Secret Breakers: The Power of Three (10 page)

‘So, where on the floor should it be?’ yelped Tusia. ‘Where do we put it?’

Hunter’s face looked as if the suggestion he was saying in his head was not really very polite.

‘Let’s just see where the light falls at two o’clock if we line the map up with its edge against the wall,’ offered Brodie, pushing up her sleeves to reveal both her watches. ‘At least with this clue we aren’t late.’

The hands on her Greenwich Mean Time watch revealed they had five minutes.

That was when the bell began to sound.

‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’ spluttered Hunter.

‘We can’t go now!’ said Tusia. ‘It’s nearly two.’

Brodie was frantic. ‘But we have to.’

Hunter grabbed the rope. ‘I’ll do it. You two sort the map!’ He raced from the mansion.

Tusia and Brodie struggled with the tapestry. Brodie could feel her heart beating in her throat.

Minutes later Hunter threw the door back open.

‘Well?’ the girls yelled at him.

‘Down to three,’ he panted. ‘Look.’ The lifeline rope looked forlorn and nearly empty, three red ribbons flapping near the end.

‘But why?’ squealed Tusia. ‘This must be right. The map and the light. I don’t understand.’

Brodie stared down at the map while Hunter doubled over and tried to catch his breath. It was two o’clock. What had they done wrong?

When Hunter spoke his words came in gasps. ‘The pattern from that corpse flower. It’s settled. It doesn’t look good.’

The three of them looked down. The pattern cast by the flower was right in the middle of the lake.

‘That’s why we lost the lives,’ snapped back Tusia. ‘I told you it was important where we put the map. You can’t just put it anywhere.’

Hunter’s face suggested he’d thought of another unshared and impolite location.

‘It’s the wrong way round,’ yelled Tusia, scanning through the clue again. She kicked her shoes from the corner of the tapestry and dragged the edges as if she were trying to train a badly behaved puppy on the end of a very short lead. ‘Help me move it, then. Before it’s too late. The clue says “
line the lower stitches straight with the fire
”. It must mean we’ve got to get the bottom edge lined up with the grate, not the wall. The clue says so.’

Brodie and Hunter grabbed a corner each and pulled the tapestry round into position. Then they stood again. And the pattern stilled.

And the light from the coloured glass of the corpse flower settled now on the hand-sewn location of Hut 11.

Hunter straightened up. The coded rope hung down from his hand. They had three lives left.

‘We can’t do this,’ mumbled Tandi, a pile of six red ribbons on the table in front of her. ‘They’re doing their best.’

‘But they have to be better,’ said Smithies. ‘It’s what we agreed.’ His words were catching in his throat.

‘But we’ll lose them all,’ moaned Tandi. ‘It’ll all have been for nothing.’

Smithies had been pacing by the window. He stopped. ‘We agreed we’d find the best. The very best. Only those who are up to the task can stay. Working together, Tandi. That’s always been the key.’

‘Three of them. Three lives left. It could all be over,’ she mumbled.

‘I know.’

‘And that’s what you want?’

Something like anger flashed in his face. ‘I want those who can cope with all there is to know,’ Smithies said quietly. ‘I want those who won’t be scared when they know what we’re really up against. And I want a team.’

‘And if we lose all three?’

Smithies rested his hand on the pile of ribbons. He didn’t say any more.

Hut 11 was small and dark. Brodie was sure she could see Ingham looking in at the window. She felt a prickle of fear.

There was a table in the centre but it was hardly fit for a banquet. Brodie looked closely. She saw graffiti had been etched into the soft wood with blades of some sort. The three of them circled the table slowly. Brodie let her fingers trace along the carved initials. ‘Who do you think they were?’ she said at last, letting her fingers slow across each shape and groove. ‘Black Chamber members from the past. Real ones,’ said Tusia. ‘People who worked together on MS 408.’ ‘Well, maybe it was easy for them,’ hissed Hunter. Brodie let her hand rest. She pressed the nail of her finger into two pronounced carvings of the letters AB. Alex Bray. Could they be her mother’s initials? Could she have carved them long ago as a child sitting with code-crackers at this table?

