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And Dane, for his part, buried his feelings as best as he could, protecting himself and saving his friendship with Logan in the process.

“She is so weird,” Dane said to Logan now, though Logan couldn't help but notice him staring at Hailey 'til she was out of sight.

“Cool about the rollerstick, anyway. I've always been terrified of those things.” Logan shrugged.

Dane nodded, accepting the change of subject. “Hey, is 'at her?” he asked, and Logan squinted across the field.

It was the first time he saw her, Erin Arbitor. She was sitting on the plasti-grass, eating corn bread, alone.

And Logan said, “I don't know,” though he was somehow sure that it was.

“What's she doing? Looks like she's talking to herself,” Dane said.

But Logan didn't notice that. Instead he noticed her hair, straight and copper all the way down to the small of her back. He noticed her eyes, shining cobalt blue in the sunlight. He noticed her clothes, which couldn't possibly have come from Spokie. Kids from Spokie wore local fabrics, mostly drab shades of cotton, wool . . . but hers were loud, bright, and synthetic. She was foreign, somehow. Different. Better. She was beautiful.

“Talk to her,” Dane said, seeing the look on Logan's face. “I dare you.”

“I don't know,” Logan said, but Dane laughed and gave him a good, hard push in the right direction, and somehow Logan's feet just kept right on walking after that.

3

Halfway across the lawn, Erin sat, totally inside her own head, playing through what she'd discovered the night before.

My dad. My dad is a .
. .

She felt the words form on her lips but didn't speak them aloud. This was her secret. Not even hers, in fact, but her father's and her father's alone . . . if it was anyone's at all.

The box had been filled with papers, a whole stack of them, the most she'd ever seen at once. Nothing was ever written on paper anymore, since everyone had switched to tablets, and yet here was a boxful of it, yellowed, handwritten, one of a kind, confidential. In an age of infinite digital documentation, paper was the last safe place for secrets. Not to be copied and pasted with the stroke of a stylus, not to be sent around the world at the press of a button, not to be recorded and stored forever in a million irretrievable pieces across cyberspace and time, paper was intimate . . . fragile. Her father wrote of things she never knew existed, of the Eyes & Ears Bureau where Mr. Arbitor worked within the Department of Marked Emergencies, of missions he'd been on, surveillance he'd taken, people he'd locked away . . .

My dad is a spy
. Erin now found herself reassessing every perception she'd had of her father. His career move from the Beacon police department finally made sense. The stress he was under, his humbled nature, the seriousness with which he took his work . . . even his effort to blend in, physically, over the past few years . . . all of it fit, once Erin had the context.

And then there was the paper at the top of the box, the most pressing memo of all—Agent Arbitor's current assignment. The one that brought him halfway across the country, the one that uprooted Erin's life and tore her family apart:
Peck and the Markless threat in Spokie
.

A real-life mystery. A whole slew of unsolved crimes. Ongoing. Dangerous. And her father was the detective.

She had just begun to wrap her head around it when out of the corner of her eye she saw a short, skinny, jumpy boy with dirty-blond hair approach and heard him say in a quiet voice, “Hi. I'm Logan. You're Erin, right?”

But in that moment the class bell rang across the field, and Erin did not answer, and Logan went red and hurried away.

4

“No luck, huh?” Dane ribbed Logan as they walked the halls to their next class. “Maybe she was just overwhelmed by your confidence and your masculine good looks.”

“Shut up,” Logan said, but he was laughing. “I didn't exactly see you walk away with her number either.”

“I was just playing hard to get,” Dane said. “Chicks dig that.
Don't they, Hailey?
” he yelled, and Hailey looked confused and caught off guard across the hall. “See what I mean?”

Science & tech lab would have been beyond boring if Dane and Logan hadn't been joined by class president Tom Dratch, who fed off Dane's sarcasm and turned the two of them into an unstoppable comedy duo intent on getting Logan detention for laughing.

It turned out Hailey was in the class too, as was her friend Veronica, and from across the room they quickly became the source of Dane and Tom's comedic material for the day.

Having grown up just a bit bigger and stronger than the other girls at Spokie, it seemed that every semester Veronica tried a new sport only to become the best at it. So far she'd been Spokie Middle's MVP in soccer, field hockey, tennis, lacrosse, and softball. She was taller than any of the boys in their grade, had coarse black hair and wide shoulders, and always dressed in a sports uniform. Before class started, Dane and Tom asked her if she planned to join the boys' football team this year. Tom said they needed a new quarterback. The boys all laughed, but Logan got the impression that Veronica was genuinely interested.

Logan didn't know Tom too well outside of Tom's friendship with Dane, but Logan did know he could count on Tom to begin bugging him about the school play, and Tom sure didn't disappoint. This year, it was
Mark of a Salesman
. As class president, Tom saw it as his job to stir up interest in all the school's extracurricular programs, and years ago he'd pegged drama as Logan's one true calling. (It wasn't.)

“I just think it would get you out of your shell,” Tom said, having no idea how condescending that sounded. “Besides, it's a classic. You'd make a great . . . what's his name? You know, the brother character.”

And Logan said, “We'll see,” even though he knew he wouldn't, just before Ms. Dirkin began boring the class with the practical details of New Chicago's nuclear fusion plant.

Logan's last classes of the day were gym, government, and economics, and in each, he swam in a sea of anonymity. In fact, the only familiar face whatsoever was Veronica's in gym, and all that meant was that Logan would never win a game.

Yet the moment Logan entered economics, he had the feeling it was soon to become his favorite period of the day.

