Sneak (3 page)

Prologue

07:16:32

There was a clock in the corner that

counted the seconds, an old-fashioned analog-type with long hands and a slender needle that tapped a maddening beat. The room was dark, and a team of men and women stood with their arms folded and their faces cast in canyon-deep shadows. A line of noses and the tips of chins, but no eyes, no lips, no ears. . . . They loomed over the man lying at their feet, but were they smiling? Frowning? It was impossible to say.

“I’ve done nothing wrong,” the man pleaded. “What is all of

this?”

“When did it begin?” someone said in the crowd.

“I don’t . . . who . . . when did
what
begin?” The man shivered violently.

A young Advocate stepped forward to the pulse of the clock.

The room’s light shifted over the pieces of her face, and the blue tint of her eyes now shone even as the rest of her disappeared. She bent forward and touched the man’s flushed cheek and said, “
This
.

The fever. When did it start?”

The man lay bound at the Advocate’s feet, soaked in a cold

sweat and trying to make sense out of her question. “About . . .

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Evan Angler

I’d say . . . about a month ago,” he said, looking up. “Maybe. Yes.

About a month.” He sneezed twice.

No response from the Advocate leaning over him.

“I don’t understand. You come to my work, you pull me from

my desk, you bring me here, poke me with needles . . . because of a
fever
?”

The Advocate sighed.

“What is it you
want
from me?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing anymore.”

“Then . . . then you’ll let me go, won’t you?” Rapid breathing now from the floor, rasping and wet. The clock counted seconds on the wall.

It counted for a long time.

“No.”

“I have a family!” the man cried. “A wife. And kids. Marked,

everyone of age. Loyal citizens!”

The young Advocate knelt down now, into the light, beside the

man. “We know,” she said ominously.

He looked up in horror. This woman had no Mark on her wrist.

This woman was Marked on her face.

“Who . . . who are you people?” the man asked.

The young Advocate tucked a wisp of her chin-length hair

behind one ear and smiled, beautiful in the harsh, fractured

light. “The International Moderators of Peace,” she said. “I’m the Advocate here. Behind me are my Coordinators.”

The man squinted at them through his watery eyes. “Then

there must be some mistake. I’ve never heard of any of those

things. My record is completely clean. I’m not a threat to peace any where!”

A Coordinator stepped forward, stone-faced, and knelt down

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Sneak

beside the Advocate. “Very sorry to say that you are, sir. Very sorry to say that you’re wrong.”

The Advocate put her hand on the bound man’s shoulder. “No

fault of your own,” she apologized. “It’s just . . . this fever . . .

we’re going to have to do something about this fever . . .”

In his delirium, the man looked past the young woman, past

the team who’d captured him, up and over to that old, analog

clock. Sixteen minutes after seven, it read. And the man tallied his last few seconds on earth.

07:16:28.

07:16:29.

07:16:30.

07:16:31 . . .

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One

New Chicago,

New Rules

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Logan Paul Langly ran until his legs

gave out and his insides burst with pain. He ran until there were sparks in his eyes and splinters in his lungs. He ran until he collapsed.

The sun had long since dipped behind the skyline’s abandoned

rooftops, and Logan Paul Langly slumped now against the side of a building that gave no shelter, under lampposts that gave no light.

Ahead of him, outlined against the dying glow of a purple

horizon, was an overpass, silent and slowly crumbling. This was the Ruined Sector, the outskirts of New Chicago, destroyed in

the States War and never rebuilt. He was fifty miles out from

Spokie. Another twenty from downtown.

Downtown was where he needed to be.

So Logan stood and stumbled on, blindly, paranoid, walking

backward half the time, under the shadows of the dead neighborhood. A winter stillness held him at arm’s length from any sense of hope these city streets might have given him, but even in his exhaustion, he knew that this was progress. For the moment, he wasn’t being followed. For the moment, he wasn’t lost.

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