The air hummed with static, like the moment before a lightning strike.

  Marv leaned over, fingers tapping out an uneven rhythm against the table.

  Across from him, Amelia’s eyes bore into the page, fists clenched tight, as if the numbers might unscramble themselves if she just stared hard enough. After a while, she blinked and broke for air. “Marv, do you think…”

  “I don’t know, Ames. But we have to find out.” He picked up a pencil and slid the book beneath the desk lamp’s halo.

  “So… what do we do?”

  “First, we figure out what kind of cipher we’re dealing with.”

  “Okay. How many types even are there?”

  Marv gave a crooked smile. “I doubt anybody knows the answer to that, Ames. Ciphers have been around forever. Monks used to encrypt outlawed holy books so only people in their church could read them. Pirates stitched hidden warnings into their sails. During the Great Crusades, spies smuggled their battle plans behind enemy lines disguised as poetry.” A sideways glance. “Ask Raymond about the last one—he’s probably old enough to remember it firsthand.”

  Amelia’s look said it all: now’s not the time, Marv.

  “So we’ve got what — a thousand years of different options to sort through? Fantastic. Where do we even start?”

  Marv rubbed the back of his neck. “Trial and error, I guess. With the emphasis firmly on error.”

  His pencil hovered over the page. Then he started to sketch out possibilities.

  “Okay, first of all, we can rule out a basic substitution cipher.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s a playground cipher really. You’re just swapping numbers for letters—A is one, B is two, C is three. Any toddler with half a brain could crack it.” He screwed his face up. “Besides, we’ve got numbers above twenty-six. Makes it impossible. One down.”

  The pencil picked up speed—scribbling, crossing out, starting again. Theories sparked and died in quick succession.

  Rokov shift? Nope.

  Halberd grid? Not likely.

  Verandini spiral? Definitely not.

  Math came next: sequences, ratios, prime numbers. One after another, Marv chased them down until the logic broke.

  Eventually the pencil clattered against the desk.

  “Damn. Couple of times there, I thought I had it. I really did.” He exhaled hard, like he was trying to push something out of his chest. “Sorry, Ames.”

  “It’s okay, Marv. We knew it wouldn’t be easy.”

  “Yeah…” His fingers raked through his hair. “But there’s definitely some logic here. I can feel it. I’m missing something obvious. Something stupid.”

  “Let’s forget the numbers for a second. Just look at the pattern. There are eight clusters. Each cluster is made up of three numbers, separated by slashes.” He traced his finger left to right across the page, following the rhythm. “number, slash, number, slash, number.”

  He grabbed his chin and scrunched up his mouth.

  “They’re structured a bit like dates, right? But the numbers don’t work. They descend—first number’s the biggest. Second’s smaller. Third’s always smallest.”

  “Could it be coordinates?” Amelia offered hopefully.

  Marv squinted at the page. “Possible, I guess. But standard coordinates stick to two axes—X and Y, latitude and longitude. That tells you where something is on a two-dimensional surface, like a map. A third number—a Z-axis—would usually add height or depth. Useful if you’re tracking satellites or mapping tunnels, but that seems like a stretch here.”

  “Okay.” Amelia nodded. “Not coordinates then.”

  “Hey—no such thing as a bad idea.” Marv winked.

  She arched an eyebrow. “Really? What about when you tried to hot-wire the hand dryer in the school bathroom to fast-charge your tablet?”

  Marv shrugged. “Okay… fair point. Some ideas are maybe worse than others.”

  “Especially ones that trigger the science wing sprinklers and evacuate three floors of the school during exam week.”

  He raised a finger. “In my defense, that highlighted some glaring inefficiencies in the school’s evacuation protocols. Sure, chemistry was a write-off, but in the long run, lives were saved.”

  Silence coiled between them.

  Suddenly Marv stood. Shoulders back, arms folded, one finger pressed to his mouth. He began circling the book slowly, like he was waiting for the numbers to bolt. Then he went completely still.

  Marv was hunting.

  “Alright. Back to basics. Any encryption runs on a shared set of rules; a structure both the sender and receiver agree on. This cipher’s no different. It might be analogue, old school, but it’s built on the same logic. For it to work, you need one thing.”

  He tapped the page.

  “A key.”

  He let that land.

  “You can encrypt anything—text, images, doesn’t matter—but if the receiver can’t unlock it, it’s worse than useless. Just noise.” He wiggled his fingers beside his temple. “Static. A cipher’s just a locked door. Doesn’t matter how clever you are: no key, no access.”

  “Right,” Amelia said, following his logic. “So the code is the door, the real message is hidden behind it… and the cipher unlocks it?”

  “Exactly. Figure out the type of cipher and you’ve got your key. Then—click—” Marv mimed turning a lock and pushing open a door. “— you’re in.”

  Amelia went quiet.

  “Marv…”

  “Yeah?”

