by Chris Miller
Trista wasted no time following orders. Pulling her bowstring over her shoulder, she took a seat on the back of the cycle and waited for me to drive. I hesitated a moment longer.
Desi closed her eyes and gripped tightly to the two black rods, which lit up at the tips, one orange and one blue. She moved the rods through the air, streaming a trail of light behind each tip like sparklers on the Fourth of July. When she finished her motion, the tails of light did not disappear. Instead, they remained attached to the rods, hanging from the tips like electric whips; orange—long, blue—short. Armed and ready, she set her sights on Vogler, waiting for his first move.
With a bone-shattering yell, Vogler stormed the door, leading with his right shoulder, his gun drawn.
“Hurry, Hunter!” Trista shouted. “He’s coming!”
“Go!” Desi shouted again.
This time I obeyed, jumping onto the cycle and firing up the black Ghost with an electric whir.
Bweeeeeeeeeeee-cacha-cacha!
The Ghost sputtered and choked black smoke into the room before the engine died. This was not good!
Blam!
Vogler slammed into the door, knocking it down like a lineman tackling a child.
“Everybody freeze!” Vogler yelled. Desi was already frozen, standing her ground between Vogler and us.
“You cannot have him,” Desi said calmly. “He’s with us.”
Vogler pointed his silver revolver straight at Desi’s head and replied, “There’s no way I’m going to let that happen.”
Pulling the trigger, a gleaming purple bullet fired its way toward Desi’s skull. With her right hand she spun her short blue whip around, creating a protective circle of light, which shielded her from the bullet. At the same moment, she lashed out with the orange whip in an aggressive attack, which Vogler barely evaded. The whip connected with the wall, tearing through it like a knife through butter.
“You’re a bad seed, Desi, one I intend to eradicate.” Vogler launched himself up overhead and spun around, firing three consecutive rounds at Desi. She deflected the first two with her blue whip and dodged the third by diving to the side. Vogler landed in front of me and would have grabbed my arm if Desi hadn’t yelled out, “Duck!”
A flashing line of orange light streamed narrowly overhead, as Trista and I ducked low to the bike. Vogler scrambled backward to avoid being caught by the deadly whip.
“Get out, now!” Desi screamed.
I tried firing up the engine again.
Bweeeee-cacha-cacha! Bweeeeeee!
More black smoke puffed into the air, as the engine struggled to life. The room was beginning to get dark with the fumes. The bike lurched forward toward Aviad’s office, but before we could make it out, a bookshelf landed in front of the door between rooms, blocking our escape. With no time to stop, the bike smashed into the shelf and started sputtering again. In the collision, the eraser that Desi had lodged in the oil pan fell loose and we started draining more oil.
“You’re not going anywhere!” an enraged Vogler yelled. He had single-handedly thrown the shelf in front of us, blocking our only exit. Desi quickly retaliated, occupying Vogler with a new string of attacks. There wasn’t enough room to ghost into the next room. We needed to move the shelf.
“You drive!” I shouted at Trista. “I’ll clear the way.”
Trista nodded and took the handlebars of the bike for the first time. I hopped off the bike and grabbed my Veritas Sword. “The Way of truth will be made clear,” I whispered, dwelling on the Code of Life. My Veritas blade gleamed into action as I swung it down across the shelf ahead, severing it in two. The shelving fell apart, allowing Trista to pull the throttle and push through to the other side. I ran after her and jumped onto the back of the bike.
Covering Trista’s hands with my own, I turned the bike toward the emergency exit and prepared to ghost through it. Before we left, I paused a moment to watch the last of the fight unfold.
I caught a brief glimpse of the struggle between Vogler and Desi through the door between the rooms. The fight had intensified in the last minutes. Flashes of purple and strings of orange and blue lit up the room like fireworks. But when Desi caught a bullet in the foot and fell to the ground, the colorful display came to a sudden end. Vogler raised his revolver at her head and was about to deal his fatal blow. Desi caught my eye and slid her orange whip across the floor, igniting the oil spill beside her in a fiery explosion.
“Noooooooooo!” I shouted, watching Desi and Vogler vanish in the flames. I wanted to stay and see if I could help her, but the trail of oil we had left behind was burning its way to our bike like a snake.
I cranked the throttle and aimed for the exit. The fire was right behind us when I flicked the ghosting switch and we felt the pull of the sputtering cycle leap forward. If we were lucky we would make it through the door, but where we would end up was anyone’s guess.
Chapter 15
Middle of Nowhere
The other side of the bookshop door was anything but an escape. With a jolt, our Ghost came to an abrupt stop, tossing us over the handlebars onto a searing white sand scape.
The transition from darkness to radiant light was blinding. A full minute passed before I could even think of opening my eyes to face its brilliance. When I did, it wasn’t a welcome sight. The midday sun reflected off the powder-white sand beneath us in a way that made us feel as if we were words on a blank page. In some ways, perhaps we were. The horizon seemed to be a long way off, if there was one at all.
