Sneak (29 page)

“
Huh
?”

“Transactions. Markscans.” He pointed to her wrist. “Got any

you need forgotten?”

Erin hadn’t the slightest idea what this boy was talking about, so she decided to take a more direct approach.

“I’m Erin,” she said. “I’m looking for help.”

“Then you came to the right place. Shawn.” And Shawn held

up his Markless hand.

Erin shook it hesitantly.

“They call me the Tech Wiz.”

“Oh really?”

Shawn nodded.

“So what’s a Markless like you doing with a tablet?”

“Can’t be the Tech Wiz without one.” Shawn shrugged.

“And as a ‘tech wiz’ you are . . . ?”

Shawn smirked. “Providing my services. And it’s not
a
tech wiz—it’s
the
Tech Wiz. The one and only.”

Suddenly a Beaconer stormed up to the two of them. “Hey!

Tech Wiz! What’s she got to do with our deal?” he whispered

harshly.

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“Chill out, man. It’s done. We’re cool. You’re set.”

The man glanced around uneasily. “How will I know it

worked?”

“You’ll know ’cause you’ll never get caught, that’s how.”

Shifting on his feet, the man shot an uncomfortable look in

Erin’s direction but finally nodded to Shawn. “Fine. But if you’re lying to me—”

“Man, how could I be the Tech Wiz if I went around lying to

people? You trust the man who sent you here or not?”

“Yeah, sure I do—he says you’re the best.”

“Then I
am
the best,” Shawn said. “So you got your end of the deal or not?”

The man handed Shawn a rollerstick, and Shawn handed him

the tablet. “Thanks,” the man said. “I owe you one.” And he ran off without looking back.

Erin sat down beside Shawn now, making no attempt to hide

her interest. A Markless hacker? It was too good to be true. “Okay,”

she said. “What in the
world
just happened here?”

Shawn smiled. “The Tech Wiz provides a very special service,”

Shawn said. “For a price, the Tech Wiz can wipe a Marked slate totally clean.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Look,” Shawn said. “What’s the real purpose of a Mark, huh?

From DOME’s point of view, I’m speaking.”

Erin shrugged. “To separate upstanding citizens like me from

riffraff like you?”

“EEEH—
wrong
! Erin Ms. Marky, thank you for playing . . .”

Shawn made a little bow to her, like the host of a talk show, and he waved her along.

“Hey, wait—seriously.” Erin laughed. “I wanna know!”

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“Listen, if
that’s
all DOME wanted to do, they wouldn’t go through the trouble of giving each person his own unique Mark.”

He picked up Erin’s hand, and pointed to the tiny numbers in the lines of her tattoo. “No. No—the
point
of the Mark is that
with
it, DOME knows everything about you.
Think
about it. Every time someone buys a sandwich, what do they do? They scan their Mark.

Every time someone enters a building, what do they do? They scan their Mark. Every time someone goes to the doctor, or approves a document, or gets on a Metrorail, or goes to a sports game, what do they do?
They
scan
their
Mark
.

“It’s all digital. And all those little scans—everyone’s scans—

they go straight into DOME’s network, where they’re logged

forever. If you’re Marked, DOME doesn’t just know you’re a citizen—they know what kinds of food you like, they know how you

get to work each day, they know what kinds of movies you watch, what kinds of prescriptions you’re on, where you’ve been, where you’re likely to go next . . . for all intents and purposes, they know
everything
about you.

“It’s control. The Mark is control. Over
you
. Does DOME

invoke it much? Maybe not yet. But they could. And they will

when it’s useful to them. So of
course
DOME wants everyone to be Marked. To be Unmarked is to be off the grid! To be free!” He held up his own Unmarked wrists and smiled gleefully.

“Okay, yeah. I get it,” Erin said. “But what does that have to do with whatever just happened here?”