  The words felt stupid before they even left her mouth. “This might sound a bit crazy, but… I had a dream last night.”

  He waited.

  “One of my nightmares. You know.”

  “Uh-huh.” He stopped pacing.

  “It started in the closet. Always does. But this one went further. There was a corridor. Then another door, and I was in the kitchen — my kitchen. In my old house.” She swallowed. “Something was chasing me. Just a shadow. A black shape. I closed the door to keep it out. But when I looked down, there was a key in the lock. Like someone had left it there for me.”

  Marv didn’t move a muscle.

  “The thing is… she was in the room. Before I got there.”

  “Who?”

  “My mom.” Amelia’s eyes flickered. “It’s like she left it for me.”

  She let it hang there, waiting for him to laugh, or wave it off, or say dreams don’t mean anything.

  He didn’t. He just looked down at the book. Then at her.

  “Okay—first of all, are you okay?”

  She nodded.

  “Second—I think maybe your mom did leave you a key.”

  His fingers traced the edge of the page.

  “She had to have used this code before. You don’t try something like this out for the first time under pressure. This was an active messaging system. She was part of a network—a sender, and probably a receiver too.”

  He started pacing again.

  “And a network is just a series of connected nodes. Could be two, could be two hundred. Doesn’t matter. What does matter is that this message was a network ping. A signal flare. She wrote it in a secure language that only people in her network could decode. Whatever’s in here meant something—to her, and to whoever was meant to read it.”

  He looked up.

  “But your mom didn’t have much time. And we know she saw what was coming, because your folks hid you before it happened. They must have known they were in trouble, Ames.”

  Amelia’s eyes welled.

  Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

  “And if you’re a systems thinker, you don’t blindly trust a network that might be compromised. If one node is under threat, you have to consider the others might be too.”

  “So what are you getting at, Marv?”

  “Scientists don’t hope for the best. They deal in evidence. Facts. They build redundancies. Make backups. Because anyone who knows the first thing about science knows that entropy is guaranteed.”

  He turned toward her.

  “So what do you do if you’re out of time and the message matters too much to lose? If you’re not certain the person you’re writing it for will even get it?”

  “Go on.”

  “You build a failsafe. She didn’t trust the system anymore, Ames. Whatever was going on that night, she knew her network might be compromised. And if it was, she couldn’t risk the message dying with it.”

  He looked at her. Certainty in his eyes.

  “So she didn’t just write a message and send it blindly. She didn’t cross her fingers and hope it reached the right person. She made sure someone—anyone—could find it. And decode it.”

  Amelia frowned. “But I don’t—”

  Marv raised a hand.

  “What I’m saying is: she didn’t just leave you a book, Ames. She made you the last node in her network.”

  He lifted the book to eye level, eyes scanning, mind racing.

  “She left you everything — right here. This book… I’m pretty sure it’s the lock and the key.”

  “But… how?” Amelia’s voice cracked.

  “I think it’s an old-fashioned book cipher—vintage espionage stuff.” He framed the numbers with his hands, like he was taking a photograph. “You use a book as the cipher key. Write the message somewhere else, keep it separate. Only someone with a copy of the same book can decode it.”

  “The number sequences, that was the first clue. In a book cipher, the first number always references a page. That’s why it’s biggest—tons of pages in a book like this. The second number’s smaller because it’s the line number. The third’s the smallest because there aren’t that many words on a line.” He tapped the page. “Page. Line. Word. That’s what the clusters represent. That’s what this is.”

  He looked up.

  “We’ve got it, Ames.”

  “So each cluster is a word?” Amelia asked, leaning forward.

  Marv grinned.

  “No—not quite. You don’t usually use whole words in this type of cipher. You just take the first letter of each word. That spells out the message.”

  Amelia’s eyes stayed locked on the book. “But wait, Marv… the message is written inside the book. You said the book and the message are supposed to be separate—”

  “Exactly.” He held up a finger. “That was the missing piece. At first I’d ruled this kind of cipher out. Correctly, I might add. Until I realised something.”

  Amelia looked up. “What?”

  “You’d never, ever write the message in the key book. You’d keep them completely separate—air-gapped.” He pointed to the scribbled digits. “But this—God, Ames. Your mom was brilliant. Whatever happened that night, she made a decision, in the moment. Counterintuitive. Crazy, even. One that only a genius would think to make.”

  He exhaled softly.

  “She collapsed the system. On purpose. She wrote the code inside the key book, because she wanted someone outside the network to be able to find it. To decode it. She built a failsafe—so anyone could read it.”

  Amelia’s eyes widened. Her hand gripped the edge of the table.

  Marv’s voice dropped. “Think about that night, Ames. What happened. When you’re backed into a corner, you do what you have to do. Rules be damned.”

  Amelia could see it — her mother frantically flipping through pages, scribbling numbers in messy handwriting, forcing a message into the only thing she had left.