‘Because they didn’t have to work with you, Toots.’

Tusia scowled and then opened her mouth to answer.

Her words were drowned out by a bell.

‘You do it, B,’ said Hunter.

Brodie coiled the rope in her hand. It was lighter than before. She glanced at the window, then opened the hatch in the vacuum system, slipped the rope inside the container and closed the door. The container thumped in the tubing like an erratic heartbeat. No one spoke.

When Brodie opened the returned container her fingers were moist with sweat.

There was no need to say anything.

One solitary red ribbon fluttered on the end of the rope.

‘I know why we’re losing lives,’ she said. ‘And we have to stop!’ Her eyes stung with tears.

Hunter and Tusia said nothing.

‘You just never let up. On and on, trying to prove which of you’s the most clever, and the point is you both are, that’s why you’re both here.’

‘Now hold on a minute,’ interrupted Hunter. ‘I’m always fair to you, BB. It’s just her I can’t stand.’

‘Well “her” has a name. And it’s not T or Toots. It’s Tusia.’

Hunter flushed red but Tusia began to grin from ear to ear.

‘And you’re just as bad,’ Brodie continued, causing the smile to evaporate quickly from Tusia’s face. ‘Hunter’s OK and if you stopped for one moment trying to score points off him because he’s a boy then you’d realise that. Don’t you see?’ she said, holding the rope as the single ribbon lifted and fell in the air. ‘This must be where they worked! The code-crackers of the past. The Veritas team looking at MS 408. Working together, maybe all through the night, trying to make sense of a mystery. These are their names, look, carved here. If we join the Study Group we sort of take over from them. We sit where they sat. But it’s not going to happen, is it? With the rowing and the moaning. That’s why we’re losing lives.’ She lowered her hand once more to feel the shape of the initials on the table. She laid the rope beside it.

There was a long silence. The initials of Study Group members of the past stared up at them. The red ribbon fluttered.

Eventually Hunter drew a breath. ‘Sorry, Tusia,’ he said deliberately. ‘I guess laughing at you was just too much fun. We should start again.’

‘Yeah, well,’ Tusia said slowly. ‘We
should
be working together.’ She tapped the initials on the table. ‘Guess they were quite a team.’

In places the initials linked and looped together.

‘Shape and space,’ Tusia said. ‘It’s my thing. And I suppose being part of a team isn’t. Or working with boys as a general rule.’

Hunter began to raise his hands as if to argue.

‘But OK. I’ve got to try and see things differently. I’ll give it a go.’

‘Good,’ said Brodie. ‘We’re a team. In this together. And we have one life left. So let’s solve this puzzle.’

Hunter pulled the crumpled clue out of his pocket.

Tusia took the paper from him. She read the clue aloud for the third time.

‘
To take a place amongst us, line the lower stitches straight with the fire then prepare for feasting in the place where the corpse awakes at two
.’

‘We’ve covered everything except the feasting,’ said Brodie.

‘Yeah and that’s the part I’m most looking forward to,’ added Hunter, although there was really no need for him to confirm this.

‘It says we have to prepare. Do you think we have to do some cooking?’

‘I seriously hope not,’ laughed Hunter. ‘My rock cakes at school were so realistic they tasted like real rocks.’

‘No. I’m sure we just have to get things ready for a feast. But in here? How can we do that?’

‘We could lay the table,’ suggested Tusia, peering round the room for anything that may do as a cover.

‘Here,’ said Hunter, scurrying to the corner of the room and returning with a large folded square of fabric. ‘A tablecloth, do you think?’

‘Maybe,’ said Brodie, smoothing the fabric across the table as Tusia hurried over to help. ‘It’s a bit tatty. Hardly great for a feast.’

‘It’s all there is,’ said Tusia.

‘And it’s full of holes,’ added Hunter, slowing his hand over small circular tears in the fabric. ‘But that’s not a criticism,’ he said quickly. ‘Just an observation.’

Tusia stood up straight. ‘Hold on. Look at the holes and the carving on the table. Can we let some of the initials show through the holes and spell out a message?’

