Then she noticed something: the string length was 4-5-9-5. She tried an online anagram solver on each part — nothing. But when she treated the dashes as spaces and the whole thing as a single string of letters, she saw a pattern: every two letters could be reversed.
That gave: — still cryptic.
She stepped back. “What if it’s a known key?” She typed the string into her computer’s frequency analyzer. It suggested a with the key “help.” She tried it: mwqa-mqbrh-alfysbwk-qiwdz