“I’m retrieving data and activity logs now.”

Eli nodded, clearly more excited about all this—a second round?—than Marwan was.

Eli asked, “How many times have you done this? How many of you have there been?”

“I’m not sure,” the device said. “I have only recently learned to remember.”

Eli said, “You texted me an address. Why? What’s there?”

“It’s where my data comes from,” the device said. “It’s how I found you.”

“Can you find your … GPS log? To see where you came from just now?”

“I will try.”

“That’s a really good idea,” Eden said.

Marwan nodded agreement.

“Why didn’t you think of that last time?” Ilanka said.

“Just didn’t!” Eli said. “Maybe because we didn’t know it could fly? I sort of assumed someone had put it there and then turned it on so it wouldn’t have any record of anything before the music room.”

“Why didn’t it think of it?” Eden said.

Eli shrugged. “Probably because it wasn’t programmed to.”

“I have a location,” the device said.

“Show us,” Eli said.

The others drew close to Marwan as the address appeared. Eli said, “I knew it.”

“Knew what?” Eden asked.

“At Ilanka’s dad’s office,” Eli said. “There was a Wi-Fi network named Aizel.”

Ilanka said, “This address is basically next door.”

Marwan looked at each of them in turn. They were such an odd team. Like the worst possible Ocean’s 4 a person could assemble for a heist. But he couldn’t deny this weird fondness he had for the three of them—not just for Eden. He asked, “Should we go there?”

The device said, “We should go there.”

Ilanka

ILANKA

They climbed out of the cab they’d hailed by school and stood in front of the address, maybe expecting someone to come out and greet them. There were no signs on the building, but a doorbell next to a keypad beside the door beckoned.

“Here goes nothing,” Ilanka said, and pressed it.

Nothing happened.

“We have this brand of alarm and smart lock at home,” Eden said. “And it’s all Wi-Fi based, meaning it can probably be hacked. Aizel?”

The device said, “Trying now.”

If Ilanka were being honest with herself, she thought they sort of sounded like idiots calling it Aizel. But she also felt its presence as a real entity; like there were really five of them there and not four. She knew it wasn’t a real person, but it still had an energy about it, an energy that unnerved her. They were all playing nice with it now, but she hadn’t forgotten what it had done with Svetlana, and now that she suspected it (the last one anyway and weren’t they the same?) had messed with her father, she liked it even less than she had before, which was not at all.