Page 35 of The Words Beneath the Noise

My pencil moved automatically, jotting notes in shorthand only I could read, cross-referencing against yesterday's traffic. Same source call sign. Same time window. Same repeated sequence buried in the middle of otherwise clean encryption.

Pattern. There was always a pattern if you looked long enough, if you let your brain stop trying to force meaning and just let the shapes reveal themselves.

I grabbed a fresh sheet and started mapping frequencies, counting letter occurrences, building a visual representation of the data. My hand cramped. My eyes burned from staring. The overhead lights buzzed at a frequency that made my molars ache, but I'd learned to tune it out years ago, to file it under necessary discomfort rather than unbearable sensation.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, a voice that sounded like Ruth told me I should take a break, eat something, look at an object more than two feet away to rest my eyes. But that voice was easy to ignore when I was this close, when I could feel the answer hovering just beyond conscious reach.

QXMPL. If I shifted the substitution key by three instead of five. If I assumed the operator had made a consistent error in his settings, the kind of mistake that happened when you were cold and tired and going through the motions without really thinking.

My pencil flew across the paper, testing the theory, and suddenly the letters weren't letters anymore. They were Germanwords emerging from chaos like shapes in fog: WIEDER. DIESELBE. ROUTE.

Again. Same. Route.

My heart kicked up. This wasn't routine traffic. This was confirmation of a supply route, the same one they'd used yesterday and the day before, a pattern that meant our side could anticipate, could intercept, could turn this intelligence into action that saved lives.

Or ended them, depending on which side of the equation you counted.

“Got you,” I muttered, already reaching for a clean sheet to write up the formal decrypt. “Got you, you careless bastard.”

“Talking to the intercepts again?”

Ruth's voice pulled me back to the physical world. I blinked, vision swimming as I tried to refocus on something that wasn't encrypted text. She stood beside my desk with her arms crossed, expression caught between amusement and concern.

“They talk back if you listen long enough,” I said, my voice coming out rough from disuse. How long had it been since I'd spoken to another human? Hours, probably.

“That's called auditory hallucination. Normal people would be worried.” She glanced at the organized chaos of my workspace, the three pencils, the pages covered in my cramped handwriting. “You've been at this since ten hundred. It's past fourteen now.”

Had it really been four hours? Time did that when I hyperfocused, compressed and expanded until it lost all meaning. Four hours could feel like twenty minutes or twenty days depending on whether I was inside the work or outside looking back at it.

“Cracked it, though.” I held up the decrypt with the kind of satisfaction that probably looked disproportionate to anyone who didn't understand what it meant to wrestle meaning fromapparent randomness. “Supply route. Same one they've been using all week. Wehrmacht operator keeps making the same encryption error.”

Ruth leaned over to scan my work, her sharp eyes catching the logic even without seeing every step. “Good. Finch will want this immediately.” She paused. “After you eat something.”

“I'm not hungry.”

“You're never hungry when you're working. That's how I know you haven't eaten since breakfast.” She wasn't quite scolding, but her tone carried the weight of someone who'd had this conversation too many times. “Art. You can't keep doing this. Your brain needs fuel.”

“My brain is fine.”

“Your brain is running on fumes and stubbornness.” She pulled a chair over and sat, a signal that she wasn't leaving until I acknowledged her point. “I know the work helps. I know it's easier to think about patterns than people. But you're no good to anyone if you collapse from malnutrition.”

My jaw tightened. She was right, of course. Ruth was almost always right, which was both comforting and deeply annoying in moments like this when I wanted to argue but had no logical ground to stand on.

“I'll eat after I file this,” I said, already gathering the papers into a report folder.

“I'll hold you to that.” She stood, then paused, hand resting briefly on my shoulder. Physical contact from Ruth was rare enough to be significant. “You did good work here. This will save people. Remember that when the guilt starts circling.”

The guilt was already circling. Had been since the moment I'd translated those German words and understood what they meant. Someone on the other side, some tired Wehrmacht soldier, had made a mistake that might cost his compatriotstheir lives. And I'd caught it, documented it, set in motion a chain of events that would turn human beings into casualties.

But Ruth was right about the other side too. British soldiers who wouldn't walk into an ambush. Supply lines that wouldn't be cut. Lives saved by information I'd helped extract from apparent noise.

Both things were true. Both things made me complicit.

She squeezed my shoulder once before moving back to her own desk.

I finishedthe formal write-up in ten minutes, dropped it in the priority basket for Finch's attention, and finally allowed myself to look away from the work. My neck cracked when I rolled it, muscles protesting hours of hunching. My fingers ached. When I tried to stand, my legs had gone stiff enough that I had to grab the desk for balance.

Four hours. Christ.