Sneak (Swipe Series)

connecting buildings at their fortieth, eightieth, one hundred twentieth, one hundred sixtieth, and two hundredth floor entrances, though only a handful of skyscrapers actually rose quite that high, and the network of streets in the grid thinned substantially in its upper two layers.
    “We can’t possibly see it all,” Hailey said. “How do we even begin to look for a place like Acheron in all of this chaos?”
    “I don’t know,” Logan said. And from a hundred feet up, that skyscraper-sized projection of Cylis looked down at Logan, and it laughed.
    6
    Erin exited her apartment building on the eightieth floor, onto the third-tier sidewalk of the Beacon grid, and for all her loneliness, it did feel good to be home. The crowded streets, the angry, late pedestrians, the endless line of cabs and electrobuses, the fast-moving sidewalk treads, the lights so bright you had to squint when you came out, even at night. . . . This was where she was meant to be.
    And yet what Erin was about to do was as far outside her comfort zone as anything she’d ever dreamed of.
    She had to bite the bullet. She had to ask a beggar for help.
    For a while, Erin walked along that third-tier level, looking for misers on the street, anyone she could walk up and talk to. But this was delaying the inevitable, and she knew it—the real Markless kept to the lowest levels. If she was going to do this, she had to descend.

    It took her nearly a dozen tries to find a Markless that would even so much as look at her, but Erin was determined not to give up.
    As she strolled along the ground level of the Beacon grid, Markless were scattered all about. But some part of Erin knew that this couldn’t be the whole story. With the street cleanings DOME so routinely did each night, there simply had to be somewhere else for them to go. Somewhere they could hide. Together. Out of sight. In Beacon’s shadow.
    As she walked, Erin eyed a woman sleeping on the ground with a dog. The woman had covered herself with a sign that read, “Don’t need your money. Don’t want your pity. The meek shall inherit the earth. Matthew 5:5.”
    Up ahead, a man weaved in and out of the throngs of Beaconers, juggling trash and dancing a bit and singing some pre-Unity song, “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
    He’s gonna get himself shot , Erin thought, singing an exclusioner song like that right out in the open . But to Erin’s surprise, no one seemed to mind. In fact, every time the man sang a lyric, any Markless in earshot would sing it back to him, creating an informal chorus of call and response.
    Had it always been this way? To Erin’s memory, Beacon’s Markless were nothing but scoundrels—filthy, begging, crazy, and dangerous. Had they always been so . . . harmless?
    “I don’t understand,” Erin said, stopping the juggling man in his tracks. “Are you begging, or what?”
    The man stopped in front of her, but he continued juggling his trash as he spoke. “Not begging, ma’am.” He smiled. “Singing. Do you know the tune?”
    “No . . . ,” Erin said.
    So the man walked on, shaking his head. “Oh, when the trumpet,” he sang, “sounds its call! Oh, when the trumpet sounds its call! Lord, how I want to be in that number—when the trumpet sounds its call!”
    It took a couple more encounters like this before Erin realized she needed a new strategy. She had to get one of these tightwads to talk. She needed their help if her plan was going to work, and to get that, she needed a way in.
    So Erin bought a tempeh sandwich from a street vendor, swiping her Mark at the cart’s scanner, as an offering for the next beggar she found.
    But even that, it turned out, wasn’t enough to strike up a worthwhile conversation. When she approached a kid a few minutes later, holding the sandwich out and saying, “It’s yours, really—take it!” the kid just scoffed at her and ran away along the sidewalk treads.
    Her entire childhood, Erin had grown up fearing these people, resenting them, thinking they wanted nothing more than to have what she had, than to be who she was.
    Tonight, for the first time, it occurred to Erin that maybe they were who they were by choice, that maybe they saw her and her shiny Mark with the same mix of pity and contempt she’d always felt toward them.
    It was a disorienting thought, on top of the head-spinning display of lights and sounds and advertisements all around her. After the months she’s spent in quiet Spokie, the whole