”
A few feet away, Hailey paced nervously, her hands shaking with a dull, endless frustration. “Walk, don’t walk—what difference does it make? What we need is a plan.”
“We have a plan,” Peck said patiently.
“Then we need a better one.”
Erin sat up, just a little. She rubbed her temples with both hands and tried hard to push back some of the pain. “Beyond this ridge is Sierra City,” she said. “You can see it now. The lights, the ruins . . .” The desert to the west was black on black in all directions, but Erin was right—signs of life did sparkle among it. “And in Sierra City is Dr. Rhyne. The Trumpet documents I hacked pointed straight to him. He’s there. I’m sure of it. And we need to find him.”
Earlier that winter, it had been Erin who’d discovered Project Trumpet, the nanovirus designed to wipe out the Markless in the case of a rebellion. DOME had been using its Pledge process to vaccinate the Marked since the program’s inception. Erin alone had hacked DOME’s most secret files surrounding this, following the trail of information through one buried memo to another, all the way to the horrible truth—that Acheron did exist, that Logan’s sister was inside of it, that the place was a training ground for IMPS, and that six months ago, on August 16 at 7:16 in the morning, a stealth team of those IMPS called the Trumpet Task Force had been dispatched to assassinate a group of Marked A.U. citizens already sick with the fever. Somehow, it seemed clear, Project Trumpet had finally been activated. But the experiment was a failure. Its nanovirus wasn’t killing Markless. Instead, its vaccine was killing Marked. And now Erin, Marked and vaccinated herself, was the next victim to suffer the consequences.
“Dr. Rhyne was the DOME engineer who created the nanovirus all those years ago. The Trumpet documents confirm it. We’re close to him now. Closer than I ever believed we could get. He must have a cure. He’ll help us. Because it’s his virus that isn’t working right. It’s his fault I’m sick. He’ll have to fix it.” Erin was shivering again in her blanket on the rocks. “We find Rhyne, we save lives. Millions of them. Mine included. That’s the plan.” She lay back down, fingers still pressed to her temples, absorbing the pain of a headache that wouldn’t go away.
“I don’t like this,” Hailey said. “What if this drone is just the beginning? What if they are in Sierra waiting for us? What if we’re walking into a trap?”
Erin shook her head. “My dad . . . he used to talk about Sierra. You know it’s the tech capital of America, right? What Beacon has in economics and New Chicago has in manufacturing, Sierra has in tech. All our nano-stuff’s come out of here, all our tablets, all our rollersticks and wallscreens . . .”
“So what?” Hailey said. “That just means they’ll have better tools to catch us with.”
“No, you don’t understand, Hailey. Why is it that techies are so drawn to this place?”
Hailey shrugged.
“Less government! Fewer prying eyes. Sierra’s as far as you can get from Lamson and Cylis. There isn’t nearly the same level of oversight out here.” Erin smiled. “My dad hated this place. It’s practically lawless. DOME’s foothold here isn’t nearly what it is out east, or up in New Chicago. Same goes for the IMPS. Even without Rhyne, it’d be the perfect place for us to go next.”
Peck nodded. “Many of the best minds in the world live out here, for all the same reasons Erin was saying. It’d be great for us to talk with some of them. The Sierra Library is top notch too—chock-full of banned books. I’ve been dying to check it out for years.”
“DOME can try all they want,” Erin said. “But once we outrun that probe down there, there’s no way anyone’s ever gonna find—” Erin stopped short. “What’s that sound? Am I hearing things again?”
“Not hearing things,” Peck said. “I hear it too.”
From high in the air over toward Sierra, a low, electric hum like from some great, spinning energy ball pulsated and whirred and traveled through the sky. The four of them craned their necks back, following the soft buzz up and over to a source that must have been nearly a mile away, moving fast and just ahead of its lagging roar. The glowing blue dot lit a tiny patch of clouds as it careened up, over, and through them, and its vibration became something Logan and the others could feel just as well as hear.
“What in the world . . . ,” Peck started to say, but already that soft blue dot was closing in. It seemed to travel the whole sky in just under a minute, moving fast and with the high, parabolic arc of a missile.
