Storm (Swipe Series)

history, he will be the savior too—the savior to the survivors of the very same plague he planned.” Lamson laughed. “Who else could have ever challenged Cylis’s power, Logan? Who else could have even approached it?
    “No one. Except me. Someday. If I’d decided I wanted to. And you. The Dust. Someday. If the chips fell in your favor often enough, as they have this year.
    “It wouldn’t have been likely. But it was possible . And these . . . these were contingencies that Cylis could not abide.”
    Lamson shrugged. He turned halfway back toward the window, gazing idly at the light leaking through.
    “There is no good and evil in this world, Logan. Not as I see it. There are only winners—and losers. We’ve lost now you and I.
    “And Cylis has won.
    “And that, I’m sorry to say . . . is simply the story of it.”
    Lamson’s head fell back. The air left him in one long sigh. None went back in.
    Lamson was dead.
    There was a smile on his face.
    3
    Logan made no attempt to run when the IMPS broke into Lamson’s office, led by his own sister, Lily Langly. He put up no fight. He stood numbly where he was by Lamson’s desk, its tablescreen dark and glossy. The sounds of the door crashing down and the IMPS rushing in registered not at all in Logan’s mind. To him, the room was quiet, a soft ringing in his ears the only thing separating it from total, isolating silence.
    When the magnecuffs came hammering down around his arms and legs, Logan stumbled, but he did not flinch. His blood pressure didn’t rise, his heart rate didn’t spike. To Logan, it was as if the whole scene were playing out ten thousand feet below. He watched from his great height, bemused, smiling even, up above the gray and tumbling storm clouds, and not caring in the slightest about that tiny, misguided boy being dragged roughly down the hall. What was his name? Logan wondered.
    Ah, yes—Langly. Unfortunate, deluded Logan Langly.
    I knew him once.
    He had a sister I think I liked.
    4
    “Snap out of it,” Lily said, slapping her brother across the face. “Look alive now. This next part’s important.”
    The two of them were standing at the end of the hallway, just inside the Capitol’s main entrance and steps.
    “You betrayed me,” Logan said. “You set me up. You knew Lamson was trying to protect us, and you had me stop him anyway. Hundreds of thousands will die! Your own family . . .”
    “That’s right,” Lily said. “And I would do it all again, if that’s what it takes.”
    Logan stared at her blankly.
    “If that’s what what takes? Lily—if that’s what what takes?”
    Now Lily pulled her brother close, and she hugged him tight. “You grew up to be a good kid,” she told him. “A hero, you know that?” She fell away, looking stoically out the Capitol’s doorway to the steps beyond.
    “I love you, Logan. But this next part might hurt.”
    “Why?” Logan asked. “Because you’re going to sentence me?”
    “No,” Lily said. “I’m going to leave it to your peers.”
    And with that, Lily dragged her brother out the door, to the top of the Capitol steps. He was bruised and bloody and he was having trouble standing, so she had to prop him up for the Markless protesters down below to see.
    “Markless!” she called. “I present to you the accused!”
    All at once, the crowd was still. “This boy, Logan Langly . . . the face of the Markless uprising . . . the very symbol of rebellion against the Mark, against the Marked, against everything Lamson and Cylis and the Global Union stood for . . . has just been convicted of mass murder on a scale difficult even to imagine.”
    The crowd was not inclined to trust the Marked government—least of all Cylis. And yet the pieces fit. This was the boy who’d broken out of Acheron. This was the boy who started the revolution. What else was he capable of? The crowd simply didn’t know.
    And the seeds of doubt had been sewn.
    To all those who knew of him—through Markless radio and River rumors, through huddle hearsay and banned copies of Swipe . . . the crime fit the man. The motivations were clear. The capability was self-evident. Cylis’s story checked out.
    But in that awful haze of protest-wide doubt, one lone voice spoke up.
    Tyler had squirmed his way to the front of the crowd, and he poked his head out from between two much taller adults. “Oh, this is bogus ,” he yelled. “Come on, you people don’t actually believe any of this nonsense, do