“I don’t know,” Eli said, and his face seemed to be vibrating, like he was barely holding it together. “Ilanka said no one would talk to her at the hospital because she’s not family.”

“I can’t believe this is happening.” Her ribs were somehow tied too tight around her lungs. “I mean, did it hack a traffic light?”

Eli said, “I honestly have no idea.”

“Why would it do this?” Eden half whispered.

It was right there in the bag, probably listening and plotting. Eden was expecting, at any minute, a Panera-like outburst.

“She broke a rule,” Eli said flatly.

“But so what?” Eden said, anger now mixing with fear. “Why does it care?”

“It doesn’t care,” Eli said.

“You know what I mean.”

“I don’t know,” Eli said. “It’s just programmed.”

“But why would that be one of the rules? And why would whoever started the whole thing allow this to happen? Allow someone to get hurt?”

Eli said, “I don’t know. Maybe it’s not under their control anymore?”

Eden tried to take a deep, calming breath again, but something felt broken. Like she’d outgrown her body—needed a new one, a full transplant.

A woman struggled to get through the door with a crying toddler in a stroller and sat at the table next to them, her annoyance spreading like cigarette smoke. The little boy caught eyes with Eden and stopped crying when Eden raised her eyebrows at him. She bulged her eyes out, trying to be funny, and then looked away.

She checked her phone.

Citizen told her that a woman about four blocks away had called 911 to report a group of people fighting in the street.

Marwan still hadn’t written back. She should text him now with an update, except there wasn’t really one. And she’d texted Anjali earlier and asked her to meet later, but Anjali hadn’t replied.

“While I was waiting for Ilanka,” Eli said, “I started watching this video about an app that can read facial expressions. Like there’s this emotion engine, they called it, with so many human expressions cataloged and tagged that the app can actually tell what you’re feeling just by looking at you.”

“I can’t even do that,” Eden said. She sure couldn’t read Julian, or Marwan.

“You think it’s doing that?” He nodded at the bag.

“I don’t know,” Eden said. “It does seem to respond differently to different moods, and I’m not sure how else it could do that?”

Eli said, “We need to go somewhere where we can talk to it.”

“The park?”

“It’s supposed to rain so not ideal.”

They couldn’t go to her house—her mom was home (and actually knew she was meeting Eli in a café, just didn’t really know why it mattered)—and he didn’t offer his.