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But his sister
had
died. That
happened
. And ever since, Logan was about one floorboard creak away from certainty that someone, somewhere, was out to get him too.

3

His parents didn't know it, but Logan kept a flashlight hidden under his pillow. The switch to the ceiling light was all the way across the room, and he would have had to get up out of bed to turn it on. That was unacceptable. So Logan sat, now, back to the wall, covered in blankets up to his neck, and his hand braced the flashlight against his cheek to steady the beam of light as he swept it around each corner of the room.

There was nothing immediately out of the ordinary, except for the opened window. No mud on the floor, no stuff out of place . . .

He turned the flashlight around, pointing the unlit end of it away from him, and flipped a switch along its handle. The main light turned off, and out of its other end, the violet haze of a black light began to glow.

Black lights were useful. They revealed lint, smudges, blood, traces not seen by the unaided eye . . . and most importantly to Logan, they showed nanodust. There wasn't a Marked person around who didn't leave a cloud of it behind.

Tonight, though, like every night, Logan saw nothing—just the single small trail left by his father, an empty room with an unpleasant draft, and a window slightly ajar.

Time to check the rest of the house.

Logan tiptoed to the corner of his room and called for the elevator, which arrived promptly and took him to ground level.

Like many private residences in the town of Spokie, Logan's house had just one room to a floor, with an elevator connecting them and an open-air spiraling staircase outside in case of emergency, or for use during the nice summer months. Each room had panoramic windows and doors in two of the corners—one to the elevator and one to the outside staircase. The height of these houses varied widely and could reach higher than twenty floors, but Logan's had only eleven. This was good. More would have taken longer. Because every night, without fail, after his parents had tucked him into bed and gone to sleep themselves, it was Logan's job—self-appointed— to look thoroughly through each floor, bottom to top, flashlight in hand for signs of even the slightest suspicious thing.

Paranoid? To Logan, it was practical. These were simply the habits any boy might develop if he were certain that someone was out to get him.

The first floor was the foyer, lined with pictures of the family and hangers for coats and not much else. Nothing unusual this evening, so Logan double-checked the front door's dead bolt and moved on.

The second floor was the kitchen. Knives were all in place. That was a good sign.

The third floor was the dining room, only ever used for holidays and entertaining guests, and tonight it was as empty as expected.

Fourth floor was the bathroom, but no one lurked in the shower tonight. Floor five was the living room, cluttered but hardly suggesting a break-in. Six was Mr. Langly's office, and the holograms of his latest architectural projects glowed untouched. Seven was Logan's bedroom, which he skipped for now.

Eight was a rec room that no one ever used. It had been Logan's room up until five years ago—right
there
was where his bed used to be—but he'd moved down a floor when his sister passed away. Because she had lived on the ninth, and because every night while she was alive she'd tap a rhythm for Logan to hear through the floorboards.
Shave-and-a-haircut
, it went, and Logan would throw both shoes up at his ceiling.
Tap-tap
, they went
. Two-bits
. That was how they always said good night. When Lily died, it didn't take more than one tapless night for Logan to know that he couldn't live under that ceiling anymore.

Lily's room, nine, was a floor frozen in time like a museum of her last days, like one big held breath. It was Logan's least favorite to visit. A chill ran through him each time he did, and his eyes watered and made it hard for him to see, but still he never skipped it—nine was the perfect place for an intruder to hide. Tonight, though, like each night, there was no one there, or at least no one Logan could find, and he wasted no time stepping back into the elevator, knocking a soft
tap-tap
against the wall as he did.

Ten was his parents' bedroom, which Logan didn't need to check, so he moved straight to Mrs. Langly's study on eleven, filled to the brim with screens and meteorology tablets and satellite dishes, though no spies or burglars or murderers. It was beginning to look as if Logan would wake to see another day.

On the roof was the Langlys' yard. It was too small to play football up there, but it had a nice view. The grass shook gently in the evening wind, and having now checked each floor, Logan relaxed and allowed himself the drowsiness leading so pleasantly to sleep. He took the elevator down to his room on seven and crawled back under the covers, relieved to have made it through another night.

