Sneak (Swipe Series)

Logan sideways for just a moment longer than he would have liked. “Well, that’s when it started,” she said. “’Bout a month ago. DOME has agents everywhere now, patrolling the streets. Someone with a dirty coat or unwashed hair or a skinny face comes along, DOME asks to see a Mark. Any poor tightwad can’t show one . . . off they go.”
    “Where?”
    “Hard to say.” The girl shrugged. “They don’t come back. Anyway, you can understand why I get a little jumpy around strangers these days.” She took his hand playfully, twining her fingers in his and pointing his wrist upwards to examine it again.
    “Still not Marked,” Logan said.
    “Yeah, well . . . can’t be too sure.” The girl rolled her eyes and let his hand drop. “So where’s your huddle, then, Mr. Lone Wolf?”
    “Huddle?”
    “You don’t have a huddle?”
    Logan cleared his throat nervously.
    “A huddle’s, like . . . you know, your tribe or whatever. A circle. A family. Maybe not a real family, but—”
    “I get it,” Logan said. For a moment, Peck and Blake and the others flashed into his head. “I almost had one once, I guess. I didn’t know you called them huddles.”
    “Well, what do you call them?”
    “I dunno,” Logan said. “A gang?”
    The girl laughed. “ Gang is a tycoon word. Markless stick to huddles.”
    “Tycoon?” Logan asked.
    “Sure. Tycoons, bigwigs, hotshots, moguls—you know, the big spenders. The haves . The Marked.”
    Logan had heard the words before, but in Marked culture only the most foulmouthed people would dare use them in such a disparaging way.
    “Oh, don’t look so offended,” the girl said. “The day the Marked stop calling me ‘miser’ and ‘skinflint’ and ‘tightwad’ and all the other awful slurs they’ve thought up over the years is the day I’ll apologize for calling them moguls. Until then . . . well . . . they started it.”
    The two of them looked out at the lake for a long time.
    “I need to get going,” Logan said, shivering a little. “I’ve got a long way to walk tonight.”
    “What? Have your ears frozen shut? I told you, kid, downtown is off-limits. We stick to the Ruins now.”
    “No.” Logan frowned. “I need help.”
    “Well, then let me. I have warm clothes, food—”
    “I don’t need to survive . I need to move .” The girl looked at him, not understanding, and Logan sighed. “I need to get to the capital, to Beacon City. I have an aunt and uncle downtown, and as far as I can figure it, they’re my only ticket there.”
    “They Marked?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Then they’re not family anymore.”
    “Look, whatever,” Logan said, turning to leave, but the girl grabbed his shoulder before he could.
    “You won’t make it—”
    “I’ve made it this far—”
    “ They won’t help you .” The girl looked desperate now, her voice shaking suddenly. Logan wondered how many friends she’d lost in the last couple of weeks. “DOME’s turning them on us. I’m telling you, it’s like Mark-Unmark warfare or something. Your family won’t take you to Beacon. They’ll take you to the Center to Pledge and align yourself with Lamson and Cylis, like all the other moguls and hotshots. They’ll take you to be Marked .” The girl ran her fingers through her hair, looking down and sighing deeply, trying to compose herself. “And that’s if you’re lucky. That’s if they don’t just send you straight to DOME on some trumped-up charge, like the good little tycoons they are.” She looked out at the lake again, frozen and peaceful, and she took a few more deep breaths. “The one thing they will not do”—she spoke slowly now, her energy spent— “is get you to Beacon.”
    Logan sighed, feeling the cold creep in under his skin again. He wrapped his arms around himself. “They’ll have to,” he said, simply. “They’re my only shot.”
    “Only shot at what?”
    Logan frowned, and for a moment his mind traveled far away. To his sister, to Lily, a flunkee, swiped by DOME during her own Pledge five years ago, shipped halfway across the continent to Beacon City, to be punished in ways so secret that even most DOME employees didn’t know the specifics. Logan thought of her, hidden away, alone and scared and confused. He had to save her.
    “It doesn’t matter what,” Logan said finally.
    “Well, it’d better. It had better matter a lot, actually. ’Cause you’d be risking everything for it.”
    “You’d be amazed,” Logan said,