Oh no.

Don't think yet. Just solve.

'I betrayed Crew. M.I.H.O. compromised from within.'

'Director MALA FIDE until extraction. Beware Small Controller.'

'I'm sorry.'

Impossible. Pack runner. Close blood.

It also doesn't make sense... Karolina was the one who was uncovered in the EMTERR-backed dream study...

But did someone sell out Karolina? That you never discovered.

A paragraph from his red folder flashes redder across your mind: '... POSSESSING A MONSTROUS INTELLIGENCE THAT RESTS ON HALLUCINATORY LOGICAL CONSTRUCTION.'

Home gäng... really did us in? After everything?

But definitely more ominous.

'MALA FIDE': Bad faith, standard espionage parlance for contaminated, compromised or treacherous.

The best you can come up with is an image of a tiny Melita, reprimanding you for failures both real and imagined.

'MALA FIDE'... Bad faith. A betrayer in your midst.

You imagine a tiny Melita sitting on the edge of a yellowed phone receiver.

A single cell of terminal intent.

If they aren't already a bloody mass screaming at existence.

The key slides in. The tumblers are lifted up and fall back into place.

The beauty of ciphers.

A memory is knocked loose -- it's a scene from HOLOCENE's favourite novel -- a science fiction offering with elements of horror.

The Honour Stall in Party Alley might be a good first stop.

'Blood Type: Hecatomb'.

Or you have fundamentally misjudged the depth and nature of your friend's malaise.

Oh look. A fresh rung on the 'abject mental illness' ladder. Down we go.

Eerily familiar now. The text almost recites itself.

Suddenly you realize the eight displacements you have found are all of them: an eight letter keyword that encodes the cipher in cycles: E S C H A T O N.

You and HOLOCENE the loving parents-in-waiting.

A flatland vertigo takes hold of you as you face the expanse of letters again.

GAUNTLET HAS HIT THE GROUND. CASCADE IS NOTHING IF SHE IS NOT BRUTE-FORCE.

This... is an entirely different beast than the Rezeda cipher PSEUDOPOD left you.

An elite art form, a lesson from the old school of espionage -- though now sadly half-obsolete in the face of ever-improving codebreaking machinery.

Strip away the romanticism. Codebreaking is about rigour. Nothing else.

SCREAM AT IT UNTIL THE WORDS SELF-ORGANISE FROM FEAR.

Bigrams, trigrams, character frequency, index of coincidence analysis. Tables, tables, and more tables.

You are at home here, in the secret runes of your kind. Your training should hold.

A lurch of tedium at the name alone.

Yet.

All minds on deck, gäng. Big thinking required here.

Across time and chasm, a garbled signal reaches you.

You fall into the rhythm of it, the instances of each letter jumping to your eye one by one as you move through the text.

Take 'H' as an example. In a text with 291 characters, that's about 7%, which is more than double the number you would expect to get if it were entirely random -- 1/26th, or roughly 3%.

Ruling out a simple transposition or affine shift cipher. Probably polyalphabetic.

The cipher wavers like a mirage -- a madman's shopping list, equal parts banality and wonder.

Three in 145 character-pairs is 2%, which corresponds to the frequency for the most common bigrams in the regular alphabet -- TH, HE, and IN.

There is a structure, but you can only palpate at its contours like a blind woman.

The median of the chains is thirteen.

Gibberish. The fact that it starts with a one digit number precludes this possibility.

Chills run through you as the letters begin to spell out a plausible message.

Steady yourself. You've slipped deeper into the game.

Not for you. For enemies.

Checks