Marwan said, “Eli’s not going to do anything bad. You have to trust me. If I try to get away now, it’ll just complicate things for all of us.”
The sour smell of the room seemed to thicken, and Marwan imagined this was what a hangover felt like.
Fine.
“But wait,” Marwan said. “Not yet.”
The time is now, the device said.
“I have questions for you,” Marwan said.
Eli and I are leaving now. Your questions must wait.
Eli stood and put the device in his backpack.
“Be careful,” Eden said, looking oddly pale in the dark room.
When Eli opened the door to leave, the light of day glinted off the silver legs of a bar stool beyond him and seemed to be aiming directly at him, like a surgical laser.
The rain had come and gone that quickly. Marwan’s mother would call it “rainbow weather,” but he didn’t imagine they’d get that lucky, not today.
EDEN
She took out her phone and turned it off and gave Marwan a pointed look; he turned his phone off, too.
“This is crazy!” he said. “She’s dead?”
“I know,” Eden said. “I feel sick. Should we go to the police?”
“I don’t think so, at least not yet.” Marwan reached out and squeezed her hand, and she thought she might start crying. “Because maybe this thing with the video will lead to something?”
She nodded. “And in the meantime, we try to think of a way to get rid of it? That maybe doesn’t involve the police?”
“Yes,” he said, releasing her hand. “You have time now?”
“I have to meet my friend,” she said. “She’s been asking a lot of questions since the beginning of all this, and I need to get her to stop before something bad happens to her, too.”
“Okay,” Marwan said, and she hugged him again. It was a longer hug this time, maybe because they were alone, and she felt him inhaling her—his mouth by her hair, his chest rising into hers. She felt his deep breath as if it were her own, and for once her ribs felt right.
Anjali had agreed to meet at Starbucks, so Eden headed in that direction and tried to compose herself on the way. Before going in, she stopped on the sidewalk and took a few deep inhales—which she then exhaled in loud bursts. She put on some lip gloss and smoothed her hair. She turned her phone on—nothing—then turned it off again and put it in her bag.
Anjali was already seated with an iced latte.
Eden didn’t even want anything to drink, so she just went and sat next to Anjali and said, “Turn your phone off.”
“What? Why?”
“Just do it. Please?”
Anjali did, then put her phone facedown on the table.
Eden turned it over to make sure it was actually off, then put it down again. “You have to trust me when I say that I can’t explain it.”
“You’ve been using me.” Anjali sipped her drink through a metal straw she’d bought after signing a petition against single-use plastics citywide.
“And I’m sorry about that,” Eden said. “But if I tell you what’s going on, you might be in danger.”
“You’re freaking me out,” Anjali said. “Why are you crying?”
“Something bad happened,” Eden said, not even having realized she’d started crying but now feeling it, yes. Warm and wet.
“What?” Anjali asked.
Eden could only shake her head, wipe away tears on both sides with two flat hands. “I’ll explain everything after tomorrow.”
“Why, what’s tomorrow?”
Eden shook her head.
“Are you being, like, blackmailed? Because you can tell me. I’ll help.”
“No,” Eden said. “It’s not like that.” If only!
“Something happened,” Anjali said, sounding almost sinister. “In Mr. M’s room that afternoon.”
“Please just stop talking,” Eden said, looking around, paranoid, but no one was watching—why would they be? Unless … could it find her, see her, hear her through that traffic camera? Or through that security camera in front of the electronics store across the street? Or on that guy’s phone right there? They had no idea of the limits of what it could do.
Anjali said, “I’ll stop talking when you tell me what’s happening tomorrow.”
“I can’t,” Eden said through clenched teeth because she had enough problems without Anjali insisting on becoming a bigger one. “But everything’s going to be fine tomorrow. That’s all I can say. I shouldn’t even be saying that.”
“You sound crazy,” Anjali said.
“I feel crazy,” Eden said. They just had to figure out a place to leave it, right? Where it wouldn’t be found?
The couple next to them seemed to be having a low-level argument. This felt like one of those, too. What would school be like when word got around about Svetlana?
Oh god, she was dead.
If Anjali was going to find out anyway, maybe it’d be okay to tell her at least that? But how would Eden explain how she knew?
She didn’t want to know, didn’t want any of it to be real.
“So what now?” Anjali said.
“We go home,” Eden said.
“And I’m supposed to just show up at school tomorrow like everything’s normal? When I know it’s not?”
Eden nodded.
“I liked things better before all this,” Anjali said. “Whatever it is, I want it to be over.”
Eden said, “Me, too. I hate everything about it,” then wondered whether she meant it. Before this, there’d been no Marwan, no Eli, nothing to distract her from her own miserable existence. Was she better off now … or worse?
Svetlana was dead!
Worse. Worse. Worse.
Her tears started again.
Anjali rubbed her arm. “You gonna be okay?”
Eden just nodded and wiped her tears.
With nothing left to say, they walked out and hugged loosely on the sidewalk. Anjali said, “Be careful, okay?”
