Swipe

be dead.
    “What should we do?” Logan asked. “We don’t have Marks. We can’t even get ice cream.”
    “We’ll take a walk.” Hailey smiled. “Walking’s still free.”
    Now Logan smiled too. “Cool. All right,” he said. “Well . . . see ya.”
    Logan sighed and turned to make his way to English. What he didn’t see was Dane, waiting at the end of the hall.
    He didn’t see Dane’s clenched fists.
    And he didn’t see the look on Dane’s face.
    2
    At lunch, Logan found Erin sitting by herself on the lawn above school in the one patch of sunlight between the shadows of the surrounding buildings.
    “You hear it last night?” Logan asked.
    “Hear what?”
    “I don’t know what time it was. A voice. In the gel. It was faint, but the powder picked it up.”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Erin said.
    “Erin, you must have heard it.”
    Erin chewed her soy cheese sandwich and looked toward the sun, closing her eyes and letting it warm her face. “I didn’t hear anything.”
    That’s when Logan remembered Erin getting fed up on the playground. She’d picked the gel right out of her ears before they’d even left the scene. Great , he thought, she won’t believe this either .
    “Well, it happened. It must have been Peck. He showed last night, I’m sure of it. After we’d left.”
    Erin laughed. “That’s a likely story. Did he come with a unicorn?”
    “Look!” Logan was quickly losing his temper. “I’m sorry last night didn’t go perfectly according to your crackpot plan—which was no less dangerous just because we weren’t kidnapped, by the way—but I have no reason to make up any of this stuff. You’re the one who wants it to be true so bad. I’d much rather see it all go away.”
    Erin stuffed the rest of her lunch into her backpack. Logan noticed the equipment still inside.
    “But if you can get over your self-pity for two seconds, I got to thinking last night.”
    Erin looked at him, eyebrows raised. Impress me , they seemed to say.
    Logan could not believe what he was about to propose. Just two days ago, it had seemed insane to him, impossible. But the game was different now. “I don’t know how it is in Beacon, what you do with your Markless—”
    “In Beacon they sleep on street corners,” Erin said. “Filthy, begging, crazy, dangerous. They’re a menace. They’re useless. They’re picked up by the street cleaners with the trash and the spit.”
    “—but in Spokie the Markless mostly stay in an area called Slog Row. They stay away from us, and we let them be.”
    “That’s very civilized of you.”
    “Well, it’s that or—forget it, I don’t need to defend Spokie to you. That’s not the point.”
    Erin squinted at him in the sun. “What is your point, Logan?”
    “My point is that whether or not you’ve given up on this thing already, it seems to me that we . . . or I , if that’s how it’s gonna be . . . that we might be able to find some dirt on Peck if we . . .” He sighed, his heart pounding just at the thought of it. “If we took a little detour through Slog Row one of these days.”
    Erin shook her head. “If you were right about that, DOME would have been all over it already.”
    “I’m sure they have tried. I’m sure they’d love to be. But the Markless won’t talk to DOME,” Logan reasoned. “DOME’s the enemy.”
    “They have ways,” Erin said.
    “Oh yeah? And what would those ways be? DOME can’t send a mole in ’cause all their men are Marked. Anyone on Slog Row would spot it a mile away. I suppose they could bug the place with some of that nano-equipment you stole . . .”
    Erin picked at the plasti-grass. “Unlikely, actually, without a warrant. Laws still protect the Markless unless you can catch them for a crime. And DOME’s a huge bureaucracy. Unless they have proof Peck’s staying there—and I’m sure he’s not—they wouldn’t risk botching his trial.”
    “So there you have it. Slog’s not an avenue for DOME. The two groups cannot work together. People on that street have nothing to lose. They’d sooner die than help an agent. I’m sure some have.” Logan shook his head. “It’s a closed door to DOME.” He looked at his empty wrist. “But it’s not to me.”
    Erin considered this. “Let me get this straight. You wanna visit Slog Row . . . ourselves?”
    “Yeah.”
    “To find a trail that leads to Peck.”
    “It’s not as elegant as your bug tape, I admit.”
    “Forget