She had a panicked thought, then wrote, Was saving battery, with shaky fingers.

Your battery is at 87 percent.

Oh, she wrote. Outsmarted.

The next text said: I sent one of your photos to Julian.

She pushed through the front door and slid her phone onto the kitchen table—too hard so it flew across and hit the floor—and hooked left into the bathroom and didn’t turn the light on and made it to the toilet just in time.

It felt good to get that out of her stomach, whatever it was. She flushed, then brushed her teeth and looked at herself in the mirror. In this light—something about the angle of it on her nose—she looked so much like her father.

She could figure this out.

She had to.

Eli

ELI

He climbed the subway stairs and sat on a bench on the platform and let the train pull out of the station. When it was gone, taking everyone else who’d been waiting with it, and leaving a few people off, he had a clear view of the building across from school. He took the device out and put it on the bench beside him.

Eli had sort of hoped that now—now that something really bad had happened—the owner of the device would step forward, shut it all down. There would be an apology for things getting out of hand. Or some kind of police involvement.

The lack of action, the lack of a reveal of the man behind the curtain, had to mean that the creator/owner/whatever you wanted to call it had expected this sort of outcome. And was fine with it. Had, in fact, orchestrated it.

Forces greater than Eli had imagined were in play.

Someone was dead.

His mind felt foggy.

It had never occurred to him that anything like that could happen outside of the movies, not really.

The device generated a new message: No one is home.

“How do you know which apartment it even is?” Eli asked, wanting to seem helpful and not just completely freaked out.

Comparing video with current view.

“Can you look up who lives there?”

I am not sure.

“What now?”

Watch and wait.

While Eli sat he checked in on Eliot because no one ever died in Willow Creek and it felt like a safe place to spend a few minutes. He sent Eliot off on a quest to upgrade his wardrobe again.

The sun caught the surface of the device just so when it generated a message—Your game is more interesting than I am?—and Eli saw it was covered in fingerprints.

Eli put his phone away. “Sorry. Hey, can you scan your surface for fingerprints? And compare them with mine and the others, like from our touch ID on our phones? See if there are more prints that aren’t ours?”

Affirmative.

Eli’s eyebrows shot up. He waited, pleased with his idea.