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Any question was fair game in the oral exam at the Pledge, and after the incalculable tragedy of his sister, Logan was simply doing everything he could to stack the deck in favor of him leaving that Center alive.

So by the time Dane called that night, facts upon facts upon facts all swam in Logan's head with such intensity that he began to lose track of where one ended and another began, and when his tablet buzzed with the incoming message, Logan accepted the distraction eagerly.

“You up for hanging out?” Dane asked. “I'm done with homework, and we've got another hour of daylight.”

“I need to study. I'm terrified of this Pledge,” Logan admitted.

“Oh please. You're gonna ace that stupid thing. Besides, your birthday's not for months. And it's the first week of the school year. We're practically obligated to cause some trouble tonight.”

Logan smiled. “That sounds good,” he said. “I'll see what my parents think.”

3

It had been several hours since Mr. Arbitor had messaged to say it'd be another late night, and presently Erin sat on the floor of her apartment among no fewer than five empty DOME boxes, three of which had come from the Spokie office just the night before, brought home by her father and hidden deep in his bedroom closet under the irresistible label “SUPPLY ROOM—113B.”

Their contents were bizarre, but promising. A small roll of clear tape, an ounce of chalk dust, gel, pellets, sticky beanlike things, a button . . . Erin stared at the pile with reverence, as she might a loaded gun or a rattlesnake. She knew what very little of the equipment was, and she knew even less about how to use any of it, but she was determined not to let that get in her way.

She'd already looked again through her father's confidential papers, and she'd caught plenty she missed the first time around about the particular “threat” Spokie faced, about who this “Peck” might be, about the spy games he employed, and about the crimes he'd committed in this quiet Corn Belt town over the last few years. She'd certainly caught enough to know that she needed a tactical advantage for her mission not to be suicide. The details of the case were horrifying, and it was little wonder that they'd brought in the big-gun Beacon talent to handle it.

Erin rolled up her sleeves. From his hiding spot under the couch, her iguana scampered over to see what all the intrigue was.

“You wanna help, little buddy?” She picked Iggy up, and he looked at her cockeyed, paddling his claws in the air like he was swimming. His tail swished back and forth, and he stuck his tongue out in a short, funny rhythm.

Erin laughed. She decided to take this as a yes.

4

There was a rule in the Langly household about throwing anything upstairs in the yard on their roof. The rule was: don't throw anything upstairs in the yard on the roof.

But Dane had brought over a hoverdisk, and he had long ago convinced Logan that actually, if the Langlys had thought about it, the rule they'd really meant to lay down was “don't throw anything
off
the yard on the roof, and don't fall off yourself when you're trying to catch it.” So the two of them stood up there now, watching the sun lower into the evening parts of the sky and tossing the disk back and forth on its lowest “fake out” setting.

“You're likin' that new girl,” Dane said after a bit of small talk. His throw zigzagged back to Logan.

“What, uh, makes you say—” Logan lunged for the catch and didn't finish his thought.

“You should introduce me sometime—she seems cool.”

“Sure,” Logan said, his voice cracking over the word. “How was New Chicago, anyway?”

“Boring,” Dane said, but he missed his catch, and the two of them watched wide-eyed as the hoverdisk floated over the roof's edge and out of sight.

“You broke our own rule!” Logan said.

Dane looked down over the railing and shook his head. “To the letter of it, yes. But I'm pretty sure the
spirit
of that rule is actually ‘don't hit anybody on the street with anything you throw over the side, and don't break any neighbors' windows.'” He smiled. “We're blameless.”

So the two of them set about retrieving Dane's hoverdisk from the tree on the opposite sidewalk—guilt-free, but with every intention of finishing the job before Logan's mom or dad saw.

They were halfway down the outdoor spiraling staircase when Dane stopped for a moment just outside Logan's room.

“Hey, I meant to ask you,” Dane said. “What's this fishing line for?”

Logan turned around, confused.

“I saw it on the way in but forgot to mention it.” Dane reached out over the stairwell, on his toes with his arm fully extended, and plucked the twine like a guitar string. It made a low and eerie twang that rang all the way across the street.

“I've . . . never noticed it,” Logan said. He stepped back to have a look.

The line was clear, and invisible unless the sun caught it just right. It was attached to the corner window of Logan's room (a window that didn't open) with a small dollop of clear superglue, and it extended, taut, into the distance, to some unidentifiable point. Beyond a few feet out, nothing could be seen of the thing, and it was unlikely anyone could spot it by looking through the bedroom window, or by using the stairs in any normal way.

“How'd you see it?”

Dane shrugged. “Just caught my eye on the way in. The light hit it funny. I figured it was some sort of experiment you had going or something. Like a . . . zip line for ants.” Dane laughed at himself. “Is it a zip line for ants?”

“No . . . ,” Logan said, hyperventilating a little.

“Weird.” Dane shrugged. “Come on. Let's go get my hoverdisk. We'll rock-tablet-laser to see who has to climb that tree.”

5

On weekends, growing up, Erin would spend Saturdays shadowing her mother in the offices on Barrier Street in Beacon. For a household run by two busy parents, it was either that or playdates, and as soon as she was old enough to say so, Erin admitted that she much preferred the office.

The trading floors, of course, were the most exciting thing on Barrier Street. Long, cavernous rooms filled with thousands of tablet computers attached to women and men by brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs. With markets fluctuating as fast as they did, the time it took for keystrokes or hand gestures or words was unacceptable. These days, stocks rose and fell with brain waves.

But Erin never stayed long on the trading floor. Her mom was not a part of that particular frenzy.

