Not Your Villain (Sidekick Squad #2)(55)

“That’s what you said about everyone, though,” Bells says.

“Denise was especially boring.” Emma rolls her eyes.

Bells and Jess share a glance. He starts over. “I mean, whenever you date someone, you go out once or twice or maybe three times—”

“Like Kyle—” Jess jumps in.

Bells nods. Kyle Duan was a great example. “He was cool.” It was a strange two weeks, and Bells thought they would have an addition to their group. Kyle adored Emma, ate lunch with them a few times, and seemed genuinely interested in getting to know Bells and Jess.

“I liked Kyle!” Jess grins.

“I thought I did,” Emma says. “But I guess not. I—”

“Lost interest,” Jess and Bells chime in.

“Pay attention.” Emma flicks Bells in the nose as he’s sprawled upside down on the couch, listening to them go round and round about what to do next. “Do you even know what we’re working on?”

“Find the Resistance, decode the thing, get the news leaks to stay up long enough to matter, save the world,” Bells says, deadpan.

“It’s not that simple,” Abby says. “Everything we’ve done—trying the regular news outlets, blogs, even the conspiracy theorist forums—any mention of Captain Orion that’s different from the official story disappears.” She clenches and unclenches her fist. “What we need is a simultaneous nationwide broadcast that can’t be shut down, and we need my dad for that because I can’t— I’m not—” Abby’s voice wobbles.

Jess squeezes her hand. “It’s going to be okay. Let’s focus on figuring out what this says.”

Jess got a message from her parents today, a seemingly random string of numbers. Bells can’t make sense of it; apparently they made several attempts to crack the code before he got there and they got distracted by Emma’s letter. Even Brendan has given up, scurrying off to work on another project.

Bells takes another look at the message. It’s nothing at all like the coded messages Brendan showed them from the conspiracy forums and the conversations of people of interest. This just looks like a string of numbers. “Are you sure we’re going about this in the right way?”

Abby shrugs. “I mean, there are many ways you can go from letters to numbers and back, not to mention all the languages in the world. We’ve barely started.”

Jess looks up from the message. “How are we doing on finding the Resistance? Hey! Bren-Bren!”

Brendan huffs into the room with several large boxes. “Sometimes I wish I had Mom’s superstrength,” he mutters. “A little help?”

Bells gets up, grabs the other end of the box, and helps Brendan bring it to the table. “What is all this? Books?”

Brendan snorts. “These are logs, printed out on all the recycled paper I could find. And I had to go out and get more because there are hundreds of pages of this stuff.” He flips open the lid of the box and lifts out stacks and stacks of paper with tiny, almost unreadable lines of code. It looks like gibberish to Bells.

“So, remember T1-2904?” Brendan points at a line of what must be encrypted chat. “They invited ST-1LE3 to this other network three months ago. Before that, their conversation on this forum,” Brendan gestures at a popular forum devoted to current broadcast shows, “was strictly about these two shows, getting to know each other, jokes, that sort of thing, but three months ago ST-1LE3 started wondering if the Collective was keeping something from them.”

“Okay…” Emma picks up a sheet of paper.

“And they weren’t flirting with each other,” Brendan says, triumphantly. “Okay, they were, but that’s beside the point. We now have this. It’s a new forum that T1-2904 invited ST-1LE3 to, but everything is encrypted. There are at least fifteen active members in our region alone.” Brendan bounces. “These people talk to each other about meetings and locations and they’ve pinged at least five of the keywords I was looking for, but they’re careful, even on their own forum. These are instructions for ST-1LE3 to meet them for the first time.”

Jess blinks. “Okay, these are just characters and numbers… why did you print these out? Don’t you have a program to decode this?”

Brendan rolls his eyes. “Yes. But this was sent as an archaic twenty-first century file type that can’t be scanned as text. It’s an image only. It’s gonna take all of us to crack this.” He rolls his shoulders and glares at all of them. “Here’s what you need to do…”

Bells only half-listens to the instructions; the plan seems straightforward: manually scan the text for any of the special characters Brendan has noted and jot those down for a second encryption.

Jess and Abby get to work, dutifully scratching with their pencils.

It looks as if it’s going to be a long night. Bells sighs, trying one more time to make the numbers make sense, when Jess walks into the room, biting her lip. She glances at Bells, then at Emma, and the floor; anywhere but at Abby.

“So, I found your dad,” she says quietly.

“I know you know which direction he’s in,” Abby says. “How many times do I have to tell you; until we know for certain how long it would take to get there, it’s not worth going in that direction?”