With the Ghost out of oil and lodged in the sand, we were on our own to find shelter from the sun. It was hot…too hot. If we didn’t find help soon, we’d become food for whatever creatures lived in this desolate wasteland—if anything could live out here.
“Where do we go?” Trista asked, pulling her sweater off and tying it over her head like a scarf.
Scanning the horizon, I spotted a grey rock formation—cliffs of some kind that seemed within a reasonable walking distance. With any luck we would find some relief, however slight, from the heat of the day. We set off in their direction. Already, I could feel my skin burning. It wouldn’t take long before my brain was fried too.
Step by step we inched our way through the sand. The cliffs were nearly twice as far away as we had imagined them to be. A full hour later we reached them, desperate for shelter from the unforgiving sun. I spotted a small cave nestled midway up the side of the cliff that looked deep enough to hold us both, if we could make it up the cliffside.
Despite the odds, we struggled up the steep embankment to the ledge of the cave, pulling ourselves in and collapsing in an exhausted heap. It was a small cave, not big enough to stand up in, but deep and relatively cool. The relief was slight, but welcome. We caught our breath and rested.
“Now what?” Trista sighed after a long moment of silence.
“I have no idea,” I answered honestly. “I’m too exhausted to think.”
“Me too. What I wouldn’t give to be sniffed by a big ol’ smelly Scampa right about now,” Trista joked, recalling our previous entrance to Solandria.
“Yeah, where are the Thordin brothers when you need them?” I chuckled. “Ven and Zven. What a pair they were, huh?”
Trista smiled fondly at the memory and then, in the best Thordin brother accent she could muster, added, “Don’t cha believe none of my brother about being first to find you three,” she said, fighting a smile as she spoke. “Twas Godee, my Scampa, that nosed the lot of you first!”
The two of us laughed uncontrollably for a moment at her goofy impression of the two men who had rescued us from the snowbanks.
“You know,” I said jokingly, “you sounded just like them. You sure you aren’t related? You might even look good in a beard.”
“Hey!” Trista complained, slapping me almost immediately in a playful attempt to pretend she was upset. “W
atch it, buck-o.”
I grabbed her hand to keep her from slapping me again, but didn’t let go after she stopped trying. Lying there in the cave on our backs, holding hands, I felt closer to Trista than I had in a long time.
Maybe it was the heat exhaustion; maybe it was part fear of the unknown. Whatever it was, it felt good to be with her again. It was good to remember again. The shared experience we had in Solandria had drawn Trista and me closer to each other, and to the Author.
“Sorry about Desi,” Trista said finally, bringing us back to reality. My heart sank a little at the thought of having lost her. Somehow, despite what I saw, I held out hope that maybe she had survived. I let go of Trista’s hand.
“Did you like her?” Trista asked.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Of course I liked her. Why wouldn’t I? She was trying to help me…to help us.”
“I know, I just….” Trista considered venturing further, but thought better of it. “Never mind.”
“What?”
“It’s nothing, really,” she answered.
Ugh, girls. I thought. Why can’t they just come out and say what they mean?
“You can’t leave me hanging like that,” I ventured.
“I dunno; it’s complicated, I guess,” Trista continued. “I don’t want you to think bad of me but, in a weird way…I’m glad she’s not with us right now.”
“Trista!” I said, feeling suddenly defensive and slightly angry. “How can you say that!”
“I know, I know! See, I told you it was complicated. I don’t want her to be dead or anything, I just didn’t feel comfortable around her. That’s all. She was just controlling and….”
I shook my head. I can’t believe you’re jealous, I thought.
“I’m not jealous,” Trista answered my thoughts. “I’m just…protective.”
I eyed her suspiciously. Was she even aware of what she was doing? How could she possibly be hearing my thoughts? I quickly decided to change the subject to the situation at hand.
“You want to try and figure out where we are?” I asked, pulling the Author’s Writ from my backpack.
“Why not,” Trista replied.
I opened the Writ in hopes of locating the holographic map, the one Sam had shown me in the Revealing Room during my first visit to Solandria. The book opened easily but no words appeared on its pages. The book was blank. Once again, I had forgotten my key; without it the book was useless to us. I was about to put the book away when Trista noticed something inside it. There were markings on one of the pages, handwritten notes and randomly drawn circles and lines. Whoever had owned this book had marked things in it, points of reference.
“Listen to this,” Trista said, reading one of the notes from the edge of the page. “It says, The best way to see the future is to make it. Know your end, and the true Author will be revealed. What does that even mean, ‘true Author’?”
“Beats me, I thought there was only one Author,” I said.
“Here’s another one,” Trista continued. “The circle of seven await fire from heaven. Mysterious, don’t you think? Do you think it has something to do with the Consuming Fire?”
“Could be. The Seven are already marked though; you’re one of them, remember?”
Trista nodded, fingering the place on her collar bone where the mark of the three-tongued flame had been made. Surprisingly, it was there again, visible for both of us to see.
“I don’t get it,” Trista said. “How come you can see it now?”