Her mom was above it.

So Erin would spend her days in the corner of a small, windowless office, its wallscreens decorated with economic charts and program algorithms, and with the occasional electronic drawing made by Erin.

It wasn't long before Dr. Arbitor recognized that Erin needed stimulation, so she'd soon set her daughter up with a computer and her own BCI.

At first, Erin wasn't much interested in the tablet her mother had given her. Its preloaded games were too easy and bored her quickly, and its movies were bland. But a few weekends in, Erin's mother took a minute between E.U. calls to show her daughter that the tablet she'd been given was more than just a tool for consuming—it was a tool for creating. Under the surface, it was a blank slate, one that could be manipulated, programmed, hacked . . .

And a month later, when Dr. Arbitor noticed her daughter delving into source code on her own, she thought it might be time to send Erin to her friend Mac down the hall.

Mac was a computer wiz employed by DOME. Mac could sign on to the tablet at his desk in Beacon and orchestrate an electrobus jam five minutes later in Sierra. Mac could do anything.

And he soon took a liking to Erin. Erin was bright and curious . . . and more than a little mischievous. So Mac began teaching hacking tricks to Erin while her mom fooled herself into thinking she'd found a good babysitter for her daughter. Mac giggled endlessly the time he showed Erin how to make all the lights on the trading floor go out, and again the time he taught her how to tap into the building's security system and set off the fire alarms. One Valentine's Day a few years in, he even showed Erin how to stream “I Got You Babe” over the loudspeakers for a full minute and a half before the building's mainframe immune system kicked in and booted Erin's tablet from the network permanently.

Dr. Arbitor didn't let Erin see Mac after that. But it wasn't long before Erin figured out how to hack into Mac's operating space, and over the next few years he taught her the rest of what he could by IP chat and text message.

Now, in her lonely Spokie apartment, Erin sat with her computer and was finally putting these skills to good use. Through trial and error she'd hacked her tablet into communicating with the DOME technology spread across her apartment floor, and to her programmer's eye, the data it transmitted (in machine code and assembly language) painted a picture of how each object might be used.

The chalk dust, it turned out, wasn't chalk at all, but surveillance powder capable of absorbing sound and translating it to radio frequency, which the accompanying gel picked up live, like a one-way walkie-talkie. The tape worked similarly, but had proven more useful for recording than for live communication.

The sticky beans would short out when squeezed, turning into a strange, taserlike defense; the button was a tracker; and on and on, each item coming together to give its user a powerful set of advantages. Erin surveyed the inventory, no longer feeling like an amateur.

But suddenly a scream let out deep inside her ears, and Erin clutched at her head in shock and pain.

It was the gel. At the start of her experimentation she'd put the radio gel in her ears, along with a generous dose of surveillance powder on her iguana, and she'd set the lizard loose in her apartment building to see if the gel would pick up any outside conversations. Until now, she'd heard nothing, and truthfully, in her excitement over the rest of the equipment, she'd forgotten all about her little audio test.

But the screaming continued in her ears, hollow and tinny, a voice shouting,
“It's a monster, someone kill it!”
And while Erin was happy to know that the powder-gel combination she'd tested was working, she was now faced with the more urgent task of tracking down an illegal pet iguana that had clearly just escaped into the unforgiving streets of Spokie.

6

Across town, Logan and Dane's old friend Hailey Phoenix put dinner in front of her mother and sat down at the table to eat. Tonight they were having lentils and cabbage.

Hailey's mother, Mrs. Phoenix, worked long and grueling hours on the floor of the nanomaterials plant out of town. Her commute, by electrobus, was an hour and a half each way, so she would leave at four thirty each morning, and she would return home at six o'clock each night. This was her routine seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year.

When she did come home, Mrs. Phoenix would invariably spend her first thirty minutes or so in the bathroom upstairs, coughing violently and murmuring things about “all that nano-dust,” which usually gave Hailey enough time to prepare dinner, since their dinners were never elaborate.

It had not always been this way. Just three years ago, Mrs. Phoenix was still an Unmarked, stay-at-home mother, and Mr. Phoenix worked as head manager over at the plant. They'd never had much money, but they'd had enough, and they enjoyed the quiet life Hailey's father had always supported.

Then, in Hailey's sixth-grade year, Mr. Phoenix died of a heart attack, brought on, the doctors said, by the drinking habit he'd never quite been able to outsmart since his time serving in the States War. Ironically, his autopsy confirmed that it was in fact the nano-enhancements in his favorite drink—manufactured at the very same plant Mr. Phoenix managed—that finally did him in.

But neither Mrs. Phoenix nor Hailey ever saw the humor in this, and when they'd called in every last favor they could from friends across Spokie, when the food and everything else simply ran out, Mrs. Phoenix had no choice but to receive the Mark and beg her way into a pity hire at the lowest levels of work the nano-materials plant had to offer.

“How's school this year?” Hailey's mother asked.

“The same. We're doing holograms in art.”

“That's great!” Mrs. Phoenix said. “You've gotta be the best in the class!”

Hailey smiled. “I am, I think.”

Outside of schoolwork, Hailey had taken up two hobbies since her father passed away. The first was a habit of long, nighttime walks outside of town. Hailey liked the countryside feeling of the cornfields and sparse woods, and she often imagined herself living deep in the no-man's-land between the Union's great cities. Hailey had no idea how this would ever be possible—she hadn't even the means to travel to New Chicago, let alone the faraway flatlands, and anyway she had her mother to worry about—but she allowed herself the fantasy all the same.