“Destroyed it?” I say, looking up at him in disbelief. “Couldn’t they just shut it off or take out the SIM card?”

Ash’s dark hair is wet and neatly combed and he’s wearing a white button-down with a light gray sweater, a black blazer, and a pair of expensive-looking jeans. I stop dead in my tracks. I’ve never seen him in anything besides our school uniform and right now he looks like he just stepped out of a magazine.

“With the right technology, your cell phone can be tracked, with or without a SIM card,” he says. “It’s easier to locate if it’s on, but it’s not impossible to locate if it’s off. It’s not worth taking the risk.”

My fingers linger over the familiar case. I drooled over that phone for most of the year and bought it for myself for my birthday after painstakingly saving up my babysitting money. It’s only four months old.

I frown. “I know it’s silly that in the midst of everything that’s happened I care about my cell phone,” I say, and sigh. “I just…do.” What I don’t tell him is that it feels like it was the last thing linking me to normal teenhood, and I really didn’t want to give it up. Missed texts from Emily, pictures from the last two months that I never uploaded to my computer, and notes on the knife and sword tricks I was learning. My old life is being stripped from me piece by piece.

He nods, but instead of silently judging my frivolity, he smiles. “You really are beautiful,” he says, and chuckles to himself. “I never thought I would say that to a girl with a very sparkly cell phone case. But it couldn’t be more true.”

I laugh, too, taking the edge off my phone massacre. My braid is messy and strands of it hang around my face. My jeans are worn and cuffed at the bottom, my socks mismatched, and I’m in the same oversized cable-knit sweater as when I arrived at Academy Absconditi.

“You’re clearly still feeling the effects of that sedative and your brains are scrambled,” I say. “Speaking of sedatives, how did we get to this hotel?”

Ash shrugs like he doesn’t think it deserves much thought. “The Academy transportation system is as mysterious as its location. It helps keep the school hidden. Every time Layla and I have returned to Egypt, we’ve been dropped off and wake up in a different location.”