Devin was back to scanning his cards. “Me too,” he muttered.
“We weren’t voting!” Vivian pressed her hands to the table and stood up.
“Me three,” James said.
“Mrs. Ortega!” Vivian and Maddie said at the same time. Nisha continued to write things down in her notebook.
James smiled at Emily, and she realized that the majority was in her favor. She should have been thrilled. She should have been clapping gleefully. Not out of gloating but because she’d done it. She’d joined a school group and done more than sit in the background daydreaming about reading and book hunting. But what if a presidential GameCon slash Valentine’s Day dance was the most ridiculous dance in the history of school dances? What had she done?
Mrs. Ortega clapped her hands. “Wonderful! A presidential GameCon sounds like a fantastic compromise, doesn’t it?”
“Sure,” Nisha said softly, continuing to scribble.
Maddie slumped back in her seat. “Whatever.”
“Fine,” Vivian said. She pointed her pen to Nisha. “You’ve been writing all this down?” Nisha nodded, and Vivian said, “Congratulations. You’re our committee secretary.” As she wrote on her clipboard, she zipped a line through her original theme and sounded out Presidents’ Day GameCon Dance. “At least it’s not an insipid lovey-dovey theme. All right. Now the real work begins. We’re going to need to get the word out: posters, flyers, mentions in the morning announcements.”
Maddie raised her hand. “I’ll do posters. I love to paint.”
“I can help,” Nisha quietly added.
“We’ll need refreshments—”
“Food!” Devin waved a hand wildly. “We love food!”
Vivian sighed and continued, “Decorations for the dance, people to man the welcome table, a DJ—”
“We know a DJ,” Emily interjected. To James she said, “Right? Didn’t Charlie say he DJs?”
“You really think he’d want to play music for a middle school dance?”
“We can pay him five hundred dollars,” Vivian said.
James whistled. “Maybe I’ll be our DJ, then. I can put together a playlist.”
Vivian rolled her eyes and directed her question to Emily, “Can you talk to this Charlie person?”
Emily nodded. “Sure.”
The dance was a top spinning in motion, and she’d opened her mouth—twice now—and changed its trajectory. There was no turning back.
CHAPTER
18
THE REST OF THE WEEK passed in a blur of school, unsuccessfully attempting to make sense of the unbreakable code letters, and brainstorming plans for the school dance. Before Emily knew it, it was Sunday. She and James were hanging out in his room, sketching ideas for turning the gym floor into a game board for some sort of presidential game, when Emily abruptly jumped up.
“I’m checking one more time.”
James groaned. “You just checked an hour ago.”
“Maybe the book’s been found in the last hour,” Emily said. She shook his mouse to wake up his computer.
When she had helped out at Hollister’s the day before, she double-checked the tote bag and found the Tom Sawyer still there. It had remained there the whole day.
She logged into Book Scavenger and looked under Matthew’s account. The Tom Sawyer they’d hidden and posted with his user name hadn’t changed its status. Mr. Quisling wasn’t taking their bait.
This frustrated her. It was similar to the feeling she got when she was faced with a puzzle that seemed like something she should be able to solve, but she still couldn’t figure it out.
Not to mention, it drove her nuts wondering if Mr. Quisling had made any progress toward cracking the unbreakable code. Did he know what the letters meant? Could he have even already solved it? You’d think that would make the news, though, someone deciphering a legendary unsolved cipher. But Mr. Quisling seemed like the sort of guy who wouldn’t want to solve it for the fame or notoriety; he would want to prove to himself that he could do it. The possibility of finding gold was probably motivating, too. Emily related. Those were pretty much her exact reasons as well.
Feeling restless to find out something, Emily searched for Babbage, Mr. Quisling’s Book Scavenger identity, to check on his recent activity. There was nothing new other than the book she and James had watched him “find” a week ago in the redwood park. The user who had hidden that book was called Coolbrith.
Out of curiosity, Emily clicked on Coolbrith’s account and was surprised to see Coolbrith had only ever hidden four books. When she pulled up the titles of those books, she straightened in her seat.
“James, the only books Coolbrith has hidden are copies of Tom Sawyer.”
“That seems weird,” James said.
“Very coincidental,” Emily agreed.
“Ferry Building.” James tapped one of the locations for Coolbrith’s hidden books on the screen. “Didn’t you say the book we hunted but never found last October was Tom Sawyer?”
Emily’s neck prickled. She knew that Mr. Quisling had found multiple copies of Tom Sawyer, but she’d only been thinking about their teacher and the book, and whether there was a connection to him working on the unbreakable code. It hadn’t occurred to her that the copies of Tom Sawyer might have all been hidden by one person. But, sure enough, Coolbrith had hidden copies of Tom Sawyer at the Ferry Building last October, the Mission in November, Washington Square in December, and Mark Twain Plaza in January. Babbage was the user who found them every time.
Emily entered both user names into the search bar on Book Scavenger: Babbage and Coolbrith. The top hit was a thread buried deep in the user forums titled “Quest For Babbage.”
“A quest! I should have known,” Emily said.
“What’s a quest?” James asked.
