Naive and Damned

Chapter 7: Calamitous Clarity

Falco

'...What? What is this?'

Falco sucked in his breath at the contents of the letter, and his heart thumped with the spiking adrenaline coursing through his body.

He couldn't read a thing. Falco had been taught multiple methods of ciphering as a Warrior Candidate, both used by Marleyan forces and those known from other countries, but he didn't immediately recognise this one. Both letters and numbers were used, and lacked spaces between them to indicated separate words..

As if rejecting the letter's very existence, Falco jolted backwards, his breathing becoming erratic. 'Why would Kruger – No, there's no way he would, this was far more important – it has to be!' A throbbing began to ache from his head, even as he tried to calm down, taking shaky and uneven breaths, and forcing his shoulders to relax from their hunched position, moving them in harmony with his breaths. He focused back on the letter. 'Okay. This is happening. But you can deal with this, just stay calm.' Luckily, being in a war and harsh training did have its uses – this wasn't the first time he'd been under such severe pressure. Reminding himself of this fact helped alleviate some of the worry. He could deal with this.

Adrenalin kept him uneasy, jumping at the sound of his father cursing the stove. Falco shifted again, placing the letter down on the desk.

He stared. For a long time, he stared. The letter stared back.

He'd been tricked.

The man he'd confided in about almost everything, his biggest secrets, was just using him for his own gain. Kruger (if that was even his real name) didn't care: he just wanted Falco to be an obedient delivery boy.

Finally, his eyes left the page, simply unable to look further. His eyes slipped closed as his head hung low, slow breaths and a thundering heartbeat all he could hear, and his tightened chest all he could feel.

For a short moment, he felt blank. As if there was no world outside his own head, and the pain he felt as it throbbed.

He wanted the letter gone, from here, from his life, from existence. Yet, he could not; that would change nothing. The implications of this could never go away. As the adrenaline faded, Falco held on to reason, grasping at it with trembling hands. 'Focus, focus... what you need now is information.'

If Mr Kruger was really a soldier for Marley, he'd of used encryption Falco was familiar with. He wouldn't of had the opportunity to create an entirely new one and communicate what it was with whoever he was sending it too if they were at another internment zone, which his supposed family would be.

With one last deep breath, he picked up the letter.

The most likely option was that Mr Kruger was a spy from one of Marley's opposing forces. Regrettably, Marley had many, many enemies. That didn't narrow it down in the slightest. Falco pondered it over, looking at the encryption. It did not look like anything the Middle-Eastern Alliance had used, even the encryptions they hadn't figured out. Ergo, it wasn't likely they planted Mr Kruger.

Falco moved on to studying the letters and words, focusing on any patterns. It was five cramped lines of letters and numbers without any spaces, so it was a little overwhelming on his eyes. However, one thing that stood out was that the numbers were always two-digits, four-digits, or six, which could indicate pairs of two meaning something, like a letter or even a word. After realising this, he looked at the letters again – sure enough, the same pattern emerged, but only with a few.

Falco took out his sketchbook and carefully removed a page with a ruler and noted down all the reoccurring pairs and the numbers: 9, 18, 42, 29, 2 and 57.