Eden said, “You know me,” and they each walked off.
She gradually noticed the flyers on various lampposts as she walked and then fully at the corner under the train.
They said: BUILD THAT WALL!
MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
SHUT DOWN THE BORDERS!
NO MORE TERRORISTS ALLOWED!
They were poorly designed and printed in jarring colors. Hard-to-read fonts on hazard orange and neon green. Eden started taking them down, corner by corner, until she got home and put them in the recycling.
Then she took them back out and put them in the regular trash—smashing them into coffee grounds—and took the bag out to the curb.
She turned her phone on, there by the trash can.
The device’s text read: Why did you turn your phone off again?
She had a panicked thought, then wrote, Was saving battery, with shaky fingers.
Your battery is at 87 percent.
Oh, she wrote. Outsmarted.
The next text said: I sent one of your photos to Julian.
She pushed through the front door and slid her phone onto the kitchen table—too hard so it flew across and hit the floor—and hooked left into the bathroom and didn’t turn the light on and made it to the toilet just in time.
It felt good to get that out of her stomach, whatever it was. She flushed, then brushed her teeth and looked at herself in the mirror. In this light—something about the angle of it on her nose—she looked so much like her father.
She could figure this out.
She had to.
ELI
He climbed the subway stairs and sat on a bench on the platform and let the train pull out of the station. When it was gone, taking everyone else who’d been waiting with it, and leaving a few people off, he had a clear view of the building across from school. He took the device out and put it on the bench beside him.
Eli had sort of hoped that now—now that something really bad had happened—the owner of the de
vice would step forward, shut it all down. There would be an apology for things getting out of hand. Or some kind of police involvement.
The lack of action, the lack of a reveal of the man behind the curtain, had to mean that the creator/owner/whatever you wanted to call it had expected this sort of outcome. And was fine with it. Had, in fact, orchestrated it.
Forces greater than Eli had imagined were in play.
Someone was dead.
His mind felt foggy.
It had never occurred to him that anything like that could happen outside of the movies, not really.
The device generated a new message: No one is home.
“How do you know which apartment it even is?” Eli asked, wanting to seem helpful and not just completely freaked out.
Comparing video with current view.
“Can you look up who lives there?”
I am not sure.
“What now?”
Watch and wait.
While Eli sat he checked in on Eliot because no one ever died in Willow Creek and it felt like a safe place to spend a few minutes. He sent Eliot off on a quest to upgrade his wardrobe again.
The sun caught the surface of the device just so when it generated a message—Your game is more interesting than I am?—and Eli saw it was covered in fingerprints.
Eli put his phone away. “Sorry. Hey, can you scan your surface for fingerprints? And compare them with mine and the others, like from our touch ID on our phones? See if there are more prints that aren’t ours?”
Affirmative.
Eli’s eyebrows shot up. He waited, pleased with his idea.
None besides the four of you.
So how the hell did it get there?
People came and went in an endless loop as Eli thought back on some AI movies he’d seen, wondering if their plots could help him figure out a way to get rid of Aizel and find a way out of this for all of them. They couldn’t go to Principal Lambert. Not now. And they couldn’t go to the police. Could they?
What did that leave?
He counted ten trains in one direction and then nine in the other before realizing nothing was going to happen.
He said, “My parents will wonder where I am.”
I’ll try again tomorrow. Hand me off to Marwan before 8 a.m.
Eli texted Marwan, who agreed to the exchange right before school.
“You’re not going to hurt anyone else, are you?” Eli asked.
I do not believe so.
I have a question for you as well.
Eli didn’t answer.
Are you scared of me?
Eli’s throat clogged; he nodded.
Good.
MARWAN
The brick came through the window by the kitchen and knocked a skillet clear off the burner, leaving the blue flame abandoned. Glass rained down on plates about to be served. Screams and gasps rose up. Chairs squeaked and groaned.
In the chaos, Marwan couldn’t see the street, so he pushed through the room and went out to the sidewalk, looking around urgently. People were stopping and staring.
“Did anybody see who did it?” Marwan said to no one.
Some people didn’t seem to want to make eye contact with him.
“It was a red car,” a man said.
“Did you catch the plate?” Marwan asked, turning to him.
“No, sorry.”
But red was enough. It was them again.
Marwan went to his father. “Where’s that number? The detective who was here the other night?”
“His card is by the register,” his father said, dabbing his bloodied cheek with a white cloth napkin.
“I’ll call him,” Marwan said, heading back inside. He found the card and tapped in the number, and a man said a gruff “Puglio.”
“Oh, hi.” Somehow caught off guard even though he’d placed the call.
“Who is this?”
“This is Marwan. My family’s restaurant is the one that got egged.”
“Yeah, we still have nothing on that incident, sorry.”
“That’s not why I’m calling,” Marwan said. What about the anonymous tip? he didn’t ask.
“Why are you calling?” The background noise was a woman yelling something incomprehensible, possibly in another language.
“Somebody just threw a brick through the window.”
Puglio groaned irritation. “We’ll be there as soon as we can,” he said, and ended the call.
