Sneak (28 page)

Beyond the apartments across the street, hundreds more build-

ings stood, poking up into the sky with neither tops nor bottoms visible through such an elaborate suspended network of streets and elevators and ramps and bustle.

And beyond all of
that
was the ocean. From this distance, its waves looked still, frozen in time, same as they ever were.

She’d thrown away everything she had in order to make it

back to Beacon. She’d put it all on the line, and she’d succeeded.

Her dad was right—she
had
gotten her way.

Her parents resented her for it.

And the city was indifferent.

3

Down in the Water District, Logan and Hailey walked swiftly

across the piers and pathways connecting skyscrapers that rose straight up out of the ocean. They tried their best to blend in, but it was tough since they were soaked to the bone—and sorely out of place. All around them Beaconers rushed by, heads down,
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casually ignoring the crowds and bright lights and the waves crashing below, but to Logan it was mesmerizing.

“Erin told me that outer Beacon refused to move when the ocean rose,” Logan said. “But I never expected it to be this beautiful.”

Hailey nodded, gazing up. “It’s incredible.”

Eventually the two of them made it onto the district’s main

boardwalk, and Logan and Hailey felt as though they couldn’t

possibly see enough of it at once. Street vendors offering food Logan had never heard of and souvenirs unlike anything he’d ever seen; Markless performers playing music and dancing and telling jokes and doing tricks; countless smaller side bridges jutting off the main drag; a steady line of water taxis crossing the waves below . . .

Ten blocks ahead, the boardwalk sloped up, running into City

Center and rising sharply with the gradient of the mount. When he saw it, Logan stopped short, overcome suddenly by the gravity of what he was here to do.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” Hailey asked. She put a hand on his shoulder. “We here to sightsee, or are we here to find your sister?” She pushed him playfully toward the hill.

The two of them didn’t look back after that.

4

In her apartment just up the hill, Erin Arbitor tried desperately to drown out the sound of her parents’ ongoing argument. She’d come home to a nightmare. And the only escape was Erin’s belief that with just a little more digging, she’d find the path back to Logan.

Erin had her earphones on and her music at full volume as

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Evan Angler

she typed furiously across the surface of her tablet, sitting cross-legged on her bed, delving deep into the files of DOME’s servers with the help of a new worm she’d programmed just that night.

On a plastiscreen by her side, Erin kept her picture displayed—

the one she’d taken of Mr. Cheswick’s top-secret page. Every few minutes, she’d look back at it, scrutinizing each line, down to the finest details.

Project Trumpet. IMPS. Acheron. It was all a part of the same

vast secret. She had scratched the surface. But it was time to dig a little deeper.

Find
the
connections, find Lily. Find Lily . . . find Logan
.

There, buried deep in cyberspace, was a short routing index

of a single troop of IMPS, corresponding precisely with the dates on Cheswick’s page.

Nothing too useful about a routing index . . .

Except
.

There. The first and last stops. The coordinates of the IMPS . . .

They were right here in Beacon.

First
and
last
stops
.

Home
base
.

Could
this
really
mean . . .
?

Yes. It must
.

Acheron
is
at
those
coordinates
.

Logan’s destination . . . all along . . . has been just a few blocks from
my house
.

She had to get outside.
Now
. To be on the front lines. To make her way to Acheron. She couldn’t do it from a computer. She couldn’t do it from her bedroom. So Erin folded the tablet and stuck it in her pocket. She opened her door and braced herself. She stepped into the hallway.

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The argument was louder than ever.

“
Look
. I don’t want this any more than you do. You think I
like
coming back here like this? In this way? You think I don’t
know
that this wasn’t part of our deal? Things
change
, all right? Stuff goes wrong. So can’t we at least
try
to make this work? For Erin’s sake?

Please? I’m not asking for much here . . .”

“
You’re
not asking for much?
I’m
not asking for anything!

I shouldn’t
have
to ask for the same basic respect I give to you!

You’re the one who told me to give up everything I’ve been working toward my whole life, right at the time I was needed the most!

This G.U. merge is happening
now
, Charles! I should be in Europe tonight! Not
here
, arguing with
you
—”

Erin shivered, hearing her parents talk like that. She shook her head violently, as if to shake the words right out of her skull.

Forget
about
them
, she thought.
You’re on a mission now. You’re
finding Acheron. You’re finding Logan. So just forget about all this for now
.

“I’m going out,” Erin called. Her parents went silent for a

second.

“Okay, honey,” her mom said weakly.

And Erin was gone.

5

Logan and Hailey had made it up the hill, all the way into City Center. They held hands so as not to get separated, but the crowd wasn’t the only thing contributing to Logan’s and Hailey’s sensory overload; the lights and sounds were overwhelming after so many years spent in the quiet town of Spokie.

On the sides of each building, from the ground floor to as

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high as Logan could see, were advertisements—bright, flash-

ing, skyscraper-sized screens, demanding that A.U. citizens buy the newest tablet or rollerstick or soyshake . . . compelling them to vote for so-and-so or such-and-such in the upcoming spring

elections . . .

And in the midst of it, hundred-foot-tall projections of Cylis walked from one skyscraper to another, superimposed on top of all of the other ads, each building coming together to make a citywide video screen just for him, so the chancellor could address everyone all at once, and speak “one-on-one” about the myriad advantages of the Global Union merger.