Shawn smiled. “Whoever that guy was—he’s done some

things with that Mark of his—some things that, let’s just say, he’d just as soon Cylis not know about. Maybe he . . . skipped work to go to a pro hover-dodge game. Maybe he did some stuff to help a Markless family member. Whatever it was,
my
job is to hack into
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DOME’s Marked network, and delete a few eensy-beensy little

boxes in a database. Just here and there. On the dates this guy gave me.

“Then he loans me his tablet, I work my magic, and bada-

boom, bada-bing: Mr. Marky Mark here’s scot-free. DOME won’t

come looking; no one else’ll come asking . . . Mr. Mark can sleep easy again.”

“And for this he gave you a rollerstick?”

“Hey, look—if you’re good at something, charge what

you’re worth. I start my fees high, and I raise them from there.”

He looked over at the rollerstick. “I don’t even want this stupid thing. But it never hurts to have a commodity. A rollerstick like this’ll barter for quite a fair price in the sublevel, once I crack the Mark lock.”

“Hold up,” Erin said. “Sublevel?”

“Yeah.” Shawn nodded. “What about it?”

Erin frowned. “I don’t know what that is.”

Shawn looked at her as though she must have been messing

with him. “Wait a minute . . . you’re not kidding? You really don’t know what I’m talking about?
Really?
” Erin shrugged, and Shawn exhaled powerfully in his disbelief. “It’s where I live! Where you’d live too if you’d had enough sense to skip your Pledge.”

Erin smiled. “I think you’re talking about just the place I’m

looking for,” she said.

“
You?
” Shawn laughed. “No way.
No
way!
Nuh- uh. Not a chance.”

“Come on,” Erin said. “Just point me in the right direction.”

“Nope. No, siree. No, no.”

Erin sat for a minute in the shadow of the advertisement lights.

Finally, she turned to Shawn. “Must get pretty annoying, having to borrow tablets all the time from the people you’re helping. Bet
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you sure could do a lot with one of those things if you had one all to yourself.”

“You better believe I could,” Shawn said. “But there’s not a

Marked in the city willing to barter one o’ those.” He laughed. “I’d have to find me a
felon
to get someone desperate enough to spend that kinda credit on a simple hack-erase.”

Erin looked at him, smirking just a little. Then she pulled her own tablet out of her pocket.

“Take me to the sublevel,” she said. “And it’s yours to keep.”

7

That night in Spokie, Michael Cheswick sat at his desk for a long time, not doing much of anything. He would have stared out the all-glass walls of his office, but it was too dark to see.

He would have shuffled documents or gotten a head start on

this week’s agent assignments, but he just didn’t have it in him.

He knew what he had to do.

There was no avoiding it.

But he stared at that call button without pressing it for a long, long time.

8

A full week had passed since Logan and Hailey first set foot in Beacon. They slept in gutters each night, scrounged for food each day . . .

And they’d made no progress whatsoever in finding Acheron.

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With hands hidden, they’d snuck all around City Center by this point, but nothing anywhere had suggested even the
existence
of a Markless prison, let alone the location of one.

“Maybe we should just get ourselves arrested,” Hailey sug-

gested at one point, exasperated. “Quick—steal something. We’ll be in Acheron by morning.”

“No,” Logan said, refusing to find either the wisdom or the

humor in it. “I had that option once already. It wasn’t a good idea then and it isn’t a good idea now. We enter Acheron on our own terms, or we’ll never make it out.”

“I’m just saying . . .” Hailey smirked. She and Logan stood

now at the edge of the grid’s fifth-tier sidewalk, looking out over the whole city. It was a bit darker up here since not as many buildings and wall advertisements made it up this high, and it was less crowded too. The air was thin and cold.

“It really is a beautiful place,” she said. They could see for miles in all directions. An ocean on one side, colliding gracefully with the bridges and skyscrapers of the Water District; a vast urban sprawl on the other, sloping down past City Center, to the outer districts that lay with their shorter buildings all the way to the horizon.

Little dots of light twinkled in the distance, and Hailey imagined each one as a window into a cozy home with a happy family.

“Maybe it isn’t in City Center after all,” Hailey said. “Maybe it’s out in the lower districts, off the hill.”

