The Sign of the Serpent by Majanka Verstraete

Author:Majanka Verstraete [Verstraete, Majanka]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-945723-42-1
Publisher: Firefly Hill Press, LLC

Chapter Eighteen

“So, I know your Dad urged you to read chemistry books as a child,” Roan said as we sat down on the chairs in the parlor, “but it’s really astonishing how you can remember all that.”

“It’s my mind palace,” I explained. “Everything in my mind has a specific room, a door. I didn’t know all that chemistry stuff until I opened the door to my chemistry room again. Then, it all came flooding back.” I put the paper down in front of me. “Wyatt, could I have another blank sheet of paper?”

“Sure,” Wyatt said as he handed it to me.

I had sat down on Sherlock Holmes’ chair, and instinctively, Wyatt sat down on Watson’s chair.

“I don’t really get how that mind palace thing works,” Roan said. “Is it something visual?”

I nodded. “Yes. My mind is…well, a palace. There are numerous corridors, endless doors, and each door holds knowledge I’ve acquired over the years. I know where my chemistry knowledge is locked up in, so all I have to do is go there and recall the information I’ve absorbed as a child. It’s very visual, yes. When I entered that room, I saw myself as a child, sitting in my father’s library, him teaching me…” My voice trailed off.

My father had taught me so much, and so much of that information was locked up in the rooms of my mind, and I might never access it again. The void he’d left after his death was enormous and I could feel it pushing on my shoulders even now, weighing me down.

“Anyway,” Wyatt said, picking up on my deteriorating mood, “let’s crack this code.”

“Okay, we have thirteen elements and the letter Z. This makes me think that we’re looking for a code with at least fourteen letters or numbers,” I said. “Let’s start with the obvious.”

I listed the elements in numerical order and then encircled the first letter of each, but that ended up being gibberish. Next, I listed the elements in alphabetical order, circled the first letter, and then ordered these numerically, but again, it was gibberish.

“I think the numbers and words are connected,” I said on the third try. “Like, the number tells us which letter of the word we need.”

“Okay,” Wyatt said as he moved closer toward the coffee table where I had spread out the papers. “So, how about for flerovium, number 114, we take letter 1, f, twice, and then letter 4, r?”

“Okay, so for number 116, livermorium, I take l twice, and then o once,” I said, musing out loud.

By the end, we had the following sequence of letters: f f l l l o l g h c m o r e c s n p m t m i m i u e h o, which made absolutely zero sense, no matter how many combinations we tried.

“My head hurts,” Roan said after an eternity. “That combination is wrong, obviously, because there’s no word, or even a sentence, in the history of mankind that can be devised from it.

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