Swipe

parents’ bedroom, which Logan didn’t need to check, so he moved straight to Mrs. Langly’s study on eleven, filled to the brim with screens and meteorology tablets and satellite dishes, though no spies or burglars or murderers. It was beginning to look as if Logan would wake to see another day.
    On the roof was the Langlys’ yard. It was too small to play football up there, but it had a nice view. The grass shook gently in the evening wind, and having now checked each floor, Logan relaxed and allowed himself the drowsiness leading so pleasantly to sleep. He took the elevator down to his room on seven and crawled back under the covers, relieved to have made it through another night.
    Except!
    There! On his desk! The picture he kept . . . had it moved?
    In its frame was the last snapshot taken of Logan and his sister, on the eve of her death, smiling over presents with the blur of family celebration behind them. Logan always kept this picture positioned so he could see it from his bed. Now it rested ever so slightly pointed away, his view of it not quite straight on, the desk space in front of it just slightly wet with water that should have been in the glass beside it.
    Who had been there? Who had snuck in through the window? Who had tipped the glass and knocked the picture askew?
    No one .
    No one , Logan told himself. You’re being insane .
    . . . Right?
    And Logan’s heart snapped in his chest—so hard that it hurt—when across the room, the door to the outside stairway clicked quietly shut.

TWO

ERIN ARBITOR AND THE
GOVERNMENT WORK
    1
    E RIN ARBITOR WAS AWARE OF HER FATHER’S voice beside her, but she couldn’t have told you what he was saying. His chatter filled their magnetrain compartment like a bored conductor’s while her mind wandered further and further away, past the blur of unfamiliar tracks, past cities and towns, over mountains and across rivers, all the way back to Beacon City, her city, half a continent away and nothing like the humdrum destination she rode to now.
    Spokie , she thought. It would never be home.
    “—don’t know why we couldn’t have caught an earlier train,” Mr. Arbitor was saying. “Soon as we get in we’ll have to register you for school; then I need to get straight to the office and set up while you unpack at the apartment.”
    “Fine, Dad,” Erin said. She held her pet iguana up to the window so it could see an oily and polluted Lake Erie off in the distance.
    “It’s just a lot to do in one afternoon—”
    “I know, Dad.”
    “—and you and I are both gonna need to hit the ground running tomorrow.” Mr. Arbitor shook his head. “Not even there yet and we’re already behind. Kept saying we should have left on Friday . . .”
    Erin rested Iggy on her lap and emerged reluctantly from her daydream, caustic and angry. “If only there could have been some way for us to stay with Mom in Beacon instead of uprooting our lives for no good reason.” She shook her head, feigning sympathy. “Then you wouldn’t be suffering such a terrible inconvenience.”
    “It was your mother’s decision not to come with us,” Mr. Arbitor said forcefully. He ignored Erin’s tone. “She knows how important this job is. And not just to me—to the Union.”
    Erin sighed, caught square in the middle of a standoff between two strong-headed, working parents.
    Just two months ago, Mr. Arbitor had surprised his family with the announcement that he had received a promotion at work, and that they would be moving to Spokie to accommodate it. Erin’s mom, a top economic software analyst on Barrier Street in Beacon City, had told him precisely what he could do with that idea. Of course, Mr. Arbitor was certain it was only a matter of time before his wife gave in and found a way to keep the family together, but so far, she had not, and Erin was left with no choice but to get used to a new town a thousand miles away while her dad played a game of spousal career chicken and her mom continued enjoying life in the Big City back east.
    “Well—anything for the Union,” Erin said sarcastically, and her father rolled his eyes.
    “I mean it,” he said. “I took this job with good reason. You’ll feel better about it once your mother’s out here with us.”
    “She’s not coming out here with us, Dad! She’s waiting for you to come to your senses and tell DOME you can’t just uproot your family because some bureaucrat’s offering more money to copy and paste documents in