Espionage? Teenage spy? Sounds bonkers. That kind of thing only happens in movies.
Normal teenagers wake up every morning and go to school, come home, do homework, do their chores, go to sleep - then wake up and do it all over again.
Ariella Alder...
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𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚛𝚝𝚎𝚎𝚗 | 𝚗𝚎𝚠𝚙𝚎𝚛𝚜𝚙𝚎𝚌𝚝𝚒𝚟𝚎
"Can you walk me through what your brain figured out?" Grayson asked.
"Shut up!" I urged.
The bulletin boards are in their new positions. Grayson was attempting to decipher what was going on in my brain. Thea and Celia sat off to the side.
Celia has always been interested in my work. She hears all of my badass stories, when I'm bored and want to tell her about a mission. However, this part of espionage is thought of as boring. Gathering information. Sifting through clues. Finding answers. This is the part of the job that Grayson and I both enjoy. I also find enjoyment in kicking some ass.
"Are you figuring out the code names for the experiment? If we can find these people, then we have a lead on who kidnapped the Hawthorne's," Grayson said.
"What if there's no experiment? We know these people aren't real," I said, circling the & symbol on the pages. "This is the only paper that uses this symbol. Maya and William Hawthorne are meticulous people. They always write the word 'and,' they'd never use this symbol unless it was necessary," I explained.
"Okay. No experiment. Strange symbols. Maybe it's a clue," Grayson added.
"A clue to what?" Celia asked.
"New perspective," I murmured.
I wrote out the words: Ariel & Carl Rhea.
I started connecting lines from each of the letters. Statistically, there are thousands of combinations that could be made from these letters. My brain needs to focus on the small pieces of words.
Ariel.
Ariel.
Ariella?
My name?
"Seven? What are you doing?" Grayson asked.
I continued to draw lines connecting the different letters.
Doing this by hand, I needed to step into the brain of Maya and William Hawthorne.
An enormous spider web of lines, crossing and intersecting at different points. The dry erase markers on my wall were all being used. Red marker for vowels. Blue for constants. Green for symbols. Black for extra letters.
A mystery waiting to be unraveled through the work of my brilliant brain.
It took a few extra minutes, but eventually the only combination that made sense stared at me in the face.
"Fucking hell!" I muttered.
"What?" Celia and Thea asked.
"You've gotta be fucking kidding me," Grayson muttered.