Tusia dragged the tablecloth to the left a little and a new series of shapes peeped through the holes made.

‘You write down letters we can see at any one time, B, and we’ll try and make some words with them.’

Brodie grabbed her notebook and peered at the tablecloth and the initials that showed through the holes.

‘Anything?’

After about twenty minutes of rejected combinations, Brodie was ready to give up.

‘You can’t give up now, BB,’ Hunter pleaded. ‘Not when it was all your idea about trying to get along. We’ve got to think around this. See it another way.’

Brodie wasn’t so sure. She couldn’t make any words at all from the showing letters.

Tusia suddenly stood bolt upright from the table. ‘That’s it.’

‘Pardon?’

‘The other way!’ repeated Tusia. ‘Hunter’s right.’

‘Look we don’t have to go over the top with this friendship thing,’ Hunter mumbled. ‘B only wanted us to be polite to each other.’

Tusia waved her hand to stop him talking. ‘I mean the cloth needs to go round the other way. Like the tapestry. It’s the wrong way round. Or in this case,
upside down
.’ She pulled the cloth from the table like a magician performing a trick and then respread it across the wooden surface, teasing it straight so it hung with uniformity across the wood. ‘Didn’t Ingham bang on about seeing stuff beneath the surface. Didn’t he go on and on about looking at things from different angles?’

Brodie nodded in agreement. ‘It’s what we’ve been taught. To see things differently!’

Tusia resmoothed the cloth flat against the wood. ‘So now. This way round. What initials show through this time?’

Brodie called out the letters that appeared through the holes in the cloth. Two Es, two Ts, an S, O, V and R. She scribbled them down on her notes.

‘Well?’ said Hunter, peering over her shoulder. ‘Can you read it? Can you make a word?

Brodie began to group the letters.

‘What does it say?’

‘Shh. I’m doing my best.’ Brodie scribbled letters as she spoke.

TOE
ROT
STORE

‘We need to use all of the letters, surely,’ Hunter pressed.

‘I’m trying. I’m trying.’

TEST
TESTER

Brodie stood back from the table. A fizzing sensation lifted in her stomach. She was nearly there. She shuffled the initials into a new order then crossed them off on her pad and put her pencil down.

She could make two words. And the words she made were ‘
TEST OVER
’.

The sound of ringing pierced the air.

The fizzing in Brodie’s stomach flattened. Her hands shook.

They’d finished the test. They solved the clues. But the bell was ringing.

‘Now what?’ said Hunter.

Brodie couldn’t answer. She knew what she should do.

She walked to the vacuum opening. She coiled the rope inside the container. She closed the door.

Had they done enough? Was it all too late?

The rope rattled above them. It pulsed above their heads. There was silence. Then the sound of falling.

Brodie looked at the others before she opened the door.

She took the rope.

Had they failed? She could barely look.

Slowly she uncoiled the loop. She held it high.

Nine red ribbons fluttered there. The coded message made it clear. They were ‘in Veritas’ at last. They were part of the team.

It took about ten minutes for the others to join them. Smithies led the way and Miss Tandari followed pushing a trolley laden with cakes and pastries, chocolates and pies. Ingham entered last, beaming despite himself, mug and chain firmly in his grasp.

‘It was teamwork that did it,’ said Smithies when everyone had quietened down enough to listen. Brodie thought for a moment he winked at her but she couldn’t be entirely sure. ‘And this hut’s where the most special of teams met. The Second Study Group worked long and hard on the puzzle of MS 408. Many team members gave up their reputations trying to solve the code.’

Hunter munched noisily on a chocolate Danish before a glare from Miss Tandari made him rest it on his plate.

‘You join us now as legitimate code-crackers, solvers of puzzles and enigmas, and we’re honoured to have you as part of the team.’ He raised a glass of lemonade into the air. ‘We’ve no idea how this will all work out. But that’s the exciting bit. We’ll need our wits about us. And as Mr Jenkins has so aptly pointed out to us, an army marches on its stomach, so I suggest we all tuck in.’