Storm (Swipe Series)

we could imagine. He said a battle was brewing that would make even the Total War look tame. He said for all we’ve discovered so far, we’ve barely scratched the surface of what was really to come.
    “And so he left. For Europe? For the Dark Lands, beyond even the scope of the Global Union? Who knows. He left for answers, plain and simple. I guess he figured the details would fall into place.”
    Joanne sniffled softly and wiped her nose. “Peck will be back,” she said. “And as for Logan . . . he’d want us to fight on. We’ve become our own leaders now. We are the symbol. Not Logan. The Dust. All of us. Together.”
    “Beacon’s Markless need direction,” Shawn said. “Now morethan ever. If Peck’s right about this war on the horizon, then we have our work cut out for us right here in Beacon. We may not know everything about what we have to do . . . but we know where to start.”
    “I vote we save Eddie,” Tyler said, off in his own corner and barely listening. “I vote we do whatever it takes.”
    “Don’t you get it?” Blake asked. “There is no saving Eddie. It’s not a matter of finding him—he’s gone . He’s Lily’s lapdog now. There’s no turning back.”
    But Tyler shook his head. “Eddie wouldn’t flip,” he said. “He’s no traitor.”
    “Tyler—he’s working with Lily . He led Logan straight into her trap back at the Capitol!”
    “Well then Lily hasn’t flipped either!” Tyler insisted. “Then it wasn’t a real trap!”
    “She unleashed Trumpet, Tyler. She sentenced her own brother to death . She’s been appointed to Cylis’s Global Council—”
    “I don’t care! I don’t care how it looks! At some point, you just have to trust people. There were plenty of Marked who thought Peck was bad a year ago, and look how wrong they were!”
    “Yeah, but Peck never started a plague!” Jo said.
    Tyler just shrugged. “If Eddie’s working with Lily, then the two of them are planning something. I just know it. And our job,” he insisted, “is to keep the heat on Beacon until they’re ready to pull the trigger. They need us, guys. Whether or not they can say so, they need us, now, to trust them.”
    “Well . . . one way or another, something’s coming,” Shawn admitted. “There’s no way Tyler’s wrong about that . . .”
    “What about you, Erin?” Jo asked, looking over to her as Erin gazed, still, out the window. “What’s your take on all this?”
    “It’s just like my dream,” Erin said absently.
    Shawn laughed. “What?”
    “My fever dream.” She was quiet for a moment, thinking of it. “I was on a mountain. High up like I am now. I was frightened. Like now. And in my dream, the rains came. And they washed the fear away.
    “I didn’t ever make it all the way up the mountain,” Erin said. “I haven’t learned, yet, what the person up top wanted to tell me.
    “But my dream was right about the rain.”
    Below, Beacon’s streets were filled with Marked and Markless alike, all basking in the downpour. Smiling. Letting its cure rain down in sheets.
    “I guess we lost the battle,” Erin said. “But this isn’t over yet. And it’s still up to us to win the war.”
    Before her, the crowds puddle jumped. They splashed. They danced in her storm.
    5
    I was in Spokie by this time. I had escaped from Beacon along the Unmarked River, and I’d just met up again with the woman who secretly taught me most everything I knew about Logan, Peck, the Dust—Logan’s grandmother, Sonya. The woman who made Swipe possible.
    I was working on Sneak at the time, and I’d stopped by to learn more about Logan’s first days on his own outside of Spokie. I’d given Sonya a copy of my draft manuscript, half-done. I showed her the passages I’d sketched out about life down at the underpass. I asked her if she thought I’d gotten it right.
    She read the chapters over a few times before handing them back to me with a shrug and a sigh.
    “It doesn’t matter now,” she told me. “Whether any of this is right or wrong.”
    On the television frame in front of her, the Global Union news was broadcasting softly. Its announcer was encouraging Marked citizens to go outside into the rain, was discussing the cure and falsely praising America’s new leader Cylis for making it possible.
    Grandma Sonya did feel better, it was clear, in the wake of Dr. Rhyne’s rain. But it did little to brighten her mood.
    “Your book is fine,” she told me. “It’s close