Storm (Swipe Series)

enough.” She looked at her wrist, scarred and bandaged where she’d burned off her Mark a few weeks ago. “But none of it matters now, with Logan gone. None of it matters at all.”
    I swallowed hard. I thought about how best to tell her what I’d learned from my research out east, in the time since I’d last met with her, and in the aftermath of Lamson’s death. Finally, I decided just to blurt it out.
    “Your grandson isn’t gone, Sonya. He isn’t dead. Not technically, at least. Not yet.”
    Sonya’s eyes brightened immediately.
    “That’s, uh . . . that’s actually one of the reasons I came back,” I told her. “To ask what you think I should do with the truth. It would be dangerous, you realize, for people to know. He’s safer, right now, if the world thinks him dead.”
    Sonya frowned.
    “But . . . if it’s what you want . . . well, I’m in a unique position to tell people,” I said. “I could write about it—the truth—in Storm .”
    She thought about this for a moment.
    She cried a few silent tears.
    She told me to do it.
    And so I will.
    6
    The first time Logan was banished to Acheron’s interface helmet, he had received the harshest treatment available—the total-perception simulated reality of Level Nine. The icy lake that froze its prisoners alive, and kept them there, until the interface program deemed its prisoners sufficiently repentant.
    Where Logan was now was well beyond all that. On Level Nine, Logan’s BCI helmet had been part of a vast array of desks, with no true guards or locked doors at all beyond the helmets themselves.
    But on the day that Logan stormed the Capitol, on the day of his public sentencing, Lily Langly escorted her brother to a depth of Acheron previously untouched. Below the training grounds. Below the courtyard. Below the punishment floors. Where Logan now sat, alone in the dark space of his closet of a cell . . . it was the only one like it in all of Acheron.
    Within it, Logan’s personal helmet simulated not fire, nor ice, nor tar, nor snakes, nor anything like that. That would raise alarm bells. That could draw attention.
    So this time, Logan’s helmet simulated . . . nothing.
    There was no repentance here. No persuasion. No goal of “Revision” awaiting him at the end of his sentence.
    There was, in fact, no sentence at all. This was simply exile.
    In the face of her brother’s otherwise certain death, it was the only thing Lily Langly could think to do. She snuck him down here . . . and she threw away the key.
    Here, awareness folded in on itself. Space had no dimension, time had no direction. Logan could not move. He could not sense. He could not feel.
    “Where am I?” he asked into the void, after who knew how much time had passed.
    But Logan hadn’t heard his own words when he spoke them; there was no sound here, of course. There was not even emptiness.
    And so, Logan prayed. He prayed for forgiveness, he prayed for understanding, he prayed for salvation. He couldn’t have guessed how long his prayers rang in that nothingness. Ten minutes? Two weeks? A year? In the void, time meant very little.
    Until, finally and all at once, the question was answered.
    “Well, that’s a funny thing to ask,” a voice said from nowhere perceptible. “How did you get here if you don’t know where ‘here’ is?”
    Logan’s mind jolted at the response. He couldn’t make sense of it. He couldn’t make sense of any of this.
    “I was placed here,” Logan said finally. “But now I’m lost . . .”
    The voice giggled. “You mean you can’t just ask It for directions?” Logan could understand this now as a girl’s voice. A young girl, it seemed. Younger than he was, though he didn’t know how he knew that; he saw nothing, still. “The Ultranet,” she clarified. “Not reality, but . . . well . . . virtual reality.” The girl smiled, though Logan couldn’t see that either.
    “I don’t understand,” he said. “Do you mean you can talk to the Ultranet directly?”
    “Of course,” the voice said. For It was not its own thing. It was the virtual reality itself. The Ultranet was aware. Could communicate. Though apparently not with him.
    Logan asked if the Ultranet was Cylis’s space. If Cylis owned it somehow.
    But this little girl had never heard of Cylis. “ It cannot be his,” she said. “Because It is not anyone’s. Whoever Cylis is . . . he overreaches.” The girl skipped excitedly in front of Logan, and he sensed this now,