But Logan shook his head. “With all the stories we’ve heard? Of all those different types of punishments? Enormous tar pits? Huge rooms to walk around in, blind? No way this place is small enough not to be a skyscraper. And the skyscrapers are all on the hill.”

“But we’ve
checked
these buildings . . .”

“We haven’t checked all of them.”

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“Logan, you can’t
hide
a skyscraper. They’re
tal
. Face it: if a place as big as Acheron were on this hill, people would know

about it. We could
see
it. It would have bars on it, fences around it, guards . . . I mean, you’re telling me Beacon houses the highest-security prison in the world, and we can’t find even one building with barred entrances or more than a couple sleepy guards? How would that even work? They just ask all their prisoners really nicely that it sure would be great if they didn’t sneak out?”

“I don’t know,” Logan said. “If I knew, we’d have found it by

now.”

“Look, whatever,” Hailey said. She slumped down against the

railing of the dizzyingly high sidewalk and pulled her foxhole radio out from her jacket pocket. “Wanna listen with me?”

“Sure,” Logan said. He sat down too, taking one of the ear-

phones from her. They sat close, shoulder to shoulder, listening in.

“Good evening to all you Markless out there in the greater

Beacon area. This is Dane-o-rino, comin’ to you live at thirty-nine hundred kilohertz. The only station bringing you chart-topper

after chart-topper of the Boxing Gloves’ greatest hits—performed by yours truly, raw and unplugged.”

“He is such a dork,” Hailey said.

“Actually . . .” Dane cleared his throat. “We’re the only sta-

tion bringing you anything at all. So don’t go away—because you can’t!” He laughed. “Anyway, this next song’s called ‘Comet,’ and it goes out to a special girl whose mom just wanted me to say she’s thinking of you . . . and she hopes you’re doing all right. Wherever you are.”

And then, between bouts of static over those weak, shortwave

airwaves, Dane strummed a few chords on Tabitha’s guitar. And

he began to sing.

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Logan chuckled, listening to it. And he felt Hailey’s shoulder moving up and down, too, so he looked over at her to laugh about it. Except Hailey wasn’t laughing.

She was crying.

“Hey,” Logan said. “Hey—it’s okay. It’s all right. Really.”

“It isn’t all right,” Hailey said. “We’re lost in a city with no one to help us. We have no idea how to find what we’re looking for.

I’ve given up my family, my school, my friends. . . . Logan. What were we thinking?”

Dane’s strumming played on in the earphones. He paused to

perform a griptone solo.

“Let me read you something,” Logan said. He pulled out of

his pocket the Bible Bridget had given him back at the underpass, which seemed like a lifetime ago now. “I’ve been reading this,” he said. “A friend told me it was one of the more dangerous ones to keep on me, so . . . I figured there must be some good stuff in it.”

He smiled.

“What’s it about?” Hailey asked.

“I’m not sure yet. Everything, it seems. But listen to this, from a chapter called Ecclesiastes.” Logan read from it now. “Wisdom is a shelter as money is a shelter, but the advantage of knowledge is this: Wisdom preserves those who have it. . . . Wisdom makes one wise person more powerful than ten rulers in a city.” Logan laid the book on his lap. “You and I? We’re broke. We certainly don’t have shelter. But Peck’s told us all along—what we’re really after out here is knowledge. It’s not supposed to be a quick fix. It’s supposed to be something we have to work for.

“You wanna know why I think this book was banned? Because

it’s
filled
with stories of people who took the hard path. People who risked everything to fight for what they knew was right. People
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who died for what they believed in. Just like Peck is always saying.”

He grew excited now, flipping through the pages.

“Hailey—maybe the
reason
Cylis and Lamson are scared for us to talk about pre-Unity history and religion in this country is because history and religion are true and
inspiring
! They show us that people can stand up for something real. They give us something to believe in. These stories really happened and they remind us that it’s okay if we’re not here right now to finish everything. Because we’re
definitely
here to start something.
Big
. And maybe that’s enough.