Anarchy of the Mice

Chapter Sixty-Five

The noise was deafening, like a fire alarm at one of the kids' schools if you had your ear pressed to the bell—only everywhere. I wrapped my arms up the sides of my head and waited for the siren to stop.

It didn't. It wailed on and on.

I looked to Piper. She'd tucked deeper into her steel egg chair, face bitter.

Only our new cellmate, Yves Pomeroy, rose with the noise.

"The alarme primaire!" he cried. "I cannot believe! I thought never again in my lifetime would I hear it."

He canted his ear as though he were appreciating Beethoven's Fifth.

I asked over the screech, "What's the alarme primaire?"

"It means the building has been breached! There is but one explanation: Roche Rivard is under attack!"

Now his excitement caught to me because I knew exactly who must be responsible. Quaid and Durwood. It had to be them. I didn't know how, or where, or have the faintest idea what their plan was.

But I knew it was them—and that we needed to roll.

"This is it, we go!"

On my word, Piper was out of her chair, fetching the mechanical insect from where she'd hidden it behind the toilet. She detached the tail-controller and got it aloft. I hurried to watch the terminal display over her shoulder.

Yves's expression was dumbstruck as the insect skittered below the ceiling, out of our cell and into the oubliette lobby.

The guard noticed nothing, typing busily at his computer. Did he know what to make of the alarme primaire? Was he trying to disable it?

We lost sight of him as our insect veered from the lobby, down a hallway we'd scoped out in advance. Piper worked the joystick with a steady, practiced thumb, guiding, the insect skimming below the ceiling, farther, farther...

"There!" I said, pointing.

Piper had already seen and begun backtracking, spinning the insect around and aiming its eyes/camera at the object.

It was a carafe of some sort, a beaker-shaped vessel sitting in a cutout of the limestone wall. Before it had seemed to have water inside, but now it looked empty.

Piper said, "Do it?"

I nodded.

She jabbed her thumb forward, accelerating the insect toward the carafe. The carafe got bigger in the terminal screen, then very big, then everything turned black.

From our cell, we heard the crinkle-crunch. I hurried to the front of our cell to check the guard. He'd left his computer and was turning the corner, moving toward the sound of broken glass.

"He bit!"

Piper dropped the controller in her egg chair and joined me at the cell glass. I slicked my hand along the glass, waiting for the feathery red pentagram to show itself. A moment later, it did—the spot where you needed to press for entry or exit—and I aligned my palm and fingers.

The security sensor, disabled at the insistence of Leathersby and others annoyed by its frequent malfunctions, flashed green. The cell unlocked. I pushed through.

Piper cut her eyes back. "We taking the oldster?"

I looked at Yves scrambling after us, fighting his palsy. "I think so. We might need him."

We sprinted through the lobby. Prisoners in other cells were clutching their ears against the alarm. One man laid naked on the ground, butt up, squirming as though to escape into the floor.