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fun?”
    “I, uh . . .” Thoughts of Erin flashed through his head. Flying down the streets on her rollerstick, his arms around her. Tablet calls late at night with exciting news. Lunches spent planning the evening’s adventures. “I like reading,” Logan said. “I like music.”
    The machine to his right flashed brightly in several places.
    The nurse eyed it. “Mm-hm.”
    Panic surged through Logan’s brain as it fought the encroaching effects of the nanosleep. Imagining believable lies to the nurse’s questions became much too complicated, much too confusing. As she probed deeper and deeper into his family history, his childhood, his schoolwork, his thoughts on the American Union . . . it became impossible to think of anything but the truth. He watched himself speak, some part of him cringing at his own answers, recoiling at the display of flashing lights on the machine. If he hadn’t been so determined to fight the onset of his medication from the start, he doubted he would have known what he was saying at all.
    “When’sa Marker gettin’ . . . ?” Logan slurred. There was urgency now.
    “Just a few more minutes,” the nurse said. “You’re probably feeling a little light-headed by now, but don’t worry. That’s normal.” She looked nervously to the machine, now, to his right. Her voice was distant and tinny. Euphoria swept over Logan, and he found himself suddenly giggling and at the same time furious with himself for it. He was rapidly losing control.
    Logan thought hard, trying desperately to calculate when he’d swallowed the nanosleep and figuring he had no more than a couple of minutes until the stuff took intractable hold of his consciousness.
    So Logan took a deep, sharp breath.
    Better make ’em count .
    4
    Logan had to move fast if any part of his plan was going to work.
    He had to move fast if he was going to make it out of this building on his own terms. It took supreme concentration to fight even the preliminary effects of the nanosleep, and Logan knew those were merely the lazy shadow of what loomed ahead once the dose was fully metabolized.
    His vision grew spotty and dim, like an old, yellowing photograph, and Logan’s very self seemed to bubble up through his head and out of his skull in fizzy, carbonated gurgles. It was painful, but it was a pain he’d never imagined. A pain that made him laugh.
    Now Logan felt his lungs hyperventilating in some kind of last-ditch effort to jolt his brain back into gear, and he found another part of his self noticing with ultimate, lame indifference that the nurse had already locked his arm in place on the stirrups of the desk, and that she was currently injecting his wrist with a shot of something he could not feel.
    Bemused and vacant, Logan watched with faraway eyes as the nurse pressed an intercom button on the wall . . . and called his Marker in.
    It was done before he knew he was doing it. With the nurse across the room and distracted, Logan had leaned far over to the countertop at his left. Still locked into his stirrups, his reach had dragged the legs of his desk across the floor with a grating screech he hadn’t heard. The nurse turned back his way in alarm, but Logan had already grabbed the syringe of whatever-it-was and lodged it firmly into his shoulder, pressing its trigger all the way down before she could make it back to his corner to tear the needle out. The world snapped back into view, skipping like the bad frame rate of an old, distorted video, but there and present nonetheless.
    Logan was groggy and slow and confused, but he’d regained enough of his self to know he had one chance to react. With the nurse leaning over and tending to the dark swelling that had popped up on Logan’s shoulder, he saw an opportunity that wouldn’t come again. Logan swung his free arm in a wide circle, catching the wires still anchored to his body and wrapping them tightly around the nurse’s head and neck. He would not hurt her. But she couldn’t know that yet.
    A man stormed furiously into the room, wearing a uniform unlike Logan had ever seen, part military and part medical. This man was Logan’s Marker.
    “I already know I’m a flunkee, so save your breath!” Logan said. The man paused, waiting for what might come next. “Five years ago, my sister came in for the Mark like every other kid her age—”
    “Now, Logan—”
    “ Why? Why didn’t she come back? You tell me that!”
    “Mr. Langly, we need you to calm down.”