I could feel the heat of Ben’s gaze fixed on me, but I couldn’t look away from the footage fast-forwarding across Ezekiel’s eye membrane. It flew into the humanities wing, entering various classrooms and spiraling through them. I felt a chill as the point of view neared Mr. Tomasi’s room, passing the very spot where we stood. It zipped through Tomasi’s room, spiraling out to the perimeter in seconds. As it zipped toward the door, a familiar meaty hand swung into the frame holding a stun gun, the gleaming barrel filling up the screen. A bolt of lightning fizzled across the membrane, the spark so bright it made us jump. The next view was straight up at the ceiling, each tile delineated with those weird blueprint lines, though they were now even more scrambled and staticky than before. Soon enough the ceiling slid into a blur, passing through the doorway into the hall, and then we were looking up at ourselves looking down at us.

Live footage.

“I asked you a question, Chance,” Ben was saying.

“Sorry,” I said. I couldn’t lift my eyes. I could barely even speak. “What?”

Ben’s image, even fuzzily captured in the bubble membrane, looked annoyed. “I said, ‘Transmitting to who?’”

Before I could answer, a sudden movement in Ezekiel’s eye startled me so badly I jerked back onto my heels.

A virtual eyeball rolled into the membrane, replacing the view of us. Squirming and veiny, it stared up from the space where a real eyeball was supposed to be.

Alex screamed. I might have as well.

Not Ben, though.

Ben had his stun gun out in a flash. He fired it directly through Ezekiel’s forehead into the brain. All light vanished from the membrane, taking that horrific eyeball with it.

Entry 16

ENTRY 16

“What the hell was that?”

“And what does it want?”

“Where is it?”

“Are there more?”

“Did it see us?”

“I don’t know.”

The tense voices washed over my back. We were still right outside Mr. Tomasi’s classroom, but I was at my locker, twirling the combination dial.

“Does it know how to get here?”

“Well, it is a friggin’ Mapper, Ben.”

“But why would it think we’d stick around? Wouldn’t it think we’d be long gone?”

“That’s true,” Chatterjee said. “If it saw us, then it knows that we saw it see us.”

“Plus, the signal looked all weak and screwed up,” Patrick said. “Maybe it wasn’t transmitting clearly.”

“Either way,” Alex said, “we’ll have to watch out even more.”

“Meaning what?”

My combination lock clicked open, the battered metal door swinging on its rusty hinges.