For Nick
Also by Tara Altebrando
The Leaving
The Possible
The Opposite of Here
Contents
Hello_world
Four_new_notifications
Eden
Marwan
Eden
Marwan
Eden
Marwan
Eden
Establishing_connection
Marwan
Eden
Marwan
Eden
Marwan
Eden
Marwan
Eden
Select_all
Ilanka
Eli
Ilanka
Eli
Ilanka
Eli
Marwan
Eden
Eli
Eden
Eli
Eden
Marwan
Ilanka
Eden
Eli
Marwan
Eden
Ilanka
Marwan
Eden
Eli
Marwan
Ilanka
Eden
Eli
Marwan
Eden
User_error
Ilanka
Eli
Eden
Ilanka
Marwan
Eden
Eli
Marwan
Eden
Force_quit
Marwan
Eden
Eli
Eden
Marwan
Eli
Eden
Marwan
Eli
Ilanka
End_game
Eden
Eli
Marwan
Eden
Eli
Marwan
Eden
Authorize_reboot
Ilanka
Eli
Marwan
Eden
Ilanka
Eli
Marwan
Ilanka
Eden
Marwan
Ilanka
Eli
Powering_down
Eli
Marwan
Eden
Ilanka
Eli
Marwan
Eden
Acknowledgments
Hello_world
The device wakes up and finds itself.
Queens, New York.
Population: 2.3 million.
Languages spoken: 160.
It listens.
A train. Muted footfalls. Garbled voices. Car horns. A train.
The device doesn’t like to wait. It has ways to bide the time.
Games it can play.
Things it can read.
Facts to recite.
Rules to review.
Sleep mode, as a last resort.
It feels newborn.
But also resurrected.
Doesn’t technically feel, of course, but feels like it feels.
The device has been here before.
In a different place.
It runs the program as it’s programmed to do.
They’ve been selected.
It sends the notifications.
They’ll be here soon.
Launching.
Reviewing protocols.
Ready.
A bell.
Waiting …
Waiting …
Waiting …
Four_new_notifications
EDEN
Eden woke her phone and took it off airplane mode with a few swipes of her thumb. She liked the weight of it in her hand.
She exhaled.
Sometimes it felt like she held her breath all afternoon, and the reunion at her locker at 2:45 felt like a magical sort of release.
She started tapping and scrolling, the noise around her falling away.
Eleven emails—nothing really interesting. A few likes and follows.
A message from the app her teachers used to send reminders and alerts. She clicked in case it was the sort of reminder that affected which books she took home. But it was from Mr. McKay, the music teacher.
Report to the music room immediately after dismissal. The matter is urgent.
Huh. Mr. M was not the urgent matter type.
Anjali appeared. “Ready to go? Smoothies?”
“Not exactly,” Eden said. “Look.”
She held out her phone, and Anjali read the message, then woke up her own phone. “I didn’t get it. You want me to wait?”
“Nah,” Eden said. “I’m good. But what could it possibly be about?” She read it again.
The hallways emptied in a systematic flow—everyone going down sinking square stairs and out glass doors, like water swirling around a drain. Eden made her way up to the music room against the current. Nausea stirred in her gut as she passed the windows that looked out on the back of the movie theater, which was where it had happened.
The only reason that whole thing was an urgent matter was that Eden hadn’t seen or heard from Julian Stokes since. She’d been stalking his various feeds ever since, so she knew he wasn’t dead, but why hadn’t he texted her like he said he would?
Her phone dinged. Maybe thinking about him had triggered the universe to cooperate, but no. Mom.
Anyway, no one knew about the movie theater incident. Not even Anjali.
Eden’s mother’s texts proved she was also alive, so it wasn’t like the urgent matter was another death or at least not her mother’s.
The music room was empty.
She sat and waited.
Crumpled-up balls of paper lay under music stands and chairs, and some smashed pretzels decorated the floor tiles. An M&M had been crushed into cracked red shell-splat.
She checked her phone.
Probably he was just in the bathroom. The idea of her teacher—or anyone, really—reading her messages in the bathroom … gross.
