My nightmare began when the Captain got frustrated. The Resistance was doing terribly against the government, and we had spent weeks, maybe even months, trying to crack an impossible code that the government was using to pass on secret messages.

As one of the top minds of the Resistance, I had been working on the Code almost since the beginning, along with four other brilliant minded but terrible people. We were all competitors, trying to be smarter, stronger, or more powerful than the other. The five of us were like little kids sometimes; always trying to get the attention and approval of the parent, or boss. If I could go back to that time, I would give myself a good smack in the face and tell me to get over myself. Just proving that I was smarter than everyone else was not worth almost ruining the Revolt.
Anyway, the Captain was frustrated. He figured that five nearly supernatural brains should have cracked one stupid code after months. But the Code was practically impossible.

The five brainiacs were me, Elaina (twenty-three at the time), Wesley (twenty-six), Vivian (twenty-eight), Grayson (twenty-four), and Jesse (twenty-five). Although you wouldn’t guess by looking at me now, I was very beautiful back then, with silvery blond hair that shimmered down to my lower back and stormy gray eyes. Wesley and Grayson were brothers and shared nearly identical dark hair and light blue eyes, as well as an arrogant attitude and unbearable swagger. The main difference between them was that Wesley was taller and louder and a little thinner. Vivian was extremely skeptiacl, and always kept her black hair in a tight bun or ponytail and her brown eyes spent a lot of time toward the top of her eye sockets. Jesse was just…there. He sort of blended into every setting, and was pretty unremarkable, except for his brain. If he had something important to say, he’d say it, but otherwise, he kept quiet. I don’t even remember exactly what he looked like. Blondish-brown hair, blue or green eyes. Tall. That’s all I remember about his appearance.

One day while Vivian, Jesse, and I were in the lab ignoring each other while working on the Code, the Captain stormed in with Wesley at his side. Wesley had that horrible cocky smirk on his face, like usual.

“Are you guys at least working together?” the Captain asked with a snarl. He had told the five of us countless times that we needed to start tolerating each other to crack the Code. He said that we would figure it out in no time if we collaborated on the project. It was too bad that we all hated each other too much to even consider that idea.

We didn’t answer the Captain right away. As the youngest of the five, I didn’t feel like I had to, and we all knew Jesse wouldn’t. Surely Vivian, the oldest and closest to the Captain, would take the responsibility to answer for the rest of us.

“You really shouldn’t even bother asking, Captain.” Wesley (ugh, Wesley) stepped in. Literally. He took a step in front of the Captain, showing off his all black suit with a long white tie. We all had to dress up for work, but Wesley somehow managed to look the best out of all five of us.

“Why shouldn’t I ask? I’ve told you all to work together, and from the lack of results I gather that my orders have been ignored!” the Captain was tall, broad, and scary-looking. His blacker-than-black skin only made him more intimidating. His eyes looked straight into your soul and his sneer was enough to make a grown man cower.

I finally stood up and adjusted my black pencil skirt. “Our apologies, Captain, but I think we all figure that we work better separately.” I gave Vivian a small glare for making me answer.

“I don’t care what you think!” the Captain yelled about 90% of the time, but I hated when he yelled directly at me.

I was rather an impulsive smart-talker back then, so I couldn’t resist saying, “All due respect, Captain, but I was under the impression that thinking was our job.”

I crossed the line there. The Captain looked like he was going to lose it as his chest swelled with an angry breath and his lips parted to release a missile of words at me.

“Sorry I’m late, guys.” Grayson saved the day by running in while straightening his patterned tie and buttoning his navy suit jacket. He was late a lot, actually.

The Captain composed himself and looked at the five of us individually, and then as a whole. We were his unbearably irritating team of way-too-smart, arrogant scholars that refused to work together. Looking back on it, I’m ashamed of the way we acted. We were all blind to the fact that working together was all we needed to do. We would have broken the Code in no time if we had just come down from our high horses and accepted the fact that the other four were smart too.

“All right, you guys.” The Captain started pacing, and we all knew that nothing good was coming. “I’ve tried to be patient with you. I’ve tried to understand that the Code is hard. But I will not tolerate my orders being ignored. I have told you multiple times to stop trying to outdo each other and just work on the Code like a team. But time after time after time my orders have been ignored and we have gotten nowhere! I first assigned you guys this project four and a half months ago! Forgive me for expecting a little progress in that time!”

