“It was in an opaque jar,” I say, adjusting the peas to my shoulder. A bunch spill out through the hole made by Crowlene. “Golden smoke. I didn’t see what happened to Waring and the others, but they didn’t stop us.”
Tolliver lets out a sigh of relief. “That’s Freeze Frame. They would have been basically unconscious when you escaped.”
“Good. So they won’t know I—oh no.” I swallow.
“What?” Tolliver asks.
“No, no, no. Ezra!” I snap.
He pulls his head from the trash. “What?”
“Two of them weren’t there!”
“…Okay?”
“Waring, Hecate, and Thea were there in person, but they also had two people on a laptop. They were there virtually, so the gas had no effect on them.”
CJ curses under their breath.
Poppy stands, glass in hand. “So they saw Ezra help you escape.” She chugs the last of her wine.
I push myself up and start pacing. Albeit stiffly with the injuries, but it does help me think as I try to remember what Ezra and I said when he rescued me. “Ezra’s face was covered…He made a dick joke—”
“It wasn’t a dick joke!”
“I was surprised he came back, and then there was something about…Oh shit, I think I asked about the rest of the crew.”
“Pack up,” CJ orders.
There’s a mad rush as we gather up our things and wipe down surfaces. Crowlene even helps pick the peas off the floor. By the time we sneak out the back and reset the security system, the house is exactly how we found it—with the exceptions of one missing bag of peas and a recorked bottle of 1982 Château Lafite Rothschild topped up with tap water, food coloring, and a splash of vinegar.
Twenty-Two
Cryptanalysis is the process of cracking a code without a cipher.Notthe analysis of crypts, as Tolliver was disappointed to discover.
There are different techniques—to cryptanalysis, not crypt analysis—but it usually starts by looking at symbol frequency and pattern recognition. That, combined with contextual clues, will usually give you somewhere to start. For simpler codes, you can do this by hand, but in general, this is done with a computer, and even then, deciphering a code can take anywhere from minutes to millennia.
The Voynich manuscript is written in a code that scholars have been trying to decipher for decades, without luck. No living soul can read it.
But we have something the scholars don’t:
Access to Dead people.
“So, the Afterlife is real,” Ezra says, pacing around my living room.
“Yup.” With a jerk, I lie back in the faux leather recliner Dante used for gaming.
We’ve placed it between the lumpy thrifted couch and the ornately carved stone fireplace. The room is really coming together, if your style is Tudor Revival meets college dorm.
“And you can go there whenever you want?” Ezra has dragged his fingers through his curls so much it looks like he was electrocuted.
“Yup.”
“And come back?”
“Unless you’re Dead.” I purse my lips, thinking. “Actually, that’s kind of what we’re trying to change.”
Tolliver has rigged up a makeshift Orpheus chamber using the recliner and a TV tray, where his monitoring equipment shows various graphs and wavy lines that he somehow interprets as my vitals. I don’t allow myself to contemplate how much this is just like old times, or else I’ll start thinking about the last time Tolliver hooked me up to these machines. Instead, I need to focus on today’s task: taking the grimoire into the Afterlife.
