“It said he has gotten too interested, like asking too many questions. He’s been texting it and stuff. Asking it where it came from and why and all.”

“Any good answers?”

“Not that he shared with me.” Eden took the lid off her tea and dunked the tea bag in and out a few times. “Anyway, we went to look at this art installation like ten feet away, and when we came back it was gone, then a few minutes later it was there again. I don’t know if someone took it and put it back or if it somehow turned invisible? Like a trick-of-the-eye kind of thing where it was camouflaged? Then it said it was being watched, that someone was coming for it. So we took it on a ferry ride to Wall Street and Brooklyn.”

“What?”

“I know! And when I got home my friend Anjali was there and I’d said I was with her but my mom had bumped into her randomly, even though I thought my mom was out in the city, and I had to scramble up a lie when she saw a text from Ilanka about the device.”

This was the time to say it! He knew why her mom had lied! He couldn’t do it, though. He said, “Wow.”

“Yeah.”

“How did you explain it?”

“I said it was just an inside joke because one of our teachers is always going on about our devices and device time and device dependency so now it’s just like a thing we all say but really we’re just talking about phones or whatever.”

“That’s pretty good.”

“Thanks. Oh, and it’s been talking to me, like in a real voice—or computerized voice, but it sounds real. And it can project its messages onto walls. And it actually seemed mad at me yesterday. Like vibrating and saying ‘Do not ignore the device.’ Freaked me out.”

“I missed a lot!”

“Oh, and did you see Ilanka’s text?”

“Yeah, I saw. If I were the device, she’s the one I wouldn’t trust.”

“Why?”

“She wanted nothing to do with it. Now all of a sudden she does. It doesn’t make sense. Why is she doing it?”

“Why are we doing it?” She sipped her tea. “And, like, why the four of us?”

“Maybe it was something we did, like, online. Like a search or a website we visited. Something we bought? An app?”

“Maybe,” Eden said. “I’m not sure it matters. We just need an exit strategy. I mean, we can’t just keep going forever with it, right? What do you think would happen if we just, like, walked out, right now? Left it here.”

He shrugged. “It would fry both of our phones?”

She said, “So we’d get new phones.”