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Now that’s creepy.”
    “Maybe someone figured out he’s hacking, and they want Hawk to do the same for them? He might have gotten himself in trouble.”
    “And us with him,” Liz reminded Faith. “We’re the ones wearing the jeans, remember?”
    That wasn’t quite true. They weren’t actually wearing them, because they hadn’t been shipped yet, but Faith understood what Liz was saying. They needed to get with Hawk and talk this whole thing through. She wasn’t sure nearly free jeans were worth the risk of real trouble.
    Miss Newhouse was on high alert in the morning lecture sessions, pacing the room like a vampire hunting for a victim. There was a rumor floating around the school that someone was peddling a Wire Code, which had been a problem at Faith’s other schools and was something she’d hoped wouldn’t make the leap to Old Park Hill. Wire Codes required a complicated hack that usually only worked for a few days before it was discovered and patched by programmers at the State.
    Wire Codes, Faith knew, were nothing to mess around with. They revealed things on Tablets in ways that were not allowed. They showed things people weren’t supposed to see. Staring into a Tablet where a Wire Code had been entered set the mind on fire; and once you were exposed, turning away didn’t matter. You’d done the equivalent of taking the hit or injected the needle. The Wire Code was in you. Its electronic rewiring of your brain had infected you. In the four or five hours that followed, a Wire Code provided a heightened sense of reality. Colors burned brighter, flavors intensified, feelings of happiness amplified tenfold.
    Faith had never tried a Wire Code, though she’d had opportunities at all her old schools. There was usually at least one floating around every few weeks on campus, and most of the students found out about them. They were made up of a sequence of numbers and letters, and they were always passed around in a very specific way. Like the drugs of the past, Wire Codes had their own culture of delivery systems and symbols. Marijuana had its joint, acid its tab, cocaine its pocket-sized cylinder tube. In the early days of Wire Codes the people who made them wrote them out on paper, but it was risky. Handwriting recognition had seen huge advances with the advent of the Tablets. Writing a number or a letter was like a fingerprint that could be traced. And Wire Codes were never passed from Tablet to Tablet, based on the widely held belief that the States were out there intercepting every questionable transmission. Somewhere in the very early days of Wire Codes, the method for delivery was chosen, and it just stuck: plastic beads on a chain or a string. Sometimes the chain of letters and numbers was short, sometimes long; but it was always strung in a loop with a series of cheap plastic beads, like a charm bracelet for a little kid.
    The Wire Code alert meant Faith couldn’t talk to Hawk while her lectures were going on, which was probably for the best, because she was falling behind in Buford’s advanced English and she really needed to focus. Unfortunately, there was something else on her mind, something bigger and more exciting, and it was making Buford sound like a lawn mower as he deconstructed Henry V ’s secondary characters. Her meet up with Wade was at noon, and no matter how hard she tried, Faith could think of little else as Miss Newhouse made her way around the room for the third time. She had a hawkish nose and dark eyes, she was thin like a pencil, and she leaned over sitting students with a frown on her face.
    Faith looked toward the back of the classroom as Miss Newhouse stopped in front of Dylan Gilmore. Newhouse leaned down, putting both hands on Dylan’s desk, and Faith slid one of her earphones off so she could hear what they were saying. One ear was filled with Buford’s weed-whacker–buzz voice; the other zeroed in on the far corner of the room, where Dylan was slumped in his