Swipe

Spokie than in Beacon!”
    “That’s not what this is, Erin.”
    “What about Mom’s career, huh? What about my education—”
    “This is what’s best for all of us,” Mr. Arbitor said, in a tone that suggested he’d been through this enough times with his wife already. “When we are called upon, we make sacrifices. Some things are more important than—”
    “Than what? Than your family? How important can it be when you won’t even tell me what you’re needed for? I mean, maybe if I had some sense of what you were doing out here, at least I could wrap my head around—”
    “Government work, Erin. Government work.”
    “’Course, Dad,” Erin said. In all his years at DOME, Mr. Arbitor had never once talked about the specifics of what he did. When friends asked, Erin said what she was told to say, which was, “Government work,” even though she had no idea what that meant. Somehow it just summed it up, said it all. If anyone pressed, she was supposed to say, “DOME, Department of Marked Emergencies.” But no one ever pressed. The weight of the first two words was enough.
    Frankly, Erin couldn’t understand what her father was doing at a desk job in the first place. When she was younger, he had been a Beacon police officer, and a good one at that. In those days, when they’d play games together, he’d swoop her around the room with one hand. She’d hug him at night after his long days of patrolling the city, and it’d knock the wind out of her, every time. She loved that.
    Now, sitting beside her in the plush, DOME-reserved train car, Mr. Arbitor was balding, and what remained of his hair was too long and unkempt. His face was lined from stress, and he’d become soft and fat. Looking at him, there were hints at some of the strength he’d kept—the definition in his forearms, the width of his back—but nothing that would grab a person’s attention, nothing to terrify a criminal in pursuit, and Erin resented him for it. Why he’d given up life as a hero, as a known hero in the greatest city on the continent, for anonymity at DOME doing who-knew-what for higher-ups too selfish to mind transferring a family man halfway across the country, Erin would never know.
    “Been a nice ride, anyway,” Mr. Arbitor said, after hours of silence, and despite herself, Erin had to agree. She’d never been away from the coast before, hadn’t ever ventured far beyond the closest suburbs of Beacon. There’d never been a reason to, and anyway, long-distance travel was tough ever since the airline and auto industries collapsed. A plane ticket from Beacon to New Chicago would have cost several times Mr. Arbitor’s annual salary, and private cars were mostly a forgotten luxury. Intercity magnetrain lines were just recently becoming reliable enough for cross-country travel, and even this trip was only really made affordable by the tickets DOME had supplied.
    Erin had to admit she liked the feeling of it, of the smooth, silent tracks, of seeing the countryside pass and change. The Beacon Metrorail trains were different, slow and loud and rough enough to make you sick, and none of the lines went far enough out of Beacon for a change of scenery, anyway.
    On the magnetrain, the world transformed before her. The vast metropolis spreading out from central Beacon gradually thinned. Buildings shrank in both size and height, and city blocks eventually gave way to towns, which gave themselves, in turn, to wasteland.
    A satellite photo of North America at the time would have looked much like a grim, sepia-toned shooting range. Three enormous bull’s-eyes dotted the browned and dusty continent, and Erin was making her way between two of them now. The first and most prominent would certainly have been Beacon, which was the largest of America’s cultural epicenters, its rings extending up and down the eastern coast as well as westward, their faintest influences reaching all the way out to the Allegheny River.
    The second bull’s-eye would have been New Chicago, much smaller than Beacon, but very dense, and stretching far north to create a long oval, marred only by the Great Lakes, and extending well into an area once known as Canada.
    The third and final bull’s-eye of the American Union would have been Sierra City, the youngest and least developed of the Union’s urban capitals (it had been within Erin’s lifetime that the old western coast was destroyed by the earthquake), but sprawling and lively nonetheless.