She checked her phone. Noted the time stamp at Starbucks, then looked at the time. If she left now, maybe he’d still be there. “I don’t know,” she said. “What if it’s, like, a bomb?”

“If it’s a bomb, why are you sitting here?” Eli said.

Eden groaned. “I didn’t actually mean it was a bomb.”

“Then what?” He put the cube down.

She had liked Eli more when he didn’t talk to her.

Marwan looked at his phone. “Listen. Mr. M’s not here, and I’ve got to go.” He reached for his stuff.

The cube pulsed once, and again, and again.

One side of it lit up with letters—red words traveling like a stock market ticker around all four of its vertical sides. Eden could just make out the message:

I am not a bomb.

She had a rapid-onset bad feeling about this. A worse bad feeling than the low-level dread she had about most things.

That message went away, and a new one appeared. Eli went closer, bent down to read, and blocked Eden’s view.

“What’s it say?” she asked, and a chill burst inside her like it had that day her mother had called and said, “Something happened to Dad.” It settled like frost on her skin.

Eli turned to them with his eyebrows raised. “It says, ‘Nobody leaves.’ ”

Marwan

MARWAN

“Yeah, okay, I’m leaving.” Marwan stood.

He wouldn’t be late for soccer if he hustled, and he really couldn’t be late because soccer was the way out. If Marwan managed a soccer scholarship, his father could hardly say no to his going away.

“I’m leaving, too,” Ilanka said. “That’s just creepy.”

She got up and threw her backpack onto her shoulder with such force that her water bottle flew out of its side mesh pocket and landed on the floor with a clang, like a dull cymbal. It skidded toward Marwan—a small herd of pink unicorns galloping across the room—and stopped at his feet, so he picked it up and handed it to her.

“Thanks,” she said.

Marwan wasn’t sure they’d ever been in a class together or even spoken, but somehow he knew her name. She was pretty, in a sort of severe, chiseled Russian way, which made sense because her parents, he was pretty sure, were Russian. Accents and all. She wore heavy makeup and had dark brown hair that was always tied back in a tight bun—like at any moment she expected she’d get a call from the Olympics and be asked to do an uneven parallel bars routine. He knew that about her, too, he guessed. Gymnastics. And now, unicorns, though she didn’t seem the type.