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the feelings and jealousy Dane admitted to, or of the embarrassment Hailey felt, and Logan never did understand why the relationship between his two closest friends went so suddenly cold in the final weeks of that summer. He assumed it was just natural when Hailey quietly faded from the two boys’ lives the following school year; that it was just the course of things when she started spending more and more time with other girls, or when she fell in with those elusive “cooler kids” last year at whom Hailey hinted every once in a while, when the three of them made awkward conversation at lunch or on the way home from school.
    And Dane, for his part, buried his feelings as best as he could, protecting himself and saving his friendship with Logan in the process.
    “She is so weird,” Dane said to Logan now, though Logan couldn’t help but notice him staring at Hailey ’til she was out of sight.
    “Cool about the rollerstick, anyway. I’ve always been terrified of those things.” Logan shrugged.
    Dane nodded, accepting the change of subject. “Hey, is ’at her?” he asked, and Logan squinted across the field.
    It was the first time he saw her, Erin Arbitor. She was sitting on the plasti-grass, eating corn bread, alone.
    And Logan said, “I don’t know,” though he was somehow sure that it was.
    “What’s she doing? Looks like she’s talking to herself,” Dane said.
    But Logan didn’t notice that. Instead he noticed her hair, straight and copper all the way down to the small of her back. He noticed her eyes, shining cobalt blue in the sunlight. He noticed her clothes, which couldn’t possibly have come from Spokie. Kids from Spokie wore local fabrics, mostly drab shades of cotton, wool . . . but hers were loud, bright, and synthetic. She was foreign, somehow. Different. Better. She was beautiful.
    “Talk to her,” Dane said, seeing the look on Logan’s face. “I dare you.”
    “I don’t know,” Logan said, but Dane laughed and gave him a good, hard push in the right direction, and somehow Logan’s feet just kept right on walking after that.
    3
    Halfway across the lawn, Erin sat, totally inside her own head, playing through what she’d discovered the night before.
    My dad. My dad is a . . .
    She felt the words form on her lips but didn’t speak them aloud. This was her secret. Not even hers, in fact, but her father’s and her father’s alone . . . if it was anyone’s at all.
    The box had been filled with papers, a whole stack of them, the most she’d ever seen at once. Nothing was ever written on paper anymore, since everyone had switched to tablets, and yet here was a boxful of it, yellowed, handwritten, one of a kind, confidential. In an age of infinite digital documentation, paper was the last safe place for secrets. Not to be copied and pasted with the stroke of a stylus, not to be sent around the world at the press of a button, not to be recorded and stored forever in a million irretrievable pieces across cyberspace and time, paper was intimate . . . fragile. Her father wrote of things she never knew existed, of the Eyes & Ears Bureau where Mr. Arbitor worked within the Department of Marked Emergencies, of missions he’d been on, surveillance he’d taken, people he’d locked away . . .
    My dad is a spy . Erin now found herself reassessing every perception she’d had of her father. His career move from the Beacon police department finally made sense. The stress he was under, his humbled nature, the seriousness with which he took his work . . . even his effort to blend in, physically, over the past few years . . . all of it fit, once Erin had the context.
    And then there was the paper at the top of the box, the most pressing memo of all—Agent Arbitor’s current assignment. The one that brought him halfway across the country, the one that uprooted Erin’s life and tore her family apart: Peck and the Markless threat in Spokie .
    A real-life mystery. A whole slew of unsolved crimes. Ongoing. Dangerous. And her father was the detective.
    She had just begun to wrap her head around it when out of the corner of her eye she saw a short, skinny, jumpy boy with dirty-blond hair approach and heard him say in a quiet voice, “Hi. I’m Logan. You’re Erin, right?”
    But in that moment the class bell rang across the field, and Erin did not answer, and Logan went red and hurried away.
    4
    “No luck, huh?” Dane ribbed Logan as they walked the halls to their next class. “Maybe she