Swipe

left, right, up, right, elevator—thirteenth floor, straight, left, right . . . but he couldn’t keep track. It turned out his visit to the Center across the street, with Erin’s dad after Dane’s concert, was just a preview. He’d never walked so deep into a building so big and so swallowing.
    “You ever forget where you’re going?” Logan joked to the nurse.
    “Constantly,” she said, and she swiped her Mark under a scanner mounted to the wall, above which a floor map appeared and dotted a line to their destination, like the world’s worst imitation of Pac-Man.
    The room she finally brought Logan to was featureless and unassuming. In its center, against the far wall, was a chair like you’d see in a university lecture hall, with its right side flattening out into a small surface big enough to rest an arm against. Along this surface and at its end were stirrups—one for the upper forearm just below the elbow, the next for the back of the hand— and five rings for the fingers. This was Logan’s guess; the nurse explained none of it.
    To the side of the chair was a machine, roughly the size of a refrigerator, stacked with disk drives and exuding a tangle of wires leading to a monitor. Logan followed with his eyes the wires to their ends. They looked to be designed specifically for attaching to flesh, and Logan felt his heart rate rise.
    “You can sit right there,” the nurse said, and when Logan did, he noticed a wall-length mirror to his right. He saw himself in it, remembered his interrogation with Mr. Arbitor after Dane’s concert, and immediately wondered who was watching from the other side. “Your Marker will be in shortly to officiate your Pledge and conduct the procedure. I will be prepping you for it in the meantime. Do you have any questions before we begin?”
    “Yes,” Logan said. “Can I do it without the nanosleep?”
    The nurse smiled at him as if he’d asked her to drill a hole in his head. “Trust me when I say you wouldn’t want that,” she said.
    “Do I not have the option?”
    “I’ve been prepping Pledges here for nine years,” she said. “No one’s ever done it without the sleep.” She held the spoon out. Pooled on it was a thick, silvery serum. It looked to Logan like mercury, and just as poisonous. “Open up.”
    “I’d rather know what you’re doing to me,” Logan said, and a look of righteous anger flashed across the nurse’s face.
    “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s . . . a requisite part of the process. If you need more time to consider the benefits of the Pledge itself, I can reschedule your appointment for a later date. But between you and me”—she glanced almost imperceptibly toward the mirror at Logan’s right—“I’d take the sleep.”
    Peck’s warnings began buzzing through Logan’s mind like mosquitoes. You will not return from the Pledge , they hummed. Whatever crime they saw in your sister, they will see it in you .
    But Logan had to see a Marker. Five minutes alone with one— that’s all he needed. It was worth the risk. So Logan opened his mouth, and in went the nanosleep. It tasted good, icy and thick like a gelatin. The nurse waited for him to swallow, but he did not.
    “Whah if ah own’d wagup?” Logan asked. The dose crackled on his tongue like soda and Pop Rocks, electric in its reaction to his mouth.
    “You will.” The nurse laughed. “I promise you’ll wake up.”
    “Buh whah if ah own’d?”
    The nurse smiled. “When it’s over, I give you this.” She wielded a syringe from the countertop beside her. “It’ll perk you right up.”
    Logan weighed his options a final time. But there was no avoiding it. The choice had been made. Logan swallowed the nano-sleep.
    “Good,” the nurse said. “In a moment you’ll feel the first wave of the sleep, and from there we’ll have a few minutes for questions and answers before you nod off and I make way for your Marker.” The nurse smiled, as if this were all the simplest thing in the world. “And when you wake up, it’ll all be over! May I?” She brushed Logan’s hair back and began attaching wires with cool, wet suction cups to his temples and scalp and the nape of his neck. He shivered at her touch. “Logan, do you have any professional goals? Career plans? Aspirations?”
    The question caught him off guard. “I wanna make a difference,” he said. “I guess I never thought much about how.”
    The nurse nodded. “And what do you like to do for