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His vision grew spotty and dim, like an old, yellowing photograph, and Logan's very self seemed to bubble up through his head and out of his skull in fizzy, carbonated gurgles. It was painful, but it was a pain he'd never imagined. A pain that made him laugh.

Now Logan felt his lungs hyperventilating in some kind of last-ditch effort to jolt his brain back into gear, and he found another part of his self noticing with ultimate, lame indifference that the nurse had already locked his arm in place on the stirrups of the desk, and that she was currently injecting his wrist with a shot of something he could not feel.

Bemused and vacant, Logan watched with faraway eyes as the nurse pressed an intercom button on the wall . . . and called his Marker in.

It was done before he knew he was doing it. With the nurse across the room and distracted, Logan had leaned far over to the countertop at his left. Still locked into his stirrups, his reach had dragged the legs of his desk across the floor with a grating screech he hadn't heard. The nurse turned back his way in alarm, but Logan had already grabbed the syringe of whatever-it-was and lodged it firmly into his shoulder, pressing its trigger all the way down before she could make it back to his corner to tear the needle out. The world snapped back into view, skipping like the bad frame rate of an old, distorted video, but there and present nonetheless.

Logan was groggy and slow and confused, but he'd regained enough of his self to know he had one chance to react. With the nurse leaning over and tending to the dark swelling that had popped up on Logan's shoulder, he saw an opportunity that wouldn't come again. Logan swung his free arm in a wide circle, catching the wires still anchored to his body and wrapping them tightly around the nurse's head and neck. He would not hurt her. But she couldn't know that yet.

A man stormed furiously into the room, wearing a uniform unlike Logan had ever seen, part military and part medical. This man was Logan's Marker.

“I already know I'm a flunkee, so save your breath!” Logan said. The man paused, waiting for what might come next. “Five years ago, my sister came in for the Mark like every other kid her age—”

“Now, Logan—”

“
Why?
Why didn't she come back? You tell me that!”

“Mr. Langly, we need you to calm down.” It was the first time anyone had ever called Logan “mister.” Titles like that were reserved for the Marked. Logan looked at his wrist in a confused, hazy horror. It swam in front of him, fading in and out like everything else, but it was still Unmarked.

“I'm no mister,” Logan said. “I have no Mark.” He couldn't tell to what extent his words were slurred. In his head they were crystal clear.

“But you will, Mr. Langly. You are here to Pledge your allegiance to General Lamson and Chancellor Cylis. You're currently having an adverse reaction to the nanosleep, but if you'll just calm down—”

“
I am calm. This is calm. Now, what happens to flunkees?
” Logan demanded.

“Mr. Langly, as we've already informed your family and documented extensively in official DOME records, Lily Langly was a casualty of the Marking procedure—”

“Meaning
what
?” Logan asked.

“Meaning that the procedure didn't
agree
with her—”

“You're gonna have to be more specific than that,” Logan said, and he pulled more tightly on the wires around his nurse's neck. She didn't struggle.

“Mr. Langly, consider the consequences of what you are doing—”

“I want my sister back! Tell me where my sister is!” He could hear whimpering from the nurse in front of him, and he hated himself passionately for it.
Why won't you just tell me? Tell me where my sister is so this can be over!

“Mr. Langly, what you're asking for is highly classified information.”

“Then she
is
alive! You know where she is!”

“I didn't say that, Mr. Langly. But if you let the nurse go, I promise—you and I can have the private chat you're looking for.”

“We chat first!”

The Marker lowered his shoulders. The tension left him. “Mr. Langly . . . look at yourself.”

Logan paused. He let the wires slack. The nurse rubbed her neck and stood up, not looking at Logan as she rushed out of the room. Logan slumped in his chair, his arm pressing uncomfortably against the stirrups. And Logan wept.

5

“I'm a monster,” Logan told his Marker. “I hate myself.”

The Marker handed him a handkerchief. “You're not a monster. You're just desperate.”

“You could have stopped me sooner. You could have overpowered me.”

“Yes. But then in your eyes I'd be still be the enemy. And I am not the enemy, Logan. Your nurse was not the enemy. DOME is not the enemy.”

“I'm the enemy.”

A shrug.

“And I'm a flunkee, aren't I?”

The Marker sighed. “Usually they aren't so lucid when we tell them so.”

“What will you do to me?”

“I can't tell you that, Logan.”

“Do you even know?”

“My piece of it, yes.”

“Will it be the same thing you did to Lily?”

“It's always the same.”

“If I'm a lost cause anyway, you might as well tell me, right?

What do you have to lose?”

The Marker laughed. Logan waited for him to speak, but he didn't.

“They're coming for me, aren't they?”

“Yes, Logan.”

“Right now.”

“Yes, Logan.”

“Will I be punished? Will I be tortured?”

The Marker suddenly took an interest in his own hands that were resting on his lap. “Yes, Logan.”

“Where will I go?”

The Marker smiled thinly. There was silence.

“Do you like your job?” Logan asked.

The Marker frowned for some time. “I don't,” he said, finally. “Between you and me.”

