“SO you’re saying they’re in a play?” Possum Ansel asked as he served Kit and Eeni a cola-can custard with eggshell and lemon-peel sprinkles. The sun had set and Possum Ansel’s bakery was full of customers, all of them eager to hear what Kit and Eeni had seen at the zoo, even though none of them had been eager to risk their own necks going there.
“It’s not a play.” Kit tried to explain the zoo to Ansel and his customers. “It’s like the scenery in a play, but they’re trying to make it look like real life.”
“You can tell, though,” Eeni added with her mouth full of custard. She had a gob of it on the tip of her little pink nose and she licked it off before she continued. “Nothing looks quite right. The colors are too bright and the background is too shallow. You can tell People painted it, not animal folk. People just don’t have the rodents’ gift for making art.”
“Their artistry is not our concern!” said Martyn to a chorus of agreement from the church mice behind him. “What are they doing with our neighbors? They have no right to take our kind into their zoos! The Moonlight Brigade exists to prevent just this sort of calamity!”
“Hey!” Eeni objected. “I didn’t hear any of you offering to help us when we went to the zoo, so now that we’re back, why don’t you let us eat our custard in peace before haranguing us!”
Kit smirked a little. Haranguing was just a fancy way of saying scolding, but Eeni never missed a chance to show those mice she knew just as many big words as they did.
It had taken him and Eeni the rest of the daylight just to make it back to Ankle Snap Alley on foot. They’d had to keep to the shadows and the side streets, because if a Person saw them, they knew they’d be snatched up. If they were, they’d have been lucky to be locked in the zoo. Uncle Rik was right when he’d told Kit what usually happened to folks like them when the People caught them. Most of the time, alley folk like them who got snatched up in the daylight were never seen again.
Kit took a bite of custard while the church mice shifted from paw to paw with impatience. He wasn’t actually hungry, he just wasn’t ready to talk to everyone yet. He was still angry at them for yelling at him about letting Valker go free. And the sight of his mother in the People’s zoo had robbed him of his appetite. All winter long, he’d wondered how he would find her again and what sort of place a zoo might be, but now that he knew, he could not imagine how he would get her out.
He needed the time it took to swallow his custard to think. Twice now, he’d had all of Ankle Snap Alley crowded around him making demands without offering any solutions themselves.
When he became the leader of the Moonlight Brigade, he had thought it would be all planning tricks and capers and heists, leading raids and being cheered by grateful creatures, large and small. He hadn’t realized how much being a leader was just explaining stuff to impatient crowds. Mr. Timinson wasn’t even there to help out. He’d gone off to wherever foxes went when they weren’t teaching classes. A library, maybe, or a henhouse?
“I’m going to get our neighbors out,” he told everyone in the bakery. “I just don’t know how yet.” Everyone gasped, although they shouldn’t have been surprised. He hadn’t had a moment to think since his uncle was taken.
“Relax,” Eeni reassured them all. “Not-knowing is just the first place you put your paws on the path to knowing. Wouldn’t be much point to sniffing the wind if you already knew what it’d smell like before it blew by.”
The creatures of Ankle Snap Alley murmured their agreement with Eeni’s wisdom, even the ones who didn’t really understand what she meant, because she’d said it with such confidence. That was another trick of leadership Kit wished he had: a way with words. He wasn’t half the talker Eeni was, but then again, she wasn’t half the plotter he was. Together the two of them made one pretty good leader.
“Here’s what I’m going to do,” Kit said, shoving in one more mouthful of Possum Ansel’s gooey cola custard. “A heist is like breaking open a beaver dam. If you can find the weak spot in the dam, you can let all the water come rushing out. We just have to find the weak spot in the zoo.”
“So you’ll have to go back there?” Blue Neck Ned cooed.
“You couldn’t pay me to go back there,” Shane Blacktail said.
“But you’ve never been there a first time, brother, so how could you go back?” Flynn Blacktail replied.
“Well, no one paid me to go a first time either!” Shane explained. “A raccoon with sense doesn’t risk his fur for free anytime.”
“And yet Kit’s risking more than his fur to set his friends and family free,” said Flynn.
“He’s sentimental,” said Shane.
