Sneak (Swipe Series)

invoke it much? Maybe not yet. But they could. And they will when it’s useful to them. So of course DOME wants everyone to be Marked. To be Unmarked is to be off the grid! To be free!” He held up his own Unmarked wrists and smiled gleefully.
    “Okay, yeah. I get it,” Erin said. “But what does that have to do with whatever just happened here?”
    Shawn smiled. “Whoever that guy was—he’s done some things with that Mark of his—some things that, let’s just say, he’d just as soon Cylis not know about. Maybe he . . . skipped work to go to a pro hover-dodge game. Maybe he did some stuff to help a Markless family member. Whatever it was, my job is to hack into DOME’s Marked network, and delete a few eensy-beensy little boxes in a database. Just here and there. On the dates this guy gave me.
    “Then he loans me his tablet, I work my magic, and badaboom, bada-bing: Mr. Marky Mark here’s scot-free. DOME won’t come looking; no one else’ll come asking . . . Mr. Mark can sleep easy again.”
    “And for this he gave you a rollerstick?”
    “Hey, look—if you’re good at something, charge what you’re worth. I start my fees high, and I raise them from there.” He looked over at the rollerstick. “I don’t even want this stupid thing. But it never hurts to have a commodity. A rollerstick like this’ll barter for quite a fair price in the sublevel, once I crack the Mark lock.”
    “Hold up,” Erin said. “Sublevel?”
    “Yeah.” Shawn nodded. “What about it?”
    Erin frowned. “I don’t know what that is.”
    Shawn looked at her as though she must have been messing with him. “Wait a minute . . . you’re not kidding? You really don’t know what I’m talking about? Really? ” Erin shrugged, and Shawn exhaled powerfully in his disbelief. “It’s where I live! Where you’d live too if you’d had enough sense to skip your Pledge.”
    Erin smiled. “I think you’re talking about just the place I’m looking for,” she said.
    “ You? ” Shawn laughed. “No way. No way! Nuh-uh. Not a chance.”
    “Come on,” Erin said. “Just point me in the right direction.”
    “Nope. No, siree. No, no.”
    Erin sat for a minute in the shadow of the advertisement lights. Finally, she turned to Shawn. “Must get pretty annoying, having to borrow tablets all the time from the people you’re helping. Bet you sure could do a lot with one of those things if you had one all to yourself.”
    “You better believe I could,” Shawn said. “But there’s not a Marked in the city willing to barter one o’ those.” He laughed. “I’d have to find me a felon to get someone desperate enough to spend that kinda credit on a simple hack-erase.”
    Erin looked at him, smirking just a little. Then she pulled her own tablet out of her pocket.
    “Take me to the sublevel,” she said. “And it’s yours to keep.”
    7
    That night in Spokie, Michael Cheswick sat at his desk for a long time, not doing much of anything. He would have stared out the all-glass walls of his office, but it was too dark to see.
    He would have shuffled documents or gotten a head start on this week’s agent assignments, but he just didn’t have it in him.
    He knew what he had to do.
    There was no avoiding it.
    But he stared at that call button without pressing it for a long, long time.
    8
    A full week had passed since Logan and Hailey first set foot in Beacon. They slept in gutters each night, scrounged for food each day . . .
    And they’d made no progress whatsoever in finding Acheron. With hands hidden, they’d snuck all around City Center by this point, but nothing anywhere had suggested even the existence of a Markless prison, let alone the location of one.
    “Maybe we should just get ourselves arrested,” Hailey suggested at one point, exasperated. “Quick—steal something. We’ll be in Acheron by morning.”
    “No,” Logan said, refusing to find either the wisdom or the humor in it. “I had that option once already. It wasn’t a good idea then and it isn’t a good idea now. We enter Acheron on our own terms, or we’ll never make it out.”
    “I’m just saying . . .” Hailey smirked. She and Logan stood now at the edge of the grid’s fifth-tier sidewalk, looking out over the whole city. It was a bit darker up here since not as many buildings and wall advertisements made it up this high, and it was less crowded too. The air was thin and cold.
    “It really is a beautiful place,” she said. They could see