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“Logan, no. This
cannot
be what you're Pledging for. This cannot be your plan.”

“I guess I shouldn't count on your help, then.”

“Logan, what could I even do?”

“I don't know.” Logan shrugged. “Hack into the system. Get me out if you had to.”

Erin stared at him sadly.

“I need to find my sister, Erin. You have to understand.” Tears filled his eyes quickly now, unexpectedly. “I miss her so much, Erin . . .” He wiped them with the back of his unmarked hand. “I've missed her so much . . .”

Erin was quiet for a moment. “Logan,” she said as gently as she could. “Peck is manipulating you. He found your weakness, and he's using it to manipulate you into doing something rebellious against DOME. Against
Lamson and Cylis
, Logan. He's tricking you into doing his dirty work.”

“I am
not
being manipulated,” Logan said. “These are
my
choices.
My
beliefs, now.”

“Please,” she begged. “Don't do anything stupid tomorrow. Go in there and
behave
, Logan! Or else you really
will
be in danger! You're on thin ice with DOME as it is! It's all they need for you to act out during your Pledge! Going off on some conspiracy rant, interrogating some poor Marker—”

“If I'm wrong, I'll know I'm wrong, and I can bury Lily for good. I'd still come out ahead.”

“In a jail cell!”

“And if I'm right . . .”

“Logan, promise me you'll go home and think about what I'm saying. All I want—
all
I want—is for you to come home to me tomorrow, smiling and Marked. And for us to enjoy Spokie as full A.U. citizens in Lamson's name. In Cylis's name. Together.”

Logan smiled. In another lifetime, that would be all he wanted too.

“I promise I'll consider it,” Logan said. And he took her hand. “But I want you to promise me something too.”

Erin waited for him to speak.

“Don't say anything about Peck to your father. Not about the warehouse, not about the other kids . . . let's just . . . wait 'til after the Pledge to sort all that out, all right? They aren't a threat to me now, and whatever's really going on with them, let's just . . . let's just sleep on it, okay?”

Erin frowned. Then she nodded.

“Say okay.”

“Okay,” she said. She was looking at her reflection in the spoon. It was upside down.

Erin smiled as she and Logan stood up from the booth. But when they went out to meet Mr. Arbitor on the sidewalk, she walked to her father without looking back, and the two of them left without saying good-bye.

TWELVE
PLEDGE

1

T
HE MORNING OF LOGAN'S PLEDGE, THERE WAS
no cake, no extended family gathered around the table, and no celebration.

Logan ate a piece of toast, and his mom sat next to him silently.

“Big day,” Dad said, coming into the room. “You, uh . . . you want me to walk you there, or anything?” It was the most his dad had said to him in a month.

“I'll be fine,” Logan said. “I know the way.”

“You know . . .” His dad was clearly trying his hardest. “It's really going to be great for us. For your mother. And maybe a nice, steady, after-school job would . . . would do you some good.”

“I know.” Logan finished his breakfast. “I know all that.”

And still, Mom didn't say a word. She just stared at Logan's plate, at the crumbs he'd left on it, sitting perfectly upright, hands at her lap, vapid . . .

“Oh, I know, I know,” Dad said. “I'm just . . . just excited for us. A new start and all. Today's a good day.” He placed his hands on Mom's shoulders, and it was only the faintest glimmer in his eyes that said anything different.

“Well, I'll be off, then,” Logan said, not making a longer moment out of any of it than he needed to. And as he entered the elevator, he wondered when, or if, he'd see either of them again.

Logan stood in front of the Center for almost an hour before going in. He watched Pledges come and go, he watched staffers punch in for the day, even watched some leave again for lunch. He wondered which were Markers. And he knew there was only one way to find out. He watched the sun move a good ways across the sky, until the large spire of the DOME Umbrella cast him in shadow, and the windows of the Center to its side reflected bright, painful spots of sunlight into his eyes. Logan breathed the air and stood, calm and still, less frightened than he'd been in as long as he could remember, because today would be the end of all of that. His dad was right. Today would be the start of something altogether new.

2

“Just complete these two forms, please.” Logan took the tablet and stylus from the lady at the desk. “Last ones you'll ever need to fill out,” she said with a wink, and Logan thought of that unmistakable standard-issue Government Smile.

“You'll call me in?” Logan asked, finding a seat in the waiting area.

“Oh yes. Your reservation's in our system, so it won't be long.”

Logan went to work on the forms.

The room surrounding him was dotted with nervous kids fidgeting on felt seat benches, half a dozen in total. Each celebrating his or her birthday, like Logan, alone in the sterile, white room among the chatterbox televisions of the DOME Center for Pledging and Treatment. One frame projected a woman talking excitedly about all the many daily uses of the Mark—access to shopping, banking, health services, transit services, worker's eligibility, no-hassle security clearance, voter registration . . . the list went on and on. Another frame projected a man discussing outreach to those who didn't yet have the Mark, and welcoming those Markless who had finally decided to make The Right Choice and Pledge Today.

Those words flashed across the screen as the man said them: “The Right Choice” and “Pledge Today.”

And indeed, perhaps as many as twenty Markless sat in the waiting room at this very moment, men and women of every age, all of them filthy, hungry, putrid, scratching themselves and jittery, antsy, looking constantly around the room as though any moment someone would sneak up behind them, whisper, “Gotcha! Ya filthy, stinkin' skinflint!” and clasp an industrial-grade pair of electro-magnecuffs around their abhorrent, Unmarked wrists.

“Logan Paul Langly?” a nurse called from halfway behind a swinging door.

Logan stood, head held high, and went in for his Pledge.

