The cab was waiting for us when we stepped out into the parking lot of O’Connor’s. It didn’t look as if it had gone anywhere since we last saw him thirty minutes prior, but who knew what adventures our driver had gotten into since we’d seen him last? We hopped in, and without so much as a word, the cabby started driving us back to where he had picked us up in New Braintree.

  “I can’t believe we risked our future on finding that crazy son of a bitch,” Cam muttered when we were finally settled in the backseat. I shot him a grim smile, thinking of my likely short future. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean it like that…”

  “It’s okay. I know what you mean. With any luck, getting back into the academy will be as easy as getting out.”

  “You thought that was easy? My heart was beating so fast, I thought surely everyone in the bay could hear it as we were climbing out the window.”

  “I’m pretty sure they could,” I joked.

  A long moment of quiet passed between us, as we both fluctuated between fatigue and the adrenaline rush of what was to come.

  Cam cleared his throat. “That guy was pretty nuts, huh? You think we should tell Diaz that Dan Driver is likely the Ramcharger Killer?”

  “How would we explain that deductive process?” I asked.

  “We could wait until Monday and tell him that we bumped into Dan over the weekend."

  “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “I’m pretty sure Dan won’t be hurting anyone else, that’s all.”

  “How can you be so sure?” I could feel Cam’s eyes on me in the dark of the backseat. “Did he say something to you after I walked away?”

  “Kinda,” I said, pulling out Dan’s black phone from my pocket.

  “You’ve got to be shitting me, Max!”

  “He wanted me to log into the Endr app.”

  “I bet he did. Do you have any idea how much shit we’ll be in if he really is a serial killer, and you get caught messing around with his phone?”

  I hadn’t really thought about it that way. Dan had handed me a possible lifeline, and no matter how strange and unlikely, I needed to see if any part of it was genuine. I had nothing to lose and everything to gain.

  “If it turns out to be bullshit, I’ll dump it in the woods on the way back to the academy.”

  “If it’s bullshit?” Cam half-shouted, his voice cracking. “Does any part of you really believe that you’re going to log into some weird phone app and you’ll suddenly not be dying? I mean…what the hell, Max! I love you, man, but you need to get a grip. You’re dying, and no magic phone app is going to change that.”

  I knew in my heart that he was right. Cam wasn’t really angry with me. He just wanted me to face my illness head-on. He would be there standing with me, of course. I had been so caught up in my own feelings today that I hadn’t thought about how he must be feeling, knowing his best friend was dying and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

  I nodded at him and held up the phone so we could see the medallion on the back. In the passing illumination of streetlights, I was able to read the inscription beneath the medallion number. “The River Flows.” What river?

  “What do you think the number means?” Cam asked. “Maybe it’s how many medallions were given out?”

  “If so, then Dan was number 1042 when he received this twenty years ago,” I guessed. “Or, it means there were at least 1,042 Endrs when the medallion was originally given out. Who knows how many times this thing has been passed on?”

  “The iPhone first came out in 2007,” Cam said. “They were the first smartphones with an app store, meaning there’s no way he had this thing for the last twenty years.”

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Let’s see what kind of phone this is…” I looked closer at the back of the phone. I couldn’t quite make out what the small writing on the back of the phone said.

  “Elysium Pro,” Cam said, pointing to the tiny text I was struggling with. “Is that the model or the brand? Either way, I’ve never heard of it.”

  “I’ve definitely heard of it. Remember high school? I took that Philosophy and Religion honors class our senior year. In Greek myth, Elysium was the afterlife for heroes and warriors. The river referenced on the medallion might be a reference to the River Styx.”

  I flipped the phone over in my hand, and when I did, the light of the screen lit up the whole backseat. There was no home screen. The phone was open to the Endr app, showing a blank login. The logo’s font was black and white, and looked like someone might have hand-painted the acronym “Endr.” It was eerie, and I wondered if the designer had intentionally crafted the letter R to resemble a sickle.

  Beneath the disturbing logo were the words Earth’s Next Dimensional Relay System, followed by a longer version of the text from the medallion. It read “The River calls, Endr. You have been selected to serve as a conduit between worlds. State your name and begin your service.”

  There was a place to list my “Endr Identification,” a grayed-out button that said, “Begin Service,” and beneath that, a quote:

  Every soul has a destination. Every Endr helps get them there.

  --Bureau of Afterlife Dispatch

  Cam must have been studying the screen at precisely the same pace as me, because he made an all too familiar scoffing sound when he got to the bottom. “Bureau of Afterlife Dispatch… This app was designed by an organization with the letters B.A.D. Real original.”

  We stared at the screen a little longer. The login screen stared right back. The backlight showed no indication that it would shut off. The bright screen drew my eyes back to the text box, which read, “Enter Your Name.”

  “What are you waiting for?” he asked. “This is one of those Ouija Board moments. We both know it’s bullshit. This is like the moment when we were in middle school, and you decided to say 'Candyman' in front of the mirror three times. Just do it, already.”

  I clicked in the text box, and the cursor started blinking. Years and years of digital citizenship training had taught me not to enter my full name on a suspicious site, so when I finished typing “Max,” I clicked the “Begin Service” button. Nothing happened. I felt myself slump in disappointment. Cam saw my expression and squeezed my shoulder.

  The car slowed and stopped, and my attention fell away from the phone. We paid the cabby, then both made our way back through the sand pit and through the woods until we could see the perimeter fence of the main campus.

  “No sirens and no lookout lights. That’s a good sign.” I was trying to be optimistic because I could tell Cam was nervous. To be fair, I’d been even more winded on the second trek through the woods, and from his worried glances, I suspected he was starting to worry if I could make it back over the razor wire, let alone through the window at the barracks.

  Crossing the street, we made our way to the fence and to the mat we had left in the weeds. Placing it over the razor wire, we dropped into the interior of the grounds and back to the parking lot outside of our barracks. It took a few tries, but we managed to find the car we’d liberated it from and return it safely.

  There was no sign of any of the training staff, so we carefully crawled back to our squad bay and climbed back through the window, re-securing it once we were through.

  Cam and I separated. He returned to his rack, and I waited a few minutes before I tiptoed back to mine. And as I lay there, thankful for how everything had worked out, I could once again hear the tick of the clock at the base of my bed. We had timed everything perfectly, making it back to our beds just after the 3:00 am check-in round. It appeared that our bunched-up pillows and blankets had fooled the overnight staff. It helped that we were both on top bunks.

  As I lay there in the mostly quiet room and listened to the clock, I couldn’t help thinking about the passage of time and what little might be left for me in this world. I replayed every word of our conversation with both Clarence and Dan, feeling like I was missing something important.

  The phone. Where had I put the phone? In the anxiety of getting back into the academy, I forgot that I had smuggled a phone back onto the academy grounds. The instructors would surely find it, and then what?

  Under the covers, my hand reached into each pocket and traveled over every fold of my tee and sweats. There was no phone. My heart sank. Had I dropped it while climbing the fence? The window? There would be a lot of corrective PT in the morning if one of the staff found the phone on the grounds.

  On the one hand, I was thankful that I couldn’t be caught with the illegal paraphernalia, but on the other, I found myself distraught over losing the phone, even as I knew how ridiculous the idea of an app that could save my life sounded. I sighed. I was exhausted, and I would tackle whatever happened in the morning.

  No more Endr app. No more mysterious phone. No more Dan Driver. And pretty soon, I knew, no more Max.

  - - -

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