“Maybe when when we’re in Destiny it’s hidden,” I reasoned. The logic sounded good to me. Trista seemed to agree as well and continued scanning the markings on the page.
“This last one is just a bunch of gibberish; I can’t even pronounce it. No vowels.” She slid the book between us and pointed to a place on the page where the markings had been made. The random sequence of letters was written above five vertical lines.
RNWWTW WNR
|||||
I wasn’t as interested in the note itself as much as I was curious at what Trista had just said about it; no vowels. It was the same observation Simon had made about the letters my dad had written on his final drawings. Could there be a connection?
“What?” Trista asked, noting the curious look that had crept across my face.
“It’s just interesting,” I explained. “My father wrote a message like this on one of his drawings.”
“He did?” Trista asked, wondering why anyone would write such nonsense. “In what language?”
That’s when it hit me. It wasn’t a language at all. It was a code—a cipher actually. My father loved them almost as much as I did. He had taught me many of them: writing in reverse like DaVinci, using letter substitutions, anagrams and binary coding too. As a kid I had thought they were good fun. We often left secret messages for each other to decipher. It was something of a game between us at the time. It had been a long time, but I was willing to bet the message was a cipher.
“Caesar’s cipher!” I exclaimed.
“Excuse me?” Trista asked, having trouble keeping up.
“It’s a coding system where letters are replaced with other characters in the alphabet. Here let me show you.”
With my hand I brushed the thin layer of sand that blanketed the rock floor evenly across the stone to make a clean slate to write on.
“If I wanted to say ‘hi’ to someone using a Caesar’s cipher, I’d replace each of the letters with another letter a few characters forward. Let’s just say we agreed to use a three letter shift. In this case, HI would become KL. See?”
I wrote the word in the sand, then the coded word below it.
HI
KL
“But how do you choose how many letters to skip?” Trista questioned.
“Usually you decide ahead of time,” I answered, “but in this case I think whoever wrote this left a message in another kind of code below it.”
“You mean, those scratches below it are a code too?” Trista asked, looking at the five vertical lines.
“Numbers actually. Five 1s.”
Trista’s eyes widened, “So, whoever wrote this message wanted us to rotate the letters five times.”
“No,” I added, “They aren’t tick marks, they’re binary.”
Trista gave me the look of someone who had just heard a foreign language. “Bi-what?” she asked.
“It’s a numbering system that only uses 1s and 0s. Digital devices use it to calculate all kinds of information. It’s actually not that much different from the numbering system we normally use…once you get to know it.”
“I’m not sure I want to know it,” Trista answered.
“Sure you do, it’s cool,” I said.
Trista shrugged her shoulders as if to say, “If you say so.” I took it as her approval for me to continue.
“Our numbering system is based on tens. We call it the decimal system. That just means we have ten numbers that we use to count with: one through nine, plus zero.”
Trista nodded, keeping up with me so far.
“Binary is different; it only has two numbers. One and zero.”
“So you can’t count past one? That’s stupid!” she exclaimed.
“No, no. Look,” I cleared the sand slate again and started drawing. “The first numbering space in our decimal system is the one’s column. It can be anything from one to nine or zero, right?”
Again, Trista nodded.
“Then there’s the ten’s column and the hundred’s column and so on. In binary there are columns as well. But each column can only be a one or a zero. So if I wanted to write zero, I’d write 0, if I wanted to write one I’d write 1.”
“Exactly like the decimal system,” Trista observed.
“Right, except there’s no 2 in binary so if you wanted to write two
what would you do?”
Trista stared back blankly, “Beats me.”
“You would do the same thing you’d do if you ran out of digits in the decimal system. You’d start another column.”
“So two would be 11?” Trista asked
“No, it would be 10. The first column resets itself to zero, just like when we start a new column in our numbering system. Like when we write 10 for example.”
“So, how would you write three in binary then?”
“You just add another 1 to the one’s column. Three would be 11.”
Trista’s eyes lit up a little, “I think I get it. But it’s still weird.”
I remembered how hard it was for me to grasp the concept at first too. It had never occurred to me there would be more than one way to count things. In some ways, learning binary was like learning another language—a language with only two digits.
“To read binary you just have to think differently about your number columns,” I explained, drawing out the number 11111, which had been written below the coded message. Between each number I drew a line to separate the columns. I wrote the value of the columns below each number, starting from right to left.
“The first column is the one’s column, just like in decimal. The second column is the two’s column, double the first column. The third column is the four’s column, then eight’s, then sixteen, then thirty two and so on. See? You just double the previous column value. Add the values together and you’ll have your number. If there is a 1 in the column you add that number, if there is a 0 then you don’t.”
1 1 1 1 1
16 8 4 2 1
“Okay, so 11 would be two plus one, which is three!”
“Exactly, and 11111 would be….”
“Sixteen, plus eight, plus four, plus two, plus one,” Trista said triumphantly, pausing a moment to add it all up in her head. “Thirty one!”
“Right,” I said, proud of the fact that I had explained it so well. “So, if my hunch is correct, thirty-one is how many times we shift the letters of the alphabet to decipher the message.”