Storm (Swipe Series)

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
    D EAR READER,
    We have escaped. We’re alive. But for how long?
    I’m writing to you Markless now because you’re the ones who question. Who think differently. Who doubt.
    And under a government that Marks its citizens in the name of Unity, that swipes its own kids over the faintest sign of what might someday turn into defiance . . . you are the ones in danger.
    It is you who will be weeded out. To be forgotten. So that all who remain will be unified.
    One month ago, Logan Langly and his friends in the Markless Dust took a stand against all of this. They traveled to Beacon, the capital city of the American Union, to take back the swiped, to rescue Logan’s beloved sister Lily, and to expose the truth behind the Mark at any cost.
    But all was not as it seemed.
    With the unwitting help of a Marked ally named Erin Arbitor, the Dust very nearly did succeed. They found Acheron, the Markless prison thought surely not to exist. They sneaked inside. They saw the place for what it was—a training ground for General Lamson’s secret army of “Revised” Markless, modeled slavishly after Chancellor Cylis’s in the European Union. They came face to face with these International Moderators of Peace. These IMPS. They even found Advocate Lily Langly among them.
    But Advocate Langly did not want saving from Acheron. She betrayed her brother and his friends, imprisoning them. And while Logan did later narrowly manage to escape, his good friend Eddie did not.
    Meanwhile, General Lamson and Chancellor Cylis have been consolidating their power. Under the terms of the new Global Treaty, the American and European Unions have finally completed the decade-long process of their merge. They are now, together, the Global Union, ratified in the name of peace.
    But within this supposedly peaceful Union, Erin Arbitor has just discovered something else: evidence of a targeted, biological weapon—Project Trumpet—conceived by Cylis long ago and designed by the Department of Marked Emergencies to unleash upon the world just in case its Markless ever got . . . out of hand.
    Well. The Markless are out of hand now. In the wake of the truth about Acheron, exposed by the Dust and symbolized by Logan’s imprisonment, protests have risen up all throughout America, from Beacon City to New Chicago. It seems certain that Trumpet will be activated nationwide.
    Yet, so far, it is not the Markless who have gotten sick. It’s the Marked.
    And Erin has just come down with the first signs of a fever.
    Now Logan Langly, Daniel Peck, Hailey Phoenix, and Erin Arbitor are on the run. Away from Beacon. Across America and under the new umbrella of the Global Union. Fugitives wanted by DOME and the IMPS both. They’ve set out to find a cure before it’s too late.
    But this is a battle that’s bigger than them. And it’s one they cannot win alone.
    My name is Evan Angler. This book is the third in the ongoingchronicles of the Dust’s great defiance. It has surely been outlawed by now. To hold it is a crime. To read it is worse. So if you’ve come this far, then you and I are already in this thing together.
    Welcome to the Dust.
    Let’s see how much trouble we can find.

    Evan Angler

PROLOGUE
    THE REQUEST
    T HE DOOR TO THE HOUSE WAS CLOSED AND locked and guarded by two men wearing uniforms unlike any Connor had ever seen. They were quiet. They held rifles and wore helmets that shadowed their faces. They stared out and didn’t move.
    Connor watched from the yard next door, dark under the curtain of a hot September night. The town around him was still, suspended in the thick, stifling air, and he crept through it silently.
    Around him, paper cups and wrappers and colored confetti littered the dirt, dotting it with reminders of the day’s celebration—and of how quickly it had passed.
    A morning parade down Main Street, a town-wide feast lasting all afternoon, an award ceremony, an evening full of pomp and circumstance—after-parties with dancing and live music—all celebrating him . Connor Goodman, national hero, first-ever recipient of the General’s Award for Marked Excellence, Promise, and the American Dream. General Lamson himself had come all the way from the capital to present it.
    Yet here Connor was now, just two short hours later, stripped of all dignity, locked out of his own house, and sneaking around like some Markless burglar just to get a glimpse inside his own living room window. Humiliating, Connor thought. And