Swipe

blinking lights on a machine, and DOME shrugged its shoulders, and DOME snuffed my sister out. Just as they will me, just as they do anyone else, when they so choose.”
    Logan’s Marker stared at him. He walked to Logan, still strapped into the chair. He rested his hand on Logan’s shoulder, and he spoke calmly, but very fast.
    “Four men will arrive shortly to take you away. I don’t know for certain what they will do to you. I don’t know yet where they will take you. It could be a number of places, and that won’t be disclosed to me until you are dispatched. I can’t stop them, Logan, and I never could’ve.” The Marker looked fearfully over his shoulder now, to the door behind him. “But I can tell you what you came here to learn.”
    “Thank you,” Logan whispered.
    “Your sister is in Beacon,” the Marker said. He fingered a charm hidden around his neck as he spoke. “God forgive me. God forgive us all.”
    6
    In a far-off room, Erin sat at her father’s computer, breaking the rules one final time. She hacked under his account through DOME’s deepest, safest channels. She hacked straight into the Center Marking computer that hosted Logan’s name, and she played the recorded scene of his Pledge from its beginning. It was clear, the choice Logan had made. It was clear what Erin had to do.
    7
    Four men arrived now to take Logan away. The first two were nurses, looking frightened and apologetic. The other two were officers, looking anything but.
    By now, Logan was accustomed to the DOME agents and policemen of Spokie’s streets. But these two men before him were a class altogether new. Together, they must have weighed five hundred pounds. They wore helmets with visors that came down past their eyes; their shadowed faces were like stone. Each wore a belt and shoulder straps holding equipment and weapons. And they came holding the two biggest and sturdiest pairs of remote-controlled electro-magnecuffs Logan had ever seen.
    Logan’s mind raced and his heart pounded. His Marker hadn’t known all the details. He had known very few, in fact. But in their last few minutes alone, he had told Logan what he knew. He had done for Logan what he could. And Logan forgave him for the rest. “Now we’re even,” Logan had said.
    “No. But maybe now I can sleep at night.”
    The Marker watched as the officers locked Logan into the electro-magnecuffs—one pair for his wrists and one for his feet. The nurses flanked them on either side, nervously. Together, the men walked Logan from the room.

    In the hall, each officer followed Logan with a weapon close to his back. But the nurses kept their distance up ahead. One of them swiped his hand under a Markscan on the wall, and the same map display appeared from before, with a new dotted line pointing the group along their way.
    “That’s odd,” the nurse said. “Why would we take that route?”
    “The system has its reasons,” the other said. “Lead the way.”
    The officers pushed Logan into an unmarked side door, where instead of plaster-white and clean, the walls were concrete-gray and forgotten. They’d followed the system’s directions into the Center’s unused, innermost halls.
    “You remember where it said to go?” the first nurse asked.
    The second pointed. “The map said this way.”
    “I’ve never been this way.”
    “Me neither.”
    “Maybe it’s faster. Maybe it’s a shortcut.”
    Logan shuffled silently between officers as the nurses second-guessed themselves and circled deeper and deeper into the Center’s bowels.
    “Down there,” one said. “Another Markscan. See where we are.”
    The other walked forward and swiped his hand under the scanner on the wall . . .
    . . . and immediately, all the lights in the windowless passageway went out. Simultaneously, Logan’s electro-magnecuffs turned off. They went slack and fell from his wrists and feet, clanging on the ground and echoing through the hall. The darkness surrounding him was complete. There was shouting and anger and confusion between the nurses, and empty, frustrated clicking from the weapons and tools the two officers carried. Nothing worked.
    “What did you do?”
    “I didn’t do nothin’!”
    “You busted the whole system!”
    “No, I didn’t!”
    “Well then, why’s it broke ?”
    And Logan stumbled blindly through two doorways and down three flights of steps before anyone knew he had gone.

    “Erin,” Logan whispered as he barreled through an emergency exit