“Ask him what the deal is with the device,” Marwan said.

“It just told us not to tell anyone about it,” Eli said.

“Are you for real?” Marwan asked.

Eli answered with a defiant look of amusement, but whatever, Marwan had places to be.

“Let’s just go,” Marwan said. “And if anybody asks, the whole urgent matter that’s clearly not urgent never happened.”

“Works for me,” Ilanka said, and walked out.

“But I just told Mr. M about the messages we got,” Eli said. “So he knows we were here.”

Marwan didn’t have time to care.

The device blinked urgently:

DO NOT TELL ANYONE ABOUT THE DEVICE.

DO NOT LEAVE THE DEVICE UNATTENDED.

Eden seemed mesmerized, like if you waved a hand in front of her face, she might not even blink. Marwan was tempted to try it.

“So what should we do?” she said to no one in particular.

A shrieking alarm woke violent vibrations in the instruments around them. Marwan’s hands went to his ears. At first he thought the device was doing it, but no, it was the fire alarm. “We need to go,” he said.

“I say we take it,” Eli said.

“I say we leave it,” Marwan said.

Eden looked at him with a sort of panic in her eyes. Then she looked back at the device … Marwan looked, too.

DO NOT LEAVE THE DEVICE UNATTENDED.

DO NOT LEAVE THE DEVICE UNATTENDED.

DO NOT LEAVE THE DEVICE UNATTENDED.

DO NOT LEAVE THE DEVICE UNATTENDED.

The cube went abruptly dark—Marwan had the strange sense that it was thinking—then lit up with rainbow swirls that quickly tightened into new words:

TAKE ME WITH YOU …

Followed by:

OR ELSE.

Eli was maybe about to reach for the device when Eden grabbed it, shoved it into her backpack, and headed for the door.

“Seriously?” Marwan shouted, following her down the hall, where even the air seemed to be screaming at them to get out. They went down three flights of dizzying stairs and out to the front of the building.

She crossed the street and he followed. Eli was with them when they stopped on the corner and turned toward the sirens; Ilanka was long gone.

A fire truck with a toy skull strapped to its front grill stopped in front of the school, and firefighters wearing their weight in gear leaped from it. The walkie-talkies on their belts crackled as they swarmed the building like alien invaders.

Eden

EDEN

Oh god, oh god, oh god. She really shouldn’t have taken it. Why did she take it?

“Now what?” Marwan said.

“I don’t know.” Eden’s heart was trying to burst its way out of her. Adrenaline was no joke. “Do you think it …?”

The timing was too perfect to be coincidence.

“Do I think it what?” Marwan seemed mad at her.

“Do you think it triggered the fire alarm?”

“What—no,” Marwan said, like it was ridiculous.

Maybe it was.