“I’m so sorry, Zach.”
“And now I’m dead.”
“You aren’t dead yet!” I take him by the shoulders. “There’s still hope.”
Zach’s face crumples. “I don’t want to die.”
I pull him into a hug. “You’re not going to. Not if I can help it.” I rock him back and forth in my arms, rubbing his back. “It’s okay, Zach. We can beat this.”
He looks at me and nods, his face an iron resolve. “I’m not going down without a fight. What do we do now?”
I let out a long breath. He’s trying to be so strong. “Now, we get to work. At the lab, a code was spray-painted on the wall.” I point to the piece of paper where I copied it down.
VXTZ UAR +11
“Next to that was a red 3D rectangle,” I say. “It’s standard practice for the Collective to encrypt messages. The plus-eleven is half of the key. It’s a simple Caesar Cipher. The other half of the key, I have committed to memory.”
Zach nods. “That makes sense. I learned about ciphers in my comp-sci class in high school.” The gears in his head turn. Now that he has something to focus on, he looks more hopeful.
“Yeah, but the results don’t mean anything to me.” I point to more scribbles below the original code. “When I decode it, I come up with this.”
AGXN VZB
“It looks like the decryption didn’t work,” I say. “Does that make any sense to you?”
Zach scrunches his face up. “No, not really. Here, let me see that code again.”
I hand Zach the note, and he stares long and hard at the original letters. Then his face brightens. “Wait. You said the first part of the encryption was a Caesar Cipher, right?”
I nod.
“Are you sure that’s a plus-eleven?”
“I think so. What else could it be?”
“Are those capitalI’s, maybe? Instead of ones?” Zach asks. “As in Roman numerals. Get it? Roman and Caesar?”
I drop my jaw. “You mean like Roman numeral two. So, the first part of the key is a two!”
I use the number two in the key, work out the new solution, then write it on the paper.
PSNS DD4
Zach points at it. “PSNS. Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. That’s in Bremerton, Washington, right on the other side of Puget Sound.”
“Oh, my god, Zach! You’re a genius!” I hug him so tightly that he grunts a little. “What does the DD4 mean, do you think? And the red rectangle?”
Zach shrugs. “Not sure. Guess we’ll have to go there and see.” His whole demeanor has changed. He’s filled with hope. And so am I. He gets up and heads toward the bike. “But not sure how we’ll get there. The bike is running on empty, and it kinda got smashed when I jumped off it.”
I walk in the other direction and gesture for him to follow. “C’mon Zach. Our chariot awaits.”
When I approach the Audi and make it chirp with a click of the key fob, Zach’s face lights up. “Wow. I’m impressed.”
I tell him all about how I found the car as I enter our destination into the navigation system.
“It’s sixty-six miles to the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard,” I say. “We still have one hundred and three miles of electric range left. That should get us there with miles to spare.”
Zach slaps the dashboard. “Let’s see what this baby can do.” His resilience is astonishing. Even sick and staring down death, he’s still his same wonderful, quirky self. I’ll never take him for granted if we somehow make it through this.
