“A little of both,” Philby said.
“What clues?” Amanda asked. “I love puzzles.”
“These numbers at the end are a clue. But the apostrophe’s the biggie.”
“Huge,” Finn said, mocking him. He didn’t like the way Amanda and Philby were suddenly so buddy-buddy.
“Break the numbers apart and you get—”
“Two-seven-three-six—”
“Twenty-seven and thirty-six,” Philby said, correcting her.
“And that’s significant because?” she said.
“How many letters are there in the alphabet?”
Philby wanted her to think it out for herself.
“Twenty-six. But oh…my…gosh…” Amanda said ecstatically.
“That’s big news?” Finn asked. “I know that much.”
“But if you add in the ten numerals,” Philby said. “One through zero.”
“Not zero through one?” she inquired.
“No, I don’t think so. You’ll see why….”
These two were speaking a foreign language. “Back up!” Finn said.
“By including the number thirty-six,” Philby explained, “he’s telling us that he extended ten characters—or numbers—past the end of the alphabet. So twenty-seven is—”
“The numeral one,” she answered.
“And thirty-six—”
“Is zero!” Amanda said excitedly. “One followed by a zero—is ten.”
“Yes. All together it’s a date, I think. Ten-fourteen. October fourteenth.”
“Whoa!” Finn said, seeing the solution. “But that’s…what…two days from now?”
“Exactly,” Philby said, agreeing. “And since that date makes at least some sense in terms of the code, it shows us he was using a system—”
“Where each letter and each numeral represents a number,” Amanda said. “Or in the case of the alphabet, a different letter.”
“Yes,” said Philby. “That’s it: a cryptogram.”
“So another clue is the letter M,” she said.
Finn was lost. “We know this because?”
“Because it follows the apostrophe,” Philby said.
“So M either represents an S or a T or a D,” Amanda said, “because those are the only three letters that ever follow an apostrophe by themselves, except for M, and I don’t think M is likely to be M. Also, it’s probably not D, since I bet this message is in the present tense—apostrophe D would be short for had, the past.”
“She’s fast,” Philby told Finn, who mugged, trying to appear that he was following them.
“And where does this get us, exactly?” Finn said.
“Cryptograms are about patterns. Words follow patterns. Vowels are in certain places in most words. Wayne wouldn’t make it ridiculously difficult, just hard enough that the Overtakers couldn’t understand it when they found it.”
“He’d have had to actually write on the wall,” Amanda explained to Finn. “Otherwise Jess would not have seen it. Her dreams, her visions, are like snapshots of the future. She wrote down each of these letters. She saw this clearly.”
“But all we have are a couple of numbers and an S or a T,” Finn said. “I don’t see how that helps us.
Wayne needs us now.”
“The most common letters are vowels,” Philby said. “I’m pretty sure I can decode this. The P’s repeat. The I’s. Therefore they’re probably vowels. It’s going to come together easier than you think. It’s like Scrabble in a foreign language.”
“When?”
“Finn!” Amanda said, complaining. “He just got it today. It’s not that easy.”
“But I thought we were going after the temperature records. I thought that was the way we decided we might find Malef—” He caught himself. “You know.”
“Then you want the Engineer Base.” A woman’s voice turned the heads of all three kids.
Wanda stood there looking down at them.
“Where’d you come from?” Finn said, his suspicion obvious.
“You will need to learn to pay more attention to who’s behind you, who’s watching you. I followed you and Amanda from school.”
“You’re freaking me out,” Finn said.
“You were so busy with getting her onto the bike, you never looked at what was going on around you.”
It was true: at the time, Finn hadn’t been thinking about anything else.
“But the Overtakers don’t go outside the parks,” Philby said.
“They did at least once,” Finn corrected. “She did. I saw her drop Jess off at the car wash that time.”