Page 6 of Absent Remorse

“A heat responsive surface?” Joseph said. “That’s the trick to this?”

“I think that might just be the start of it,” Amber answered. “Do you mind if I take this with me?”

She knew she was asking a lot. After all, this had been sent to Joseph so he could write a story on it.

She saw Joseph smile. “I can’t think of anyone better placed to try to work it out. Take it. Tell me if you find out what it’s all about.”

Amber nodded. She would. For now, though, the cube was already fading back to bare metal as she took her cup away, becoming a mystery once more.

It was a mystery Amber suddenly needed to unlock. A puzzle like this was suddenly enough to grab her full attention.

CHAPTER FOUR

Amber was back in her old apartment in Washington, just staring at the cube. Staring and trying to make some sense of it all.

She didn’t have to be in Quantico today, she’d chosen one of her days off from the training to be the day after her date with Joseph just in case … just in case the date went better than she could have hoped. She was there in the middle of clutter formed from other puzzles, piles of them covering most of the square footage of the apartment. Right then none of them mattered.

Amber immersed the cube in a bowl of warm water, watching as symbols started to appear on its reactive surface. Amber wrote them down as they appeared, trying to map out the complex topography of it all so that she had all the information at once, rather than just whatever appeared in the brief moments while there was heat applied to the cube.

The symbols looked like some kind of writing. Not English, or anything using the same alphabet. Not the Greek alphabet either, in spite of the clue that had let her get even this far with the puzzle. It was something else, something that looked like some kind of hieroglyphics.

Once she was sure that she had the symbols down, Amber went to her laptop. Her email showed that she had requests to provide puzzles for a couple of would-be clients. One was for a compilation of original puzzles designed to combine the artistic with the brain teasing. Another was an invitation to write regular questions for a panel quiz. Both paid surprisingly well, and Amber knew that she couldn’t afford to turn them down.

She hoped that she would be a full FBI agent soon, but with the way her scores on the shooting range were going, she couldn’t be certain that was going to happen. Agent Rauzer had made it clear that she was never going to be an agent if she couldn’t use her sidearm effectively when required.

If that happened, then Amber would need something to fall back on. She didn’t have her job as a full-time puzzle editor anymore. Maybe another newspaper would hire her, but it was a competitive field to get into, and Amber had no doubt that Harry would have put the word around that it wasn’t a good idea to hire her.

That meant that she had to build up the portfolio of things she’d done outside of her job on the newspaper. It also meant that Amber could bring in some extra money to help support herself while she was busy with the training. The reputation she’d built there was bringing in offers of work, but now Amber had to justify that by supplying inventive, impressive puzzles.

Amber started to work on those for a moment, trying to block out the shape of what she would produce. The one for the compilation would be the tricker of the two, because Amber had to design ways to integrate the design of puzzles with some kind of artwork, letting that lead the readers through the puzzle. In a way, that meant that she could create a more difficult puzzle than she ordinarily would have, because she could use the artwork to provide the readers with direction.

Most of the time, this would have been exactly the kind of project that would have excited Amber. It would have caught her interest and kept it, so that she would probably have found herself unable to tear herself away from it, probably working on the piece deep into the night.

Instead, Amber had barely made it five minutes into the initial design before she found her attention drifting. She found herself glancing back in the direction of the metal cube. The first time that she did it, Amber tried to bring herself back to the work that she was meant to be doing, but within another few minutes, she found the designs she was drawing for the puzzle starting to resemble strangely familiar hieroglyphs.

She stopped herself the moment she realized that she was drawing the designs from the cube. That was someone else’s puzzle, not hers. Worse, it was a puzzle that Amber didn’t really understand yet. The designs didn’t mean anything to her so far.

If she didn’t start to understand them, Amber suspected that this puzzle would be stuck in her head like a toad squatting in a pond. It would refuse to let her think about anything else. It would keep coming back when she tried to work on anything else or even when she was trying to train back at the FBI training facility. Amber couldn’t afford to have anything else cluttering up her brain like that when she was still struggling with some aspects of the training course.

She needed to go back to the puzzle and solve it, if only so that she could free up her mind to do other things.

Amber started to look online for any references to hieroglyphics similar to the ones on the cube. Yet, while it seemed that this layer was Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, her best attempts to translate them using dictionaries of known symbols simply didn’t make sense.

Amber did her best to read up on hieroglyphics and quickly found that Ancient Egyptian used such symbols in two different ways. First, there was a simple pictorial representation of the meaning of a word, so that one symbol could mean a whole word or a group of words. Second, and possibly more interesting, the symbols had also come to represent letter sounds or combinations.

Amber wrote out the letters, working from top right to bottom left, the way the online resources suggested that she should.

Tchthtrsfthmntnlck.

It was a meaningless jumble of letters, so much so that Amber suspected that she might not be translating it correctly. Splitting the string of letters up and feeding them into a search engine to try to translate from both Ancient and more modern Egyptian did nothing. There was no combination that it would accept as words. She tried reading more on hieroglyphs and quickly realized that she was missing at least one key component.

Hieroglyphics didn’t supply vowels. Traditionally, the letterawas used between the consonants they did provide, but inserting it here only seemed to make things more confusing. Amber found herself wondering about other combinations of letters. The problem was that she didn’t know any Ancient Egyptian beyond what she was grabbing from the internet, so it was hard to pick out patterns.

Except, what if it wasn’t in Ancient Egyptian? Was it possible that this was an English phrase? Taking the vowels out of English words and sentences was a common form of puzzle, so silently, Amber started to split the letters up, trying to find combinations that worked as words. Those first few could be “teach” or “touch”. The last few looked as though they might be “unlock”.

“Touch the tears of the moon to unlock,” Amber said aloud as she deciphered it. Only, what did that mean?

That sent her off down another rabbit hole, trying to find symbols that might be described that way. She found the symbol she wanted and realized that there was one of it on every face of the cube. Which she would only be able to find when the cube was hot or by memory.

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