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“Some group of criminals.”

“You said it. I think they're in over their heads.”

“They have Peck on their side, don't forget that.”

“Yeah. But no wonder he steers clear of them.”

“Not clear enough, we're hoping.”

Erin smiled. “Not clear enough. That's exactly right.”

3

“Okay, skinflints, knock it off!” Jo shouted across the Fulmart. It quieted momentarily. “We're out of here in five minutes, you understand me? Say your last good-byes.”

“Good-bye!” Tyler shouted.

“Good-bye!” Eddie yelled.

“I never liked your layout!”

“Your sports section is weak!”

“And your shelves make terrible beds!”

“Yeah, peace out, Fulmart!”

“We're outta here!”

Meg hissed from Jo's shoulder.

Suddenly the back door opened. Everyone froze, including Joanne.

“Hello?” Jo said. “Hello?”

“What's going on in here? What's with all the shouting? You guys gone crazy?”

It was Blake. Blake was back from Peck's.

“Blake!” Jo dropped Meg on the floor with a
thud
. She flung her arms around him. “I'm glad you're back. We're leaving.”

“
What?
Why?”

“Logan and the girl. They came by today, after you left.”

“They came
here
?”

“That's right.”

“How'd they find us?”

“We don't know. We're not sure it wasn't an accident. They were looking for—” She lowered her voice to a whisper and covered her mouth. “They were looking for Peck.”

“Then it's worse than we thought.”

“That's right. They're out for blood.”

Blake shook his head. He whispered too. “Then we'll give them blood.”

“But it's not safe here anymore. Not with that girl's tricks. If she doesn't have the place bugged by tomorrow, I'd be shocked. We're leaving tonight. Right now, now that you're back.”

Blake nodded. “Where we goin'?”

Jo looked at him. Then she made a quick look around the store. “I'd rather not say.”

Blake understood. He gathered a backpack's worth of stuff for himself, and the five of them prepared to leave.

“Think we'll ever be back?” Eddie asked.

“I don't know, Ed,” Jo said. There was sadness in her voice.

“Bit off more than we could chew with this one, didn't we?” Tyler poked. “This Logan's a real tightwad.”

“He's a challenge,” Blake said. Then he whispered, “But Peck thinks he's worth it.”

Eddie shook his head. “Then Peck's gone mad.”

And Jo hit him so hard he'd never say so again.

4

“They're moving out.” Erin folded up her tablet and stashed it in her pocket. No need for the video feed anymore. “We follow them all the way, but we never reveal ourselves. You got me? They need to think they're getting away. They need to think they're safe.”

Erin's blood pumped 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? You like calling my two rotten parents ‘master'? Calling
me
‘master'? Being compensated in table scraps?”

George sighed. “There are things more important than material wealth, Master Dane.” And very quickly, he flashed to Dane a charm, which dangled from a necklace he'd kept hidden under his suit. What was it? A symbol? Of what? Dane had never seen it before, but it seemed somehow rebellious to him . . . dangerous.

“What is that, George?”

George winked. “A reminder, Dane. Just a reminder.”

George had left Dane after that, closing the door behind him, leaving Dane to play his mitts as long as he wanted, increasing the noise cancellation in the walls as he exited.

It wasn't until very late that Dane shot up and realized he'd fallen asleep with his mitts still on. He threw them to the beanbag. What was that noise?

A crack. A snap. Motion outside the den's window. Dane dashed to it and cupped his hands around his face, peering outside. Who was there?

Dane bolted through his house and out the front door, onto the lawn. The night was cool and damp. “Hello?” Dane called. “Show yourself, ya stingy miser.”

There was no response. Just the stillness of night. The oak tree whistled in the wind.

Dane crept to the window outside his den, looking for signs of trespassing . . . or trespass
ers
.

No one was there. But in the flowers below the den's window, Dane saw three chrysanthemums bent and broken, lying in the dirt, trampled.

“I heard you!” Dane shouted into the black of his empty cul-de-sac. “I'm calling the cops!”

And when Dane went back inside, that's exactly what he did.

“I'd like to report a disturbance,” Dane said over the video connection of the tablet. “Trespassing. The perpetrator got away.”

“Noted,” the woman said, unimpressed, on the other end of the line. She frowned. “Can you show me your Mark, sir? Just holding it up to the camera is fine.”

“I'm not Marked,” Dane said. “I'm underage.”

A wave of interest suddenly flashed over the woman's face. “I see,” she said. “Another one.”

“What do you mean, another one?” Dane asked. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“It's probably nothing,” the woman said. “But if you see or hear anything else out of the ordinary—
anything at all
—I want you to call this number.” Then she flashed the digits on the screen.

Dane recognized the extension number. It was famous, drilled into children's heads right along with the codes for fires and police and medical emergencies. But the number was different from those. It was unique. The number was for DOME.

6

The Dust travelled silently through browned cornfields, already an hour's walk out of town. Tyler didn't devise a game. Meg rested limp and dull on Jo's shoulder. This was not a happy field trip, and everyone knew it.

But Blake knew something else too.
You can force us from our home, Logan. You can keep us on the run as long as you want. But we're not your big concern anymore. And Peck has a trick or two left up his sleeve
.

So you wanna play a game with us, Logan? Sure, we'll play a game with you. We'll go a round. We'll even go all in. Take a chance, Logan. Call our bluff. See what it brings you
.

He couldn't hold his excitement any longer. There was hope, and he had to let someone else know it. “Logan's gonna have some fun at school from now on,” Blake whispered to Joanne.

Jo nodded. She smiled too. Jo knew exactly what that meant.

“Boo!” someone whispered behind the two of them, and Meg stifled a yelp on Jo's shoulder.

Blake turned abruptly. “Don't
do
that, you little skimp!”

It was Eddie. Blake had sent him off earlier to do a sweep of their trail and make sure no one was following.

“See anything useful?” Blake asked. “Or were you just hanging back there long enough to scare us?”

Eddie leaned in, serious but perfectly relaxed about it. “A little of both,” he said. “But, yes, we're being followed.”

7

“They're walking in circles.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We've been through this cornfield before. Half an hour ago.

They're walking in circles.” Logan looked at Erin in the dark and shrugged.

“Do you think they're lost?”

“Not sure,” Logan said. He squinted across the field, over the husks. “But I only count four kids up ahead. Maybe one's lost and they're looking for—”

But a powerful knock to the back of Logan's head proved him wrong.

Erin screamed, swinging around to see a short girl planted behind her with a rock in her hands. The girl's eyes looked violent and unsympathetic under her thick set of bangs. Without hesitating, she hurled the rock at Erin, who barely deflected it off her arm. Immediately, Erin's hand went numb, and her elbow swelled in a way that made it hard to bend. Logan shuffled on the ground, trying to regain a sense of his surroundings.

Now three boys and a second girl encircled them in the clearing between rows of corn.

“You got 'em, Meg!” one of the boys said, jumping up and down. “Two points! Two points!”

“Shut
up
with the names!” the oldest boy whispered harshly.