3

The nurse led Logan through a labyrinth of hallways and stairways and elevators, and he tried to count the turns. Left, right, straight, left, left, right, up, right, elevator—thirteenth floor, straight, left, right . . . but he couldn't keep track. It turned out his visit to the Center across the street, with Erin's dad after Dane's concert, was just a preview. He'd never walked so deep into a building so big and so swallowing.

“You ever forget where you're going?” Logan joked to the nurse.

“Constantly,” she said, and she swiped her Mark under a scanner mounted to the wall, above which a floor map appeared and dotted a line to their destination, like the world's worst imitation of Pac-Man.

The room she finally brought Logan to was featureless and unassuming. In its center, against the far wall, was a chair like you'd see in a university lecture hall, with its right side flattening out into a small surface big enough to rest an arm against. Along this surface and at its end were stirrups—one for the upper forearm just below the elbow, the next for the back of the hand— and five rings for the fingers. This was Logan's guess; the nurse explained none of it.

To the side of the chair was a machine, roughly the size of a refrigerator, stacked with disk drives and exuding a tangle of wires leading to a monitor. Logan followed with his eyes the wires to their ends. They looked to be designed specifically for attaching to flesh, and Logan felt his heart rate rise.

“You can sit right there,” the nurse said, and when Logan did, he noticed a wall-length mirror to his right. He saw himself in it, remembered his interrogation with Mr. Arbitor after Dane's concert, and immediately wondered who was watching from the other side. “Your Marker will be in shortly to officiate your Pledge and conduct the procedure. I will be prepping you for it in the meantime. Do you have any questions before we begin?”

“Yes,” Logan said. “Can I do it without the nanosleep?”

The nurse smiled at him as if he'd asked her to drill a hole in his head. “Trust me when I say you wouldn't want that,” she said.

“Do I not have the option?”

“I've been prepping Pledges here for nine years,” she said. “No one's ever done it without the sleep.” She held the spoon out. Pooled on it was a thick, silvery serum. It looked to Logan like mercury, and just as poisonous. “Open up.”

“I'd rather know what you're doing to me,” Logan said, and a look of righteous anger flashed across the nurse's face.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “It's . . . a requisite part of the process. If you need more time to consider the benefits of the Pledge itself, I can reschedule your appointment for a later date. But between you and me”—she glanced almost imperceptibly toward the mirror at Logan's right—“I'd take the sleep.”

Peck's warnings began buzzing through Logan's mind like mosquitoes.
You will not return from the Pledge
, they hummed.
Whatever crime they saw in your sister, they will see it in you
.

But Logan
had
to see a Marker. Five minutes alone with one— that's all he needed. It was worth the risk. So Logan opened his mouth, and in went the nanosleep. It tasted good, icy and thick like a gelatin. The nurse waited for him to swallow, but he did not.

“Whah if ah own'd wagup?” Logan asked. The dose crackled on his tongue like soda and Pop Rocks, electric in its reaction to his mouth.

“You will.” The nurse laughed. “I promise you'll wake up.”

“Buh whah if ah own'd?”

The nurse smiled. “When it's over, I give you this.” She wielded a syringe from the countertop beside her. “It'll perk you right up.”

Logan weighed his options a final time. But there was no avoiding it. The choice had been made. Logan swallowed the nano-sleep.

“Good,” the nurse said. “In a moment you'll feel the first wave of the sleep, and from there we'll have a few minutes for questions and answers before you nod off and I make way for your Marker.” The nurse smiled, as if this were all the simplest thing in the world. “And when you wake up, it'll all be over! May I?” She brushed Logan's hair back and began attaching wires with cool, wet suction cups to his temples and scalp and the nape of his neck. He shivered at her touch. “Logan, do you have any professional goals? Career plans? Aspirations?”

The question caught him off guard. “I wanna make a difference,” he said. “I guess I never thought much about how.”

The nurse nodded. “And what do you like to do for fun?”

“I, uh . . .” Thoughts of Erin flashed through his head. Flying down the streets on her rollerstick, his arms around her. Tablet calls late at night with exciting news. Lunches spent planning the evening's adventures. “I like reading,” Logan said. “I like music.”

The machine to his right flashed brightly in several places.

The nurse eyed it. “Mm-hm.”

Panic surged through Logan's brain as it fought the encroaching effects of the nanosleep. Imagining believable lies to the nurse's questions became much too complicated, much too confusing. As she probed deeper and deeper into his family history, his childhood, his schoolwork, his thoughts on the American Union . . . it became impossible to think of anything but the truth. He watched himself speak, some part of him cringing at his own answers, recoiling at the display of flashing lights on the machine. If he hadn't been so determined to fight the onset of his medication from the start, he doubted he would have known what he was saying at all.

“When'sa Marker gettin' . . . ?” Logan slurred. There was urgency now.

“Just a few more minutes,” the nurse said. “You're probably feeling a little light-headed by now, but don't worry. That's normal.” She looked nervously to the machine, now, to his right. Her voice was distant and tinny. Euphoria swept over Logan, and he found himself suddenly giggling and at the same time furious with himself for it. He was rapidly losing control.

Logan thought hard, trying desperately to calculate when he'd swallowed the nanosleep and figuring he had no more than a couple of minutes until the stuff took intractable hold of his consciousness.

So Logan took a deep, sharp breath.

Better make 'em count
.

4

Logan had to move fast if any part of his plan was going to work.

He had to move fast if he was going to make it out of this building on his own terms. It took supreme concentration to fight even the preliminary effects of the nanosleep, and Logan knew those were merely the lazy shadow of what loomed ahead once the dose was fully metabolized.