Still other buildings displayed bar graphs showing which

stocks on Barrier Street were rising and which were falling. And those buildings even seemed to have Markscans where they met

the roads, so that anyone who wanted to could walk right up and buy or sell or trade stock as they watched the graphs shift in ten-foot increments overhead.

Standing in the midst of it, Logan found himself longing to

share this with Erin. It should have been their moment, really, but nothing had worked out as planned. And Logan was past believing it ever would.

No substitute would replace her. Not ever, he knew.

“It’s amazing,” Hailey said, pulling him back down to earth.

“Almost too amazing,” Logan replied.

Above them, a grid of streets and walkways five layers thick

stretched up into the sky, connecting buildings at their fortieth, eightieth, one hundred twentieth, one hundred sixtieth, and two hundredth floor entrances, though only a handful of skyscrapers actually rose quite that high, and the network of streets in the grid thinned substantially in its upper two layers.

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“We can’t possibly see it all,” Hailey said. “How do we even

begin to look for a place like Acheron in all of this chaos?”

“I don’t know,” Logan said. And from a hundred feet up, that

skyscraper-sized projection of Cylis looked down at Logan, and it laughed.

6

Erin exited her apartment building on the eightieth floor, onto the third-tier sidewalk of the Beacon grid, and for all her loneliness, it did feel good to be home. The crowded streets, the angry, late pedestrians, the endless line of cabs and electrobuses, the fast-moving sidewalk treads, the lights so bright you had to squint when you came out, even at night. . . . This was where she was meant to be.

And yet what Erin was about to do was as far outside her com-

fort zone as anything she’d ever dreamed of.

She had to bite the bullet. She had to ask a beggar for help.

For a while, Erin walked along that third-tier level, looking

for misers on the street, anyone she could walk up and talk to.

But this was delaying the inevitable, and she knew it—the real Markless kept to the lowest levels. If she was going to do this, she had to descend.

It took her nearly a dozen tries to find a Markless that would even so much as look at her, but Erin was determined not to give up.

As she strolled along the ground level of the Beacon grid,

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Markless were scattered all about. But some part of Erin knew

that this couldn’t be the whole story. With the street cleanings DOME so routinely did each night, there simply had to be somewhere else for them to go. Somewhere they could hide. Together.

Out of sight. In Beacon’s shadow.

As she walked, Erin eyed a woman sleeping on the ground

with a dog. The woman had covered herself with a sign that read,

“Don’t need your money. Don’t want your pity. The meek shall

inherit the earth. Matthew 5:5.”

Up ahead, a man weaved in and out of the throngs of Beaconers, juggling trash and dancing a bit and singing some pre-Unity song,

“When the Saints Go Marching In.”

He’s gonna get himself shot
, Erin thought,
singing
an
exclusioner
song
like
that
right
out
in
the
open
. But to Erin’s surprise, no one seemed to mind. In fact, every time the man sang a lyric, any Mark less in earshot would sing it back to him, creating an informal chorus of call and response.

Had it always been this way? To Erin’s memory, Beacon’s

Markless were nothing but scoundrels—filthy, begging, crazy,

and dangerous. Had they always been so . . . harmless?

“I don’t understand,” Erin said, stopping the juggling man in

his tracks. “Are you begging, or what?”

The man stopped in front of her, but he continued juggling his trash as he spoke. “Not begging, ma’am.” He smiled. “Singing. Do you know the tune?”

“No . . . ,” Erin said.

So the man walked on, shaking his head. “Oh, when the trum-

pet,” he sang, “sounds its call! Oh, when the trumpet sounds its call! Lord, how I want to be in that number—when the trumpet

sounds its call!”

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It took a couple more encounters like this before Erin realized she needed a new strategy. She
had
to get one of these tightwads to talk. She needed their help if her plan was going to work, and to get that, she needed a way in.

So Erin bought a tempeh sandwich from a street vendor,

swiping her Mark at the cart’s scanner, as an offering for the next beggar she found.

But even that, it turned out, wasn’t enough to strike up a worth-while conversation. When she approached a kid a few minutes later, holding the sandwich out and saying, “It’s yours, really— take it!”

the kid just scoffed at her and ran away along the side walk treads.

Her entire childhood, Erin had grown up fearing these people,

resenting them, thinking they wanted nothing more than to have what she had, than to be who she was.

Tonight, for the first time, it occurred to Erin that maybe they were who they were by choice, that maybe they saw her and her

shiny Mark with the same mix of pity and contempt she’d always felt toward them.

It was a disorienting thought, on top of the head-spinning display of lights and sounds and advertisements all around her. After the months she’s spent in quiet Spokie, the whole place felt a little to her now like a run-down funhouse—bizarre, distorted, dirty, and fake.

And then, down the block, at the corner under the shelter of

some scaffolding, one Unmarked teenager caught Erin’s eye. He

sat hunched over a tablet, quietly typing away in a trance of intense concentration.
How
did
a
Markless
like
him
get
his
hands
on
a
tablet
?

Erin wondered.

“Whatcha doin’ there?” Erin asked, standing over him and

looking down.

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“Nothing to you, Marky.”

Erin laughed, and she leaned over to peek at his tablet screen.

“Looks to me like you’re programming . . .”

The boy looked up, clearly annoyed to be disturbed. “You here

for a favor?”

“A . . . what?” Erin asked.

“Someone recommend you?”

“N-no . . . ,” Erin said. “Should they have?”

“You’re darn right they should have. Got any transactions that need deleting?”