In The Afterlight (The Darkest Minds #3)(79)

“Let’s go get something to eat, okay?” Liam said. He looked back over his shoulder. “Coming?”

I shook my head. “Have to shower and take care of a few things. I’ll catch up with you later.”

Liam waved and started walking with Zu back down the hall, heading to the kitchen in the lower level.

“Okay, what’s going on?” I asked before either Cole or Nico could speak. “What happened last night?”

“It’s easier to show you.” Cole started past me, heading the same way his brother had taken, toward the stairs. I followed him silently, watching Nico watch the floor, my stomach clenching. It was getting too hard to pretend like I didn’t care.

It was the first time I’d been down in the computer room since the supplies had come in last night. Where there had once been only one laptop, there were now five desktops. Another three silver laptops were spaced out along the desks, which were still pushed against the walls, leaving an empty space at the center of the room for planning. I spotted a printer and a scanner near the old laptop. Nico had picked a seat at the far back corner of the room, as usual. Cole brushed aside printouts of indecipherable code from one of the nearby seats and offered it to me.

Nico keyed in some kind of a password and brought up a window of more code.

“Somehow this doesn’t feel ‘easier,’” I said. “What are we looking at?”

“This is our server log,” Nico said. “It seemed like it was lagging last night, so I was trying to troubleshoot what the issue was. This right here—” He pointed to the screen. “That means someone sent one of the files saved there, transferring it via FTP to another encrypted server.”

“What file?” I asked.

“It was one of the videos from the Thurmond testing,” Cole said.

“But there’s more,” Nico scrolled up. “There are gaps in the server’s activity log, all between the hours of midnight and four A.M. on two other days.”

“It’s not because no one was awake to use the computers?” I asked.

Nico shook his head. “We’ve been leaving the computers on overnight to transfer everything to remote backup servers in case ours fail. There would have been huge spikes of activity—but look.”

The huge spikes of activity were there, beginning at eleven o’clock in the evening, but abruptly cutting off at two in the morning, only to resume four hours later, right around the time Nico or another Green would first roll in to start the day’s work.

“Is there really no way to tell who did it?” I asked, squinting at the screen.

“It was a Green,” Nico said.

“It might have been a Green,” Cole said.

“No,” Nico insisted, “it had to have been a Green. How many kids actually know how to erase server activity?”

“Okay,” I said. That made sense, unfortunately. “But if they went to such great lengths to hide the other instances, would they have left this blip for someone to find?”

Nico shrugged. “Maybe they were interrupted? Or they were in such a hurry they didn’t have time?”

Cole asked another question that disappeared beneath the rush of blood in my ears as I stared at the screen, blinking to clear the blurriness that turned it into nothing more than a glowing square.

“...think?” Cole touched my shoulder to get my attention, making me jump.

“Sorry,” I said quickly, avoiding their stares. “I’m tired. What did you just ask?”

“My theory is one of the computers just glitched, or there’s a problem with the server,” Cole said, his eyes soft with concern.

“Occam’s razor,” Nico said. “Make the fewest assumptions. The simplest solution is usually the right one.”

“I don’t know anything about a razor, but who the hell would kids be sending the intel to?” Cole asked. “Who’d be stupid enough to try to sell information at the risk of getting their asses caught and hauled into a camp?”

“Could it be someone from Kansas HQ accessing files remotely?” I asked Nico.

He shook his head. “It’s someone here.”

Damn. I shared a look with Cole.

“I want to believe it’s a one-off thing,” he said, “but keep digging. Let me know if they try anything again, okay?”

There was a knock on the windows running along the side of the room—Kylie, dressed in all black, her hair tied into a poofy bun. “Ah,” Cole said. “That’ll be the groups leaving this morning to try to track down those tribes in Montana. You two figure the camera situation out, okay?”

“Wait,” I said, “They’re leaving this morning? Where did the cars come from?”

“They’re taking the SUVs Lee rounded up for yesterday’s haul,” he said, stretching as he stood. I followed him to the door, listening to him rattle off instructions about training and which weapons to pull from the locker for training the next day, but when I reached the door, I didn’t follow him out into the hall.

I stepped back into the computer room and caught sight of the white board out of the corner of my eye. Someone, likely Cole, had started scribbling information on it—coordinates, camp populations, number of PSFs assigned, anything and everything the League might have had in its files. Peppered through were details from Clancy’s documents—I saw tidbits about the camp controllers tossed in like afterthoughts.