Sneak (Swipe Series)

today because we think we have one.”
    “Well, I can’t wait to hear it. I’m sure it’s a doozy. In fact, if it’s anything like your last dozen plans—”
    “We found Logan,” Mr. Arbitor said. And he relished the look on his daughter’s face. “Yeah. Thought that might get your attention.”
    “What do you mean you’ve found him? Where is he?” Erin turned to Johnson, speaking urgently now, her tough attitude forgotten.
    “To clarify—we don’t actually have the boy in custody. In fact, we’re basing this off a rather unreliable source that has yet to be confirmed and . . . well . . . it could easily turn out to be a false alarm. But Erin”—Johnson leaned forward—“between you and me, I don’t think it is.”
    Two more ice chunks fell from Erin’s sleeves. They splashed on the table in front of her, and she leaned back slowly.
    “Okay,” she said, unzipping her jacket. “So what do you need me to do?”
    3
    There was a perfect stillness to the woods outside of Spokie. The trees were bare, and the sky behind them was a bright, clear blue. There were no birds or squirrels. Even Hailey’s footsteps barely made a sound.
    She arrived at the glade just as the sun slipped into the trees, casting long shadows across the grass. Hailey knelt down, scanning the ground and counting the rocks and the sticks scattered about. To anyone else, they were nothing. But to Hailey, they were a lifeline. Each rock a dot and each stick a dash, they spelled out exactly what she was looking for.

    It was Morse code. The oldest code in the book. But who would think to look among the rocks and the dirt?
    It was a system Hailey and Peck had devised the night Logan ran off, when they realized that even notes burning away on paper would be too much of a liability from then on. The game had changed. Even a single visit between Hailey and Peck was now an impossible risk.
    They set the first location together that night in November. Each would be in the woods, they decided, but each after the first would be in a different spot. Keeping it the same would invite DOME to look too closely, and perhaps notice the code. So the first location would be by the birch tree next to the wide stream, and the second location would be included in the message at the first. The third in the message at the second. And so on. In this way, Hailey’s nighttime strolls seemed arbitrary to anyone not reading the code. Pointless, even.
    But this visit to the glade was anything but pointless.
    Hailey translated the message in her head and smiled.
Hayes farm.
Here to stay.
Come with Logan
or not at all.
Next note at cave.
PS Make radio
3900kHz
    4
    Erin had her jacket off, and it lay in a wet crumple on the floor. The room grew dim in the waning daylight, and she listened intently to each word Johnson said.
    “They are fractured, and they are desperate. Throughout New Chicago, the Markless community is reeling. We’ve cracked down on squatters; we’ve cracked down on loitering; we’ve even redefined probable cause.”
    “These orders have come straight from the top,” Mr. Arbitor assured her.
    “The top?” Erin asked.
    He smiled. “With the Global Treaty in place, the game is changing. Rapidly.”
    “What do you mean, ‘in place’? I thought all that G.U. stuff wasn’t happening until the spring, when Parliament could vote—”
    “It wasn’t. But Chancellor Cylis and General Lamson are pushing it through.”
    Erin knew as well as anyone that the general in chief of the American Union had always been a supporter of the European Union’s chancellor. She knew that the two of them had been advocating for a true Global Union ever since Lamson adopted Cylis’s Mark program in America, just after Erin was born. Erin’s mother, a top economic software analyst on Barrier Street in Beacon, had even helped facilitate the merger of the A.U. and E.U. economies over the past decade. But Erin never could have imagined that the Global Treaty would pass through the American Parliament so quickly; it was a process she figured would take years.
    “We are close, Erin, very close, now, to a single-nation world. Never again will we worry about another Total War. Never again will we suffer from fractured cultures or incompatible views. Unity , Erin. Complete unity is upon us.”
    “This is classified, you understand, what we’re telling you.” Johnson looked nervously between Erin and her father.
    “Okay,” Erin said.
    And Mr. Arbitor