by Lisa Fiedler
“Perhaps,” said Titus, his eyes blank. “But then your place is here, not out in the tunnels, isn’t it?”
If you only knew, Zucker thought. If you only knew . . .
He bowed and left the throne room.
A war had begun. Somehow Zucker and his new friends were going to have to win it.
Deep in his heart, he knew that they would.
acknowledgments
(MOUSE) HEARTFELT THANKS TO Ruta Rimas, who truly made this book possible. With unfailing instincts and a supercreative spark, she’s the kind of editor writers wish for. She has been such a huge part of Hopper’s story. He and I are both so lucky to have her.
I’m also fortunate to have the world’s two greatest agents, Sue Cohen and Madeleine Morel, getting the job done. Thanks for taking care of business and for respecting my tendencies to panic, forget, take on too much, and never read all the way to the bottom of an e-mail.
Have a sneak peek at the next underground adventure in Mouseheart Vol. 2:
Hopper’s Destiny!
Not long ago, in the daylight world of Brooklyn, New York . . .
It was not crisp, cozy apsen curls he felt beneath him.
It was the cold hard cement of the pet-shop floor that pressed against the fur of his belly.
Everything hurt—his bones, his teeth, his tail. He was aware of a frenzied scuffle going on around him—sweeping sounds, and Keep’s heavy feet, his angry voice.
Pup opened his eyes.
The world from this vantage point was a flat, dusty expanse of floor dotted with the lifeless bodies of his cagemates. His stomach turned with grief and disgust as he blinked away the blur and searched for his siblings.
“Hopper?” he called. “Pinkie?” But his trembling voice was lost in the windy noise of straw against cement and the pattering of rain on the sidewalk outside the open door. Of course Pup did not know the names for straw and rain. He knew nothing of human objects and life outside his cage. But he did know this: he was in trouble.
“Hopper . . . Pinkie!” He tried again to holler, but his words were no louder than passing thoughts.
With great effort he lifted his head and scanned the shop. There! His brother and sister, scrambling down the cord that grew out of the money machine like an electrical tail!
They’re coming to get me, he thought, relief overtaking him. Hopper will save me.
Pup closed his eyes and waited. The vibrations of Keep’s tromping feet shook the floor, and damp air swirled in from the stormy world outside the door.
The door . . . toward which Pinkie and Hopper were running.
“No!” Pup cried out. “Wait for me.”
He tried to lift himself onto his paws but his fall—a terrifying drop through space, which he was only now beginning to remember—had left him far too sore. He could barely move at all, let alone with enough speed to catch up to his siblings.
Eyes wide with disbelief, he watched as the broom chased Hopper and Pinkie toward the door.
And then, with a bang, it slammed behind them, trapping them, Pup realized, forever out, while he was stuck here, forever in.
However long forever might be he could not begin to guess.
A flicker of motion caught his tear-filled eyes, and he turned toward it. A cagemate, left for dead beside a torn scrap of plaid fabric, had begun to stir. But Keep spotted the movement as well. Pup made to shout a warning, but the stiff bristles of the broom came down hard with a loud slap. Pup could almost feel the impact on his own shivering body as the updraft caused by the swinging broom sent the scrap of fabric fluttering into the air; it hovered briefly, like a checkered kite, then drifted downward to land once again on the dirty floor, this time within paw’s reach of Pup.
“Gotcha!” gloated Keep, as he shook his broom clean.
Pup gasped, his breath strangling in his throat as he bit back a whimper of terror.
“Nasty little varmints ripped my shirt,” Keep muttered, frowning at the piece of fabric. He grabbed a dustpan from the counter and swept the squashed cagemate into it. Then he stamped across the room and bent down, using his boot to kick another unconscious mouse into the rusted dustpan.
Pup felt his blood freeze. Keep was cleaning up . . . mouse after mouse was being flattened, then swept or shoveled into the metal receptacle. Unless he could find a way to conceal himself, he would be next.