There was a long pause while the five of us squirmed at our desks, embarrassed but not ashamed.

“Now I have devised a plan. I was actually just talking about it to Wesley on my way here.” The Captain gave Wesley a big, sharky smile.

Wesley’s eyes bulged in dismay. “You were serious about that, sir?”

The Captain laughed a slightly evil laugh and nodded. “Yes. I am going to lock you five in the lab until the Code is broken. I will force you to work together.” He turned on his heel and slammed the door behind him. We all heard the click of the lock that meant we were trapped with four people we hated.

Despite the fact that we were one of the most respected teams in the Resistance, we had a small lab. There was just enough room for our five small desks, a round table with five chairs that were rarely touched, and our large computer that received information from the Captain, the hackers, the soldiers, and every other group in the Resistance. We each had our own smaller computers at our desks, but we “shared” the big computer. It would be hard to ignore each other for very long in such a small lab when nobody could leave.

Jesse was the first one to react to the Captain’s order. He walked to the round table and sat down. He then looked at us, his green or blue eyes amazed at the fact that we aren’t coming right away.

Grayson was the next one to give in. He made a small noise of disgust and sat down away from Jesse at the table. Vivian rolled her eyes and joined them, opting to sit next to Jesse rather than Grayson.

Wesley and I locked eyes, daring each other to sit down. I always seemed to clash the hardest with Wesley. He was my strongest competition.

Wesley and I sat down across the table from each other in almost perfect synchronization. I was in between Jesse and Grayson, and Wesley was in between Vivian and Grayson.

“Okay…have you all ruled out the Wasatch Cipher?” Wesley asked. We all looked angry and annoyed to be working together.

“I ruled out Wasatch last week, Wesley.” I gave him a pointed look of exasperation. “If you had paid attention during my report you would know that.”

Wesley laughed. “You’re so naïve, Elaina.”

“What? To think that you have a competent enough attention span to listen to a five-minute report? Yes, how naïve of me.” It was my turn to laugh.

“Let’s make a list of the things we’ve tried.” Jesse suggested, pulling out a piece of paper. We all started listing aloud the different ways we’d tried to decipher the Code. We ended up with a long list and the realization that we had wasted a lot of time trying things that the others had already ruled out.

For about twenty minutes, we all just stared each other down. I went to the big computer and printed off five copies of a fairly new piece of the Code that looked like this:

14.15/5.10.1.26/13.9/4.9.10//14.22/8.10.5.6/14.8/21.25.11.1.5.10

“Well I figure that the dots separate letters and the slashes separate words.” Vivian said, looking at her copy.

“Congratulations for figuring that out four and a half months after everyone else.” Grayson muttered. “The double slash probably separates sentences, if that was going to be your next brilliant observation.”

“Shut up, Grayson! Just because I tried to get us all on the same page—”

“Yeah, page one!”

“I bet I’m farther than you are!”

“Shut up!” Jesse shouted, standing up quickly. He then looked embarrassed and sat back down. “Look, Vivian’s idea is good. We should all be on the same page.”

I was the next to speak after about a minute of silence. “This is a new piece of Code. I know we’ve already done this, but let’s all match a number to a corresponding letter and just see where to go from there.”

“Oh haven’t you done that already?” Wesley asked, showing us his paper with a smirk. “I’ve done it hundreds of times with other pieces of Code. It’s just gibberish.”

NO/EJAZ/MI/DIJ//NV/HJEF/NR/UYKAEJ


“Yeah, we’ve all done it with the other pieces, I just wanted a good starting point. Have we tried a letter shift?” I asked, looking around the table. “I’ve tried the letter shift with some. On this one it just looks like this.” I held up my paper.

JN/OEJA/ZM/IDI//JN/VHJE/FN/RUYKAE


“Yeah, letter shifts are pretty common.” Wesley said arrogantly. “If Elaina was a little smarter, maybe she’d know that and try putting the letters of the original code backwards.”

“Go ahead, Wesley.” Vivian rolled her eyes. “Let us know if that cracks it.”