But it didn’t look like a missile. It looked like an oversized blue baseball charting the course of some incredible grand slam. It wasn’t flying. It was falling.
And it was headed straight for them.
Hailey turned to Erin, her expression a mix of self-righteousness and horror. “You were saying?”
“Take cover,” Logan shout-whispered. “Hide!”
Within seconds, the giant ball was there, right on top of them, just a couple hundred feet above.
Logan shielded his face. Peck grimaced. Hailey held her breath. Erin pulled the blanket up to her eyes.
And then that glowing orb did something unexpected. In the last hundred feet of its free fall, short bursts of steam sprayed out from below in all directions, slowing it, aiming it, controlling the final moments of its descent. It wasn’t going to crash. It was going to land.
Now just a few feet overhead, the object could be seen for what it was—a glass sphere about the size of a car, its blue glow shooting out the front like a single, huge headlight. Softly, quietly, it touched down onto the ground in the center of the rough square formed by Logan, Peck, Hailey, and Erin.
Logan held a rock in his hands. He bounced it a couple of times, preparing to throw the thing with whatever force necessary to defend himself.
A short, sliding sound escaped the giant ball, and Logan, Peck, Hailey, and Erin watched in silence as the side of it opened up.
But what stepped out wasn’t DOME. It wasn’t an IMP. It was a kid. No older than ten or eleven. He was tanned with dusty brown hair and freckles. He wore a nanotech tie-dye t-shirt with a pattern that swirled and moved and morphed like a vat of paint still being mixed. He took two steps forward, and promptly threw up onto the ground.
“Sorry,” he said. “That always happens.” Then the boy stood up as tall as he could, balancing on tiptoes, looking down at the valley below. He squinted at the DOME probe and frowned. “You guys are the Dust, right?”
Logan stared at him. “Who’s asking?”
“Oh, hey—Logan! Nice to meet you, I’m Sam.” The boy stepped forward to shake Logan’s hand. Logan gripped his rock tighter and made no motion to return the gesture.
The boy shrugged and pointed to Erin. “You’re the hacker, right? Snooping around Dr. Rhyne’s files?”
Everyone stared. For a moment, there was quiet.
“Hit a snag, I see.” The boy pointed down to the car in the distance and the drone still circling above it.
“You could say that,” Peck said.
The boy frowned. “A gas car. Private. Quite a useful commodity, before you went and totaled the thing.” He eyed Peck and the others in succession. “Wonder where you found it . . .”
“A friend,” Peck said. “It was a gift from a friend.”
And in fact, this was partially true. The car had once belonged to Winston, son of the Rathbones, a megarich family out in the middle of nowhere that just two months earlier had come very close to having Peck and all his friends killed on their way out to Beacon. And they would have, too, had Winston not taken mercy on them just in time. He’d given that car—his family’s one-of-a-kind prized possession—to the Dust in the hope that they might escape his family’s clutches and make it the rest of the way to Beacon in one piece.
They had. But that wasn’t the end of the gift’s usefulness. For the past week, Peck and the others had been burning up the last of that car’s trunkful of gasoline canisters like the whole thing was going out of style (which it very much had), and praying that it just might have enough life left in it to take them all the way to Sierra.
So close, Peck thought.
But the boy frowned and pulled Peck back into the present. “You are here to see Dr. Rhyne, though, aren’t you?”
“How?” Erin asked, raising an eyebrow and trying to hide her terror. “How could you have guessed that? What exactly is it you know about us?”
The boy shrugged. “I know your best option is to come with me. I know the doctor is waiting for you. And I certainly know how impatient Dr. Rhyne can be.”
“Oh yeah?” Logan said. “And what makes you think any of that?”
The boy stepped back toward the giant blue ball, inviting the rest of them inside. “Because Dr. Rhyne sent me,” Sam said. “I’m the doctor’s son.”
4
“It’s called a POD,” Sam said several minutes later. “Projectile Object Delivery. Little start-up company called PopHopper began making them a couple years ago. Just a pet project, I think, but they’ve really caught on.”
“You’re not Marked,” Peck said. “How are you flying it?”
