"Uh-huh," said Lizzie. "Only even when we turn it into letters we still can't read the message because it's in code. A really hard code."
"Does each letter stand for another letter?" Hazard asked.
"Yes, but there's some extra trick on top of that. Like maybe you're supposed to throw out every third letter or something, and then it will make sense," said Lizzie.
"Can the letter A ever be a letter A?" asked Hazard.
"We don't think so. See, basically, this is like a cryptogram, and a letter is never itself. There's another kind of puzzle that's called an anagram, where you just take the letters and mix them around to form another word. Like the word 'nap' could be the word 'pan' and the 'a' doesn't have to move, or the word 'cat' could be the word 'act'—"
"Or the name 'Gregor' could be the name 'Gorger,' " said Gregor, giving Lizzie a poke in the side.
"That's what I said when Gregor told me about the Underland. That he and Gorger really had the same name," said Lizzie.
Man, that seemed forever ago! When he'd told his family the story of his first trip. "Yeah, Hazard, I'm talking about meeting giant spiders and throwing myself off a cliff, and all Lizzie can say is that this nasty old rat king named Gorger and I've got the same name. Because the letters matched. Oh, she saw that right off," said Gregor. He took a deep drink of his tea and was vaguely wondering if he should eat more cake when Heronian spoke up.
"She saw that right off?" the mouse asked slowly. "She saw that right off?"
"Sure did," said Gregor. "Well, you know how she can mess around with words." He didn't see what the big deal was. Noticing that "Gregor" had the same letters as "Gorger" couldn't hold a candle to doing that crazy who-ate-the-cheese-for-lunch puzzle. But this new information produced a strange reaction in the room. One by one, the members of the code team raised their heads and stared at Lizzie, who was twisting the aqua marker around and around in her hands.
"I saw that right off. I did," Lizzie said to herself. "That's what I saw."
"What she saw, it is the flaw in the Code of Claw," said Daedalus. "Think about exactly what it was that you saw, Lizzie."
Lizzie's eyes shifted to the code tree and began to dart around the letters. "An anagram. I saw an anagram. Where some letters can be themselves." Her mouth dropped open slightly and her breath came out in short pants.
Gregor had seen several panic attacks begin like this and was tempted to intervene. But everyone else was frozen, not daring to interrupt whatever was going on in her head. So he waited, too.
"An anagram — of Gregor's — name," said Lizzie.
"In the naming is the catching," Reflex said in a quivering voice.
"Maybe — that line — wasn't about my — name at all!" Lizzie suddenly dropped her marker and snatched up the piece of code she had been showing to Hazard. She read it, her lips moving silently over the letters. When she looked up, her next words were barely audible. "Gre—gor. Gor—ger. I think — I know — how to break — the code!"
PART 3: The Warrior
Chapter 19
Lizzie flipped over the strip of fabric and wrote the alphabet on the blank side as the words tumbled out of her mouth. "Okay, okay, what if it's like an anagram, and there are letters that don't change. Then all you would need is one key word and a really simple code and the rats could still keep it in their heads."
"And you think it's 'Gregor'?" asked Ripred.
"It's the word I saw," said Lizzie.
"It would be a good choice. You could remember it by 'Gregor' or 'Gorger,'" said Heronian.
"It is even easier," said Reflex. "The words only require four letters: G-O-R-E. 'Gore.' One needs only to remember the word gore."
"Yes," said Lizzie. "Yes. So the G, O, R, and E stay the same." She wrote these letters above themselves on the alphabet.
E G O R
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
"And now we use a cipher so simple that no one could forget it," said Daedalus.
"Single shift, be the simplest, single shift," said Min.