Pulse

long time to get to sleep that night, and even when she did fall asleep, it was more like a half wakefulness. She kept having dreams of things moving in her room. She dreamed the glass of water on her nightstand had tipped over; but instead of the water spilling onto the floor, it hung in the air and blew apart into a million droplets, then danced above her bed. Some of the droplets touched her lips, and she tasted the water with her tongue. It was cool and sweet, like spring, and she smiled in her dream. The drops came together again, returned to the glass, and the dream ended.
    In time someone would tell Faith Daniels the truth, but not yet.
    She wasn’t ready to know, but one day she would be told.
    What happened in her room was not a dream.
     
    Faith and Liz both awoke to the same message from Hawk on their Tablets and simultaneously realized they’d allowed a new person into their tiny, private circle.
And he’s back! How you guys doing? Miss me? Let’s do some hand-holding, ladies!
    It was no longer just the two of them; it was the three of them. Hawk’s Tablet was back, and he was becoming a fixture in their lives. Faith and Liz didn’t talk about it, this idea that they’d let someone in; but they both knew it had happened. It was like they were afraid to bring it up for fear that the other one would disapprove. The little guy was definitely growing on them.
    By 8:00 a.m., when Liz met Faith at the front of the school, they’d both been messaging Hawk for an hour.
    “This is getting a little strange, right?” Liz said.
    “More than a little. I’d say it’s getting creepy. How does a Tablet just vanish and then reappear? Who does that?”
    Faith was thinking the same thing about the drawing she’d done, but she didn’t know how to tell Liz about it, at least not yet.
    “It was just there , too,” Liz repeated what Faith already knew. “Right next to his bed, like it had never left his side. Means someone was in his house. Now that’s creepy.”
    “Maybe someone figured out he’s hacking, and they want Hawk to do the same for them? He might have gotten himself in trouble.”
    “And us with him,” Liz reminded Faith. “We’re the ones wearing the jeans, remember?”
    That wasn’t quite true. They weren’t actually wearing them, because they hadn’t been shipped yet, but Faith understood what Liz was saying. They needed to get with Hawk and talk this whole thing through. She wasn’t sure nearly free jeans were worth the risk of real trouble.
    Miss Newhouse was on high alert in the morning lecture sessions, pacing the room like a vampire hunting for a victim. There was a rumor floating around the school that someone was peddling a Wire Code, which had been a problem at Faith’s other schools and was something she’d hoped wouldn’t make the leap to Old Park Hill. Wire Codes required a complicated hack that usually only worked for a few days before it was discovered and patched by programmers at the State.
    Wire Codes, Faith knew, were nothing to mess around with. They revealed things on Tablets in ways that were not allowed. They showed things people weren’t supposed to see. Staring into a Tablet where a Wire Code had been entered set the mind on fire; and once you were exposed, turning away didn’t matter. You’d done the equivalent of taking the hit or injected the needle. The Wire Code was in you. Its electronic rewiring of your brain had infected you. In the four or five hours that followed, a Wire Code provided a heightened sense of reality. Colors burned brighter, flavors intensified, feelings of happiness amplified tenfold.
    Faith had never tried a Wire Code, though she’d had opportunities at all her old schools. There was usually at least one floating around every few weeks on campus, and most of the students found out about them. They were made up of a sequence of numbers and letters, and they were always passed around in a very specific way. Like the drugs of the past, Wire Codes had their own culture of delivery systems and symbols. Marijuana had its joint, acid its tab, cocaine its pocket-sized cylinder tube. In the early days of Wire Codes the people who made them wrote them out on paper, but it was risky. Handwriting recognition had seen huge advances with the advent of the Tablets. Writing a number or a letter was like a fingerprint that could be traced. And Wire Codes were never passed from Tablet to Tablet, based on the widely held belief that the States were