Storm (Swipe Series)

to understand how it works.
    “Most Markless across the countryside are subsistence farmers. We here in the Village of the Valley are no different. We grow what we need in order to feed ourselves; no more and no less. It’s how we survive outside of the Union, without the conveniences of the Mark. It’s our entire way of life.
    “And it’s good work,” Hans continued. “It’s satisfying to taste for yourself the fruits of your labors. But it’s tenuous too. We live year to year. And one bad harvest would kill us.”
    Dane looked around, noticing the way the land across the valley had been partitioned—this acre for sweet potatoes, that one for corn, a third beyond it for squash . . .
    And all up along the ridge too, terraces had been built straight into the steep hillside, maximizing space for planting. In the parts too steep or rugged even for that, the villagers had scattered apple trees for treats.
    “Dane,” Hans said. “I’m afraid.”
    Dane swallowed hard. What did that mean? “Afraid of what?”
    Hans found a rock resting in the dirt, and he sat on it now, breathing out a long sigh as he did. “You’ve heard of the Tipping Point, I assume.”
    “Sure,” Dane said. Everyone had. It was the period, pre-Unity, when the weather turned. When it simply got too hot for life to continue as it always had. When the oceans died and the habitable lands dried up. When the food went scarce. When the water stopped flowing. When hurricanes, blizzards, heat waves, and locusts were all that was left, ruining houses and land alike. Historians were quick to note that it was the Tipping Point, in large part, that hadled to the Total War. Hard to keep peace , the saying went, when your home is in pieces .
    “Then you know,” Hans said, “that the Tipping Point ended agriculture as we once knew it.”
    “Yeah, but they fixed that,” Dane said. Humanity had proven resilient.
    It was the chancellor’s own scientists who first found a way around the permadrought. One of the things that made him so popular over in Europe, in fact. Just as the Total War was dying down, Cylis used his newfound political capital to build the world’s first weather mill smack in the center of what was soon to become the new European Union. At this mill, sophisticated, long-range missile launchers shot canisters of benign chemicals—mostly silver iodide—all over the continent, precisely and strategically, as a way of “seeding” European clouds. Natural rain had become nearly unheard-of throughout the hot spring and summer months, but suddenly, with the introduction of the weather mill’s new chemical cocktail, clouds across the sky were able to form rain again. It was a breakthrough that saved millions of lives. And it wasn’t long before Lamson adopted Cylis’s methods in America too, commissioning from the European Union the world’s second great weather mill just ten years ago.
    “ We control the weather now,” Dane said. “ We make it rain. People have been handling it for years.” He had learned about this in school, had studied it several times, in history classes and science classes alike, though this was the first time Dane had ever really given it any serious thought. Back in the Old District, rain was little more than an inconvenience.
    “That’s correct,” Hans said. “But with a caveat. Because it isn’treally people who control the weather, you see. It’s DOME . Theirs is the technology that makes it rain. And right now, between the Markless protests and the Global merger and the rise of the IMPS and everything else, that department is in the midst of tremendous turmoil. They face discord and unrest from all sides. They will react accordingly. And I fear we Markless farmers may be the first to get caught in the crossfire.”
    Dane stared at him, his eyes widening slowly. “They wouldn’t,” Dane said. “Inciting a permadrought? It’s just too crazy . . .”
    “Is it?” Hans asked. “You’re talking about a general who spent the last ten years swiping kids to build a secret army whose only possible purpose could be to fight a civil war . You yourself are the one who unveiled this truth to America. It is precisely this truth that incited the protests in Beacon and New Chicago. And now, privately, you’ve been telling me that the Department of Marked Emergencies has created a deadly nanovirus just in case we Markless ever get out of hand.
    “So are you really , now, going to bank on the mercy