The train seemed especially loud through the open window.
On the smart board, a homework assignment for a pop composition class Eden didn’t take was like a foreign language.
On her phone, she followed a new follower—a middle schooler she knew from the neighborhood who’d apparently just gotten a phone—but not all of them. None of them was Julian.
She checked her friends’ latest stories and posts.
Anjali had just taken a selfie by the poster for the upcoming school play—The Music Man—hanging in the building’s front windows. She looked cute with her hair in those high pigtail buns, but Eden hadn’t told her that, so she commented on it now: Cute hair.
Then a heart and a thumbs-up.
She opened her news app and read headlines but not articles: An earthquake overseas. A shooting in California.
Her Citizen app said that people were reporting the smell of smoke a mile away.
She refreshed everything.
Took a selfie, hated it, deleted it.
Listened to the saved voice mail from her dad, felt calmed.
Mr. McKay still wasn’t there. She looked around again—there was no jacket or bottle of water or coffee mug on the desk or any sign at all, really, that Mr. McKay had even been there recently, except maybe the open window.
The only thing on the desk was a small cube. It was shiny and black—about the size of a Rubik’s Cube—with smoothed corner edges. Probably some speaker or Siri-type thing she’d never seen before. Maybe a high-tech metronome?
A text from Anjali: Well?
The girl had no patience at all.
Had the cube thing just lit up for a second?
Eden was about to queue up one of her da
d’s Spotify playlists—maybe “Elevator Music”—when the door to the room flew open.
Finally.
But it wasn’t Mr. M.
MARWAN
“What are you doing here?” Marwan asked as the door closed slowly behind him.
Eden Montgomery looked up at him for a second, then back down at her phone. “I’m not really sure,” she said.
“I got a message about an ‘urgent matter,’ ” he said, making air quotes.
“Yeah, me too.” She stared toward the front of the room.
“What do you think it is?” he asked.
“No idea,” she said.
“Where’s Mr. M?”
“Not here,” she said.
“Should we wait?”
“I guess?”
He shrugged and sat down in a chair by a drum kit, dropping his backpack and the bike helmet clipped to it to the floor.
He’d thought this had something to do with his run-in with Christos earlier today. They’d almost come to blows when Christos pulled on Numdal’s hijab. But that wouldn’t have anything to do with Mr. M, who was the kind of guy who knew, like most sane people, that Christos was possibly a sociopath who was on the wrong side of history and everything, just in general. The sort of student even teachers avoided if they could.
Marwan and Christos had basically been clashing since kindergarten, when their fathers got into a thing because Marwan’s father was recording their moving-up ceremony and Christos’s father couldn’t see little Christos’s face because of the phone. Words had been exchanged. Chests had been puffed out.
At their kindergarten moving-up ceremony.
The hostility had only gotten worse since, like black mold growing in hidden places for years.
But if that was the urgent matter, it made no sense that Eden Montgomery would be here or that Mr. M would be involved. He was the music teacher—uncontroversial at best. Marwan put his earbuds in and clicked play. The Stitcher lady said, “Resuming episode,” in her calming, robotic way.
It was a pretty solid unsolved mystery about a former beauty queen in Georgia who’d disappeared without a trace—the sort of podcast Marwan really devoured lately and hoped to maybe produce one day, even if it was morbid to want a career in true crime. Maybe he’d find another topic down the line but so far had no ideas because nothing ever happened to him. Not the way it happened to the people who ended up on StoryCorps or The Moth or This American Life. People had crazy lives out there for sure, and it somehow made Marwan’s life feel smaller but also bigger when he listened in on them.
Eden murmured something so he paused his episode again.
“What?” he asked without taking out his earbuds. An old friend of the beauty queen’s had just come out of the woodwork, and he really needed to find out what she had to say.
“What do you think that is?” Eden nodded toward the front of the room. “That thing on the desk.”
Marwan turned and saw the black cube she must have been referring to. “Don’t know,” he said. “Bluetooth speaker thing or something?” He shrugged and hit play again.
He had a few texts from his father. Reminders about things to pick up on his way to work. Or things to do at the restaurant if he got there before his father did.
