Swipe

furiously, her brain at full alert, her eyes locked on the cluster of skinflints ahead of her. But with Logan to her left, crouching invisibly in the shadows, she couldn’t help but let her mind wander a little.
    He came for me , she thought. He was worried . She hadn’t expected that when she’d snuck out tonight. But she didn’t follow the train of thought to its conclusion. She didn’t allow it to reach the part where Logan had said, “You’re important to me.” Because that wasn’t possible. He couldn’t have meant it. Could he?
    Logan, meanwhile, had one eye on the kids and one on the darkness, right where he knew Erin was hiding beside him. Why had she come out tonight? Risking everything on her own in the worst part of town? What was in it for her?
    Only home , Logan decided. Bringing her family back together . . . moving back to Beacon . That’s the tie that binds us. I’m just her ticket home .
    5
    Dane Harold didn’t much like spending evenings anywhere but in his den. He hated his bedroom. With its wide spaces and bare walls and impeccable neatness, it didn’t even feel like his. Dirty clothes or stray wrappers from a previous night were always gone by the time he came home from school, and he’d long since realized that even his attempts to spoil the place were futile. Once he’d taken a pocketknife to his desk during a particularly frustrating homework session, cutting profanities into its surface with a wicked delight. The next day Dane had a new desk. To him, the message was crystal clear: these are not your things, and this is not your room to ruin.
    The living room was worse. It had a ceiling that stretched nearly thirty feet high. Its polished wood floors and priceless art made Dane feel like a visitor in a museum, not a kid in his own house. And it made him feel ashamed. No one outside the few blocks surrounding his had homes like this or wealth like this, and the other kids in Old District who did were brats. So where did that leave Dane?
    But the den was his. No one went in there but him—not his mother, not his father, not even the family’s not-strictly-legal live-in Markless housekeeper, George.
    Dane sat there now, noodling on his wailing mitts with the volume just a little too loud. He knew it, but he didn’t care. Dane never had friends over at his house these days. And he had not been ignorant to the look in Hailey’s eyes as she passed through the rooms on her way to the den, taking everything in. Did she see him as one of them , just another jerk from Old District, sitting on his acre of land? He cared about what she thought, Dane realized in his most honest moments. He cared a lot.
    Maybe he’d sleep in here tonight, right in his cyberpunk clothes, curled up on his beanbag chair in the corner. Better than the king-size bed waiting for him upstairs, with its bleached white sheets. Better than the mound of pillows that suffocated him in his dreams.
    “Master Dane?” George called gently from behind the closed door. He made no attempt to open it. “Do you think maybe it might be time for bed? Your parents have been asleep for some time now, and the noise cancellation in their walls can only go to such lengths . . .”
    “George.”
    “Yes, Master Dane?”
    “Open the door. Speak to my face. Don’t call me master .”
    George opened the door a crack and poked his head around it apologetically.
    “Oh, just come in already, will you?”
    George did.
    “Just . . . don’t clean anything, okay?”
    George stood at attention in the door frame.
    “Close the door. Sit down. Just treat me like a kid, will you? Stop looking at me like that.”
    George found a stool by Dane’s electric drum set and sat on it awkwardly.
    “Something wrong this evening . . . Dane?”
    “Do you hate it here, George?”
    George looked at him, perplexed. He didn’t answer.
    “I won’t tell my parents. I’m on your side, if you do.”
    “I don’t,” George said. “I don’t hate it here.”
    “But haven’t you ever thought about . . . just getting the stupid Mark, already? I mean, seriously, you wouldn’t . . . you don’t have to live this way.”
    “I know that, Dane.”
    “Then what in the world are you thinking? Why won’t you just do it, already? Get out of here? Let my parents pay for a maid. Or take care of themselves, for Cylis’s sake.”
    George smiled. “I told you, Dane. I like it here.”
    “You like living in a room to the side of a house that’s not yours?