Sneak (Swipe Series)

Logan could feel Peck’s hands gently patting his face, but it was as if through a bubble, as if they were very distant and as though Peck himself were speaking from across a wide canyon. “You’re Dust, Logan— you’re Dust; do you hear me?” The words were muffled at first, barely audible, barely registering. But as Peck repeated them, again and again, their meaning began to take shape. Logan could feel that canyon closing up, could feel the bubble as it broke. Slowly, he pulled himself up from out of his BCI-induced delirium.
    He had been saved. But not by Cylis.
    “Found Jo!” Blake called from just out of sight in the dim, sterile space.
    “That’s good!” Peck yelled. “Keep an eye out for Eddie.”
    “Uh . . . guys,” Hailey said. She pointed toward the edge of the darkness at the opposite end of the vast room. A Moderator had appeared.
    “Intruders!” the Moderator yelled. “Traitors!” He ran straight for them, stumbling a bit, arms out.
    And yet, in the moment, the Dust could not bring themselves to flee. Meg watched with her hands to her face. Tyler fell to his knees. Blake stood stoic and numb.
    “Ed . . . ,” Peck mumbled as the group fled, finally, toward the elevator. “Forgive us.”
    The Moderator was Eddie.
    6
    “Shawn! Shawn,” Erin said. “Look—they’re coming back out.” Erin pointed to the Moderator’s exit at the side of the vestibule. Peck, Hailey, Blake, Meg, and Tyler led Logan and Joanne out by the arms. “Let’s get outta there!” Erin said to Shawn. “Logan’s safe. I can see him, Shawn! Logan’s safe! Jo too!”
    “Can’t move yet,” Shawn said. “Whoever set this security loop in motion, I’ve gotta find their Markscan trail. I’ve gotta delete it.”
    “Why? Who cares if some tycoon Moderator gets in trouble over this?”
    “My job is to cover our tracks,” Shawn said. “Completely. I’m not about to cut loose just because of a surprise along the way. I don’t work like that.”
    And Erin looked at him admiringly. From one hacker to another.
    “Besides,” Shawn said. “I don’t like free rides if I don’t know who’s driving. You wanna know who’s helping us, don’t you? Don’t you think it’s just the tiniest bit suspicious?”
    “You’re right. Just go—go, already,” Erin said. And she waved him along impatiently.
    Shawn was digging deeper now, much deeper, into Acheron’s immune system database. Surely, there must be some clue, somewhere, as to who this mystery hacker was. Acheron’s systems were as secure as systems got. There was a heavily firewalled Intranet within its walls, but no Internet, to be sure. No way to hack into the prison from the outside. For anyone to loop the security feeds, that person would need to sit at this very desk, hacking this very tablescreen. But who besides Erin could have done that?
    “Seriously, can’t you go any faster?” Erin asked after just another thirty seconds. The Dust had made their way across the vestibule. “Checking scan logs—that’s, like, your area of expertise, isn’t it, Mr. Tech Wiz? So make it happen already.”
    “Hey,” Shawn said slyly. “As I recall, you couldn’t hack this thing period .”
    And sure enough, after several more seconds of searching, Shawn found it. The lone node in the database, stamped with precisely the same time as the footage pulled for the security loop. The condemning evidence. The person who’d compromised Acheron’s computer security before Erin ever even had the chance. The person who’d enabled the Dust’s escape.
    Except the cell was wiped clean. Whoever was responsible, they’d already covered their tracks.
    And yet, in what must have been the haste of the hack, one detail did remain.
    Shawn could hardly believe it.
    The hacker was an IMP.
    7
    “Where’s Eddie?” Erin asked when she and Shawn joined the Dust down below.
    Peck was unscrewing the air duct grate in the corner, working fast, concentrating hard.
    “Hey—guys. Where’s Eddie ? He coming or what?”
    Hailey was the only one willing to respond. She looked over at Erin. She frowned. And slowly, silently, she shook her head.
    8
    Once Logan and Joanne stabilized, the Dust moved above ground, out of that empty turbine room, out from under Beacon’s shadow. And it didn’t take long for them to find the Beacon protests.
    The protests were everywhere.
    The Dust—the larger Dust, thousands and thousands of them, co-opting that name—were entirely above ground