Page 28 of Bewitched By the Djinn
I follow his gaze. “Phones. They take pictures.”
“Phones?”
I pause. “You don’t have phones in Aetheria.” Right. Mystical land of magic, not technology.
“I do not know what that means.”
Oh, boy. Where to even begin?
I motion toward the steps outside St. Mary’s Church. “Come on. We’re gonna need to sit for this.”
Chapter
Eight
I tug out my cell phone and unlock it. “Here. This is a cell phone. It’s like a—”mini-computer in your pocket. Except if he doesn’t know what a cell phone is, he sure as hell doesn’t know what a computer is. “—a multifunctional device. I can send messages to people, like Kevin and Mimi, and it will appear on their cell phone almost immediately.”
His brows pop up. “Truly?”
I open the messenger app and show him my latest conversation with Kevin, which is mostly me texting him repeatedly and him responding withokevery five messages.
Bennet squints at the screen. “You can communicate with others this way?”
“Yep.”
I flip open the camera app, switch to the front-facing camera, and snap a quick selfie. When I tap the image, my face fills the screen, a cloud of dark messy hair, brown eyes, awkward grin, squinting in the sunlight. Beside me, Bennet stares into the camera with intense concentration, his frown deepening, green eyes sharp against the bright daylight.
He plucks the phone from my hand. “Remarkable,” he breathes.
I guess I’d be astonished too if I’d never seen a phone before.
“What else can it do?” He turns it over, then gives it a little shake, like he’s expecting something to rattle loose inside.
I snatch it back. “Don’t hurt it. I can’t afford a new one.”
We spend a few minutes while I give him a crash course in modern technology. I show him ebooks, the calculator app, and the wonder of the internet, though I struggle to explain how it all works when he asks.
“There’s, like, radio waves or something. And satellites. It’s all very complicated.”
“It’s like magic.” His eyes are fixated on the screen.
“It’s like science.”And I was never good at science.History, literature, sociology, those were my jam. I was going to apply for my masters in art history when everything went to shit.
He gestures at my phone. “Can you use this magic science to find Helen?”
“No. Well, maybe if I were some kind of hacker who could break into security cameras and use facial recognition to scan for her or whatever.”
He stares at me, brow furrowing. “You say that as if it is possible.”
“Technically, itispossible. But I have no idea how to do it.”
“This place is strange,” he mutters, shaking his head.
He’s so completely out of place. A flicker of sympathy ignites in my chest. It must be hard, being away from everything you know, dumped into a world where even the simplest things don’t make sense.
I can’t imagine being dropped in the middle of Aetheria with nothing more than the clothes on my back, in a land of magic that literally changes the landscape. No cell phones, heating pads, or coffee makers? I might die.
“Tell me more about Aetheria?” I ask. “How is it different from here?”