Muscles aching, he reached his tiny paw toward the fabric scrap. His claws closed around the frayed edge and he tugged it over himself, just as Keep turned to scan the area of the floor where Pup lay.
“That’s all of ’em,” the human grumbled, heading for the back exit with his tray full of corpses.
Not all of ’em, thought Pup, quivering beneath the fabric. His brain spun as he tried to formulate a plan. But nothing of his life in the comfy cage had prepared him for a moment like this. He was alone and afraid, with only a torn piece of cheap material to protect him.
His siblings had escaped.
No—they’d gone and left him, without so much as a backward glance.
It was an image Pup would never forget, their two tails disappearing through the sliver of open space between the door and the rain. Part of him understood that they’d been running for their lives and had probably believed him already dead, but another part of him hurt, smarting to the depths of his soul. He’d been abandoned by the only two mice he’d ever trusted. The only two mice who had ever protected him.
As he huddled there beneath the plaid tatter, a small seedling of emotion began to take root. Pup could not identify the feeling, of course; it was as new to him as snakes and brooms and rainstorms. But he knew it did not feel good.
It made his claws clench and his teeth grind and the back of his neck sweat.
Had he been more worldly or educated, he would have known exactly what to call the sensation. But he was neither of those things. He was innocent, and naturally sweet, and until now he’d never had a reason to feel this miserable, gut-searing, heart-chilling thing he could not name. He understood only that he did not like the feeling at all.
And so he fought it, let it go, hoping it would never return.
But it would return. It would come for him again, though he could not imagine now how or when or even why. It would visit him in a place and circumstance he was still too inexperienced even to dream of, this biting, clawing feeling that filled him with such darkness. This thing he did not know enough to call anger.
And since he was not strong enough to sustain his fury, he released it and let it give way to fear.
Because it was that moment when the door to the shop slammed open, letting in the noise, the damp, the rain.
And the boy.
The boy with his terrible, vicious, hungry snake.
“You again,” snarled Keep, returning with his empty dustpan. “What do you want this time?”
“Same thing I wanted last time,” the boy said. “Breakfast for my buddy. I only got two blocks away when I remembered he ain’t eaten since yesterday. He can’t wait for me to find another pet store, or trap some scrawny subway rat. He needs a meal now.”
Keep snorted. “Well, that’s too bad, because his breakfast just escaped. Every last hair of it.”
Pup peered up at the despicable boy and the repugnant reptile that squirmed on his shoulders. Fangs curved out of its open mouth as its eyes darted around the shop.
Keep walked to the door, but before he could push it closed against the splashing rain, a gust of wet wind blew in, lifting the plaid scrap into the air once again, and revealing Pup, curled on the floor.
“There’s one,” said the boy, pointing a bony finger.
Pup forced himself to lay still, allowing his eyes to open only into the tiniest of slits, through which to watch this sickening transaction.
“It’s dead,” said Keep.
“So what? Bo don’t mind—do ya, boy?”
The snake answered with a hiss. Dead breakfast was better than no breakfast it would s
eem.
“Still gotta charge ya,” said Keep, ever the savvy businessman, “even if the beast’s deceased.”
“Half price,” said the boy. “It’s dead and puny.” He dug into his pocket and fished out some coins.
“Fair enough,” grumbled Keep. “Dead rodents only stink up the joint anyway. Go ahead. Take it.”
The boy reached down and scooped up the presumed-dead Pup, who closed his eyes tight and held his breath. He almost wished he were dead.
Satisfied with their purchase, the boy and his snake ventured back out into the rain. Listening to the sound of his captor’s sneakers slap the wet sidewalk, Pup kept his body still and his eyes squeezed shut.
If only he had opened them.
If he had, he might have been able to peer through the slender space between the boy’s fingers and see his brother and sister in the shadow of a trash barrel, fighting over a discarded piece of hot dog. He might have seen them lunge at each other, then roll toward the rushing water in the gutter.
He might even have seen the raging current sweep them away, to disappear from the Brooklyn outdoors forever.
Or perhaps not forever . . .
