Sneak (Swipe Series)

that. This here’s as much as I know.”
    “We can’t thank you enough,” Peck said.
    “And you’ll never have to.” The man turned his wagon around and rode off the way he had come.

    It took them a little while to settle in, but the Dust now sat on the cracked, dry ground, circling a fire they’d built using dry grass and bush twigs. They sat with a full can of refried beans each. Tyler was playing a game where he’d wait for Eddie to scoop out a handful of his own beans to eat, and then Tyler’d pounce, knocking the back of Eddie’s hand and sending the glop flying.
    “Knock it off!” Blake said. “Tyler, you’re eating that off the ground. Eddie, you can take your next scoop out of Tyler’s can.”
    “You can’t tell me what to do,” Tyler said.
    But Blake snapped back, totally out of patience. “If Peck can force the lot of us out to a city halfway across the country that none of us wants to live in, you’d better believe I can force you not to waste the first meal we’ve had in two days.”
    Peck looked on silently, and Tyler stuck out his tongue at Blake until Eddie smacked him on the chin and sent Tyler’s teeth clamping up on it.
    “Thweet!” Tyler lisped around his swelling tongue. “That wath thuch a good one, Eddie!”
    “We have to think,” Peck said soberly. “ Think where this prison could be. Acheron. Acheron . That’s what Logan called it. The captain all but confirmed he was right. But how do we find a place we don’t know anything about?”
    Jo spoke quietly into her can. “We know it’s where we’re all gonna die, if we actually go through with this crazy prison break attempt.”
    “What was that?” Peck said.
    “Nothing.”
    Rusty was asleep already, curled up by the fire. Meg was off on her own in the dark of the wide prairie stretch, trying to catch whatever animals she could find in the nighttime dirt so they might have breakfast in the morning.
    “Well, we know the place is cold,” Eddie said. “Captain definitely said something about refrigerated cells. You remember that? Maybe that’s a clue right there.”
    “I think you’re right,” Peck said. “Thank you, Eddie.”
    Eddie smiled, a little shy to have helped such an unpopular cause.
    And Meg came back and dropped a huge spider on Jo’s head.
    It was a good thing they were so far out into the wastelands. Forget surveillance powder—any closer to civilization, and DOME would have heard that scream by ear.
    No one saw Jo again that night.
    And privately, Peck wondered, What have I done? What mess have I dragged us all into now?
    He went to sleep with tears in his eyes.
    7
    It was so late that it was early. Logan sat with his head against the cold metal of the boxcar, looking out through the open side door at the countryside rolling past.
    Dane sat at the other end with his legs dangling off the edge, and Logan listened to Dane’s griptone singing softly through the empty space, just barely loud enough to hear over the wind and the rumble of wheels on tracks.
    “He’s pretty good at that thing,” Logan said to Hailey, who sat beside him in the shadow of the boxcar wall.
    “He’d better be; he plays it enough.”
    “Whatever,” Dane said, with a shrug neither one of them could see. “I can hear you, you know. I’m right here.”
    “I just said you’re pretty good, is all. Sheesh.” Logan rolled his eyes. The two of them hadn’t exchanged a friendly word since the hypothermia scare in the woods.
    “Hey—comin’ atcha,” Dane said, and he threw the griptone to Logan.
    It was the size of a lemon, and squishy, with a little hole at its two ends.
    “Just speak into it. Anything you want.”
    Logan held the ball to his mouth. “Twinkle, twinkle, little star,” he said, and the words came out of the griptone as a perfectly tuned low C note.
    “Okay,” Dane said. “Now squeeze it lightly, just a little bit, when you say the second twinkle.”
    Logan did and the griptone let out a painful squeal.
    Dane laughed. “Lighter than that. Maybe try pressing one finger at a time. You can get a little more nuance that way.” And Logan tried it. The second “twinkle” came out as a higher note than the first. “That’s really all there is to it. Once you get a feel for it, you can sing anything, just by speaking. It’s connected to the network too, so you can even download songs or text and make your own melodies with them.”
    “Can you communicate with it?” Logan asked. “Over