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Chapter 27 - Cracking The Code

"Don't you get it!" Miles yelled happily as he sprinted down the academy stairs into the basement and ripped open the door to their hangout room. Caspar had teleported off to their cabin to go fetch Jason, so Miles and Lilly had jogged quickly into the academy building. No one knew exactly what Miles was thinking, but Miles' excitement alone was enough to get everyone moving.

"No, I don't understand," replied Lilly. "Care to explain it?"

Miles would have loved to explain it, but he didn't exactly know how. When Caspar had mentioned crosswords, it had suddenly popped into Miles' head. It was another way of deciphering the code, one that might still not work, but it was an idea. So Miles didn't know whether it would actually get them anywhere or not, but it was worth a try. The only problem was how he could explain his new idea. His head was already spinning, and explaining the concept to another person might just push its capacity over the limit.

"I don't know how to explain it, just trust me," Miles said.

"I do trust you," said Lilly. "But I just want to make sure you didn't just lose your head."

"Lose my head?" Miles asked, stopping to turn.

Lilly shrugged. "Maybe too much water got too deep up in there?"

Miles laughed a little. "I think I'm okay. I'll be great if this works."

"What works?" Lilly asked. "Just try explaining to me what you're doing."

"Well, we thought we had to unscramble the words, right?" said Miles, picking up the middle cushion from one of the couches and pulling out the notebook they kept the clues in as well as all their work figuring out the clues. "And we did have to unscramble the words!" Miles put the cushion back in its place and sat down on the couch, setting the notebook down on the table.

"Still not getting it," Lilly said helpfully.

Miles gave himself some time to take a breath and compose his thoughts. He started from the beginning again. "Okay, so we unscrambled it, right?"

Lilly nodded, still not looking too impressed. She really had no idea what was going on. Miles wondered what she thought of him now that he was acting crazy. But he'd have time to be self conscious once he had solved this code, once and for all. Or maybe his idea wouldn't even work, and he'd just look like a fool. Either way, he'd deal with it later.

"And then we got a whole load of nothing," Miles continued, no longer expected Lilly to follow what he was saying. He was mostly just gathering this thoughts at that point. "So we thought we'd hit a complete dead end. But we didn't. What we didn't realize, was that The Code had two steps to it. And we had only solved one."

"Okay..." Lilly said. "So what's the other step?"

Miles opened the notebook and started hurriedly flipping the pages. "Let's see... right here," Miles pointed to a line on the page he'd flipped to. State of the Beaver, it wrote. Lilly leaned over to see.

"Okay, what about that?"

"What if that's just a clue?"

Lilly blinked. "We know it's a clue."

"Yeah, but what if it's like one of those crossword puzzle answers, like Caspar was talking about," Miles continued. "And it's not talking about the organization. Maybe there's actually a state that has the beaver as the state animal?"

"Ohh," Lilly finally started to get it. "Well it's worth a try, I guess. Computer lab?"

"Yep."

Miles grabbed the notebook and he and Lilly stood up. As they headed back through the door they ran into Caspar and Jason.