p. 236

The old man blows into the wooden whistle, creating a tone like a “feline yowl” and then continuing into a “a wailing melody both mournful and sinister.” The baskets in from of him start to rattle and S hears a child’s cry from within as the lid of the basket begins to rise. Osfour tugs on S’s sleeve once again, ordering him, “Do not stop, especially not there.” The children in the baskets are a reference to Ostrero’s story about disobedient children who were taken from their homes and would be forced to work in suqs.

S begins to feel a pain in his head and his vision becomes blurry as if he were in a dream. Everything around him is hazy, even close objects. S’s peculiar sensations may signal danger. For whatever reason Osfour has to bring S through the night suq, he must finish his duties quickly before S is noticed by the townspeople.

FXC explains to readers that they recognize that Tiago Garcia Ferrara could not possibly be a candidate for the “real Straka.” Ferrara was an “uncommonly sensitive man who could not abide the sight of a child in even the most trivial state of suffering.” Therefore, it is unreasonable to believe that he would have written about children forced to work as slaves in baskets.

Using the code Jen formulates, which consists of using the keywords, “sleeping” and “dog” in addition to “the last 2 digits of every year in FN” she creates a list of numbers. These numbers correlate to letters in the Eotvos wheel, and when translated, she discovers the sentence,

“Mac was Judas not Tiago.”

All along, everyone believed Ferrara was the one to turn in Durand to the fascists, which ruined Ferrara’s life. According to FXC, however, Macinnes was the true convict. Additionally, if FXC’s footnotes are truly a system to communicate to Straka, then Straka must not have known this fact. Jen wonders, “How does she have this info that he doesn’t?” She postulates that FXC falsely became Macinnes’s friend and “he might’ve bragged about it to the wrong person.” Eric describes, “Garcia Ferrara disappeared a few days before they got Durand… Which is why people thought he must have talked.” Eric speculates if Mac also planned Ferrara’s disappearance as well.