“Anyone with a brain would hook up with Nico Hiraga if he slid into their DMs,” Sunny says. She clamps a hand on Gabriel’s shoulder and gives it a tight squeeze. “You don’t have to have done anything with anyone to justify your sexuality,” she states firmly. Sunny sniffs and turns her nose up at the group. “And I don’t feel a need to comment on my sexuality one way or another.”
“Wait. That’s not what this is.” I offer my hands in surrender.
I didn’t mean to pressure anyone to come out. Unlike what Gabriel might think, I highly doubt we get to combine our gayness for ultimate treasure-finding power.
“I have my own reasons, though,” Sunny adds after a moment, “for doing the hunt.”
“That’s great,” I say quickly. “We don’t have to talk about about—”
“The thing is, I’m tired of seeing Harvey Milk’s name thrown literally everywhere in San Francisco but with almost no real context,” Sunny explains. “He has an airport wing named after him, and a bunch of gift shops and streets, and yet…none of us knew about the White Night riots. We didn’t know about the first birthday party after Harvey’s murder. And that’s messed up! History should be something deep enough that we can actually explore it. It shouldn’t be oversimplified to a street sign or a single line in a book.”
I’m stunned into silence.
I turn and check the number cubes again. Threes. All the numbers come in threes…
Julia picks up her notebook and starts scribbling. She mumbles as she writes. “History shouldn’t be oversimplified to a street sign or a single line in a book.” Julia reads it over to herself and grins. “That’s great, Sunny. We should put this in the yearbook. Can I quote you?”
Sunny shrugs. “Sure. Whatever.”
I lean so close to Gabriel’s computer that my nose is nearlytouching the screen. The cubes are so tiny. But the numbers have to be here for a reason. Sunny’s words keep echoing in my head.
A line in a book.
A line.
In abook.
“There’s no message,” I had told Cam about the pigpen cipher. But I was wrong. Gilbert Baker had hidden a message in those grids through the numbers.
And he hid one in these grids too.
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.
