Chapter Twelve
I pull back from the screen.
“We have to make these bigger!”
Gabriel leans over. “Which pages? What’s going on?”
“All of them,” I say. “Well, not the whole page, but the number cubes.” My index finger hovers under one of the images. “See the numbers in there? We need to know exactly what they say. We have to be able to read all of this for the next step.”
“Which is…?” Sunny prompts.
“It’s—”
Complicated. Uncertain. Possible I’m completely wrong about everything.
I shake the responses off. “We just need to see these first,” I say. “Then it’ll be easier to explain.” I go into the view function and start zooming in. Almost immediately the image shatters into a jumble of boxy pixels.
“Yeah…” Gabriel runs a hand through his hair. “The scans were already pretty low quality to begin with.”
I stand up from his chair. “No, I get it. You did a great job in Adobe. Let me try something else.”
Before I can let the idea marinate, I’ve whisked my backpack off the floor and fled into the hallway. Julia follows me at a half trot. “What’s going on?”
I pull up to the vending machines and dig around the very bottom of my pack, scratching the unholy, crusted surface.
“I need money,” I say breathlessly.
Julia lifts her palms. “For what?”
“For—” I nod to the machine again, like it isn’t completely obvious. “We need a bottled water.”
“There’s a fountain right there.”
“To use as a MAGNIYFING GLASS,” I spit out. Sheesh. Sometimes it really does seem like I am the only person in the entire universe who’s watched National Treasure.
In a pivotal scene that follows the main characters buying some clothes at an Urban Outfitters (which admittedly is about as random as it sounds), one of the characters rushes in with the next clue, except it’s missing something—a specific time.
Just as everyone is stumped, Benjamin freaking Gates whips out a hundred-dollar bill and a nearby water bottle.
He frames the bottle over his already ginormous eyeball until—BAM!
—lo and behold, it becomes a magnifying glass and reveals there’s actually a clock on the back of the bill with the exact time they need to get to the next step.
It’s genius! It’s inspired! It’s…maybe a little too conspiracy-theory driven, but I don’t have time for that TED Talk. Either way, it’s the kind of energy I’m trying to channel in this moment. I have a plan. I’m going to get us all to the next step of this hunt.
I just need a goddamned Dasani to get us there.
Julia watches me scrounge around for another minute as I turn my backpack inside out.
Now that I’ve spoken the plan aloud, the stupidity of it seems to be slowly oozing from it, like a cracked egg on the floor between us.
My amazing idea is…a water bottle? I feel like a person could use a flashlight and squint and it would be a better strategy than looking through a water bottle.
I might as well be out here looking through a Fanta Orange for how far that’s going to get us.
Julia’s eyes remain trained carefully on my pack. Finally, she clears her throat.
“I don’t think you have any money in there.”
My shoulders sag. “I don’t. And the water bottle idea is—”
“Is fine,” Julia says, her voice straining up an octave. She shrugs. “It might be a little impractical, though.”
“Yeah,” I say, grateful she’s sparing my dignity from total impalement. “I…Yeah. Oh, wait!”
I run down the hallway toward the locker bays. 505…506…
“507,” I say out loud.
“What are you doing now?” Julia asks. “This isn’t even your locker.”
“It was—” I stop myself before I sound like a complete idiot and say this used to be halfway mine.
Cam and I were assigned lockers on either side of the school.
We used to split both of them so each of us could stash books in them for the nearest classrooms. But the locker was never actually mine. It’s always been Cam’s.
“Cam keeps a magnifying glass in his locker,” I say. At least, he used to.
The metal door squeaks as it opens. I’m not prepared for the sudden smell of Cam—sandalwood and Old Spice. It makes my head dizzy and my knees inexplicably weak.
At first glance, the contents inside his locker look relatively normal.
There’s a messy stack of notebooks, binders, and a few textbooks trying to hold on to their peeling spines.
No magnifying glass. I sigh, ready to close the locker door again.
But then I notice a piece of paper poking up from one of the binders with a message written on the top.
A Giant Btwn Streets
I pull the page the rest of the way out. Underneath the line, I see that Cam’s been trying to unscramble the letters, as if the message were an anagram.
SWAN BETTERING STAT
ENTREATS BATT WINGS
WATERGATE INT BTNSS
I smile at the last line, then reach into my backpack and pull out a pencil and my own scrap of paper. On the paper I write down:
Watergate Internal Business
Then I stuff my note, along with Cam’s, back into his binder.
“What was that about?” Julia asks as I shut his locker door.
“Just planting a fake clue,” I say. “Maybe Cam will come across it and think he’s onto something with Watergate. Or at least the coincidence will throw him off.”
