“‘Voyance’? As in, Clara Voyance?” Beck suggested, but that didn’t get them anywhere, either.
They fell silent, thinking. Adi tried redoing the cipher using “Angelos” and “escape” and “tarot” and “hermit” and “tower” before he finally snapped at everyone to stop throwing out ideas because they weren’t helping.
“There must have been something else in the room,” he said, tapping the pen rapidly against his knee. “A keyword no one picked up on, or a cipher wheel or something.”
“You’d think we would have noticed a cipher wheel lying around,” muttered Sierra.
Adi tried “Louis” as the keyword for the cipher. Nothing.
“There are eight capital letters,” said Carter, running a finger along the message.“O-I-B-S-A-B-A-A.”
“You’re right,” said Adi, circling the capital letters.
“Isthatan anagram?” asked Beck. “Sob . . . Bib . . . Abba?”
“I don’t think so. Could indicate names or initials or . . .” Adi’s breath caught. “Or . . . poetry.”
“Poetry?” Carter said with an abrupt laugh. “Now you’re going romantic on us?”
Adi lifted his focus from the paper and peered at her.“She walks in beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies; and all that’s best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes; thus mellowed to that tender light which heaven to gaudy day denies.”
Beck whistled lowly, while Carter blushed.
Sierra rolled her eyes. “Exactly how many books did you bring with you on this trip?”
“His entire duffel bag is full of them,” Beck said in slight awe. “He has one change of clothes and one bag of toiletries, and the rest is books.”
“How do you not stink all the time?” Sierra demanded.
“I send my laundry bag out like everyone else,” Adi said, putting on exaggerated affronted airs, but his focus was already lost in the ribbon again. “I think we’re looking at a poem . . . or seven sentences. Maybe less, given that theIcould be a pronoun, and some of these could be proper names. What’s interesting is that the very first letter is one of our capitals, suggesting it might actually be the start of the note. It could be . . .” He paused. “That’s it.”
He flipped to a clean sheet of paper and started writing again— copying down the letters from the note, but instead of writing them left to write, he wrote the first line in a column, top to bottom.
O
a
e
l
n
i
b
t
s
k
a
t
i