“You can’t spell sentimental without mental,” said Flynn.
“Neither of you can spell at all,” Eeni cut them off. “And if you’re not offering to help, you might as well shut your snouts. I’ve never heard creatures talk more and say less than you two Blacktail brothers!”
Shane and Flynn growled at her, but she growled right back. A rat’s growl sounded more like a squeak, but Eeni’s squeak was backed by smarts and both the brothers knew it. They went quiet.
“The Moonlight Brigade will go back to the zoo together tomorrow night,” Kit said. “We’ve got an ally there, a peacock who will help us. We’ll learn everything we can about the place and then . . .” He paused and glanced around the bakery. Every animal, in all their shapes and sizes, was looking to him, afraid and uncertain. He took a deep breath and told them what he thought they’d want to hear. “Then we’ll make the People regret they ever messed with Ankle Snap Alley.”
Fanged grins spread around the room. Kit knew how much better it felt to feel powerful than to feel afraid. He had no plan yet nor any idea how he was going to keep his promise to raid the zoo and break out the folks trapped in the Urban Wild exhibit, but he knew his neighborhood needed to hear his confidence so that’s what he gave them.
“Beware!” A loud voice shook Possum Ansel’s as a shadow darkened the doorway. “What you bite will not be what you chew, and what you chew may be more than you have bitten.”
Kit turned with all the other animals to see the form that spoke from outside. It was not one voice speaking in a riddle, but a hundred speaking together as one, not one creature, but a hundred tangled rats who lived as one.
It was the Rat King.
Chapter Eight
OF CABBAGES AND KINGS
MOST folks could go their whole lives without ever seeing the Rat King, and yet here the Rat King was, come from their mysterious hideaway to speak to all of Ankle Snap Alley at once. As far as Kit knew, this had never happened before, not even in the ancient days of the First Animals.
“Uh, hi,” said Eeni, who lost her wordy wit when it came to the Rat King. Somewhere in that tangle of a hundred rats was her mother, who’d left her long ago to tangle her tail and surrender herself within the Rat King. It was a noble calling to become one of the hundred rats, but once a creature joined, she never left. She was like a tear dropped into the ocean, adding its salt to the sea.
Eeni’s mother lived, but Eeni was an orphan nonetheless.
At the sight of the Rat King in his doorway, Possum Ansel immediately rushed back into the kitchen, dragging Otis the badger with him. “The Rat King! Here! In my bakery! “What do we cook for royalty?!” The sound of pots and pans banging and rattling broke the stunned silence of the rest of the animals.
The mice bowed; Blue Neck Ned yelped and flew to the back corner farthest from the door, and all the other creatures clucked and cooed and started asking questions.
“What does my future hold?” a weasel wanted to know.
“Will we be rich?” wondered the Blacktail brothers.
“Is the moon made of stinky cheese or of a subtle cheddar?” wondered Martyn the church mouse.
Everyone believed the Rat King was all-knowing and all-seeing, but really, the
Rat King just saw one hundred times more than any one animal and thought one hundred times more thoughts than any one animal. Kit knew it wasn’t magic that made the Rat King powerful. It was perspective.
“Silence!” the Rat King commanded, and the silence returned. “We have not come from our seclusion to be questioned about your quibbles. We have come to tell you that the wild world is not all of one mind, nor do all paws and claws wish to scratch the same dirt. There are as many truths as teeth and it is the ones you do not see that bite. Beware.”
The Rat King’s words hung heavy in the air and then, as if they themselves were one creature with many heads, every furred and feathered face in the bakery turned to look at Kit.
“Does the Rat King always speak in riddles?” the rooster, Enrique, wanted to know.
“I thought they could tell the future,” the chicken Mrs. Costlecrunk declared.
“What are they blabbering about?” Blue Neck Ned squawked from his perch, still staying as far away from the Rat King as possible.
“What you bite will not be what you chew, and what you chew may be more than you have bitten,” repeated the Rat King.
“Yeah, like that,” Enrique said. “Riddles. Are we supposed to solve the riddles?”
“No,” Eeni grumbled. “The Rat King just likes to confuse us so we’ll think they’re wise.”
