CHAPTER 35 LYRA
LYRA
Even with additional help, they still stalled out. There were too many numbers in play, too many ciphers that could potentially convert those numbers to letters, if they needed to be converted at all.
It was nine at night when an elegant woman wearing a cashmere sweater joined the lot of them.
Lyra recognized her as Zara Hawthorne, formerly Hawthorne-Calligaris, the aunt who could supposedly hold her liquor even better than Grayson could but who nonetheless managed to give off the impression that she’d been born wearing heirloom pearls.
Zara silently observed all of them for a full three minutes before speaking.
“You are making this too complicated.”
“We doubtlessly are,” Grayson agreed, “but simplifying things would require a systematic way of separating the wheat from the chaff.”
What matters, Lyra translated, from what doesn’t. As Grayson caught his aunt up to speed on their prior efforts, Lyra’s gaze went to the drawing of the rose-handled blade. The Gilded Blade. A search online for that name had turned up nothing.
“The simple version of this puzzle,” Zara said once Grayson’s explanation was complete, “is one in which the sole purpose of the THOMAS, THOMAS file was to lead to this page. If you assume the file has indeed served its purpose, the path forward is clear.”
“Start from scratch,” Grayson summarized. “With the patent number and only that number.” He met Lyra’s eyes and swept all the pages on the desk, all of their notes, hours and hours of work, to the floor.
Lyra bit back the growl that wanted to escape her throat. She hated spinning in circles, hated feeling like she was treading water while something dark and dangerous lurked in the shadows down below.
But instead of giving into that frustration, Lyra simply reached for a pen, uncapped it, and wrote the patent number down on a blank page from memory.
1312596375.
“There were no spaces between the digits,” Grayson told his aunt. “The sequence starts one-three, but that could just as easily signify thirteen.”
“And the simplest possible solution to that problem?” Zara prompted.
“Twenty-six letters in the alphabet,” Nash drawled. “We narrow the range of possible numbers in the code to one through twenty-six, that’d simplify things a bit.”
More than a bit, Lyra thought. She twisted the pen in her fingers. “That would give us…”
“Six and only six possible sequences,” Grayson finished. Lyra wrote them down, one after another.
1 3 1 2 5 9 6 3 7 5
1 3 12 5 9 6 3 7 5
1 3 1 25 9 6 3 7 5
13 12 5 9 6 3 7 5
13 1 2 5 9 6 3 7 5
13 1 25 9 6 3 7 5
“And the simplest cipher?” Zara said.
“Since when was anything the old man did ever really that simple?” Nash asked his aunt.
“Do you know how many games I lost, Nash—games of my father’s and games in life—by overcomplicating things? You of all people should know that sometimes, it’s the simple things that matter most.” Zara looked from Nash to Libby.
Simple things, Lyra thought. Like Libby and Nash. Like loving the people you love. Like starting a family.
“Simple it is,” Nash replied. “And the simplest option is a code in which one is A, two is B, and so on.” Nash grabbed a pen and converted the numbers to letters, the simple way.
Simple. Without even meaning to, Lyra found herself listing toward Grayson and remembering the way he’d looked in the woods at Mile’s End.
“The flannel, I assume, is your doing?” Zara asked Lyra austerely.
“I like it,” Grayson declared.
“You do not,” Lyra replied.
“I could grow to like it,” Grayson said, and Lyra’s thoughts went from Mile’s End to this unfathomable library in this castle of a House.
“I don’t expect you to,” Lyra told Grayson, and then she shifted her attention to the code, to the six simple letter sequences that Nash had written down:
A C A B E I F C G E
A C L E I F C G E
A C A Y I F C G E
M L E I F C G E
M A B E I F C G E
M A Y I F C G E
For the longest time, all six of them stared at the sequences in silence. Lyra closed her eyes, pressing her fingers into the bark on the side of the desk, thinking about Tobias Hawthorne and that drawing of his—about Alice.
Alice. Lyra’s eyes flew open, and she scanned the six sequences again. And there it was. She brought fingers to rest beside the second of the six options:
A C L E I F C G E
With a glance, Lyra verified that none of the other sequences contained the five letters she’d just searched for.
They didn’t.
“Alice,” Grayson said beside Lyra, his mind falling perfectly into sync with hers. “Rearrange the first five letters of that sequence, and they spell Alice.”
Maybe some things really were simple. “If you go every other letter,” Lyra replied, doing exactly that with her finger, “you don’t have to rearrange a damn thing.”
A C L E I F C G E
It was no wonder that Grayson hadn’t seen it, back when he’d first tried to solve this puzzle, back when he’d been looking for Lyra, before he’d known his grandmother was alive.
“The Gilded Blade,” Lyra said out loud, looking at that drawing of Tobias Hawthorne’s. “The name Alice.”
“What’s left?” Zara said in a tone that reminded Lyra that Alice was Zara’s mother. Lyra didn’t know for sure how much Zara had been told, but it was clear she’d been told something. “If you take away Alice,” Zara reiterated, “what’s left?”
“C, E, F, and G,” Max said.
“Music notes?” Lyra guessed, thinking back to the Grandest Game.
“No.” Nash leaned over and converted the remaining letters back to their original numerical form: three, five, six, and seven. “Echoes, Gray. All those Saturday morning games, and at least sixty-five percent of the time, when you had four digits, it turned out to be—”
“A date,” Grayson finished. “March fifth, nineteen sixty-seven.” He looked toward Zara. “Does that date ring a bell for you?”
Zara shook her head. “But then,” she said, “when it comes to my mother, I’m almost certainly not the right person to ask.”