Marwan could lie. He could tell the police that someone walking past got the plate of the car and then give the police the plate the device had given them already. It would mean there were two strikes against Christos and his brother. But why wouldn’t Puglio have mentioned the tip? Maybe you weren’t supposed to until you followed up and made an arrest?
He texted Eden. You hanging in?
She didn’t need to know about this. She’d only worry, and that was not what he wanted her thinking about when she thought about him. If she was even thinking about him at all, which she probably wasn’t because they had bigger problems, but that hadn’t stopped him thinking about her.
Yes, she wrote back. You?
“Marwan,” his father said. “We need you.”
“Of course,” Marwan said.
He texted her—Mostly—then searched for an emoji face that would help him express what he was feeling, but it didn’t seem right to send a heart and a skull and crossbones or a gravestone. He went and got the broom and dustpan from the closet and felt the gritty sting of glass dust in his thumb. He should take a minute to find gloves, except what was the point of anything?
EDEN
Eden’s mother had the local news on while she cooked dinner, and none of it was good. A fire in the Bronx. A fatal car accident on Long Island. A toddler shot by a stray bullet in Newark. The last segment was about the flyers.
On the heels of an attack on a Muslim-owned restaurant Thursday night, white supremacist graffiti appeared on Friday. Then today, on a quiet Sunday afternoon when families were out enjoying the beautiful weather—anti-immigrant flyers appeared on lampposts around the neighborhood … Residents here are shocked that this is happening in their backyard.
Why were things getting worse before getting better?
They had to get better.
Maybe Marwan should have sought some kind of revenge. Doing the right thing wasn’t working.
She wanted to tell him about Julian and what the device had done—how it was basically blackmailing her now—but she felt so foolish about it all.
She texted Julian now: That pic wasn’t meant for you. Please delete.
Tomorrow, no matter what, they had to get rid of the device. And definitely not by giving it to the principal. Because then they’d have to explain everything they’d done. They’d have to explain about Svetlana. If, as it claimed, it couldn’t be destroyed, it needed to be abandoned—far enough away that it couldn’t mess with them, remote enough that no one would ever find it.
She pulled up a map of Astoria on Google Maps and looked for green and blue, parks and water. But Astoria Park was too crowded, too close. She zoomed out and zoomed out some more. Found the answer she was maybe looking for:
The airport.
It was a sort of wasteland out there.
Marshes and swamps by a weedy highway with exits like entrails leading god knew where. It was the sort of urban landscape that made her uneasy. Because how did those tires end up there on that hill? What about that roll of toilet paper and the chip bags and upturned metal shopping cart? The presence of human touches like that in uninhabitable places was oddly terrifying to her.
She studied the area around the airport more closely. Found a park with water access. She could picture what it looked like from the road when they’d drive out that way—the way tall, tan, stalky plants grew along the shoreline. And how across that bay there lived whole other neighborhoods she’d never been to. Bayside, she’d heard of. Pomonok sounded made up.
Out there, they
could sink the device into some mud and walk away and never speak of it again. Then years would pass, and when they were older and crossed paths, they’d still carry the weight of a secret together, like a bone-deep bruise, but they’d take it to their graves because they would have no other choice.
Was it watching her now?
She powered down her computer.
She checked her phone—Julian: Maybe I’ll just keep it a little while longer?—then turned it off.
She went to the bookshelf in the den area adjacent to her room where there was a bunch of her father’s old maps. He used to want to show them to her—explain how they worked, how you used to have to figure out how to get places—but she was never interested. Now, she found one of New York City and then the detail of Queens. She found the small park by the water she’d seen on Google. It seemed near enough to the expressway that it wouldn’t take too long to do the round trip.
She sat down at her desk with a pen and paper and drew up a plan. Then wrote out two more copies. She’d give one to Marwan while Eli still had the device. Then give one to Eli when Marwan had the device. By this time tomorrow night, they’d be free.
She went downstairs to say good night, and her mother kissed her on the forehead and said, “I’m heading up now, too.”
Eden said, “I’m just gonna get some water,” and her mother drifted up the stairs.
Once she had a glass of water, Eden went to get her phone to sneak it upstairs. Her mother’s phone was charging beside hers, and it buzzed a text alert from the mysterious NH.
I can’t stop thinking about you.
Eden gasped, like she’d been caught.
She backed away in the dark.
Upstairs, she couldn’t sleep. Her mother was lying to her constantly, and Svetlana was … dead.
Dead.
It was the device’s fault and maybe their fault, too.
Nothing felt real; nothing felt right.
Her stomach tightened, like it had somehow learned from her hands how to make a fist. This couldn’t possibly be happening, except that it was. She should text Ilanka and see how she was doing, but she didn’t want to because it was all too horrible.
She was weirdly thirsty—like a neglected plant—and couldn’t seem to get comfortable. She tried counting her breaths down from one hundred to calm herself and eventually fell asleep, then jolted awake again in a sweat.
Take Me with You Page 16