“First of all, nobody’s flying anything. This thing’s not a plane—it’s a projectile. It goes up, it comes down, and that’s all there is to it. Free fall the whole time. We’re a cannonball right now, nothing more.
“Second of all, this thing’s not public transit. DOME has nothing to do with it, so no Marks required. It’s just a service—necessary after the earthquake destroyed all the roads around here.”
“But how does PopHopper pay for any of this?”
“That’s how,” Sam said. He gestured around them, to the glass casing of the POD. Suddenly the whole thing fogged over, and almost the entire 360-degree interior surface became one big panoramic wallscreen. A woman walked into view, strolling through an immaculately clean household. From the sidescreen, a dog ran happily toward her, jumping up and getting paw marks all over the woman’s nice, white shirt. The woman laughed, and smiled, and shook her head.
“Tired of washing your clothes? Do rubble stains get you down? Try Laundercloth—the fabric that washes itself!”
As she said it, the dog’s paw marks slowly disappeared from the shirt.
“Immersive advertisements.” Sam laughed. “The POD rides pay for themselves.”
Below them, in the one patch of glass not hijacked by commercials, Logan could still see outside the POD. Sierra rushed by in a nauseating blur, but even from here he could tell it was like no place he’d ever seen. Ruins and new buildings intermingled, sharing the same streets, even the same foundations, as though instead of cleaning up after the earthquake, Sierra just grew through it. Like daisies sprouting from the cracks of concrete. Except here, from this height, Sierra’s daisies looked awfully high tech. And the run-down concrete patches among them were simply ignored.
Below Logan and all around him, PODs sprang up from the ground like monstrous fleas, popping up and falling down, as though Sierra were the great, big back of some infested, hairless dog. Logan smiled, thinking of that. And suddenly the ground swelled up, rushing at him through the glass. Logan’s stomach turned over. He entered free fall. And his first PopHopper ride came quickly to its end.
Logan, Peck, Hailey, Erin, and Sam all threw up the moment they exited the POD.
“I told you.” Sam laughed, wiping his mouth. But the five of them stood now in front of the glowing blue plastic of the Sierra Science Center, and none of them gave a moment’s thought to their lingering motion sickness. Before them the SSC rose only ten stories high, but its structure and context made it far more imposing than its size alone would suggest. All around it was rubble, piled two, three, four stories high in some places: enormous slabs of concrete, mounds of old brick, huge chunks of drywall, all lumped together, like a citywide memorial, a constant reminder of the earthquake that decimated the western coast ten years ago. Rising right out of those ruins was the SSC, with an architectural style all its own. With its rounded edges and bulging shape, the Sierra Science Center looked something like a beehive, complete with a honeycomb mesh that held the structure up. A glowing white pattern of wire held the building’s blue-tinted, translucent tarp siding taut, but it also made the entire building supremely flexible in the case of a future earthquake or other such disaster. Even now, the building twisted and swayed a bit in the wind.
At its base, a single hexagonal tile was larger than the rest, and the tarp within it hung loosely from only a few of the wires. This was the building’s entrance, and a colorfully dressed woman walked through it now.
The woman smiled at Logan and Erin and the rest. Like Sam, her clothing took on a swirling tie-dye pattern. Her ears, nose, and eyebrows were pierced and dressed with heavy rings. Her Mark was only one of many tattoos on her arms and shoulders, some of which glowed with a nanoink that shone even through the sleeves of her shirt. Her hair hung in thick brown dreadlocks, tied back with a handful of tan rubber bands.
“Thanks, Sam,” the woman said casually. Then she pointed deliberately at the rest, rattling off each name in quick succession. “Peck, Hailey, Logan, and—ah, good—Erin. We are so glad you’ve come to join us.”
Erin swallowed hard. “I’m still not sure whether we’re hostages or guests,” she admitted.
“Guests!” the woman proclaimed happily. “Guests in the greatest city on Earth. Please, do come in.”
“And you are?” Peck asked before taking a step forward.
“Oh! Forgive me,” the woman said. “You can call me Arianna. Pay no attention to the stuffy old bats you’ll meet in the lab . . . no matter how many times they insist on calling me Dr. Rhyne.”