“Then why do you do it?”

The Marker chose his words carefully. “When I began, it was for the cause. I believed in peace, Unity, Lamson and Cylis . . . I believed in the symbol of that cause. I believed in what it meant. For us to come together, one people, one mind-set . . . content.”

“And then?”

“I still believe in that cause, Logan.”

“And if you think anyone doesn't—or might ever not—you swipe them. You nip them in the bud.”

“A stitch in time . . . ,” the Marker said. He laughed at himself, sadly.

“I was excited for the Mark,” Logan said. “As a kid. It was all I wanted. When my sister Pledged . . . I couldn't have been happier for her.” His Marker listened intently now. “My sister was a wonderful girl,” Logan said. “My first memories are of her holding me and kissing me with a bright smile. I think she adored me. Though I couldn't have seen it in those terms at the time. Of course, she adored everyone. She listened. She cared. She had great big plans . . . But DOME didn't see any of that, did it? DOME saw blinking lights on a machine, and DOME shrugged its shoulders, and DOME snuffed my sister out. Just as they will me, just as they do anyone else, when they so choose.”

Logan's Marker stared at him. He walked to Logan, still strapped into the chair. He rested his hand on Logan's shoulder, and he spoke calmly, but very fast.

“Four men will arrive shortly to take you away. I don't know for certain what they will do to you. I don't know yet where they will take you. It could be a number of places, and that won't be disclosed to me until you are dispatched. I can't stop them, Logan, and I never could've.” The Marker looked fearfully over his shoulder now, to the door behind him. “But I can tell you what you came here to learn.”

“Thank you,” Logan whispered.

“Your sister is in Beacon,” the Marker said. He fingered a charm hidden around his neck as he spoke. “God forgive me. God forgive us all.”

6

In a far-off room, Erin sat at her father's computer, breaking the rules one final time. She hacked under his account through DOME's deepest, safest channels. She hacked straight into the Center Marking computer that hosted Logan's name, and she played the recorded scene of his Pledge from its beginning. It was clear, the choice Logan had made. It was clear what Erin had to do.

7

Four men arrived now to take Logan away. The first two were nurses, looking frightened and apologetic. The other two were officers, looking anything but.

By now, Logan was accustomed to the DOME agents and policemen of Spokie's streets. But these two men before him were a class altogether new. Together, they must have weighed five hundred pounds. They wore helmets with visors that came down past their eyes; their shadowed faces were like stone. Each wore a belt and shoulder straps holding equipment and weapons. And they came holding the two biggest and sturdiest pairs of remote-controlled electro-magnecuffs Logan had ever seen.

Logan's mind raced and his heart pounded. His Marker hadn't known all the details. He had known very few, in fact. But in their last few minutes alone, he had told Logan what he knew. He had done for Logan what he could. And Logan forgave him for the rest. “Now we're even,” Logan had said.

“No. But maybe now I can sleep at night.”

The Marker watched as the officers locked Logan into the electro-magnecuffs—one pair for his wrists and one for his feet. The nurses flanked them on either side, nervously. Together, the men walked Logan from the room.

In the hall, each officer followed Logan with a weapon close to his back. But the nurses kept their distance up ahead. One of them swiped his hand under a Markscan on the wall, and the same map display appeared from before, with a new dotted line pointing the group along their way.

“That's odd,” the nurse said. “Why would we take
that
route?”

“The system has its reasons,” the other said. “Lead the way.”

The officers pushed Logan into an unmarked side door, where instead of plaster-white and clean, the walls were concrete-gray and forgotten. They'd followed the system's directions into the Center's unused, innermost halls.

“You remember where it said to go?” the first nurse asked.

The second pointed. “The map said this way.”

“I've never been this way.”

“Me neither.”

“Maybe it's faster. Maybe it's a shortcut.”

Logan shuffled silently between officers as the nurses second-guessed themselves and circled deeper and deeper into the Center's bowels.

“Down there,” one said. “Another Markscan. See where we are.”

The other walked forward and swiped his hand under the scanner on the wall . . .

. . . and immediately, all the lights in the windowless passageway went out. Simultaneously, Logan's electro-magnecuffs turned off. They went slack and fell from his wrists and feet, clanging on the ground and echoing through the hall. The darkness surrounding him was complete. There was shouting and anger and confusion between the nurses, and empty, frustrated clicking from the weapons and tools the two officers carried. Nothing worked.

“What did you do?”

“I didn't do nothin'!”

“You busted the whole system!”

“No, I didn't!”

“Well then, why's it
broke
?”

And Logan stumbled blindly through two doorways and down three flights of steps before anyone knew he had gone.

“Erin,” Logan whispered as he barreled through an emergency exit and out into the setting sun. “Thank you.”

8

Logan was free, but he could not think of where to go. He could not go home. He could not go to Erin's apartment. He could not go into town.

Logan saw Spokie's streets through the eyes of a wanted man.

There was one place he could think of that would take him in. One place DOME wouldn't immediately know to look. One place where he would be welcomed. With open arms. Celebrated, even, with any luck.