Suzanne Collins - Gregor and the Code of Claw

"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!"

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.

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.