Page 27 of Solo Stan
Kai
“Oh my God. The golden ratio,” Kai said, slapping a palm against his forehead with a laugh. He was an artist. He should have thought of this sooner.
FJSUW-IZNPO-KEGDP-DDECC-TW
Kai studied the letters from the post again, trying his best to preserve the soggy piece of paper. He compared the letters against the series of numbers they’d collected by completing the tasks in the scavenger hunt.
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34
“It’s the Fibonacci sequence,” Kai murmured, his smile growing wider.
The Fibonacci sequence was everywhere—in nature, human anatomy, music.
It started with zero—nothing—followed by a 1 , then another.
Zero symbolized the soul, while the double ones represented the two parts that comprised a single soul.
That’s why the pillars were 11:11 and not 1:1.
This was why 11 was the most important number in the world of twin flames, and Elias just so happened to pull it from the deck.
Kai was hesitant to call this fate, but when things aligned so perfectly, what else could it be?
Even Elias had told him not to give up on his stars and tarot.
If Kai had, he would’ve missed this rare moment in which art, science, and the divine came together in harmony.
He considered the letters on the soggy paper for a moment: FJSUW-IZNPO-KEGDP-DDECC-TW .
It was probably a simple shift cipher. All he had to do was take each letter and shift it by the numbers in the sequence.
He began, scratching the decoded message onto his palm with his fingernail as though they were a pen and pad: F shifted by 0 stayed as F , J shifted by 1 became K , S shifted by 1 became T , U shifted by 2 became W , and W shifted by 3 became a Z .
Letting out a frustrated sigh, Kai wished his mind worked a little more like Elias’s. Better yet, he wished Elias were there. Holding all the letters and numbers in his head without writing them down was tough. He paused to think over what he’d decrypted so far.
FKTWZ? he thought.
He ran every possible calculation that his left brain could manage, but even knowing the cipher was created using the Fibonacci sequence, the letters still weren’t making sense.
“I was so sure of it,” Kai said, pressing a knuckle into his right temple. He wanted to call Bobby, but his phone had broken in the rain. “I can figure this out without him,” he said. That’s what Elias had wanted.
And just like that, Kai’s faith was restored. He had to shift the numbers backward, not forward.
F I R S T D R A U G H T S E C R E T S H O W
His eyes widened. First Draught was a venue only a few blocks away—a record store by day and a bar by night.
Kai sprinted out into the torrent.