  “Everything happened so fast,” she whispered. “She could have written it just before…”

  He looked at her. The grin had faded.

  “What did she say to you that night? What did your mom ask you to do with this book?”

  “Keep it safe,” Amelia said, voice breaking. “Don’t… don’t let it go.”

  “Right. And you did. You kept it safe for more than ten years. Thing is — I think your mom knew that’s exactly what you’d do. She trusted you’d carry the message. And if the person she wrote it for never came?” He paused. “I think she wanted you to find it. She wrote it for whoever came next. And, deep down, I think she knew it would be you.”

  Amelia stared down at the numbers. They seemed to pulse on the page. “So what do we do now?”

  “We solve it.” He didn’t hesitate. “Get some paper.”

  Her body moved before her mind caught up. She grabbed a battered math workbook and held it out.

  “What if we’re wrong, Marv?”

  Marv didn’t miss a beat. He took the workbook from her hands and tore out a sheet.

  “What if we’re not?”

  He studied the first cluster of numbers closely.

  47/11/4

  “Okay, Ames,” he breathed. “You ready?”

  She nodded.

  Marv began turning pages. Amelia watched as numbers flipped past, counting down like time moving in reverse. He stopped.

  Page forty-seven.

  His finger moved down the page, steady and deliberate. He stopped at the eleventh line, then began sliding right, counting each word.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  Amelia leaned closer, holding her breath.

  Four.

  Marv’s finger stopped.

  “Hydrosphere.”

  The pencil moved, scratching softly like a match being struck.

  H

  Amelia’s heart rattled against her ribs.

  “Okay…” she breathed. “Next.”

  Marv flipped back to the cipher, eyes scanning, pencil ready.

  “Page sixty-four. Line eighteen. Word five.”

  The pages turned again. His finger traced the pattern.

  Found it.

  “Example.”

  He wrote the letter down.

  E

  The silence deepened.

  Amelia bit her lip.

  “Next one,” Marv said. “Page seventy-five. Line eleven. Word two.”

  “Like,” she whispered.

  L

  Marv kept going.

  “Page ninety-two. Line seven. Word one.”

  He paused.

  “Plasma.”

  P

  Cold curled in Amelia’s stomach.

  Her hand covered her mouth.

  H-E-L-P

  The word hung in the air like a curse.

  “Oh my God, Marv…”

  Marv looked up, face solemn, eyes steady. “We need to keep going, Ames. We need the whole message.”

  He began flipping through pages again.

  “Okay—page one-oh-six. Line thirteen. Word five.”

  He found the page.

  “Next word is Method.”

  M

  He scribbled, then turned back to the cipher.

  “One-seventy-eight. Line nine. Word five.”

  “About.”

  A

  Amelia shifted in her seat.

  “Page two-ten. Line eleven. Word four.”

  “Nucleus.”

  N

  She blinked. The letters didn’t add up, but each one pressed down on her, heavier than the last.

  One more to go.

  Marv’s voice was barely a whisper.

  “Two-forty-three. Seventeen. Five.”

  He turned the page—slower this time, like the weight of it had gotten heavier. His finger dropped, traced the line, counted the words.

  Amelia couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think.

  His finger reached the fifth word…

  “Nature.”

  He looked at her. Amelia couldn’t read his expression.

  N

  Marv finished the final stroke.

  The pencil went still.

  He didn’t move right away. He just sat there, hand resting on the page like he wasn’t ready to let go. Then, without a word, he slid it across the table.

  Amelia drew it toward her slowly. She looked down.

  Eight letters stared back at her.

  HELPMANN

  “Helpmann,” she whispered. It felt wrong in her mouth, like it belonged to someone else.

  Marv tapped the pencil against his forehead, brow creased. “But is it one word or two? Helpmann or Help Mann?”

  He tested both aloud, weighing the difference. “Could be a codename. An instruction. An acronym. Hell, could be—”

  “It’s a name,” Amelia said.

  Marv looked directly at her.

  She blinked. There was no way she could know, but somehow… she did.

  Marv nodded slowly. “Okay. A name.”

  “Yeah,” she murmured. “But I don’t know anyone called Helpmann.”

  “Maybe your mom did?”

  Amelia nodded. Her mother hadn’t chosen this word by accident. This was intentional. A message left in code—a thread wound tight through twelve years of silence, reaching all the way back to the night everything fell apart.

  She blinked hard, fighting back the heat behind her eyes.

  “Whoever this is,” she whispered, “they knew my parents. And they might know who killed them—and why. I need to find them, Marv.”

  For once, Marv didn’t have anything smart to say. His eyes flicked up at her and, for a heartbeat, she thought she saw it—a flicker of uncertainty. But he reached over for her laptop, snapped it open, and opened a new EverLink browser tab.

  The search bar blinked up at him expectantly.

  And just like that, the thread began to pull.