Sneak (Swipe Series)

won’t have anything else to do, what with my demotion and all. Come to think of it, they probably don’t need me over there at the office at all anymore, do they?”
    Dr. Arbitor shrugged. “I didn’t say that,” she said. But that was all she said.
    “Erin, would you like me to throw your plate in the microwave?” Mr. Arbitor asked. He looked at his wife out of the corner of his eye. “Mine’s already cold.”
    “I’m fine,” Erin said.
    “She has school tomorrow at 8:15. I’ll need to be at work; can you get her up?” Dr. Arbitor asked.
    “I can get myself up,” Erin said.
    “She’s going to be behind in her classes as it is, given the subpar education she’s been getting in Spokie,” her mother continued, as if Erin weren’t in the room. “So the least you can do is make sure she arrives on time.”
    “I’ll see to it, dear,” Mr. Arbitor said. He stood up to heat his own dinner in the microwave.
    Dr. Arbitor rolled her eyes.
    And Erin pretended to sneeze, so that neither of them would think twice about it when she began sniffling, or when she went to wipe her eyes on her napkin.
    She pretended to sneeze a second time.
    No one said, “ Gesundheit .”
    2
    After dinner, Erin sat on her bed with the door closed, dazed and still hungry. Her room was bare and she kept the light off, and nothing about the space was as she remembered it. With so many of her things still packed in boxes, Erin hardly even recognized the room as her own. Its size looked different. Its walls were blank. Its dresser was empty . . .
    She recognized that view, though.
    The apartment was seventy-eight stories high; about halfway up the building. Out the window, two stories above, was the third layer of Beacon’s multitiered road-and-sidewalk grid, and taxis and electrobuses whizzed by like the pumping of the city’s blood.
    Erin observed the swath of apartments opposite hers, some with their lights on and their blinds open. Erin could see one girl in a distant window five stories below, studying at her desk. Erin recognized that girl. She’d watched her study every night for years and years.
    Beyond the apartments across the street, hundreds more buildings stood, poking up into the sky with neither tops nor bottoms visible through such an elaborate suspended network of streets and elevators and ramps and bustle.
    And beyond all of that was the ocean. From this distance, its waves looked still, frozen in time, same as they ever were.
    She’d thrown away everything she had in order to make it back to Beacon. She’d put it all on the line, and she’d succeeded.
    Her dad was right—she had gotten her way.
    Her parents resented her for it.
    And the city was indifferent.
    3
    Down in the Water District, Logan and Hailey walked swiftly across the piers and pathways connecting skyscrapers that rose straight up out of the ocean. They tried their best to blend in, but it was tough since they were soaked to the bone—and sorely out of place. All around them Beaconers rushed by, heads down, casually ignoring the crowds and bright lights and the waves crashing below, but to Logan it was mesmerizing.
    “Erin told me that outer Beacon refused to move when the ocean rose,” Logan said. “But I never expected it to be this beautiful.”
    Hailey nodded, gazing up. “It’s incredible.”
    Eventually the two of them made it onto the district’s main boardwalk, and Logan and Hailey felt as though they couldn’t possibly see enough of it at once. Street vendors offering food Logan had never heard of and souvenirs unlike anything he’d ever seen; Markless performers playing music and dancing and telling jokes and doing tricks; countless smaller side bridges jutting off the main drag; a steady line of water taxis crossing the waves below . . .
    Ten blocks ahead, the boardwalk sloped up, running into City Center and rising sharply with the gradient of the mount. When he saw it, Logan stopped short, overcome suddenly by the gravity of what he was here to do.
    “Well, what are you waiting for?” Hailey asked. She put a hand on his shoulder. “We here to sightsee, or are we here to find your sister?” She pushed him playfully toward the hill.
    The two of them didn’t look back after that.
    4
    In her apartment just up the hill, Erin Arbitor tried desperately to drown out the sound of her parents’ ongoing argument. She’d come home to a nightmare. And the only escape was Erin’s belief that with just a little more digging,