outside corridors, where the large containers would hold the lilies on shutdown days.
Claire unloaded the magazine and reached for the second rifle.
“Richter taught you how to shoot?” Cooper asked.
“Richter taught me everything.” She took two test shots, hit the post but not the wire. “Jax would know what was going on. If anything.”
“Who is Jax?”
“My roommate.”
“You mean you had a friend? Did they allow that?”
Claire glanced up at Cooper. “Ha, ha, very funny.” She leaned back over the gun, squeezed. Barbwire flapped in the sun. “Of course I have friends. Jax at the top of the list.”
“Did she know you were going AWOL?”
“Oh, no. I couldn’t tell her. If she’d known and the headmistress found out, she’d be the one in trouble.”
“There’s no way to get in touch with her?” Cooper asked.
She fired off the remainder of her ammunition. “Like I said, no cell phones.”
“No computer access?”
“No . . . not . . . wait.” Claire put the gun down. “Yes. The senior computer room.”
“The what?”
She jumped from the dirt, swept most of it off her clothing. “Why didn’t I think of that before? The senior computer room. Jax and I played an online game. It was our only access to conversation with others off campus. Not that we told anyone who or where we were. We thought it would be the perfect covert way to talk to each other once she was out of high school. I planned on staying through college.” She looked at Cooper with a huge grin. “Of course. Unless Lodovica found the senior computer room, Jax will still have access and hello”—Claire hit Cooper midchest—“inside information.”
Claire reached for the pistol, placed it in the back of her pants, and shouldered the rifles. “Gotta get online. It’s almost midnight at Richter. Which is when Jax would be at the senior computer if she can.”
On a mission, Claire doubled her pace back to the war room. Once inside, she went straight to her station, ignoring the looks from the others in the room. She set the rifles on the ground next to her desk and started searching for her game.
“She thinks she has a way to talk to a friend inside Richter via a video game,” Cooper announced to everyone.
Claire saw Neil approach from the side.
“We set up profiles in a game, secret names, closed group. So when one of us left the school, we could still keep in touch. We played along with two of last year’s seniors, but they bugged out six months ago.” Claire found the game and used her log-in information and waited for her profile to boot.
“Loki?” Cooper asked.
Claire nodded. “Jax is Yoda.” She pointed to a chat room. Read Jax’s last message and laughed. Where the hell did you go?
“What language is that?” Cooper asked.
“Our own.” Claire constructed her reply in her head, had to type it out three times before pressing send. “It’s like pig latin, only using German and Russian. Every other word is a different language and has the last vowel from the previous word. We thought it was clever.”
Cooper nudged Neil. “Told you she was brilliant.”
“Only if we get the spelling correct. Overkill if no one is looking.”
“Magnificent if someone is,” Cooper praised.
“I bet Sasha would crack the code in less than an hour.”
“What did you say to her?”
Claire sat back and waited for a reply. Not that there was any guarantee there would be one right away. Jax didn’t go into the senior computer room every day. None of them did. “I told her that the air on the outside was sweeter and asked if the flowers were in bloom.”
“Code for lilies?” Neil asked.
She laughed. “We have codes for everything.”
Cooper looked at the screen. “Now what?”
“We wait. If she responds without a code word, then we know she’s been found out.”
AJ stretched out on the bed, a towel thrown over his lap. Noise from the bathroom told him Sasha was finished with her shower.
The evening played over in his head. His father’s words, his mother’s emotions or lack thereof.
Sasha.
He was itchy. Where did he fit in? He was way over his head with Sasha and her group of friends. They helped people, AJ stole from them. They were noble . . . he was a fraud.
“I’m proud of you.” His father’s words sounded in his head.
No matter how far AJ dug, he couldn’t find one thing for his father to be proud of.
Amelia had been the one to leave the nest with a decent job, a