“T,” Sunny reads aloud.
I pause. This could be nothing. I could be dragging us all toward a dead end in a labyrinth. Then again…onlyhindsight offers clear vision. Everything is cataracts until you’re looking at it from the other side.
“Can you write that down?” I ask Julia. “Please.”
I hear her pen scratching in her notebook.
“T,” Julia echoes.
I go on. “Second line…first word…third letter.”
Sunny picks up her role as translator.“R.”
My chest goes tight, a rubber band stretching farther and farther. I’m waiting for theGorJorQ. I’m waiting to reach a random letter that makes this whole idea fall apart.
But it doesn’t come.
“E,” Sunny dictates to Julia. Gabriel points to the next grid of numbers on the cube. I shift the magnifying glass, and we keep going.
“A. S. U. R…”
We’ve nearly finished the third side when Gabriel starts giggling like a small child. “Holy shit,” he says, shaking his head. “Gay power for the win.”
Before we can ask what he means, he takes Julia’s notebook and writes in the eighth letter himself, then turns and shows the rest of us.
T R E A S U RE
Chapter Thirteen
Thirty minutes and five decoded number cubes later, we’re all standing around Julia’s open notebook, staring at the six lines scrawled on the page:
T R E A S U RE
I S L A N D
B U I L D E R
R E A D S
A R C H I T E C T U R E
7 2 3
At first I think that no one’s saying anything because no onecansay anything—we’re all in too much awe, too inwardly thrilled by this secret message we’ve brought to life, to be able to talk. It’s like we’re staring down at the invisible map on the back of the Declaration of Independence. The air is weightedwith reverence. Some nonexistent movie camera lens dials in on me for the close-up.
Then Sunny breaks the silence.
“What the hell even is this?”
The beautiful soundtrack in my head featuring a particularly uplifting French horn is cut short. I sigh and look at her. “I told you two minutes ago—it’s a book cipher.”
A book cipher is pretty clear-cut. You use a series of three numbers and a book or piece of writing as the key. The first number points to the line in the key. The second number points to the word in that line. And the third number points to the letter in that word.
“I think, technically, this one’s a flyer cipher,” Julia says.
Sunny rolls her eyes. “What I mean is, we just decoded a whole treasure map, and instead of it telling us where to go dig, we get a random list of words that looks more like a fourth-grade spelling test!”
“I don’t know,” Gabriel says. “I feel like ‘architecture’ is sixth-grade spelling material, easily.”