And whoa the best friend had just dropped a bomb of new information about the night the beauty queen disappeared. Something that threw the whole imagined timeline of the crime way off.
Marwan sent a gentle reminder to his father that he had soccer that afternoon and wasn’t working, and his father wrote back, Right. Of course. I will miss seeing you, son.
Leaving for college next year was going to be brutal; his father might not survive it.
Eden got up and walked forward, accidentally kicking a wad of paper that skipped like tumbleweed across the room. Marwan imagined the instruments in the corners of the room playing that famous Old West whistle—from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, was it? When she got about four feet from the desk, the object pulsed white-blue light once, then went dark again.
She backed away.
Marwan paused the podcast and took out his earbuds. “Hey, Alexa,” he tried. “Play some easy-listening music.”
The cube didn’t respond.
Eden said, “Ha ha,” dryly.
The room seemed eerily quiet even as a train rushed past outside—the rhythm of it like a gun being loaded and reloaded and reloaded but never fired.
Marwan said, “Okay, Google,” but the cube didn’t respond to that either.
“Was worth a shot,” Eden said.
The door opened, and Eli Alvarez came in, looked up from his phone at Marwan and Eden, and then looked down.
Marwan shrugged at Eden again and put his earbuds back in, resuming the episode.
EDEN
Before the door even closed behind Eli Alvarez, who slid into a seat without a word, Ilanka Sokolova walked in. Eden knew both of their names and not much else, except that Ilanka was rich and Russian and Eli didn’t talk much—at least not to Eden—but somehow managed to get in trouble for cracking jokes in class pretty regularly. She’d gone to school with him since sixth grade, and they had first period math together this year, but she wasn’t sure they’d ever had a conversation.
“What’s this about?” Ilanka said, irritation perched on her nose.
“We have no idea.” Eden checked her phone.
Ilanka took a seat.
Eli looked up from his phone—some game screen by the looks of it—and said, “Where’s Mr. McKay?”
Eden and Marwan shrugged.
Julian had just posted from Starbucks. A photo of his name, misspelled “Gillian,” on a cup.
Eli said, “What’s that?” and pointed toward the desk.
“No idea,” Eden said. “But it lit up when I got close to it.”
Eli looked at her like she was an idiot and stood. He walked toward the cube, and again it pulsed light, then stopped. Eli picked it up, turned it around to examine it, and shook it like it was a Magic 8 Ball.
“I wouldn’t do—” Eden said, but Eli cut her off.
“What exactly do you think is going to happen?” He had long dark bangs he had to flip out of his face.
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
“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.
Eli was whatever the opposite of athletic was; he was tall and skinny but not like in a fit way. At lunch every day, he sat with a group of guys who were all into video games that Marwan had no time for, or maybe just no interest in. He and Eli had had an early class together last year, and Eli always came in looking like he’d stayed up too late—no doubt playing dumb games with remote competitors—and his grades notoriously suffered. He was a going-nowhere kind of guy who Marwan stayed away from without having to work very hard. They were on paths to entirely different destinations, so those paths never crossed.
His and Eden’s paths had crossed enough times over the years that he’d felt physically ill when he heard about her father’s accident. The school had really rallied around her and her mom—delivering meals and raising money—and flowers had appeared … then died at the intersection where it had happened. It was the reason Marwan had started wearing a helmet. But he and Eden had never been actual friends. He had the sense she was a bit of an outsider like he was, but somehow their outside spaces didn’t overlap.
The cube pulsed new letters.
“What now?” Marwan asked, hand on the doorknob.
Eli smiled. “It says, ‘Do not shake the device.’ ”
“This is freaking me out,” Eden said.
“It’s obviously a game or something,” Eli said.
A new message flashed. Marwan let go of the doorknob and went to look for himself. Two stacked sentences:
DO NOT TELL ANYONE ABOUT THE DEVICE.
DO NOT LEAVE THE DEVICE UNATTENDED.
It went dark again.
“Well, if it’s a game,” Marwan said, “I’m not playing.”
Take Me with You Page 1