After a minute or so, Wesley showed us the gibberish he’d come up with:

ON/ZAJE/IM/JID//VN/FEJH/RN/JAEKYU


“You’ve got to admit, it looks better.” Wesley shrugged. “Better than the letter shift.”

“Better, not broken.” I glared at Wesley.

“Well I figure that they’re keeping some letters in the same place and shifting the rest.” Grayson said, writing something on his paper. “Some word or phrase.”

“Like what?” I asked. “Please, share something we haven’t already tried.”

Grayson glared at me. “I don’t know, vowels, maybe? Keep the numbers that correspond with the vowels the same and then shift the rest?” he started writing on his paper frantically. We all stared at him for about fifteen minutes as he wrote out his idea:

ON/EHAZ/LI/CIH//OV/GHED/OG/TYJAEH


“Yes, wonderful.” Wesley rolled his eyes and leaned back in his chair. “We’re still nowhere. Brilliant idea, Grayson. What do you want to try next? Morse Code? Maybe we should just give up entirely because if Grayson can’t crack it, nobody can.”

Grayson took off his suit jacket. “Calm down, Wesley. It was better than your reverse idea. Third graders use the reverse code.”

“Let’s try the vowel thing with the reverse.” Vivian suggested, writing quickly and then showing us her paper:

NO/ZAHE/IL/HIC//VO/DEHG/GO/HEAJYT


We all studied her paper for a little bit. “Do you think it’s coincidence that we have two actual words on there?” Grayson asked. “’No’ and ‘go’?”

“Maybe. But without the reverse, ‘no’ is ‘on’.” I said.

“But in everything we’ve tried, one the first two letters has been an N.” Vivian said. “That can’t be coincidence.”

We all thought for a while. In my opinion, the vowel thing seemed reliable, and I noticed Wesley secretly writing something on his paper, so I decided to test out an idea I had on my own paper, but without telling everyone else. Maybe I would be the one to crack the Code and prove to the Captain that I didn’t need a team! I was brilliant on my own.

My thought was this: maybe the vowels were in the right place, but the consonants were jumbled. There must be some order they were supposed to go in. Maybe a two-letter shift. I tested that theory, and was met with more gibberish.

After a lot of silence, Jesse suggested the two-letter shift. I smiled to myself; he hadn’t caught onto the vowel trick. I was way ahead of them! I would crack the Code on my own, I was sure of it!

“That’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard, Jesse.” Grayson scoffed. “If the one-letter shift didn’t work, why would the two-letter shift work? I still say that there’s some word that the letters line up for. Give me a minute, I’ll figure it out!”

“Of course you’ll figure it out, Grayson. About ten years after everyone else!” Wesley looked up from his paper to toss an insult at his brother.

I looked up too. “And you’ll be another ten years behind him, won’t you Wesley?”

Wesley stood up and threw his black suit jacket off. “Shut up, Elaina! What valuable contributions have you made? None!”

“That’s more than you have!” I stood up too, throwing my silvery hair behind my back.

After Wesley and I started shouting, all hell broke loose. Jesse and Grayson were in a fistfight on the floor, Vivian was getting in the middle of mine and Wesley’s argument, and nobody could understand a word each other was saying.

A loud knock on the lab door is what it took to finally shut us all up.

The Captain’s voice was frantic, “You guys, we’ve spotted some government soldiers just east of here. You had better hurry up with that Code or everyone at this base will be killed. Do you understand?!”


The five of us looked at each other. Jesse had a bloody nose, Grayson the beginnings of a black eye. Our faces were all flushed with anger and hatred.

We all sat down without a word. We could hear the panic and chaos upstairs. Everyone else at the base was trying to prepare for an attack that they knew would come if we didn’t break this code within the next hour or so.

Almost half of the little time we had left ticked away as the five of us sat in silence. If another person had come into the lab, they would have almost been able to see the millions of thoughts whirring around our heads.

I looked at Jesse first, remembering how he tried to keep us unified. Then I saw Vivian, my thoughts running to her getting the words ‘no’ and ‘go’. Grayson had thought of not changing the vowels at all, which seemed like the most reliable idea we’d had all day. Then there was Wesley with his reverse idea. And I knew that the consonants were jumbled, but how were we supposed to rearrange them? It shouldn’t be too complicated, right?

