Storm (Swipe Series)

stepped back toward the giant blue ball, inviting the rest of them inside. “Because Dr. Rhyne sent me,” Sam said. “I’m the doctor’s son.”
    4
    “It’s called a POD,” Sam said several minutes later. “Projectile Object Delivery. Little start-up company called PopHopper began making them a couple years ago. Just a pet project, I think, but they’ve really caught on.”
    “You’re not Marked,” Peck said. “How are you flying it?”
    “First of all, nobody’s flying anything. This thing’s not a plane—it’s a projectile. It goes up, it comes down, and that’s all there is to it. Free fall the whole time. We’re a cannonball right now, nothing more.
    “Second of all, this thing’s not public transit. DOME hasnothing to do with it, so no Marks required. It’s just a service—necessary after the earthquake destroyed all the roads around here.”
    “But how does PopHopper pay for any of this?”
    “That’s how,” Sam said. He gestured around them, to the glass casing of the POD. Suddenly the whole thing fogged over, and almost the entire 360-degree interior surface became one big panoramic wallscreen. A woman walked into view, strolling through an immaculately clean household. From the sidescreen, a dog ran happily toward her, jumping up and getting paw marks all over the woman’s nice, white shirt. The woman laughed, and smiled, and shook her head.
    “Tired of washing your clothes? Do rubble stains get you down? Try Laundercloth—the fabric that washes itself!”
    As she said it, the dog’s paw marks slowly disappeared from the shirt.
    “Immersive advertisements.” Sam laughed. “The POD rides pay for themselves.”
    Below them, in the one patch of glass not hijacked by commercials, Logan could still see outside the POD. Sierra rushed by in a nauseating blur, but even from here he could tell it was like no place he’d ever seen. Ruins and new buildings intermingled, sharing the same streets, even the same foundations, as though instead of cleaning up after the earthquake, Sierra just grew through it. Like daisies sprouting from the cracks of concrete. Except here, from this height, Sierra’s daisies looked awfully high tech. And the run-down concrete patches among them were simply ignored.
    Below Logan and all around him, PODs sprang up from the ground like monstrous fleas, popping up and falling down, as though Sierra were the great, big back of some infested, hairless dog. Logan smiled, thinking of that. And suddenly the groundswelled up, rushing at him through the glass. Logan’s stomach turned over. He entered free fall. And his first PopHopper ride came quickly to its end.

    Logan, Peck, Hailey, Erin, and Sam all threw up the moment they exited the POD.
    “I told you.” Sam laughed, wiping his mouth. But the five of them stood now in front of the glowing blue plastic of the Sierra Science Center, and none of them gave a moment’s thought to their lingering motion sickness. Before them the SSC rose only ten stories high, but its structure and context made it far more imposing than its size alone would suggest. All around it was rubble, piled two, three, four stories high in some places: enormous slabs of concrete, mounds of old brick, huge chunks of drywall, all lumped together, like a citywide memorial, a constant reminder of the earthquake that decimated the western coast ten years ago. Rising right out of those ruins was the SSC, with an architectural style all its own. With its rounded edges and bulging shape, the Sierra Science Center looked something like a beehive, complete with a honeycomb mesh that held the structure up. A glowing white pattern of wire held the building’s blue-tinted, translucent tarp siding taut, but it also made the entire building supremely flexible in the case of a future earthquake or other such disaster. Even now, the building twisted and swayed a bit in the wind.
    At its base, a single hexagonal tile was larger than the rest, and the tarp within it hung loosely from only a few of the wires. This was the building’s entrance, and a colorfully dressed woman walked through it now.
    The woman smiled at Logan and Erin and the rest. Like Sam, her clothing took on a swirling tie-dye pattern. Her ears, nose, and eyebrows were pierced and dressed with heavy rings. Her Mark was only one of many tattoos on her arms and shoulders, some of which glowed with a nanoink that shone even through the sleeves of her shirt. Her hair hung in thick brown