Page 69 of Radiant Exception
We were a third of the way to Ganymede, and I’d been going through pictures of me, Xavier, and Cassidy from when we were younger, in hopes that it would jog my memory and somehow give me a clue to Xavier’s passcode, potentially giving me access to his decryption software. I had a strong hunch it was the answer to an old joke Xavier and I used to make with each other, but I still wasn’t one hundred percent confident.
It was odd seeing the three of us, so naive to the lives ahead of us, so playful with each other. In one of my favorite photos, which I used to obsess over as a teen, Xavier had his head thrown back in laughter at something I’d done. A giant frown slashed across my face from being the butt of the joke, but the reason why I’d secretly loved the photo was the intense expression of longing on Cassidy’s face as he gazed right at me, while I was completely unaware, too caught up in my anger to notice.
The three of us were inseparable. It never would have occurred to my younger self that only a few short years later, Cassidy would disappear from our lives and that eventually Xavier, always the glue within our little triad, would be gone, along with my parents.
I swallowed the lump in my throat, continuing on to more images, eventually stopping to giggle at a photo of Xavier with that stupid mustache Cassidy had mentioned when we were reminiscing about my brother. I couldn’t remember what had possessed Xavierto wear the style—maybe a girl he was trying to impress or a dare from a college buddy gone wrong.
My comm pinged with a message from Vaughn. I closed out of the photos and reviewed the new piece of code he’d intercepted, and nearly dropped the device, my blood running cold.
The encrypted code appeared slightly different than the other pieces, but still with the telltale signatures we’d noted, which had previously tipped Darren off to the Phoenix being directly involved with the hidden transmissions. The thing was, this altered code looked distinctly familiar to me.
I immediately recognized the cipher because it was one I had used often when I was younger. It was one of the first ciphers Xavier had developed so the three of us could trade missives without our parents being able to read the contents.
Nobody had this encryption but the three of us.
I worked to control my breathing, peeking down at the code every now and again to make sure that it was the same cipher.
“One thing at a time,” I told myself aloud.
It was the first cipher we had the key for, which meant I could decrypt the message, so I set to doing that first and, holy shit, we’d hit the jackpot. If we hadn’t already thought that it was the Phoenix themselves sending out communications, this was everything we needed to prove that assumption.
The chunk of code wasn’t even that long, but it indicated multiple high-level officials as part of Meridian, included several supply chain schedules and logistics, which would be invaluable, andperhaps most incriminating of all, referenced the recent terrorist attack on Oberon.
If we could link just those emails to an individual, they’d be so fucked.
This was a game-changer.
With the code decrypted, I knew what I had to do next.
I had to let it sink in that Cassidy was behind everything, which, despite how he’d almost sabotaged my relationship with Vaughn, was heartbreaking to think that he could have anything to do with the Phoenix, but there was simply nobody else that would have had access to that cipher.
I knew Xavier was gone before I’d even gotten the call. I’d woken up in a cold sweat, heart pounding, and I felt the absence of him. So when they told me he’d overdosed, I was already in shock because I felt like a piece of me was missing. More than that, I was the sole witness to his body being cremated.
Which only left Cassidy.
At a loss, I reopened the photos I’d been looking through before, but paused when I got to the one of Xavier with that ridiculous mustache.
It was from college. I was certain because the next in the series was him with one of his college roommates in front of the place they’d lived in their last year. Clicking on the photo data confirmed my suspicions.
We would have been out of contact with Cassidy for four years at that point, and Xavier and I were conditioned to avoid sharing anything publicly, due to our parents’ position, so our friends knewnot to post pictures of us. How could Cassidy know Xavier changed his look for a month, if they hadn’t been in contact? And if they were in contact, why hadn’t Xavier told me?
There were too many questions swimming around my head. I needed to get into Xavier’s files.
Holding my breath, I typed in the key I hoped was right: mirror. Even though we were fraternal twins of different genders, he would always joke with me and any friends that when he looked at me, it was like looking in a mirror, which always got a laugh out of me because of how silly that seemed.
Whenever I was upset, he would use the same sentiment to comfort me. “You can’t be sad, Lark. I’m not sad, and I’m your mirror.” The doofus didn’t even make sense half the time.
I pressed enter and closed my eyes, only cracking one open a moment later when my comm didn’t combust in my hand, not that I knew how he would have been able to accomplish such a feat.
“Oh my god, it worked.” I stared down at the folders, now unlocked, in absolute astonishment. “Thank you, X,” I breathed, swallowing the lump in my throat, thinking he would have been proud of me for figuring it out and then joked about how it shouldn’t have taken me so long.
Xavier also used an odd nomenclature to label his files, as another aversion tactic. He hated that I worked covert ops for IA, but he would have been such a good spy. It didn’t take me long to find the couple of decryption programs he’d used under the false labels, and I dumped in all of the encrypted coding to see if anything would come back.
While the program ran in the background, I started sorting through his communications, determined to find something from Cassidy during college that would explain how they’d been in contact and maybe why I’d been left out of the loop.
But I couldn’t find anything.
Not a single email to or from Cassidy. Not even from when we were close.