I glanced at my watch, which told me we had been in the lab for almost four straight hours. How appropriate that we had worked individually on the Code for four and a half months and we would have to break it in four and a half hours. Surely we didn’t have much longer than another half hour before the base was under attack and everything would go to waste.

Wesley picked up his paper and started writing, forcing me to remember his reverse idea again. My intuition slapped me in the face and I picked up my paper as well. I’d already tried shifting the consonants twice, and we’d already ruled out once. Three times was too many, and leaving them alone had gotten us nowhere. There was only one more sensible way to try.

I gasped as everything suddenly fit together. Reversing the consonants! Making the letter A number 1, since it was a vowel, and then letter B number 26, letter C 25, letter D 24, but letter E number 5 because of its status as a vowel, and on and on until I came up with this string of Code:

ON/ESAB/NI/XIS//OG/TESW/OT/HCRAES


I crushed my paper into a ball and threw it across the lab with a scream of frustration. The Code was impossible! I had tried everything!

“What is it?” Jesse walked over to my paper and picked it up. He studied the series of letters I had come up with carefully, and brought it back to the table. Vivian, Grayson, and even Wesley studied it with great interest. They saw the work I had done with reversing the numbers for the consonants.

“I thought that if I combined what everyone had suggested I would miraculously come up with the answer.” I said miserably, sitting back in my chair. “But I guess I was wrong.”

“I see the vowel thing,” Grayson said, obviously glad that he’d come up with something useful.

“And there’s a letter N.” Vivian pointed out.

“You used my combining idea.” Jesse said. “And you figured out the consonants thing. The only thing you’re missing is…” his eyes lit up and he started writing quicker than I’d ever seen. Miraculously, words started appearing! When Jesse had finished, he held up the paper proudly:

NO/BASE/IN/SIX//GO/WEST/TO/SEARCH


“No base in six. Go west to search!” Vivian cried out joyously. She threw her arms around Jesse, but then composed herself quickly. “Six. That must refer to the sixth sector of the Earth!”

We celebrated for a couple minutes, and then stopped dead remembering that we were about to be attacked. We’d broken the Code, but it wouldn’t do us much good unless we used it.

“Quick, look for new messages on the computer!” I shouted frantically, clearing the round table. “Maybe some older ones too. We need to decipher as much as we can within the last three days to get a clue on how to beat them on this attack!” I quickly wrote a key that we could all use to decipher the Code while Vivian and Grayson started printing off messages. Jesse brought out his phone and told the Captain that we’d broken the Code and we’d let him know what we found.

Wesley approached me as I was deciphering a message. He was deciphering one too, but he managed to ask, “Why didn’t you use my idea?”

My brain was moving so fast I hardly heard him. My answer was automatic, “I did. I used reversal in general, not reversal of the letters after I’d translated it. I didn’t think about that, but I’m glad Jesse did.”

“Oh.” Wesley didn’t say anything else; he just translated message after message next to me.

Finally, Vivian shouted, “Look! Look at this one!” She held up a piece of paper that had a strip of Code and then a translation reading:

INSUFFICIANT/AMMO//MAKE/THEM/STRIKE/FIRST


The rest of us nodded and Jesse dialed the Captain again. He relayed the message we had just decoded and told the Captain, “Just don’t attack them. They don’t have enough ammo to lead an attack and win, so whatever you do, don’t strike first!”


A painful six hours later, the Captain burst into the lab with a huge grin on his face. “I knew you could do it! I knew it, I knew it, I knew it! You guys really rose to the occasion!” he gave us all medals of achievement, and ushered us out of the lab. “Now get some rest, you’ve earned it!”

That night as I laid in my bed remembering the events of the day, I realized just how close we had come to being completely destroyed. Our constant competing and outdoing had really been a detriment to the Resistance. We were literally minutes away from being beaten, and then who knows what the government would have done to us? Was it really worth it? In the end, I didn’t even figure out the Code on my own! Only when all of our ideas had been combined was when the Code was completely broken.

I closed my eyes, my last lingering thought on how great it felt when all of our ideas had come together to accomplish something great.