“Exactly,” I agreed. “But Salzburg was so certain of it, he had my mom convinced to let him install them all over campus. Honestly, I think all the security breaches had put her on edge and made her a bit desperate. But what if that Mayhem member got caught on purpose just to pass on a piece of technology? A piece of technology that they could then detonate remotely?”

“I still don’t get it,” Elliot said, reaching a hand out to touch the prototype. I smacked his hand down and turned to glare at him.

“Obviously,” I said. “Think about the fifth bullet point, the prototypes are a bust, as in they are going to explode.”

“That thing?” he said. “You really think an explosive is hidden inside a security camera?”

I bit my lip and shook my head. “I’m not sure,” I admitted. “But I do know these were getting installed right around the time we left. It fits.”

“The prototypes are a bust,” he muttered darkly. “Future us was so dumb I could just spit.”

“Don’t spit,” I said. “That’s gross.” Before I could second-guess myself, I’d grabbed ahold of the camera and given it a hard twist. To my utter surprise, it popped off easily, and I stumbled backward. Elliot yelped and covered his head. When nothing happened, he cautiously lowered his arms and took a step toward me again, his eyes wary.

“Not how I would have handled a potential explosive,” he said. “But I always knew you were nuts.”

I ignored him as I looked at the back of the device, where a small red light was blinking on and off. I didn’t know much about what the guts of a camera looked like, but I was pretty sure this wasn’t it. “How good were you at our explosives deactivation class?” I asked. It had been a one-year course we were all required to take pretty early on in our training, since oftentimes Butterflies would trespass into the past with the very unoriginal idea of blowing up something or someone, and knowing how to deactivate a bomb was crucial. It did no good to catch a Butterfly if you left a ticking time bomb behind to finish the job they’d started.