Storm (Swipe Series)

whole way.
    “I can walk,” Erin said.
    Logan laughed. “Yeah, right.”
    A few feet away, Hailey paced nervously, her hands shaking with a dull, endless frustration. “Walk, don’t walk—what difference does it make? What we need is a plan .”
    “We have a plan,” Peck said patiently.
    “Then we need a better one.”
    Erin sat up, just a little. She rubbed her temples with both hands and tried hard to push back some of the pain. “Beyond this ridge is Sierra City,” she said. “You can see it now. The lights, the ruins . . .” The desert to the west was black on black in all directions, but Erin was right—signs of life did sparkle among it. “And in Sierra City is Dr. Rhyne. The Trumpet documents I hacked pointed straight to him. He’s there. I’m sure of it. And we need to find him.”
    Earlier that winter, it had been Erin who’d discovered Project Trumpet, the nanovirus designed to wipe out the Markless in the case of a rebellion. DOME had been using its Pledge process to vaccinate the Marked since the program’s inception. Erin alone had hacked DOME’s most secret files surrounding this, following the trail of information through one buried memo to another, all the way to the horrible truth—that Acheron did exist, that Logan’s sister was inside of it, that the place was a training groundfor IMPS, and that six months ago, on August 16 at 7:16 in the morning, a stealth team of those IMPS called the Trumpet Task Force had been dispatched to assassinate a group of Marked A.U. citizens already sick with the fever. Somehow, it seemed clear, Project Trumpet had finally been activated. But the experiment was a failure. Its nanovirus wasn’t killing Markless. Instead, its vaccine was killing Marked . And now Erin, Marked and vaccinated herself, was the next victim to suffer the consequences.
    “Dr. Rhyne was the DOME engineer who created the nanovirus all those years ago. The Trumpet documents confirm it. We’re close to him now. Closer than I ever believed we could get. He must have a cure. He’ll help us. Because it’s his virus that isn’t working right. It’s his fault I’m sick. He’ll have to fix it.” Erin was shivering again in her blanket on the rocks. “We find Rhyne, we save lives. Millions of them. Mine included. That’s the plan.” She lay back down, fingers still pressed to her temples, absorbing the pain of a headache that wouldn’t go away.
    “I don’t like this,” Hailey said. “What if this drone is just the beginning? What if they are in Sierra waiting for us? What if we’re walking into a trap?”
    Erin shook her head. “My dad . . . he used to talk about Sierra. You know it’s the tech capital of America, right? What Beacon has in economics and New Chicago has in manufacturing, Sierra has in tech. All our nano-stuff’s come out of here, all our tablets, all our rollersticks and wallscreens . . .”
    “So what?” Hailey said. “That just means they’ll have better tools to catch us with.”
    “No, you don’t understand, Hailey. Why is it that techies are so drawn to this place?”
    Hailey shrugged.
    “Less government! Fewer prying eyes. Sierra’s as far as you can get from Lamson and Cylis. There isn’t nearly the same level of oversight out here.” Erin smiled. “My dad hated this place. It’s practically lawless. DOME’s foothold here isn’t nearly what it is out east, or up in New Chicago. Same goes for the IMPS. Even without Rhyne, it’d be the perfect place for us to go next.”
    Peck nodded. “Many of the best minds in the world live out here, for all the same reasons Erin was saying. It’d be great for us to talk with some of them. The Sierra Library is top notch too— chock-full of banned books. I’ve been dying to check it out for years.”
    “DOME can try all they want,” Erin said. “But once we outrun that probe down there, there’s no way anyone’s ever gonna find—” Erin stopped short. “What’s that sound? Am I hearing things again?”
    “Not hearing things,” Peck said. “I hear it too.”
    From high in the air over toward Sierra, a low, electric hum like from some great, spinning energy ball pulsated and whirred and traveled through the sky. The four of them craned their necks back, following the soft buzz up and over to a source that must have been nearly a mile away, moving fast and just ahead of its lagging roar. The glowing blue dot lit a tiny patch of clouds as it careened up, over, and through them,