Page 133 of Reasons We Break

“What.”

“I...don’t think I was the only one who saw you in the hallway.”

Simran focuses on the phone screen TJ is holding up. A text from Kiran.You didn’t know about her and Rajan. Right??

Simran now looks more closely at the people watching her. Their gazes are wary. A few girls her age whisper around their hands.

She reaches for her own phone. There are several messages and missed calls. The first she sees is Kiran’s text:WHERE ARE YOU??

Despite her worst-case scenario coming to pass, Simran feels very little. She feels calmer, actually. The secrets are all out. But she can’t go back into the banquet hall. If she does, she’ll never leave. This situation is going nuclear, and she doesn’t have time for it.

She spins back for the parking lot. “Give me your keys.”

“Are you serious?” TJ huffs. “I don’t even know what’s going on—”

“Give them to me!”

TJ flinches.

Simran takes several deep breaths. Every second spent here is a wasted one. “TJ,” she says more calmly. “Either help me, or get out of my way.”

TJ stares at her like she’s never seen her before.

“I’m not giving you my keys,” she says slowly. “I’m coming with you.”

The room is silent as Rajan is handed a pen and the ledger. For a second, his brain stalls, like he’s taking a math test and a teacher is watching him work.

The muzzle of a gun juts into his forehead. “I’m waiting,” Zach says.

Rajan bats it away. “I’m trying to remember. It’s been a while.”

He’s not lying. Heistrying to remember something. How many times has he seen Simran work on the ledgers? The times she explained what she was doing?

The room falls silent again, but this time, he imagines a different kind of silence. Silence like the Northridge library, or an empty classroom with Simran. She never made him nervous when she watched. She’d already seen him screw up in the worst ways possible. There was nothing more to hide.

He puts pen to paper.

Simran’s voice echoes in his head as he explains what he’s writing. “Like I said, your books are easy. The Caesar cipher ofiisiplus three. The most frequent number translates into the most common letter in the alphabet,e. The rest comes from there.” He circles the end formula and throws in a few confusing buzzwords. “The inverse of the function is how you decrypt it.”

This is the hard part. Using the formula to translate the numbers into letters. He plugs it in. Double-checks his work. He scrawls the message he’s decoded across the page. It’s an inventory of supplies—outdated, but correct.

Everyone peers over his work. He can tell by their blank stares they’re not following his thought process. Thank god math is so confusing.

But, it seems to sway Snake Tattoo. He cracks his knuckles.

“It’s our lucky day.”

Zach, however, shakes his head. “I’m not buying it.”

Rajan twirls the pen between his fingers. “You want me to decode your whole ledger to prove evenIcould do it? Are you sure you wanna go through that kind of embarrassment?”

Zach doesn’t answer. Instead, he sorts through the ledgers. “There’s one thing I’d like to know.” He comes back with a piece of paper. “How you decodedthis.”

Rajan recognizes it immediately. It’s an exact copy of the message Simran had found in the Aces’ book.

Confusing, convoluted, and mind-numbing is what he’d call that decryption process, but not to Simran. It so clearly thrilled her. So much that, despite himself, he had to know why.

He’s glad he paid attention during that dinner conversation now. He takes the note from Zach. “It took a while to realize these were coordinates,” he begins, and then starts drawing out the process as best he can remember. The grid. The sentence at the top being the password to decode it. The transposition of letters...Ironically, it was easier to understand than the other ciphers Simran cracked. This one didn’t require fancy equations or formulas,xory,the sorts of things that mess with his brain. No, this was math only in its purest form: a creative way of looking at numbers.