THE NEXT DAY, AS we trudged through falling snow, I thought of Hope. I wondered why it was she’d come to talk to me. Wondered what it was she couldn’t say.
“I have some thoughts about those numbers,” Twitch said, suddenly appearing by my side. One hand rested on the shoulder of Flush, who guided him forward.
“I’m listening,” I said.
“If it’s a code, it can’t be too complicated, because too many people seem to have it. And if they’re all expected to solve it, then there’s gotta be a simple solution.”
“Makes sense.”
“Which makes me think it’s gotta be a cipher—each number represents a different letter of the alphabet. The problem is, there could be any number of choices.” He recited the numbers; at this point, of course, he knew them by heart. “But maybe we’re thinking about them wrong. Like the four numbers in the middle. We’re assuming they’re ‘one, one, zero, three,’ but maybe they’re actually ‘eleven, zero, three,’ or maybe ‘one, ten, three,’ or maybe even ‘one, one hundred and three’? There’s just no way of knowing, except by going through and doing a literal translation. Which is what we’ve been working on.”
“Okay. So did you find anything?”
“Nothing definite, but I think we’re getting closer.” He looked to Flush, who removed a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket. It was the chart, now more elaborate than ever.
“If we start with one as ‘o,’ then two becomes ‘p,’ three is ‘q,’ and so on,” Flush explained. “And if we think of the beginning numbers as four, fifty-three, ninety-two, twenty-one, one hundred and three, ninety-one and four, then we get something kinda interesting.”
“What exactly?”
“Robimar,” Flush read.
“Robimar?” I asked.
“Robimar,” he repeated.
“Is that even a word?”
“Not that we know of,” Twitch said. “But maybe it’s the name of a town. Or a person.” His excitement was palpable. “What do you think?”
“I haven’t heard of it, but it sounds like you might be getting close.”
“We think so, too.” And with that, he and Flush headed off, talking excitedly. It sure seemed that cracking the code would reveal what the Brown Shirts were up to.
When we stopped late that afternoon, we tied the prisoners to a grove of birch trees, and I removed the map—the one of the former United States. It had been living in my pocket ever since I’d ripped it from the atlas back at the Compound. Its creases were sharp to the touch.
I ironed it out on a rock while my index finger traced one town after another, looking for anything resembling Robimar. The names of the cities were exotic and foreign-sounding.
Great Falls. Excelsior Springs. Butte. Paradise.
I suddenly wondered what the name was of the town we’d seen in the Heartland. Maybe that was Robimar.
I had just returned the map to my pocket when Cat made a sharp whistling noise. Everyone stopped what they were doing, and the howls began a moment later. Wolves. Not just one lone wolf as Flush had hoped, but a pack. And there was something urgent in the cries. Desperate.
Sisters and Less Thans exchanged panicked glances and Cat took charge.
“Form a circle,” he said. “Then arm yourselves.”
Everyone scrambled to the grove of trees and got into position. With the prisoners in the middle, we all sat down around them, our backs to one another, our weapons out. And then we waited, listening to the mournful wail of howling wolves.
When darkness came, the yellow appeared.
Wolf eyes. I’d never seen so many in my life.