Lizzie nodded and began to fill in the letters.
"A is represented by B, B is C, C is D, D would be F because the E remains unchanged...." Heronian said, although Lizzie was way ahead of her. Her aqua marker speedily filled in the remaining letters.
BCDFEHGIJKLMNPOQSRTUVWXYZA ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
"Try it! Go on, try it!" said Ripred, thrusting an unbroken strip of code before Lizzie.
Lizzie's hands were trembling as she lifted the strip and began to read. "Diggers — arrive — at — camp — near — Regalia. Tunnel — under way." For a moment, they all just sat there, stunned at their success.
"That's old. We need the latest transmissions." Ripred ran to the door. "Fresh code! Fresh code!" he called. He bounded back to Lizzie, scooped her up with his nose, and tossed her in the air. He spun half-way around and caught her so she landed on his back. "A letter can be itself!"
Lizzie was laughing as she flung her arms around his neck. "A letter can be itself! A letter can be itself!"
And suddenly the whole code team burst into some kind of brainiac celebration. Reflex began to shoot lines of silk around the room like they were streamers. Daedalus was scooping up heaps of code with his wings and flinging them in the air. Heronian leaped back and forth over Ripred and Lizzie. And even old Min had geared up into some creaky old cockroach dance.
Boots was in heaven, running here and there, spinning in the streamers of silk, and boogying on Temp's back. "A letter can be yourself! A letter can be yourself!" she crowed.
"Yes, a letter can be yourself, you clueless little thing," said Ripred. But he was happy. Joyful even. Hazard wrapped his arms tightly around Luxa. "So everything will be all right? Now that they've broken the code?"
"It will be better at least, Hazard," Luxa said, hugging him back. But when she looked at Gregor, he could tell she was thinking of the rest of the prophecy. Of his death.
"Everything's going to be just fine, Hazard," said Gregor. The last thing he wanted to do was crush this moment of victory with his own troubles. "Good job, Liz!" he said, high-fiving his sister.
"It was all of us," said Lizzie. "And Hazard, too. He's the one who made me think about the anagrams."
"Can I go tell the nibblers the code is broken? I am sure it will lighten their hearts," Hazard said.
"No!" said Ripred, suddenly serious. "No one outside of this room must know we have broken the code. I will personally inform Solovet. The rest of you must swear to secrecy."
All the code team nodded in agreement, so Gregor nodded, too, although he thought Hazard was right and that the news might give everybody a big psychological boost. A young woman brought in a basket filled with tightly rolled bundles of code. The code team gathered around it, eager to decipher the latest messages. Despite the general excitement, Gregor began to think about that nap again. But Ripred had other work for him. He enlisted Gregor, Luxa, Hazard, Boots, and Temp to decode the piles of accumulated messages, just in case there had been anything of value in them. Luxa suggested they work back in the bedroom, so Gregor was able to lie down again, anyway. They had to do two passes on each strip of code, one to write it as the alphabet, the second to decrypt it with the Code of Claw. Most of the messages were old news — updates on the battle to free the nibblers, the alliance with the diggers, the Bane's location — but some yielded important information in terms of which species had sided or not sided with the Bane. The cockroaches had not, the spiders were trying to remain neutral (so Reflex's presence here must be a secret), and it was too dangerous to try to approach the ants. Gregor found it difficult to believe the ants would join either the humans or the rats. They had made it very clear they wanted both species dead. Probably nothing pleased them more than a big old war between the two.
Try as he might, Gregor could not keep his eyes open. At one point Luxa whispered, "Sleep, we will manage this."
So Gregor just let himself drift off. When he awoke, everything was quiet. Luxa, Hazard, and Boots were asleep on the bed across from him. Temp snored gently on the floor. Ripred must have sent everyone to bed. Gregor tried to go back to sleep, but his back and hip hurt. He was hungry again, too. He made his way to his feet in stages and went into the code room. Lizzie and Ripred were asleep on the floor, as they'd been the other night. Ripred opened one bleary eye, took him in, and then let the lid slowly slide shut. Gregor went over to the food cart and rooted around for a snack. He found a tureen half-filled with lukewarm beef stew and finished it off. His stomach felt better, anyway.
Gregor wished Howard would come by with some more medicine. But when he thought of the wounded, and his shoes sticking to the bloody floor of the High Hall, he knew Howard hadn't had a second to do it. He could send a message to the hospital, but again, they were so busy just keeping people alive he felt like a wimp bugging them. He wondered about his mom up at the Fount. Was she getting the care she needed? Or was the hospital there as overwhelmed as the one in Regalia? And what about his dad and grandma? Boy, he hoped his dad wasn't having any ideas about coming down here to rescue them all. Maybe his relapse was bad enough to keep him in bed. It was an awful thing to wish on his dad but it was better than having him drop straight down into the jaws of the rats.
He poured a mug of cold tea and gave up on the idea of returning to bed. He wasn't really tired now, anyway. Might as well make himself useful. The area on the stone grid was covered with the latest messages all neatly transcribed in Lizzie's aqua marker. But there were still bunches of the old code spilling over baskets. Gregor grabbed a handful of strips and settled himself down to work. It was mostly the same-old same-old stuff about troop movements that had occurred weeks ago. And then out of nowhere came this message:
// |||\ |\\ // |/ / // |\\ \|. ||\ |\\ \ ||\. |\\ \\ . \| |\\ //. He wrote it as the alphabet:
UXJUDIUJQ. FJEF. JP. QJU
And then applied the Code of Claw using Lizzie's system. The words stabbed him in the heart.
Twitchtip. Memories of the rat swam before his eyes. Her nose buried in the moss of the arena because the smell of humans made her ill. The desperate look on her face as she spun around in the whirlpool. Her claws digging into his life jacket, as she choked out, "Don't — let — go!" And he hadn't let go. He had risked his life to save an outcast rat when no one else would bother to try. And then they were friends, despite the rat/human thing. Twitchtip was the first one who knew he was a rager. She had given Boots food. She had dragged herself through the rats' maze to help Gregor find the Bane, then forced him and Ares to leave her to die. But she hadn't died. Not right away. The rats had kept her alive in a pit and probably tortured and starved her while they tried to extract information out of her about Gregor. And finally, only recently, she'd left the world. As alone as ever. The tears splashing down on the words surprised him because he hadn't cried in such a long time. Not for his mom or Ares or the mice or Thalia or Luxa, or even for himself when he knew about the prophecy. It was just that it had all been so awful, Twitchtip's life. Banished to the Dead Land because of her remarkable sense of smell, living alone in that harsh world before she finally, desperately, had teamed up with Ripred. Bleeding to death in the maze but not fast enough, not soon enough to escape falling into the hands of the rats who hated her for being a scent seer and then hated her even more for helping Gregor.
"All right. All right now." Ripred was looking over his shoulder at the message.
"It's not all right!" Gregor's voice was harsh, but low, because he didn't want to wake everyone to see him like this. "I should have gone back for her."
"We thought she was dead," said Ripred.
"But we didn't know. And they had her all this time. And we never even found out for sure," said Gregor. He thought of his dad, wasting away for years in that rat pit. Had she died in the same one they'd found his father in?
"Even if we'd known, there's almost no chance we could have gotten her out," said Ripred. "It isn't likely they —"
"Just shut up, Ripred! I mean, what do you care? You never even liked her! You treated her like trash. You only made that deal with her to help yourself, so I' could kill the Bane for you. Don't act now like — like she mattered to you!" said Gregor. He hadn't kept his voice down. Practically everyone was awake now. Frightened by his outburst. Afraid the rats had broken into the palace. "Just shut up!"