“It’s a game within the game. Book Scavenger players sometimes challenge others to a quest, or they might create an open quest for anyone to participate in. The quests can be anything people think of: You have to find books with titles that begin with every letter of the alphabet, you have to find books published in every year of a certain decade, that sort of thing. Sometimes there are prizes offered for finishing a quest the fastest, but usually it’s just a pride thing. Or something to do with friends.”
The forum thread was a back-and-forth between Coolbrith and Babbage, only Coolbrith’s messages were written in numbers instead of words.
James smacked a palm to the side of his head, causing Steve to quiver. “I should have guessed this the day we watched Mr. Quisling.”
“What? What? What?” Emily looked from the screen to James and back again, desperate to see the solution that had appeared for him.
“Two people hiding a book back and forth? It’s a book cipher!”
“Of course,” Emily whispered.
With a book cipher, the book itself was the key. You chose words found in the pages to make up your message. To encrypt your message, each word was identified by the page number, lines down, and words across, so three numbers equaled one word.
“When Mr. Quisling flipped through the book in the redwood grove, he was figuring out the message left for him,” Emily said.
Emily and James scanned the forum thread between Babbage and Coolbrith.
* * *
BookScavenger.com > Forums > Quests > Quest for Babbage
Name of Quest: “For Old Times’ Sake”
COOLBRITH has challenged BABBAGE to a quest.
Here are the rules set by COOLBRITH:
1) No outside help.
2) Find the book before anyone else.
3) Decipher the message.
4) Leave the book where you found it.
5) You’ll know you’ve reached the end of the quest when you receive your reward.
COOLBRITH
Posted October 8—11:12 PM
Level: Encyclopedia Brown
Posts: 1
Let’s revive an unfinished adventure from our past. You will und
erstand more when you complete the first challenge in my quest:
www.bookscavenger.com/october/FerryBuilding_267
Your message to solve:
(193, 3, 1) (33, 21, 5) (85, 17, 9) (173, 19, 6) (21, 18, 3)
BABBAGE
Posted October 9—8:23 AM
Level: Sherlock
Posts: 74
Robbie?
COOLBRITH
Posted November 5—6:35 AM
Level: Encyclopedia Brown
Posts: 2
Well done for round one. Here is your second challenge:
www.bookscavenger.com/november/Mission_935
Your message to solve:
(75, 2, 1) (1, 11, 6) (179, 1, 4) (165, 24, 5)
(1, 7, 3) (63, 18, 1) (178, 1, 7)
BABBAGE
Posted November 11—4:23 PM
Level: Sherlock
Posts: 75
You aren’t Robbie, are you?
COOLBRITH
Posted December 27—5:15 AM
Level: Encyclopedia Brown
Posts: 3
It’s that time again. Here is a clue to who I am:
www.bookscavenger.com/december/WashSquare_094
Your message to solve:
(21, 9, 10) (209, 7, 6) (66, 27, 2) (43, 32, 8) (157, 2, 5)
(235, 6, 9)
BABBAGE
Posted December 28—1:35 PM
Level: Sherlock
Posts: 76
I lost the card, but I know it’s you, Miranda. Do you want to meet to talk about the new info you found?
COOLBRITH
Posted January 5—1:35 PM
Level: Encyclopedia Brown
Posts: 4
www.bookscavenger.com/january/MarkTwainPlaz_012
Your message to solve:
(64, 3, 1) (33, 21, 5) (85, 17, 9)
(173, 19, 6) (143, 12, 9) (89, 3, 10) (3, 17, 2)
* * *
“He calls Coolbrith Miranda.” James pointed to the December post. “I wonder what he means by ‘new info.’”
The name rang a bell from their visit to the Maritime Museum. “Miranda? As in Miranda Oleanda, the girl he was with at the Niantic dig?” It was hard to forget a name like that.
“He’s doing a quest with someone he knew in high school or college?” James asked.
“I wish we still had the copy of Tom Sawyer,” Emily said. “We could decode this and figure out what they were saying to each other.”
“Well, why don’t we go get it? It’s Sunday—Hollister’s is still open.”
* * *
Emily and James entered the bookstore and found Charlie crouched in front of a small stack of books on a table that normally displayed literary-themed T-shirts. He snapped a picture with his cell phone.
“Hi, Charlie,” Emily said to his back.
Charlie spun to face them.
“You’re jumpy,” James observed.
“You’re chirpy.” Charlie resumed his normal slouched posture. He nodded to the small tower of books. “It’s spine poetry for Hollister’s Instagram. You arrange book titles to make a poem.”
Charlie’s stack of books read:
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Bird by Bird
Saving Fish from Drowning
Love in the Days of Rage
“Interesting.” James posed like he was scrutinizing a piece of artwork. “So are you saying the birds love the fish? And they’re crazy? Are they crazy because they love the fish?”
Emily nudged James—Charlie didn’t seem so amused by his commentary, and she had just now remembered they needed to ask him a favor.
“Hey, Charlie, before we forget—didn’t you say you DJ?”
Charlie slid the books this way and that, stepped back, and took another picture. “Yup,” he said.
“Would you DJ our school dance? It’s about a month from now, on Valentine’s Day.”
