Swipe

her iguana, and she’d set the lizard loose in her apartment building to see if the gel would pick up any outside conversations. Until now, she’d heard nothing, and truthfully, in her excitement over the rest of the equipment, she’d forgotten all about her little audio test.
    But the screaming continued in her ears, hollow and tinny, a voice shouting, “It’s a monster, someone kill it!” And while Erin was happy to know that the powder-gel combination she’d tested was working, she was now faced with the more urgent task of tracking down an illegal pet iguana that had clearly just escaped into the unforgiving streets of Spokie.
    6
    Across town, Logan and Dane’s old friend Hailey Phoenix put dinner in front of her mother and sat down at the table to eat. Tonight they were having lentils and cabbage.
    Hailey’s mother, Mrs. Phoenix, worked long and grueling hours on the floor of the nanomaterials plant out of town. Her commute, by electrobus, was an hour and a half each way, so she would leave at four thirty each morning, and she would return home at six o’clock each night. This was her routine seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year.
    When she did come home, Mrs. Phoenix would invariably spend her first thirty minutes or so in the bathroom upstairs, coughing violently and murmuring things about “all that nano-dust,” which usually gave Hailey enough time to prepare dinner, since their dinners were never elaborate.
    It had not always been this way. Just three years ago, Mrs. Phoenix was still an Unmarked, stay-at-home mother, and Mr. Phoenix worked as head manager over at the plant. They’d never had much money, but they’d had enough, and they enjoyed the quiet life Hailey’s father had always supported.
    Then, in Hailey’s sixth-grade year, Mr. Phoenix died of a heart attack, brought on, the doctors said, by the drinking habit he’d never quite been able to outsmart since his time serving in the States War. Ironically, his autopsy confirmed that it was in fact the nano-enhancements in his favorite drink—manufactured at the very same plant Mr. Phoenix managed—that finally did him in.
    But neither Mrs. Phoenix nor Hailey ever saw the humor in this, and when they’d called in every last favor they could from friends across Spokie, when the food and everything else simply ran out, Mrs. Phoenix had no choice but to receive the Mark and beg her way into a pity hire at the lowest levels of work the nano-materials plant had to offer.
    “How’s school this year?” Hailey’s mother asked.
    “The same. We’re doing holograms in art.”
    “That’s great!” Mrs. Phoenix said. “You’ve gotta be the best in the class!”
    Hailey smiled. “I am, I think.”
    Outside of schoolwork, Hailey had taken up two hobbies since her father passed away. The first was a habit of long, nighttime walks outside of town. Hailey liked the countryside feeling of the cornfields and sparse woods, and she often imagined herself living deep in the no-man’s-land between the Union’s great cities. Hailey had no idea how this would ever be possible—she hadn’t even the means to travel to New Chicago, let alone the faraway flatlands, and anyway she had her mother to worry about—but she allowed herself the fantasy all the same.
    The second thing Hailey had taken up was sculpture. Every chance her mother got, she would bring home machine scraps and discarded equipment from the plant, and Hailey would spend her free time turning it into art, which her mother kept around the house or displayed proudly on the front steps.
    This odd hobby began after Mrs. Phoenix noticed what great things Hailey was making with all the garbage she’d found on the street (there was a lot of garbage on Hailey’s street), and before long Hailey got the impression that her mother entertained wild dreams of Hailey Phoenix becoming the great modern artist of Spokie. This was even more ridiculous than her own plans to move out to the flatlands, Hailey thought, but at the same time she had to admit that it was kind of nice.
    “Holograms,” Mrs. Phoenix said. “Imagine that.”

    After she’d washed the dishes and bid her mother good night, Hailey slipped out of the house, as she almost always did, to take her nightly stroll.
    The sun was sitting low in the sky at this point, and since Hailey’s block was as close as any inhabited street got to Slog Row, there were more than a few Markless roaming the sidewalk. But Hailey didn’t