Julia laughs and shakes her head. “Come on.” She leads me back down the hall and up to the next floor, then strides to the science classrooms and tries one of the doors. The handle sticks at a quarter turn. “You still have the custodian keys, right?”
I lift my key ring from the front pocket of my backpack and hand her the set. “It’s the brass one,” I tell her. Julia slides the key in and opens the door. She goes immediately for a cabinet in the central island. “What are you getting?”
“A magnifying glass,” Julia says calmly. “We used them for worm dissection last year. I remember because I didn’t want to be at my station when my partner was cutting the worm open, so I spent fifteen minutes pretending to look for a magnifying glass.”
We both laugh. She pulls the glass out, not nearly as old and mysterious-looking as Cam’s magnifying glass but just as effective. And undoubtedly a hell of a lot more effective than a Dasani.
Julia pauses, the thick, rounded glass balanced in her hand.
“Do you want to know?” she asks.
I raise my eyebrows. “Do I want to know what?”
“Why I’m doing this,” she says quietly.
At first I think she’s talking about the whole magnifying glass thing, and the question doesn’t make any sense. Um. Because I’m an idiot? Then I realize she’s referring to the conversation from the basement. About being gay.
My skin suddenly goes clammy. I didn’t mean to corner anyone into talking about this.
It doesn’t matter if Julia’s gay or straight.
It doesn’t matter if she’s queer, or questioning, or asexual, or aromantic.
Heck, it doesn’t even matter if her great-great-great-grandmother was a pirate and now Julia has to dig a hole in the ground every five years to live up to her family name.
She can have any reason she wants to work on the hunt. I should have kept my darn mouth shut.
“Well, you’ve always been ridiculously committed to yearbook,” I say jokingly.
Julia shakes her head. “That’s not it.”
The silence opens up between us. I can’t tell if it’s a hole I’m going to step into or a doorway she wants to walk through. But before Julia has a chance to make a move either way, the actual door behind me swings wide open.
“Um, hello?” Sunny yells. “Gabriel was able to print the pages at 110-percent zoom. We’ve been calling your names for the last five minutes!”
“Sorry!”
Julia bumps the cabinet door closed with her hip and whisks past me into the hall. Just like that, the conversation’s gone.
I lock the door to the lab behind us, then catch up with Sunny and Julia at the bottom of the stairs.
Gabriel is already hunched over our worktable, which is now covered with the printouts from online.
He’s lifting his glasses and squinting hard at the pages.
He stands when he sees us come in, then points at the magnifying glass in Julia’s hand.
“Nice!” he says. “That will help.”
He steps off to one side, and Julia offers me the magnifying glass. I hold it gingerly by the handle and approach the table. No one says anything. They’re waiting for me, I realize. This is my theory. Cam might have been the one to lead us through the pigpen cipher, but this time I’m on my own.
I take a deep breath and lean over the corner of the first page. Slowly, I bring the magnifying glass down until it hovers over the Rubik’s Cube.
The cube expands, a bubble widening under the thick glass lens. In an instant, the tiny, crammed picture becomes a set of actual numbers we can study.
And there is definitely something…off about these numbers. This isn’t just a bad sudoku game. It’s like what Cam said when he first noticed the pigpen cipher—something’s here. It’s another message. I stare at one face of the cube.
524
213
912
“Let’s try something.” I nudge Harvey’s birthday flyer toward Sunny.
“Fifth line,” I tell her. Sunny blinks back at me, profoundly confused, until understanding takes hold and she jerks to life. Her finger moves down the lines of the page.
One, two, three, four, five.
Sunny looks up and nods. I check the number grid again: 5-2-4.
“Second word,” I tell her. “Fourth letter.”
“T,” Sunny reads aloud.
I pause. This could be nothing. I could be dragging us all toward a dead end in a labyrinth. Then again…only hindsight offers clear vision. Everything is cataracts until you’re looking at it from the other side.
“Can you write that down?” I ask Julia. “Please.”
I hear her pen scratching in her notebook.
“T,” Julia echoes.
I go on. “Second line…first word…third letter.”
Sunny picks up her role as translator. “R.”
My chest goes tight, a rubber band stretching farther and farther. I’m waiting for the G or J or Q. I’m waiting to reach a random letter that makes this whole idea fall apart.
But it doesn’t come.
“E,” Sunny dictates to Julia. Gabriel points to the next grid of numbers on the cube. I shift the magnifying glass, and we keep going.
“A. S. U. R…”
We’ve nearly finished the third side when Gabriel starts giggling like a small child. “Holy shit,” he says, shaking his head. “Gay power for the win.”
Before we can ask what he means, he takes Julia’s notebook and writes in the eighth letter himself, then turns and shows the rest of us.
T R E A S U R E