Why? Because there, right there, two rows from the front and three desks in, sat the new girl, Erin, right beside an empty seat. Maybe it was time for Logan to change his back-row-only policy.

5

It was five minutes from the end of the day, and Erin Arbitor had yet to learn a single thing. Computer science had been a joke— judging by the syllabus, she could have taken the final exam that morning and aced it. English looked like it'd be the year of rereading, since her school in Beacon covered modern post-Unity lit in the sixth grade. Government she was already an expert on through her father, and economics she knew inside and out just by listening to her mother chat about work. None of this bothered Erin, though, since to her, all it meant was more time to contemplate her father's secret case,
Peck and the Markless threat in Spokie
, which she was increasingly determined to crack.

Erin was so distracted by last night's revelation, in fact, that she didn't even hear the final bell ring. It took that nervous kid bothering her again—again!—just to snap her out of it.

“You're new here, right?” He'd certainly wasted no time in approaching her.

“Sorry?” Erin said.

Logan cleared his throat. “Hi again. I'm Logan. I heard you're from Beacon.”

“Yeah,” Erin answered flatly. Her mind still hadn't left her father's box of papers.

“I've always wanted to visit Beacon. My dad's constantly talking about it,” Logan said.

“Oh yeah?” Erin gathered her things and began making her way toward the door.

“He's an architect, so I guess he's interested in it from a civil engineering perspective.”

Erin could not have cared less about civil engineering, but she managed to say, “That's neat,” before exiting the classroom and escaping down the hall.

Logan followed her through the Pacific Wing, where a pod of computer-generated dolphins swam by. “Hey, I bet he'd love to pick your brain about it sometime,” he said, trailing behind Erin, who simply could not understand why this kid wouldn't leave her alone.

“Maybe,” she said.

“Where do you live? I'm over on Wright.”

“I don't know where that is,” Erin said. She tried walking a little faster.

“Just a few blocks from here.”

“Well, I'm on Vital Lane. It's a pretty far walk.” Erin was glad to have an excuse to get rid of the boy, who so obviously liked her and whose enthusiasm bordered on pathetic.

“I'm right on the way!” Logan said. “I'll walk with you!”

Erin rolled her eyes, but Logan couldn't see.

So this is life in Spokie, America
, she thought.
Boring classes, long walks home, and desperate boys
.

Erin couldn't get back to Beacon quickly enough.

6

“Space is at a premium here, since we're so close to New Chicago, and we need to save space for farming 'cause so much of the land farther out's gone bad.” Logan shrugged, trying to fill the empty air on his walk home with Erin. “I guess in Beacon they just have hydroponic farming, but we don't have that out here yet. So to leave room for everyone after the Unity, Spokie said any private lot couldn't take more than four hundred square feet of ground space.” Logan pointed to the examples as they walked past along the sidewalk.

“'Course, you can buy more than one lot, but for most people that's too expensive, and the zoning's usually restrictive. That's why a lot of public buildings, like our school, are underground. And that's why all the homes here are so skinny . . .” Erin didn't care. But it was easiest just to let the boy speak until they made it to his house. “. . . and why most people just build up and up. Mine's eleven stories, but it's just one room to a floor, so it isn't actually that big. Some houses have twenty or more.”

Logan went on to talk about the days when almost everyone in the Corn Belt lived in houses that were wider than they were tall. And you could still see examples of them, he said, in the few that remained among the buildings in Old District farther across town. But only the very wealthiest citizens could afford a home like that, since there were so few left, and since no more were being built.

“But you live in an apartment, right?” Logan asked. “All the buildings on Vital Lane are apartments, I think.”

“Yeah,” Erin said. “It's an apartment.”

“That's cool. You have more space to spread out that way,” Logan said, “since it's not a private lot. I bet your floor's pretty wide.”

Erin stopped him. “Well, here you are.” Wright Street was just up ahead. “It was nice meeting you . . .”

“Logan,” Logan said.

“Right. Thanks for taking—”

“Oh, I don't mind. I'll keep walking with you.”

And Erin couldn't help but laugh.

“I see you got the Mark already,” Logan said, clueless and trying to keep up with her accelerating strides. “Must've been recent—it looks dusty, still.”

Erin glanced down at her wrist without stopping. “I guess so,” she said. In fact, Logan was right. She'd Pledged for the Mark just last month, and fine nanodust—enough to notice even without a black light—did trail off it as she swung her arm, though she hadn't noticed until Logan pointed it out.

“It's nanotech ink, you know,” Logan said. “Not sure why they can't just use normal ink, but I guess they don't.”

“I wouldn't know,” Erin said. “Those details don't make their way onto the test.”

Logan was quiet for a moment. “I'm kinda nervous about the whole thing, to be honest,” he said.

Erin frowned. “That's stupid. There's nothing to be nervous about.”

“Mm-hm,” Logan said. “Everyone keeps saying that. No one likes to talk about the kids that don't make it through.”

This got Erin's attention. She stopped short and looked Logan in the face. “That's a myth. And it's absurd. There's no such thing as flunkees.”

Logan frowned. “It's not a myth.”

“Come on. Flunkees? There've been, like, two.”

“More than that,” Logan said. “It just never makes the news. No one talks about it.”

Erin sighed. “You sound paranoid.”

“I know,” Logan said.

She looked at him, trying to gauge whether or not he was joking. It alarmed her to conclude he was not. “Look, seriously, you're more likely to die crossing the street. Like, right now.” And Erin reiterated the point: “You're more likely to die
right now
than you are getting the Mark. You're more likely to die from food poisoning. Or cancer. Or, I don't know, lightning.”