Storm (Swipe Series)

for Peck to see. Her image now walked around to the front.
    “What have you done to this POD?” Logan demanded. “Whereis it taking me?” The glass fogged up as he said it. And suddenly it was very easy to see. All around her, a prescheduled video played of kids scrimmaging with the newest model of TechPlay Hoverdisk and all its unbelievable fake-out features. But superimposed on top of there, stone-faced, arms crossed, cool as could be, was Lily.
    “We’re going to go where we can talk,” her projection said.
    Around her, the advertisement kids laughed.
    The POD hurtled through the air.

SEVEN
    SIBLING RIVALRY
    1
    I T WAS A DARK NIGHT OFF THE SHORE AT Sierra’s edge. Under a gray sky, the bay rocked gently, its surface capping here and there with the foamy white crests of its turbulence. In the distance, the ocean grabbed feebly at the city’s junkyard coast, hoping, perhaps, to claim some ruin’s shard or brick or slab for itself.
    There were no fish below the water. There were no birds below the clouds. It was a dead view of a broken city, and even the few lights still shining did little to promise otherwise.
    “Well, that’s the end of that,” Logan said, sitting in the dark as the propulsion system sparked and shut itself off underneath him. All paid advertisements had stopped at this point, and as it was, the only image left on the POD’s wallscreen was the dim, ghostly vestige of Lily on the glass, fuzzy around the edges, and broken and wavy like a bad TV signal. When she moved, the projection jumped and jittered crazily.
    Outside of the glass, the lip of the water’s surface danced and bobbed at eye level. Ripples from the POD’s ocean crash still stretched into the black.
    “Nice job hacking the landing,” Logan said sarcastically. “I think the salt water just shorted the POD.”
    “I should hope so,” Lily said. “DOME will certainly be tracking it otherwise.”
    “They don’t think I’m here,” Logan said. “They think I’m headed up north. There’s a doctor in Sierra. She told them—”
    “I know what she told them,” Lily said. “I didn’t say they’d be tracking you . By now, my fingerprints are all over this POD hack. And they’ll have started showing up in networks somewhere. The worse shape this shuttle’s in by the time I’m done with it, the harder it’ll be for them to trace the hack back to me.”
    Logan was quiet for a moment. “DOME doesn’t know about this?”
    Lily laughed. “No, Logan. This little virtual visit’s between you, me, and the Dust. And I intend to keep it that way.”
    Logan leaned forward in his POD seat, trying hard to read the expression on Lily’s broken-up, translucent face. “The others don’t believe you’re on our side,” he said. “Even now, they’ll be thinking you tracked us down so that you could kidnap me for DOME.”
    “Indeed. The look on Daniel’s face left little room for doubt.”
    “Did you?” Logan asked.
    “No.”
    Logan smiled. He reached over his seat and touched the glass where his sister was projected. “I knew I’d see you again,” he said. “I was sure of it.”
    But Lily didn’t return the gesture. “You shouldn’t have come for me in Acheron,” she said scornfully. “That was stupid, and rash, and selfish.” The projection of her batted uselessly at his hand. “Making me choose between you and everything I’ve worked for these last five years . . . I mean, what were you thinking ?”
    Logan’s head spun with the accusations. “I was thinking I could save you.”
    “I didn’t ask for that!” Lily said.
    “You didn’t have to. You’re family.”
    Lily looked at him, astonished. “Do you have any idea what your actions have done to this country?”
    “They’ve started the uprisings,” Logan said. “People are fighting now. Even some of the Marked. Is that such a bad thing?”
    “ Yes! ” Lily yelled. “People will die !”
    Logan was silent.
    “There was a way to do this without sacrificing lives. That moment’s passed now, thanks to you.”
    “I didn’t know ,” Logan said. “How could I possibly have known?”
    “Well, maybe if you’d had even the tiniest amount of faith in your big sister—”
    “I was eight when you disappeared. You didn’t say one word to me before you left. Even now I haven’t the slightest idea what your actual intentions are. You haven’t told me. I’m sorry for doing the best I could with zero information.”
    “You weren’t