Storm (Swipe Series)

That choice is yours. But if you want to have even a hope of keeping your own mind intact, you’re going to have to learn to play by the rules, and give the right answers, and make the right faces. You’re going to have to become a false positive. You’re going to have to learn to do the things that this helmet was designed to make automatic . . . or else the IMPS will wear you down to a stub—until they really are automatic.
    “Do you understand that choice, Eddie? I mean—do you really understand it?”
    Eddie nodded slowly.
    “Now, I’m partly saying this for your sake, because it sure would be nice not to watch my brother’s friend slowly burn alive inside an interface over the next few months.”
    Eddie nodded again.
    “But I’m really saying this for my sake. A case like you, backsliding again and again . . . it’s going to turn heads. Suddenly, the Council will start wondering—what about all the other backsliders? How can we be certain all those extra Revisions worked on them , when they won’t work on you —the invincible Eddie Blackall.
    “And that , Eddie. That would be very bad. For me.”
    Eddie gulped visibly.
    “What is it you’re planning, Lily? What’s your long game? I can . . . I can help you with it, if you’ll let me. I know I’m a screw-up. But I am good at helping.”
    Lily thought about this for some time.
    “There’s a way,” she said finally. “There’s a way you can help. But it’ll be pretty boring,” she said. “Mostly, it just involves walking up and down a bunch of steps all day long.”
    “‘Mostly’?” Eddie asked. “So what else does it involve.”
    “Standing.” Lily laughed. “Though this job will come with one distinct perk . . .” She cracked a sly smile.
    “Okay . . . ,” Eddie said.
    “I don’t know,” Lily told him. “You gonna be able to keep up the act long enough to make it work?”
    Eddie laughed. “I promise I’ll try . . .”
    5
    There was a flip-flop of sandals coming from the SSC stairwell, and Erin perked up at the sound of it. “How do I look?” she asked as Arianna entered. “Any better?”
    Dr. Rhyne examined the monitors arrayed all around Erin’s alcove in the storage shelves, and she sighed. “Not yet, Erin. I’m sorry.”
    In the weeks that had passed, Logan, Hailey, and Peck had each made their own use of the time they had in Sierra. With DOME having long moved on, the three of them felt freer now to explore a bit. Logan had been visiting huddles throughout the city, learning about each one’s way of life, listening to their individualwoes and concerns and triumphs, and telling them about what he’d learned from the little Bible he’d been given outside of New Chicago.
    They’d all heard of him, of course. Logan Langly, the boy from Swipe.
    He still didn’t know how he felt about that.
    Hailey, meanwhile, had spent most of her time at the SSC, listening to the radio and catching glimpses of her mom’s and Logan’s grandmother’s amateur news hour, which the two of them started broadcasting last December in an effort to keep in touch with Logan and Hailey while the two of them were on the run.
    “That cough,” Hailey would say, each time she listened in. “That cough sure isn’t getting any better . . .”
    Hailey’s mom, Mrs. Phoenix, had been unhealthy for years, suffering a terrible chronic cough due to the dust she breathed at the nanomaterials plant where she worked just outside of Spokie.
    “It’s just the nanodust,” Mrs. Phoenix would say on air whenever she launched into another one of her coughing fits. “It sounds worse than it is.”
    But Hailey couldn’t help worrying, even so. She was eager to get back to Spokie, to take care of her mother, as soon as her ordeal in Sierra was over.
    Of the three of them, Peck’s time in the city had been, perhaps, the most illuminating. Between the books he’d been reading at the Sierra Library and the discussions he’d been having every day with Sierra’s intellectuals, historians, philosophers, political scientists, anthropologists, and theologians, he’d been talking nonstop about the war he saw coming just over the horizon. It was getting to the point that even Logan and Hailey and Erin were sick of hearing about it, but still he talked on every night before bed.
    “All of us,” he said. “ All of us are missing the forest for the trees. All this time we’ve been fighting these little battles, waging these little acts of defiance.