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against the trigger, and I scream, “Wait!” It surprises even me, and the girl takes a step back. She’s checking for a mark, and I have one—a techprint burned into my wrist by my father, who was hoping I would escape the retrieval squad.
    Shoving my sleeve up, I thrust my arm out to her and point to the pale hourglass imprinted on my skin like a scar.
    The rifle slips in her hand, the barrel now pointing at the ground.
    “Your left hand?” she whispers.
    “Yes.”
    She’s shocked, but as quickly as the rifle appeared, it disappears across her back. She pushes my sleeve down to cover the techprint.
    “Go to the Icebox,” she says, “and lie low. We’ll find you. You aren’t safe here.”
    “What’s the Icebox?” Jost demands.
    “The Icebox is the city ahead of you,” she says. “It’s Sunrunner territory and outside Guild control.”
    “Where are we?” I ask.
    “The remains of the state of California,” she says. “The Icebox is the only inhabited city in this territory. You’ll be safe from the Guild there—for now. Stay put and stay hidden. Don’t go out after hours and don’t let anyone see that techprint.”
    “Sure,” I mutter, and the girl’s hand seizes my arm.
    “Your life depends on it,” she says.
    I nod to show that I understand, even though none of this makes sense. What does my father’s techprint have to do with Earth? What’s a Sunrunner? But I know she’s right about one thing: the Guild is coming for me, and we aren’t safe here.
    She strides away without giving us her name. Her warning hangs in the air. I don’t watch her, even though she’s not headed to the metro but back toward the ocean.
    “Why would she care about your techprint?” Jost asks, but I ignore him as we start to jog back to where we left Erik. We need to get out of here, and if there are people in this Icebox, we can blend in and hide until I figure out how my techprint is linked to this girl.
    Nothing tied to the night of my retrieval can be ignored, especially when that thing is a mark left before my father showed me that he and my mother were more than dissenters.
    They were traitors—like me.

TWO
    THE SCENTS OF THE METRO MINGLE, PERFUMING it with the aromas of sewage, baking bread, rotting fruit, and the sweat of its bustling inhabitants. It is pleasant one moment and stomach-turning the next. We’ve been here for a week, but it doesn’t feel like home and no one’s come looking for us yet.
    But bit by bit I’m growing more accustomed to the strange world I’ve found myself in. We stumbled into the Icebox not knowing what to expect and found people, shops, and solar-powered lights. Erik discovered quickly that the small items we had on us could be pawned for currency, which bought us access to a cheap hotel room. Today Erik and Jost let me come with them to the grey market, the seedy part of the metro, where illicit trade takes place, on the condition that I don’t speak to anyone. I agreed but only to get out of the rat trap masquerading as a hotel I’ve been stuck in during their other trips, trips that produced stale food and little else. But I’m not looking for a meal; I want information. Erik has learned a lot on his trips to the market, and we’re starting to understand how things work here. But we still haven’t found the mysterious girl who sent us to the Icebox.
    The Icebox is a conglomeration of buildings from before the war and ones constructed by the syndicate that runs the entire metro—the Sunrunners, the powerful group that controls the Icebox by monopolizing solar trade. Our hotel’s manager patiently explained the lighting systems to us our first night. He does a fair business off new refugees coming into the Icebox, and he assures us the Sunrunners are not friends of the Guild. Apparently, Sunrunners keep control of solar energy because they are the only ones brave enough to venture outside the borders of the Interface, where the Guild mining zones begin. I think