“You should use it sooner rather than later,” Teddy said. “You’ll have time to get used to it that way.”

“I’ll think about it,” Emily said. She eyed her plate and pushed it over to Teddy, who took it with a happy little growl and tore into the leftovers with more gusto than Emily thought the food deserved.

Then Teddy was done and leaned back to pat her tummy. Emily picked up their plates and washed and rinsed them off at the sinks, adding them atop the pile of cleaned dishes they’d been working on all afternoon.

“Are you ready to go?” Emily asked.

“Yeah, coming!”

Emily and Teddy left by the front with as few goodbyes to the other volunteers as Emily could manage, and then, hand in hand with her strange little sister of sorts, Emily started walking back toward their dorms and what she hoped would be a good night’s rest.

They were a couple of blocks along when Emily felt something buzzing at her side. “One sec,” she said before gesturing to a bus stop by the nearest corner. It was empty, save for a few discarded cups left next to an overflowing garbage can.

She slipped in with Teddy and pulled out her phone from her purse. The number on the screen wasn’t her home number, which meant it wasn’t a number she recognized.

“Hello?” she said as she pressed the phone to her ear.

“Miss Wright,” said an all-too-familiar voice.

She felt her blood go cold. “Mister Handshake,” she said.

“Let’s keep this short. I’ve secured this call as best I can, but that only means so much. I . . . have to ask for a rather em—” The man cut himself off to cough, rather violently.

Emily didn’t know how to react to that, though she did pull her phone away from the side of her face as if that would do something. “Mister Handshake?”

“I’m well,” he said. “Well enough? It doesn’t matter. I need to talk to you in person, and soon.”

“Why?” she asked.

“This line isn’t secure,” he said.

Emily bit her lip and looked down to Teddy who quickly yoinked her finger out of her nose and shrugged. “I . . . I think I’d like to know why anyway.”

“ . . . All right. As you can imagine, I keep some information about all my clients. It’s stored on a very secure device, encrypted to all hell, with some power-tech thrown in for good measure. If you can’t read my mind, you can’t get into it.”

“Oh— Okay,” Emily said. She felt her stomach edging closer to a deep precipice.