Storm (Swipe Series)

mill running more or less smoothly, while at the same time maintaining an unbroken chain of inconvenient system failures serving to perpetually delay any successful canister launch. In this way, they’d kept hope among mill workers alive that the next cloud seeding could happen “any day now,” while continually ensuring that it would not.
    But that phase of the plan was over. The Goodmans were suddenly sure to be caught any day now, and the only solution they could find was to bring the whole place down in one fell swoop.
    This was all Connor’s speculation, of course. But there was little room for doubt. The one option his parents would not have entertained was a cloud seeding. The one thing they would not abide was a mill-induced storm.
    They knew the stakes. The stakes were worth this to them.
    “Hey,” Sally said, walking up behind Connor and startling him a little.
    He was happy to see her. And he wanted to say so . . . but somehow, he just couldn’t find the words.
    “They’re cold,” he told her instead, nodding at the bodies in front of him. “I touched them. Touched my mom’s hand.” He swallowed. His parents were covered now by the white sheet wrapped around them. Sally guessed that Connor must have pulled the sheet off, momentarily, to say good-bye. “They felt cold.”
    For some reason, this made Sally burst into tears.
    In another hour, DOME would take Mr. and Mrs. Goodman away from Lahoma in order to dispose of them. There wouldn’tbe a burial, of course. Burials were for pre-Unity deaths—and Markless.
    No, these days, DOME’s Ends and Beginnings Bureau took Marked bodies and cremated them. Those ashes were then taken and purified, and the carbon within them was compressed into graphite, and then again, into diamonds, and each was set onto a ring and delivered generously back to the departed’s closest surviving relative.
    Originally, this tradition began as a way to discourage any end-of-life religious practices that Marked citizens might have been accustomed to pre-Unity. But over time, DOME realized the system had a secondary benefit as well—by destroying Marked bodies, it seriously limited the supply chain of black market hands.
    So Connor had that to look forward to, he guessed. Two diamond rings, coming his way.
    Connor mentioned this to Sally.
    She cried harder.
    For what it was worth, the Ends and Beginnings Bureau had done a nice job, Connor thought now. Merciful of them, given his parents’ ultimate “traitor” status. Unheard of, in fact. In post-Unity history, no traitor had ever been given a state-sanctioned funeral. Not once. And yet Connor’s parents had been dressed nicely and laid carefully onto a small wooden stage at the grassiest spot of the browning Lahoma public park. A single flower adorned the stage. And deep down, Connor knew he had General Lamson to thank for all that. But it was small consolation. This past hour, what Connor had mostly thought of the funeral was that the Ends and Beginnings Bureau had combed his father’s hair wrong. It didn’t look like that. It wasn’t supposed to look like that. Theminutes had passed, the guilt had flared and subsided and flared again, and through most of it, Connor was lost in some great, computer-rack rat-maze of thoughts about hair, parted all wrong and bizarre, as the tentacles of guilt gripped harder . . .
    Connor couldn’t see it for himself, of course, the shock he was in. But Sally sure did.
    “It’s okay to be upset,” she told him finally. She put her arm around her friend’s shoulder and brushed a stream of tears from her own blotchy face. “It’s better to be upset. You should be upset.”
    So Connor nodded at Sally, as if that might adequately cover the whole “emotion” thing she was looking for.
    “Where are you going to stay?” Sally asked. “Do you know?”
    Connor shrugged.
    “I’d say you’re welcome to stay with us, at my house . . .” Sally trailed off.
    “But I’m not.”
    Sally nodded at her feet. “Not just yet, I think . . .”
    “So where is everyone?” Connor asked. A town this size, there wasn’t a single family that hadn’t been friends with the Goodmans. In fact, given Connor’s General Award, from six months ago until yesterday, the Goodmans might have been the most beloved family in all of Lahoma. “Not that I expected them, I guess, given the circumstances, but . . .”
    “Central Square,” Sally said. “The mayor’s holding a town hall, in