||2022 WATTYS SHORTLIST|| Aya has the Sight. She can see the secret world within, full of monsters and spirits and magic. She thought it was enough to keep her safe, but a newly-dead spirit comes to her for help and she becomes one of the hunted. En...
Sam lifted the Sharpie's point from the paper. He stared at what he'd written.
Could this be it? Had he figured it out?
Thank you, William of Ockham, he fervently thought.
It had turned into another beautiful sunny day, and he was determined that it wouldn't be the last. In the past hour or so, he'd filled several pages with his scrawl. At the top of the first, he'd drafted a table. Within it, he'd assigned numbers to the alphabet, like reverse-engineering a decoder ring, beginning with the most obvious:
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His first try had resulted in:
4144171 = DADDAGA
According to his favorite search engine, Daddaga Hana was a location in Kawaga, Japan. An unlikely match. So, he'd tried the next most obvious variations of numbers to letters. Evens. Odds. Primes. Pi. The Fibonacci Series. However, they all seemed to trend toward numbers too high.
Then he hit on the idea that, if it was a name, it probably had a capital letter. After a few more tries, he'd come up with a larger table:
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Two codes, not one, though neither was complicated. Counting by two for the capitals, counting by ones for the lower case, a repeating pattern. He was sure now that this information was from Julia, and not a trap or distraction. Lilith had obviously never considered that he would get it. Her demons hadn't been aiming for an unbreakable code; they'd applied the principles of numerology to a summoning ritual to harness the power of the twenty-two, the Master Builder on the material plane, capable of bringing about "outstanding ascendancy."
Using both of his latest tables, Sam had written a respectable list of names. Aya, whose curiosity had gotten the better of her somewhere around the Magic Square series, ran her finger down his newest list and alighted upon one name.
4144171 = Kammapa
"Kammapa. I've heard that before," she said, frowning at it. "Something Paulie told me once? He was really big on Dungeons & Dragons when he was a kid. I always thought the lore was interesting. Let me check."
