Storm (Swipe Series)

and its vibration became something Logan and the others could feel just as well as hear.
    “What in the world . . . ,” Peck started to say, but already that soft blue dot was closing in. It seemed to travel the whole sky in just under a minute, moving fast and with the high, parabolic arc of a missile.
    But it didn’t look like a missile. It looked like an oversized blue baseball charting the course of some incredible grand slam. It wasn’t flying. It was falling.
    And it was headed straight for them.
    Hailey turned to Erin, her expression a mix of self-righteousness and horror. “You were saying?”
    “Take cover,” Logan shout-whispered. “Hide!”
    Within seconds, the giant ball was there, right on top of them, just a couple hundred feet above.
    Logan shielded his face. Peck grimaced. Hailey held her breath. Erin pulled the blanket up to her eyes.
    And then that glowing orb did something unexpected. In the last hundred feet of its free fall, short bursts of steam sprayed out from below in all directions, slowing it, aiming it, controlling the final moments of its descent. It wasn’t going to crash. It was going to land.
    Now just a few feet overhead, the object could be seen for what it was—a glass sphere about the size of a car, its blue glow shooting out the front like a single, huge headlight. Softly, quietly, it touched down onto the ground in the center of the rough square formed by Logan, Peck, Hailey, and Erin.
    Logan held a rock in his hands. He bounced it a couple of times, preparing to throw the thing with whatever force necessary to defend himself.
    A short, sliding sound escaped the giant ball, and Logan, Peck, Hailey, and Erin watched in silence as the side of it opened up.
    But what stepped out wasn’t DOME. It wasn’t an IMP. It was a kid. No older than ten or eleven. He was tanned with dusty brown hair and freckles. He wore a nanotech tie-dye t-shirt with a pattern that swirled and moved and morphed like a vat of paint still being mixed. He took two steps forward, and promptly threw up onto the ground.
    “Sorry,” he said. “That always happens.” Then the boy stoodup as tall as he could, balancing on tiptoes, looking down at the valley below. He squinted at the DOME probe and frowned. “You guys are the Dust, right?”
    Logan stared at him. “Who’s asking?”
    “Oh, hey—Logan! Nice to meet you, I’m Sam.” The boy stepped forward to shake Logan’s hand. Logan gripped his rock tighter and made no motion to return the gesture.
    The boy shrugged and pointed to Erin. “You’re the hacker, right? Snooping around Dr. Rhyne’s files?”
    Everyone stared. For a moment, there was quiet.
    “Hit a snag, I see.” The boy pointed down to the car in the distance and the drone still circling above it.
    “You could say that,” Peck said.
    The boy frowned. “A gas car. Private. Quite a useful commodity, before you went and totaled the thing.” He eyed Peck and the others in succession. “Wonder where you found it . . .”
    “A friend,” Peck said. “It was a gift from a friend.”
    And in fact, this was partially true. The car had once belonged to Winston, son of the Rathbones, a megarich family out in the middle of nowhere that just two months earlier had come very close to having Peck and all his friends killed on their way out to Beacon. And they would have, too, had Winston not taken mercy on them just in time. He’d given that car—his family’s one-of-a-kind prized possession—to the Dust in the hope that they might escape his family’s clutches and make it the rest of the way to Beacon in one piece.
    They had. But that wasn’t the end of the gift’s usefulness. For the past week, Peck and the others had been burning up the last of that car’s trunkful of gasoline canisters like the whole thing was going out of style (which it very much had), and praying thatit just might have enough life left in it to take them all the way to Sierra.
    So close, Peck thought.
    But the boy frowned and pulled Peck back into the present. “You are here to see Dr. Rhyne, though, aren’t you?”
    “How?” Erin asked, raising an eyebrow and trying to hide her terror. “How could you have guessed that? What exactly is it you know about us?”
    The boy shrugged. “I know your best option is to come with me. I know the doctor is waiting for you. And I certainly know how impatient Dr. Rhyne can be.”
    “Oh yeah?” Logan said. “And what makes you think any of that?”
    The boy