Storm (Swipe Series)

now. “You just about scared me to death, jumping into the river like that!” She hit him hard on the arm, and Logan laughed.
    “Yeah, well . . . that almost killed me too, so . . .” He thought back to his hypothermia in the woods. He thought of Hailey pulling him out of the water, staying with him until he was better. He put his hand on Erin’s foot now, and suddenly he had no idea what he was feeling anymore. His heart was beating fast. Erin didn’t pull away. But she didn’t move or say anything either. Her foot felt hot through the blanket. The medical equipment beeped in the background.
    “Logan!” Peck yelled, barging in through the stairwell door and flipping the lights on unceremoniously. “Logan, you need to see this!”
    “What?” Logan asked, standing quickly from the bed and frustrated to feel all the weight of the moment before just fall away from him. “What is it? You manage to find something worthwhile at the library downtown?”
    “Uh— yeah ,” Peck said. “ You could say that .”
    He walked quickly between the storage shelves, followed closely by Hailey, who was every bit as worked up as he was.
    “Okay, try me,” Logan pressed, still irked at the interruption. “Sun Tzu’s The Art of War ? A copy of the Old Testament? I mean, what’s so important—”
    “ This .”
    Peck arrived at Erin’s alcove and held out a printed copy of a book. Logan turned it over in his hands. He read the cover.
    Swipe. By Evan Angler.
    “What is it?” Logan asked.
    Peck laughed. “It’s us. Seems we’re more famous than we thought.”
    3
    Lily’s final descent was fast and smooth. At ten miles’ altitude, she soared over New London, over its sprawling, industrial cityscape that stretched from coast to coast of what Lily knew had once been called Great Britain. At five miles’ altitude, she glided over the first traces of Third Rome, Cylis’s continent-spanning global capital that put even Beacon’s reach to shame. And at two thousand feet, she swooped in on Central Circle, its city streets swelling up, each rooftop seeming practically to skim the bottom of her incoming shuttle.
    Everything below her was a blur, but from Lily’s bird’s-eye view, it was clear that Third Rome was not like other urban centers. Its buildings were pre-Unity style, either spared during the Total War or else restored once the fighting had stopped. Even the newer construction had been designed and built clearly to match the historical aesthetic. Structures were low, no more than a few stories high, and each was made with stone sidings, their roofs an orange terra-cotta clay. Bigger buildings were gothic or baroque in style, made of marble; streets themselves were mostly cobblestone or brick. The city was laid out thoughtfully around its pre-Unity neighborhoods, with wide sidewalks for rollersticks, plenty ofroom for parks and fountains and monuments, and not a single Total War ruin to be found.
    There was a history to Third Rome, and the implication was clear: Cylis’s rise to power was no fluke, his leadership no temporary reign. The chancellor’s European Union was—Third Rome seemed to insist—the ultimate conclusion of thousands of years of human civilization. His capital built itself upon the shoulders of humanity’s greatest empires, and it had done so on Cylis’s terms. Under him, Third Rome confirmed, even the cataclysmic toll of the Total War could be swept clean, forgotten— erased —in just ten years’ time. War was no threat to him. Uprisings were no threat to him. His Marked society was the end of the road.
    Lily’s shuttle slowed as it approached the chancellor’s palace at the heart of Central Circle, landing gracefully on the flat roof of the building’s visitor wing, and its air lock opened automatically.
    A lone man was waiting for her when she stepped over the shuttle’s side and out onto the roof’s landing tarmac. The man’s short, wavy hair was brushed back neatly, white strands here and there but an oaky brown overall. He had a wide smile that carved deep, happy wrinkles into his cheeks and under his eyes, themselves a pale blue. He was even handsomer in person than he’d always been in pictures and video, and he walked toward Lily now with his arms outstretched and welcoming. He wore a crisp blue suit with a bright red tie, and Lily was struck by the energy she felt in his presence. In that moment, it was if she were the only person in the world that mattered to