Storm (Swipe Series)

wanna see this.”
    Jo led Blake to a far, secluded corner of the turbine room. They had to duck under a tangle of old pipes to get there. This corner was the medical section of Beacon’s underground Markless community, chosen partly for its privacy, and partly because the mess of tubing surrounding it was actually a large part of the room’s ventilation system. When it came to an underground infirmary, it was best to have the surrounding air filtered out however possible.
    Within this area now was a team of older Markless doctors all flocking around a flushed, sweating, middle-aged man. He was groaning, his eyes rolled up, and he turned his head back and forthin a slow, constant rhythm, as if answering some horrible question that only he could hear.
    “What’s his story?” Blake asked.
    And then Blake caught a glimpse of the man’s wrist. The man was Marked.
    “I found him up on street level,” Jo said. “He was lying outside City Center Hospital, shivering and delirious.”
    “So you brought him here ?” Blake asked. “To our Markless doctors?”
    “That’s right,” Jo told him.
    “But we don’t have facilities here,” Blake said. “We barely have medicine. Why didn’t you just take him inside the hospital streetside?”
    “Because.” Joanne sighed. “They’ve already run out of space.”
    Blake narrowed his eyes, confused.
    “He was dying, Blake. Our doctors are the only option this guy has left.” Joanne looked at the man and his Mark with a great worry in her eyes. “Blake . . . you know what this means.”
    He frowned. “Yeah, Jo. I know what it means.”

    That night, Joanne organized Markless field trips to Beacon’s hospitals all across the hill. At each of them, the line for treatment had grown in just the last day alone, spilling out now, past the doors and onto the sidewalks. And so, from each of them, Markless shuttled Marked into their great big underground huddle, where Markless doctors could look at them, and where at least they could be dry and warm.
    In this way Beacon’s Unmarked capital doubled in size thatnight, all of its newcomers Marked. Sick. Feverish. Every last one of them.
    Everything had changed, the Dust knew now. Rain relief or not, there would be no denying it anymore. The vaccine was active.
    The next wrath was already upon them.
    Project Trumpet was live.
    4
    A rain so hard it shook the house. Falling. Running. Too fast to patter or bead. Just walls of water. Falling at once like rubble from some crumbling city in the sky. Like some whole world that exploded into a billion tears. Crying onto ours.
    Hailey sat in the hallway outside her mother’s room.
    The coughing had stopped. Dianne Phoenix was peaceful.
    She’d died in the early hours of the morning, with her daughter by her side. Hailey was kneeling at the time, running a cool washcloth against her mother’s forehead.
    Hailey had been singing softly, a song she’d learned from the Markless back in Beacon.
    All day, Mrs. Phoenix had thrashed, and moaned, and screamed. Not just from the pain of it, but the delirium too. She screamed for Hailey’s father, long dead himself. She screamed for her boss from the nanomaterials plant, twenty-five miles away. She called Hailey Sonya. She called Hailey Cylis. She asked for forgiveness.
    And finally, she was quiet. Restful.
    Hailey had watched her mother breathe. She had listened to the sound of it.
    A miraculous thing, breathing, she thought. We never think of it.
    But Hailey did think of it then. She counted the breaths, each one. She listened to the air. To the way the bed shifted, just slightly, each time. Until it shifted less. And then less again after that.
    The breaths came slowly toward the end. One every three seconds. One every ten seconds. One a minute.
    And then none.
    Hailey cried. She cried heavily. It was a hard rain that fell, but it was no longer enough to renew the hope.
    There was just so much water.

    Hailey sat alone in that hallway outside her mother’s room for the rest of the night.

    She sat through the morning.

    She sat through the day.
    5
    Back in December, Hailey Phoenix made a foxhole radio for her mother out of scraps and garbage. It wasn’t built to last. And yethere Hailey was now, her mother gone while the radio still chattered away. It isn’t fair, Hailey thought, that a person’s world could go on without them . But the following night, Hailey sat in that hallway again, close as she could bear to the body she did not