Chapter 03
The Architecture of Chaos
Our hysterical laughter slowly died out, leaving the room to the heavy, monotonous drumming of the rain and the cold reality of concrete walls. Fia pushed her damp hair back, and in a fraction of a second, the vulnerable girl vanished. The agent of the Security Prefecture had returned.
"Enough," she said, the metallic chill bleeding back into her voice. "Do you not understand what's happening? The Cardinal didn't believe a single word of your promise. His Holiness already knows everything, and Demetrius is going to use his full power to crush you."
"That’s exactly why I was in such a hurry to restore those deleted files," I replied evenly, dropping into the chair. The cold, bluish glare of the monitor washed over our faces. "But the problem is, the truth hidden in these files is far more dangerous than just my execution. It’s about Father Polycarp. Poko."
"Poko? He was with us at the Academy..." Fia shifted uncomfortably, crossing her arms. "An absolute genius, yes, but a complete fanatic."
"Precisely. A fanatic," I confirmed. "A strict pedant, a perfectionist who meticulously observed every ritual. Which makes the message I received from him a week ago absolutely impossible to comprehend. At first, I thought alcohol had completely broken his inexperienced psyche. Look."
I tapped a few keys, bringing Father Polycarp’s text onto the screen:
"You have no idea how beautiful it is when you drink. You want to fly, and most importantly, you can. Yahoooo! Nothing holds you down. Maybe I had a bit too much, but gravity really can’t hold you anymore. Please forgive me, my Ace, but we ran out of whiskey. I’ve already opened a mystical account and your puzzle begins here. If it's not too much trouble, send me: eight boxes of 'Glenfiddich_' and two three big u 'Jack..ep..ep..at'."
Fia scanned the screen, her face twisting in obvious irritation. "Are you serious?" she asked. "You’re risking your neck over this absurd, drunken rambling? 'Yahoooo!'? He sounds like a lunatic."
"Wait." Clio’s voice sliced through the heavy air of the room.
She sat up on the bed. The sleepy, carefree expression was gone. In her green eyes burned the sharp, relentless spark that had made her the most promising scientific mind in the Republic’s history.
Clio slipped out of bed. Barefoot, she crossed the cold concrete floor with an untamed, careless grace. Ignoring Fia’s icy glare entirely, she stepped behind me, resting her bare arms on my shoulders as she leaned toward the screen.
She wasn't just reading the text. She was seeing its architecture.
"God, how did I miss this from the start?" she muttered, her face inches from the monitor. "It’s so elegant. Look at the exclamation."
She pointed at the screen. "'Yahoooo!' Security algorithms scan that as a drunken shout. But right after that, he says he opened a 'mystical account'. He's telling you the domain name. The provider is Yahoo. The rest of the task begins after the colon. The address and the password are hidden in plain sight."
Fia and I watched in stunned silence as Clio’s mind dissected chaos into simple, logical elements.
"Cautious people use numbers, uppercase and lowercase letters, and special symbols for passwords," she rattled off without taking a breath. "Therefore, 'eight', 'two', and 'three' become 8, 2, and 3. The word 'and' translates to the ampersand '&', and 'big u' is obviously a capital 'U'. Put it together: the password is '8box&23U'. As for the address, that’s even more transparent—'glenfiddich_jackepep'."
With mesmerizing speed, Clio snatched the keyboard from me. She typed in glenfiddich_jackepep@yahoo.com and hit enter.
"And voilà," Clio whispered with a razor-thin smile as the screen blinked. "We're in."
The Drafts folder loaded on the monitor. Inside sat three unsent emails. Three ticking time bombs capable of shattering our dogmas and turning the world upside down.
