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 aseffective. 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…offabout 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.”
