Swipe

enough energy and volume for Mom and him both. “Logan Langly, big man on campus, can’t keep the ladies off him! Come on over, tell us what’s new!” His enthusiasm seemed forced, somehow, striking Logan as oddly overpowering. Was his father angry with him? Ashamed? As he spoke, Mr. Langly took his wife’s arm and guided her gently back to her seat. For a moment, Logan stood, thinking he would confess the events of the last two nights, thinking he would explain what he’d learned about Peck. But Erin was right. This was their secret. So instead Logan followed, quiet, playing his part in the familiar scene.

    After dinner, Logan excused himself and took the elevator to his room on the seventh floor, feeling guilty and scared, if glad, to be home.
    He wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed and sleep for as long as he could.
    But something wasn’t right.
    That smell—what was it? Smoke?
    The elevator door opened to a horrifying scene.
    There, on his desk in the darkness of his room, glowing orange and yellow and sporadic and awful, was a fire.
    Logan ran to it swiftly. A paper note, burning. Logan read what remained of it through the smoke.
Logan
. . . Spokie Playground . . .
. . . Midnight . . .
. . . Or Else . . .
    No sooner had he finished reading than the paper turned to ash, burning up completely before him on his desktop, which had been wetted carefully with a protective coating of water from Logan’s nearby glass. The flame went out and fizzled in the puddle beneath it, and nothing remained of the note but a couple of charred, disintegrating tatters.
    Logan was scared beyond the capacity to scream or run or defend himself or even breathe. And when finally his heart snapped back to life it pumped white-hot fear into his brain, and the only thing that registered with any sort of clarity was: Right now, someone is here .
    Upon thinking this, Logan spun around. And the face in his window fled from view.

FIVE

SPY VS. SPY
    1
    B LAKE JUMPED FROM THE SPIRALING STAIR way, hitting the ground hard and looking for a place to hide. The sidewalk in front of Logan’s house was well lit, but he fell in among what shadows he could find and ran through their darkness.
    At the speed he was running and at this time of night, it was impossible to see, so Blake oriented himself by Logan’s shouting behind him. “I know you’re there!” it went. “I know you’re out there!”
    But Blake was long gone.
    He strained to listen for footsteps or sirens behind him. Nothing. Logan hadn’t followed.

    The settlement was across town, on the outskirts of Spokie, among gutted apartments and abandoned buildings isolated from the sparkle and disinfectant of the rest . . . the neighborhood on the wrong side of the expressway, where Spokie residents knew never to go, where cops turned the other way, where the dust settled and was never stirred . . . on Slog Row, Blake’s home among the Markless.
    Still winded from his run, Blake stepped over shards of glass, between boards of wood nailed clumsily over the broken storefront window, and into the abandoned Fulmart that once anchored the neighborhood. There was a time when everything you could want rested inside these cavernous walls—clothes, hardware, food . . . but those days were long gone.

    It started with the old firehouse, which had been abandoned for years, too far outside what had become central Spokie to be of any use. The Markless, unable to pay rent and quietly kicked out of their homes one by one, took refuge in that old building. At first, cops would make sweeps and clean the place up each night, since residents along the Row would complain. But with nowhere else to go, the Markless always returned, and as crime on the block steadily rose, residents saved up and moved out, one family at a time, to the better parts of town. In just this way, over the years, poverty on the long block spread all the way from the firehouse to the Fulmart at its other end nearly a quarter mile away, and Slog Row earned its name.
    Blake didn’t mind. The arrangement suited him. Because he was Markless. And because inside the Fulmart, second shelf up from the floor, was Blake’s home on aisle 3.
    He walked there now, stumbling a little in the darkness broken only by shafts of moonlight filtering through the boarded storefront windows, and was pleased to find the other Dust waiting up for him.
    Tyler and Eddie sat on the floor, playing cards by candlelight. “Wanna join?” Tyler