Except!

There! On his desk! The picture he kept . . . had it moved?

In its frame was the last snapshot taken of Logan and his sister, on the eve of her death, smiling over presents with the blur of family celebration behind them. Logan always kept this picture positioned so he could see it from his bed. Now it rested ever so slightly pointed away, his view of it not quite straight on, the desk space in front of it just slightly wet with water that should have been in the glass beside it.

Who had been there? Who had snuck in through the window? Who had tipped the glass and knocked the picture askew?

No one
.

No one
, Logan told himself.
You're being insane
.

. . . Right?

And Logan's heart snapped in his chest—so hard that it hurt—when across the room, the door to the outside stairway clicked quietly shut.

TWO
ERIN ARBITOR AND THE
GOVERNMENT WORK

1

E
RIN ARBITOR WAS AWARE OF HER FATHER'S
voice beside her, but she couldn't have told you what he was saying. His chatter filled their magnetrain compartment like a bored conductor's while her mind wandered further and further away, past the blur of unfamiliar tracks, past cities and towns, over mountains and across rivers, all the way back to Beacon City, her city, half a continent away and nothing like the humdrum destination she rode to now.

Spokie
, she thought. It would never be home.

“—don't know why we couldn't have caught an earlier train,” Mr. Arbitor was saying. “Soon as we get in we'll have to register you for school; then I need to get straight to the office and set up while you unpack at the apartment.”

“Fine, Dad,” Erin said. She held her pet iguana up to the window so it could see an oily and polluted Lake Erie off in the distance.

“It's just a lot to do in one afternoon—”

“I know, Dad.”

“—and you and I are both gonna need to hit the ground running tomorrow.” Mr. Arbitor shook his head. “Not even there yet and we're already behind. Kept saying we should have left on Friday . . .”

Erin rested Iggy on her lap and emerged reluctantly from her daydream, caustic and angry. “If only there could have been some way for us to stay with Mom in Beacon instead of uprooting our lives for no good reason.” She shook her head, feigning sympathy. “Then you wouldn't be suffering such a
terrible
inconvenience.”

“It was your mother's decision not to come with us,” Mr. Arbitor said forcefully. He ignored Erin's tone. “She knows how important this job is. And not just to me—to the Union.”

Erin sighed, caught square in the middle of a standoff between two strong-headed, working parents.

Just two months ago, Mr. Arbitor had surprised his family with the announcement that he had received a promotion at work, and that they would be moving to Spokie to accommodate it. Erin's mom, a top economic software analyst on Barrier Street in Beacon City, had told him precisely what he could do with that idea. Of course, Mr. Arbitor was certain it was only a matter of time before his wife gave in and found a way to keep the family together, but so far, she had not, and Erin was left with no choice but to get used to a new town a thousand miles away while her dad played a game of spousal career chicken and her mom continued enjoying life in the Big City back east.

“Well—anything for the Union,” Erin said sarcastically, and her father rolled his eyes.

“I mean it,” he said. “I took this job with good reason. You'll feel better about it once your mother's out here with us.”

“She's not
coming
out here with us, Dad! She's waiting for you to come to your senses and tell DOME you can't just uproot your family because some bureaucrat's offering more money to copy and paste documents in 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. Recently the city had celebrated its growth into territory as far as what had once been called Mexico (before it all just became the A.U.), and Erin was often told that if you could stand the heat, Sierra was a great place to live.

Outside of these urban areas, though, North America was mostly uninhabited, and while Erin had long known this to be the case, it wasn't until today that she could visualize what “uninhabited” truly meant. Along the ride, Erin had seen a few vistas still dotted with houses, and a couple even covered with them, but those were rare sights. Mostly, these days, following so many years of environmental disruption, the country was desolate, its old cities and towns long abandoned and forgotten, occupied by only the most occasional and intrepid of settlers still willing to risk its climate of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, wildfires, heat waves, blizzards . . .