“I don’t do kid functions,” he replied, studying the photo he’d taken on his screen.
“We’d pay you five hundred bucks,” James added.
That got Charlie’s attention. He pulled a business card from his back pocket. “E-mail me the info. I’ll see what I can do.”
A short while later, Emily and James were camped out on the plush purple chair in the nook. Emily sat in the seat, and James perched on the armrest, a copy of Tom Sawyer in his hand. Hollister had copies of Tom Sawyer so they were using one of those. It was easier than digging out their hidden copy from the pile of tote bags. Plus Emily was a little superstitious and didn’t want to remove the hidden book in case Mr. Quisling ended up looking for it after all.
“Okay,” Emily said. “The first word in the October message is on page one ninety-three, three rows down, and one word across.”
James flipped through the book. “Do,” he recited.
Emily read the numbers to find the next two words and James read aloud, “Do ghosts chaos.”
“That doesn’t make sense.” Emily frowned at what she’d written in her notebook. Had she made a mistake copying the numbers from the website?
“The words must not fall in the same place in this version of Tom Sawyer,” James reasoned. “Maybe Coolbrith hid a different edition each month.” When they’d pulled the book off the store shelf, they had noticed the cover wasn’t the same as their hidden copy, but they didn’t think that would matter.
“It makes sense, if you think about it,” Emily said. “If it was always the same edition, then you wouldn’t need to go find a new book to solve the next message. Our hidden copy must solve the January code.”
James tapped the copy on his lap. “Maybe this book was used for a different month. Let’s try one of the other messages.”
Emily recited the numbers for November next, but the correlating words were more gibberish. They tried December to be thorough, and this time had luck:
Flower bag will lead to me.
Emily gasped. “Flower bag! The one Mr. Quisling was stealing out of!”
“I told you he wasn’t stealing. This lady told him to look in there.”
“That card he dropped with the coded message must have been from her, then,” Emily said.
James stood up from the armrest of the purple chair and paced in front of Emily. “So let me get this straight. Coolbrith is a woman named Miranda—we think Miranda Oleanda, who was in a picture with Mr. Quisling back when they were teenagers at the Niantic dig in San Francisco.”
“Right,” Emily agreed. “And the card she left for him at the book party said something about meeting in person after they’ve solved the unbreakable code.”
“Don’t forget the directions at the bottom—didn’t the note say something about leaving the solution in the next book? She must have meant the next Tom Sawyer.”
“But he dropped the card with her puzzle and we took it—”
“And he posted a message in their quest thread asking to meet,” James finished Emily’s thought.
She jumped up. “Let’s get other editions and see if we can figure out the rest of the messages.” She ran to the tote bag display to recover the one they’d hidden—this was too exciting to worry about superstitions—while James pulled a different copy of Tom Sawyer from Hollister’s shelf.
Emily pointed to James’s. “Use yours first and see if we can solve the messages for October or November.”
They sped through, reciting numbers and flipping pages, but the book didn’t work for decoding the October message.
“Moving on to November,” Emily said. “Page seventy-five, two rows down, one word across.”
“I,” James read aloud.
“Page one, eleven rows down, six words across.”
“Have.”
“Page one seventy-nine, one row down, four words across,” Emily said.
“New.” James’s eyes flicked up and locked on Emily’s. They were halfway through the sentence, and so far it was making sense. He nodded for her to go on.
“One sixt
y-five, twenty-four, five,” she said.
“Information,” James said.
Emily’s pulse quickened. I have new information. Was this new information about the unbreakable code?
Emily bounced her knees as she recited the numbers for the last three words of the message. When James was counting down the lines to find the final word, she read aloud what they’d found so far: “I have new information about the…”
“Map,” James said.
CHAPTER
19
“MAP?” EMILY PULLED the book from James’s hands to look for herself.
“There.” He pointed to the word map.
Emily double-checked the numbers written in her notebook and re-counted the rows and words across. James was definitely right.
“Do you know what this means?” she asked.
James was already grinning when she looked up. “There is a map for the unbreakable code!”
The thought induced both despair and hope for Emily. Despair because in order to know a map existed, Mr. Quisling or his friend must have figured out the code, but hope because, well, there was a map!
“Let’s see what the most recent message says.” She hoped it would tell them how to find the map.
James picked up the copy of Tom Sawyer they’d found in the redwood park, and she called out the numbers from the January message. James read each word out loud as he found it: “Change … of … heart.… You’re … on … your … own.”
Emily and James were quiet for a beat, absorbing the words. Then Emily said, “Change of heart?”
“Did our … did our teacher just get dumped?” James asked.
“Dumped in code,” Emily added.
“Through a Book Scavenger quest,” James said. “Ouch.”
And, amazingly, Emily felt for her teacher. He’d embarrassed her in class on her first day at Booker when he’d caught her passing a note, and he could definitely be strict, but he was universally strict. He treated all his students the same, and there was something to be said for that, even if he wasn’t a warm and jolly person. It was kind of endearing that he had traded coded messages through a book-hunting game with an old girlfriend.
The Unbreakable Code Page 9
