Storm (Swipe Series)

him.
    “Welcome,” he said. “Welcome to your country. And welcome to my home.”
    Immediately, Lily went rigid, holding her breath, standing up straight, and responding with a crisp salute.
    “Oh, enough with that! There’s no need for formalities here. Come, come! Join me! I imagine you’re starving.”
    Lily paused. “Yes, sir.”
    “No ‘sirs’ here—please. We are hardly in Acheron anymore.”
    “Yes, Chancellor Cy—”
    “Bah! You’ll call me Dominic, and there’ll be no more discussion about it. Friends speak to one another by name. And friendship is the sincerest form of respect. Isn’t that right—Ms. Langly?”
    “Lily,” she corrected, recognizing the gesture.
    “Yes.” The chancellor smiled. “Yes, I had hoped so. Come, Lily. Let us eat.”
    And in the white warmth of the new morning sun hitting Cylis’s palace, Lily Langly followed the chancellor through his rooftop’s grand, private, double-door entrance—and into the Capitol of Third Rome.
    4
    Back across the Atlantic, the day in Beacon was clear and dry and bright, and for his part, Tyler was ready.
    “All right. Time to make hay while the sun is shining,” Blake said, but Tyler just laughed at him, slapping his knee and waving a fake lasso above his head.
    “We aren’t making hay, skinflint. We’re wreaking havoc.”
    “Okay, yeah, I know that, ya tightwad. It’s called an expression .”
    And Tyler would have said something about them not being at the Hayes’s farm any longer . . . but already Tyler wasn’t paying attention. Instead, he was several feet ahead, practically runningthe final stretch along the third tier of Beacon’s sidewalk system, eager to ring the bell and dying to get started.
    “Hello?” the voice said over the apartment building’s intercom.
    “It’s me,” Tyler said. He looked over at Blake, who’d just caught up. “Well, me and some lame skinflint I can’t seem to shake.” Blake punched him on the arm and Tyler laughed silently, making a face. And the entrance before them buzzed open.
    Prior to joining them, the Dust’s newest member, Shawn, had spent years building up a vast network of Markless sympathizers by working as what he called “the Tech Wiz.” Under the Mark system in Lamson’s America, everything from shopping to hospital visits to travel to opening doors was done digitally, with a scan of the Mark. This was, of course, an incredible convenience. But it also meant that somewhere in its database, DOME had a log of every single thing that each of its citizens had done over the past ten years. This made surveillance easy, and it made prosecution cases open-and-shut.
    It also put Shawn in exceedingly high demand. Because the fact was, Shawn’s was a rare skill set, and in Lamson’s America, his services had become an invaluable commodity.
    For a price, Shawn could hack into DOME’s ultrasecure Marked database network, delete any logged Markscan he wanted, and exit without a trace. Shawn could take a person’s actions and, in the eyes of the law, erase them for good. For Marked Beaconers the city over, Shawn could rewrite history.
    Among a certain crowd, this made him a popular guy.
    Of course, not being Marked himself, Shawn couldn’t ever be paid for his services in credits, even under the table. His own personal economy, instead, was a barter system, a complex arrangementof IOUs and favors and goodwill, all of which Shawn was happy to leverage at any time.
    For the Dust’s newest prank, Shawn had called upon the Sweeneys, a middle-aged couple with a taste for breaking and entering and getting away with it, and so it was that the Sweeneys’ home became the staging ground for the Dust’s newest stunt.
    “Think it’s fancy?” Tyler said to Blake on the elevator ride up.
    “A third-tier City Center apartment?” Blake asked. “Yeah, I’m gonna guess it’s fancy.”
    “Good timing,” Shawn said as he opened the Sweeneys’ door a minute later. Tyler and Blake walked in, and Mr. and Mrs. Sweeney waved a friendly hello from their couch in the living room across the way. “Just finished readying the ropes and pulleys. Meg’s at her perch across the street with Rusty. Jo’s down below, too nervous to watch. You sure about this, Tyler?” Shawn asked.
    Blake looked around the lavish room, soaking in, for just a moment, the perks of living with a Mark. But Tyler was all business. He’d already walked to the Sweeney’s open window, and he was leaning out over