067.7 Hours Since Quartz's Disappearance

Sci sat down and started to click away at his and the other two laptops without much of anything else to say. After watching him for a moment, I recognize the slight tilt to his head and the sheen in his eyes. He really is Yulks's brother. I never knew he had any siblings. He's never talked about his family before. Yulks is a very private person in general. I didn't even know he was from the West until Quartz told me. I have to turn my thoughts away when my heart stings.

"I didn't know Yulks had a brother". It's the only thing on my mind that's safe to say.

Sci's fingers freeze for a moment on the keys before he resumes typing. "I'm not surprised. I wouldn't even know his nickname if I hadn't done some snooping". Sci seems more jumpy then Yulks. Where the older is calm and laidback, the younger is nervous and jittery.

"How far apart are you two? You don't look much younger". Distractions from my thoughts are good. It's easier to focus on the present. I need to keep busy.

"I misspoke before". Sci answers in fear of the reprocutions if he doesn't. "We're stepbrothers. Or cousins, I guess, depending on how you look at it. Our mothers were twins. Yulks's mom died shortly after he was born. We never met our dad. He's only a month older then me, but he skipped third grade". Short, curt, to the point without any emotional input.

"I did know that much. He's always had a baby face. What I don't get is why you didn't go with him. You've already claimed to have gotten into Yulks's emails".

"Scholarship. Fancy high school with board. Multiple grades could try out for it. That's the only way a West side could get to an East side school. It was obvious that one of us would get it. I never applied. I had to leave school early and pick my sister up from daycare since our mom was sent to the hospital".

I almost give up questioning Sci after he says that. Everyone in the West has grown up rougher then I had it. I won't deny that. Yulks was my friend for years before I knew. He told Quartz first. The three of us put on the least flashy clothes we owned and got off a bus stop as close to the West as we could get. Yulks felt so uncomfortable sharing this side of his life that he hardly talked that entire day. I had known it was bad, but never that ugly. We went all the way to the wall. The richest in the East, like my family, have always ignored it.

Quartz- My Jasper didn't ignore it. Something in the West just made him snap. The injustice of it all made him tick. Jasper started planning this well before we graduated. He had the funds to do it, for sure. Jasper's parents already had him managing two apartment buildings and a popular cafe by then. He built the rebellion up from the ground. Yulks started it first with his online connections. It was all virtual for the first year. When I found out what the boys were doing, I supplied weapons from my father's company. I taught Jasper how to use a sword, and I showed Yulks how he can dodge knife in a pinch. The rebellion would still be fantasy without any one of us.

"I think I've got something", Sci suddenly speaks up, jolting me from my thoughts. He's working on his own laptop after sending himself the files from the other two. He turns the laptop so I can see the screen. "This is Yulks's work. The files he stole were all encoded, but he unscrambled them and then sent it through his own encryptions. He must have been trying to throw someone off his trail".

"Can this someone still be tracking these files? There's a few routers in the building to throw off signals, but if Yulks got caught......"

"No, we're fine. I'm not even connected to the internet. All the dangerous work is done".

Sci goes quiet again, tapping out a familiar rhythm on the keyboard. I can't make much sense out of what he's doing. It's always been Yulks's specialty. The screen is full of different windows and pop-ups. Sci navigates through them with ease. Whatever he had to decrypt must have finished, because a new window pops up and covers up everything else.

"I take it something like this is what you wanted?", Sci asks, glancing at me and back to the screen. He zooms it out until we can see the entire blueprint.

The file is an above view of some type of compound. The right side has one long rectangle nestled up against a few of the buildings, and it doesn't take a genius to realize that it's a crude drawing of the wall.

"So what am I looking at here? Everything is in nerd speak", I ask him.

Sci grunts before pointing at the largest building. "This is a maximum security prison. It holds the city's worst criminals before their execution dates. There's barracks and a guard post for soldiers, with an electric fence around the entire thing". Sci zooms in to look at a small building that's against the wall. He bites his lip before speaking. "I'm not sure what this one is. There's no notes in this file, but this smaller building is what Yulks was after".

The window gets buried underneath others as Sci clicks into some more freshly decrypted files. I make him a stop on one labeled 'Delta Eyes'. I don't know what it means, but Yulks is probably the only other one beside me who's seen Jasper's eyes. It has to be important if he sent it.

The file is only five pages long. Each sheet is a brief medical form with statistics like height, weight, and blood type. There are first names, but last names are blacked out. Each set of information is also accompanied by...... an eye. There's a picture of someone's eye to go along with the medical information. The first is a deep purple eye with a green diamond shaped pupil. There's a clamp keeping their eye open, as if they were unconscious at the time. Sci shifts uncomfortably in his seat and scrolls down. I would've thought two of the flies were the same if they didn't have different weights. On the fourth, I notice that the date is only a year old, unlike the others that are decades old.

The last file is dated from just a couple days ago. I would've recognized those eyes even if they weren't one in a thousand. Jasper's information is written out coldly just like all the others. We found him. "And there's more", Sci says, "Yulks sent a list of important dates. He's circled one for tonight".