But Pup saw nothing except the inside of his own eyelids, pretending for all he was worth to be a lifeless knot of fur in the boy’s clammy palm.
He would be dead soon anyway.
He might as well get used to it.
Pup had no idea how long he was clenched inside the boy’s fist. They seemed to be traveling a great distance, the boy walking, the snake wriggling. At some point the boy stopped moving, and stood still, only to continue to be propelled—not forward, but downward, smoothly. This seemed to trouble the snake, who (Pup could sense from inside the dark cocoon of the boy’s curled fingers) grew tense around the boy’s neck.
“It’s okay, Bo. It’s only an escalator. We’ll be on the train in no time.”
Train, Pup thought. Another word he’d never heard, another concept entirely foreign to him. But the idea of it, whatever it was, managed to soothe the snake.
Then the boy was walking again. Wherever the escalator had deposited them was a place without rain, because the spattering sound had stopped and the occasional drop that dribbled in between the boy’s fingers had ceased.
Pup could smell humans—more than he’d ever smelled before, more than there had even been at any one time in Keep’s cramped shop—and he could hear their gasps and cries of fear at the sight of Bo, writhing around the boy’s neck.
The boy stopped walking, and suddenly Pup’s delicate ears were assaulted with a loud growling noise that made his heart thump. The growl was followed by a kind of whistling shriek, as if some enormous beast had just exhaled.
“Best thing about riding the subway with you, Bo,” said the boy with a chuckle, “is I get the whole car to myself.”
Pup sensed the boy sitting, and then more movement, fast and sleek.
“Okay,” said the boy. “Let’s get you fed. One dead runt coming up.”
The boy uncurled his fist, and Pup felt a chill as he was exposed to the air. Using his other hand, the boy pinched Pup’s tail and lifted him up so that he was dangling, presumably, just above those lethal fangs.
“Open wide,” the boy told Bo.
Pup was so seized with panic that he forgot to play dead; he opened his eyes and found himself bathed in a sickly greenish light, face-to-face with the diabolical boy.
Startled, the boy let out a shriek, releasing his grip and flinging Pup across the train car.
Bo hissed, furious at having been deprived of his breakfast a second time.
Thwumpff.
Pup landed on the seat opposite the boy’s. He quickly scrambled to the edge and dove to the floor. He kept to the cavern beneath the long row of seats where the boy could not see nor reach.
And he ran.
For a mouse his size, it was a lengthy run indeed to the far end of the subway car. He could hear the wet soles of the boy’s sneakers squeaking on the floor as he clambered around the car, searching out his undead prey.
“There he is!” the boy cried. “We got him cornered.”
But just as the boy reached out to snatch Pup, the train came to a sudden, screeching halt. Boy and snake were flung forward, stumbling.
To Pup’s delight, his pursuer fell hard, face-first onto the dirty floor.
The boy groaned; the snake squirmed.
Pup pressed himself up against the shiny metal door.
A mad hissing filled the car as the snake unlooped his scaly self from the fallen boy’s shoulders and began to slither toward Pup.
But the whistling shriek of breath came again, and behind Pup the doors jerked wide, knocking the trembling mouse off balance.
Pup teetered on the edge of the subway car only long enough to see Bo’s fanged mouth open.
And then he fell.
Out of the car and into the darkness.
Lisa Fiedler is the author of several novels for children and young adults. She divides her time between Connecticut and the Rhode Island seashore, where she lives happily with her very patient husband, her brilliant and beloved daughter, and their two incredibly spoiled golden retrievers.
Vivienne To has illustrated several books, including the Underland Chronicles series by Suzanne Collins and the Randi Rhodes, Ninja Detective series by Octavia Spencer. As a child, she had two pet mice escape. She currently lives in Sydney, Australia, with her partner and her ginger cat. Visit her online at vivienneto.com.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Jacket design by Lauren Rille
Jacket illustrations copyright © 2014 by Vivienne To
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The text for this book is set in Absara.
The illustrations for this book are rendered digitally.
CIP data is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-1-4424-8781-9 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4424-8784-0 (eBook)