Pulse

him kicked out of bed. It was a risk he wasn’t willing to take, so he stayed perfectly still until Faith handed back the Tablet.
    “How’d you do that?” she asked. “I didn’t think it was possible to communicate with people on the inside.”
    “Technically it’s illegal. Also impossible. I know because I’ve been trying since she left. The new Tablet was set wrong or something, who knows. All I can say is, it was a gift from the gods and it probably won’t happen again.”
    Faith was overcome with appreciation for what Hawk had done for her. Hawk had given her an enormous gift she wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to repay.
    “What would happen if they caught you?” Faith wondered out loud.
    “You know what’s funny about that? No one really knows. I’ve done a lot of hacking over the past few years, but I’m always very careful to cover my tracks. Best I can tell, people who mess around with this sort of thing and get caught just disappear. I don’t know if they go up in smoke, but their Tablet identity vanishes.”
    Faith yawned. It was after midnight, and she was starting to fade as she slid down onto the bed and stared at Hawk.
    “No funny business,” she said. “Let’s get some sleep and talk in the morning.”
    Hawk wanted to ask where her parents were and what they would think, but he let it pass. Either she was a very independent girl, which was probably true, or her parents were on a trip somewhere. Either way, he was much more interested in whether or not he had really seen the blanket move across the room or not. As he let his head rest on the pillow, he vowed not to fall asleep for at least an hour, just in case something else moved in the room. For safe measure, he set his Tablet on the nightstand, turned on the video recorder, and pointed it at the closet.
    Four minutes later he was asleep.
     
    Dylan Gilmore’s brain was tired. His body was fine; there was plenty of energy there. But his mind, which he’d been putting through hell for months, was at loose ends. He was standing outside Faith’s window, trying to understand why Hawk was lying in bed next to her.
    Didn’t see that coming, Dylan thought, Even though he was nearly sure the two of them couldn’t possibly have a thing for each other, he felt the same stab in his heart that he’d felt when Faith and Wade had hooked up.
    Dylan looked at his Tablet for the time and saw that it was after two in the morning. Normally he’d have work to do, but it was risky with Hawk in the room. He noticed the blinking red light on Hawk’s Tablet and understood immediately that he was recording.
    “Nice try, little man. But it’s too soon for that.”
    As Dylan looked at the Tablet, it began to move toward him in the air. The window latch unlocked, and Dylan quietly slid the window open a few inches. The Tablet drifted through the opening, and Dylan took it in his hands, stopping the recording. He was about to delete the video file, but instead he scrolled through on fast-forward, stopping and backing up when something moved in the room. He let it run at normal speed for a few seconds, watching silently as Faith Daniels rose up in the air, the covers coming along with her.
    “Interesting,” he said, deleting the video file and sliding the Tablet back through the opening in the window. “ Very interesting.”
    Dylan stayed by the window for two more hours, watching Faith Daniels and thinking about the progress he’d made. Things were moving faster than he’d expected, possibly faster than was safe given the circumstances. As he walked away at ten past four in the morning, he made up his mind about something. It had been a very long time coming, and months of exhausting work, but the moment had finally arrived.
    It was time to tell Faith Daniels the truth.

Chapter 11
How Did You Get Me All the Way Up Here?
    Every year the Field Games were held in different States around the world. It had been five years since the United States had hosted, and the Western State had created a state-of-the-art facility like nothing anyone had ever seen. Every event would be broadcasted live onto millions of Tablets via thousands of cameras. Field Games were even fed to Tablets owned by those sorry souls still living outside the States, although there was a delay to allow for editing. In the days leading up to the start of the Field Games, news reports streamed onto the Tablets twenty-four hours a day, preempting all other programming for