himself.
Because Becca is a total language expert, having learned Spanish, Italian, German, and bits and pieces of other languages from her parents and grandparents, she’s been translating the entries into a red Moleskine notebook.
“On our flight here, I found eleven passages at the end of the diary,” she told Lily and me. “All of them are coded. We tracked Vela a different way because it was the first relic, but I think each of these eleven passages might be about one of the other original Guardians and his or her relic, but I need a key to decode them. Actually, I need eleven different keys, because they all seem to be coded differently.”
“Do you think the key words are somewhere in the diary?” I asked.
Becca shook her head. “Not the key words, but there’s this.”
She gently slid her finger down a single page at the end of the diary. Unlike most other pages, its outside edge wasn’t ragged, but straight.
“That looks different,” said Lily. “Was it cut or something to make the edge straight?”
“I thought so, too,” Becca said. “But no.” She ran her finger between that page and the facing page, deep into the gutter of the book. There, with a slender fingernail, she peeled the page back, revealing that the straight edge was in fact a fold. The page’s flap was inscribed with a large square of letters.
“It’s a cipher, but I don’t know how it works yet,” Becca said.
“I’ll tell you!” Lily bounced up, tugged her phone from the charger, and immediately started tapping on its screen.
“How do you even know what to search for?” I asked.
Lily snorted. “Because while your brain is going ‘huh?’ mine is going ‘aha!’”
I glanced over my shoulder. Darrell and Dad were loading up their trays.
“It’s called a tabula recta,” said Lily. “It’s a ‘letter square,’ created by a cryptological guy named Trithemius in the sixteenth century.” She flipped her phone around and widened an image with a swipe of her fingers. It was almost identical to the hand-inked square Becca had found in the diary.
“You did it again, Lily,” I said.
She gave a little bow. “Trithemius’s square includes twenty-four cipher alphabets, so each time you code a letter—say L, for Lily—you give it a different letter. It’s nearly impossible to figure out without the key word. Trithemius was all about improving codes.”
Dad and Darrell wove through the food court with two trays full of food. I trotted over to help and noticed that Darrell’s eyes were red. I knew right away that he and my dad had had a time-out.
“Until we get to New York, we’re not going to make much headway,” Dad was saying.
“I get it,” said Darrell. “I just wish it were all happening faster. I keep thinking of Mom in some dark place with no food—”
“You can’t go there, Darrell,” Dad said. “You’ll only twist yourself up in knots, and we don’t know anything real yet. Look, let’s eat; then we’ll call Terence Ackroyd, all of us. Get the latest. Okay?”
“Good. Yeah. Let’s do that.” Darrell settled his tray in the middle of our table. While he stuffed a pineapple spear into his mouth, Becca showed him and Dad the letter square and one of the passages.
Darrell snorted. “Beefy kahillik buffwuzz ifgabood?”
“I think you added some letters there, but either way, without the key word, it means nothing,” Becca said.
“Unless you’re an ifgabood,” he said.
Aside from the funny nonwords, Darrell wasn’t into it. He calls ciphers “word math,” which is actually a clever way of describing them. Darrell doesn’t plod through stuff. He’s an improviser. Tennis. Guitar solos. He has to jump from one thing to another, one thought to another, one move to another, just to compete. All that moving sometimes makes him hard to follow and jumpy.
Sometimes it makes him plain brilliant.
Dad perused the diary. “Eleven passages. One for each of the other relics …”
“I think so,” Becca said, twisting her lips as she often did when she was deep into translating. “We have to find the key words, but I don’t think they’ll come from the diary. I think they’re out there. In the world. We just have to be smart enough to find them.”
“Good thing we’ve got such a smarty-pants like you in our gang,” said Lily, winking at her.
Becca smiled. “Thanks, but you better save the compliments, at least for now. Breaking the code is going to be super challenging.”
The rest of our brunch-lunch-dinner passed pretty much in silence. I could tell from Darrell’s dark looks that he was going where my dad had told him not to go. Thinking about his mother trapped in a cold dark place with no light, no heat, no food … now I was doing it.
Finally, Dad keyed in Terence Ackroyd’s number, and we all went quiet. He was about to put it on speaker when it apparently went to voice mail. He hung up without leaving a message and looked at his watch. “It’s nighttime there. Maybe he’s out. He’ll call back.” He stood abruptly. He scanned the concourse in both directions, looking for what, I wasn’t sure. Teutonic Knights? I glanced around, too. No one seemed overly suspicious. Which, of course, made me more suspicious.
“Okay, team, good lunch,” he said, trying to smile but not quite making it. “We need to keep moving.”
I got what he was doing. Dad had done this my entire life—taking all the danger and scary stuff into himself so that no one else would worry or feel bad or be afraid.
If only it were that easy.
After we spent almost three more tiring hours zig-zagging among the airport’s hundreds of shops, being tricky but not really seeing anyone we could identify as being from the Order, we headed to the gate to rest and wait. The Honolulu-to–San Francisco flight was still a little over an hour and a half away, but I was surprised to find that the gate had already begun to fill with passengers from Hong Kong, whose earlier flight was joining ours. We found five seats together and settled in, then I went to look out the window.
It was evening now and the sky had darkened enough for the first stars to be visible, even over the brightly lit airstrips.
“Where math and magic join up, right?” whispered Darrell, sidling up to me. “What Uncle Henry said about the sky?”
I turned to him. “You do listen when I tell you stuff.”
“Sure,”
