“Like a god,” Leo corrected. “Right now, you’re a guest in your own phone. Root access makes you the landlord. You can kick out the bloatware. Install a lightweight kernel. Even overclock the CPU if you’re feeling spicy.”

He typed a cryptic command into the laptop’s terminal: fastboot flash recovery twrp-3.3.1-0-pine.img

Maya looked at her dying phone. Then at Leo. “Will it brick?”

“Wait,” Leo said.

“Only if you ignore the ritual.”