“But they are wise!” Martyn said, still with his head bowed. The church mice had great respect for the Rat King. None of the other folks in Ankle Snap Alley seemed to.
“Chewing more than you can bite don’t sound like wisdom to me,” said Blue Neck Ned.
“They don’t get it,” said one rat in the Rat King to another. Unlike someone made up of only themselves, someone who was made up of a hundred someones had to say their thoughts out loud.
“They’re trying to get it,” said another, adding to the Rat King’s thinking.
“We could help them get it,” said a third.
Kit wondered if any of the voices speaking was Eeni’s mom. Eeni was probably wondering the same thing.
“Can a berry be delicious?” the Rat King asked Eeni.
“Yes,” said Eeni, crossing her arms and tapping her back paw impatiently.
“Can a berry be poison?” the Rat King then asked.
“Duh,” said Eeni. She couldn’t talk back to her mother directly, but she could talk back to whatever her mother had become. Kit knew that Eeni’s sarcasm was her way of saying I love you. She was not a sentimental rodent.
“Can the same berry be delicious for one animal yet poison for another?” the Rat King said.
“Uh-huh,” Eeni replied, unsure where the questions were leading. Her eyes scanned the bits of the Rat King she could see through the doorway, and Kit figured she was looking for her mom, but of course she would never recognize her mother. Rats in the Rat King all looked alike in time, and Eeni’s mother had been a part of the Rat King for a very long time.
“So one berry can be more than one thing,” said the Rat King. “Depending on who eats it?”
“Yeah.” Eeni paused. “Depending.”
“And so it is with all things,” the Rat King said. “Food does not taste the same from one animal to another, nor do trees grow in the same soil. Not even rainbows touch the earth in the same places.”
“See?” Eeni grumbled to the rest of the bakery. “Riddles again.”
“You’re talking about the zoo, aren’t you?” Kit said the Rat King.
“Yes!” said one of the rats in the Rat King.
“He’s got it!” said another.
“Sharp as a termite’s tooth, that one is,” said a third.
“We are indeed talking about the zoo,” the Rat King said all together.
“But . . . uh . . .” Kit wrinkled his brow. “What are you trying to tell us about it?”
“To take care that you remember,” said the Rat King. “Remember that what is a balm to some is a poison to another.”
With that, the hundred-headed creature pulled away, and with a great scrabbling of claws, the heaving mass of black-and-gray-and-white fur disappeared into the night. The customers inside Possum Ansel’s bakery stood dumbfounded.
“Well, that,” Eeni declared, watching the doorway with tired eyes, “wasn’t the least bit helpful.”
“I made a hundred cabbage cakes!” Possum Ansel proclaimed as he burst from the kitchen with Otis the badger holding a towering tray of miniature cakes.
The possum’s shoulders slumped when he saw the Rat King had gone. He’d been excited to share his cooking with someone so famous who also had a famously large appetite. He looked around at his usual customers and was crestfallen.
“I’ll take a cake or two,” said Blue Neck Ned. The Blacktail brothers stepped up to get their own as well. Everyone went right back to their old ways, scamming and scheming for a free meal, like nothing miraculous had just happened. That was the way of some creatures. They ignored whatever they didn’t understand.
But Kit couldn’t ignore it and neither could Eeni.
“What did that mean?” Kit asked his friend. “What’s a balm?”
“Something for healing,” said Eeni.
“So it’s the opposite of poison,” Kit said. “What could that have to do with the zoo? Is the zoo a poison or a balm?”
“Either? Both? Neither?” Eeni shrugged. “The Rat King just likes to make things complicated. They don’t actually say anything helpful.”
“That’s not true,” said Kit. “They give us perspective.”
“Pfft.” Eeni waved her paws. “Some use that is. Doesn’t change that we’ve got to break out our friends. Dax is in there and Uncle Rik and the others. Who cares about the Rat King’s riddles?”
Kit noticed that Eeni hadn’t mentioned his mother in her list. She was probably still thinking about her own mother and Kit thought it would be kinder to avoid the subject of mothers altogether for a little while. It wasn’t like either of them could forget that they were rescuing his mother, while hers was still part of the giant tangle of riddling rats. His mother was trapped while her mother had chosen to leave her. This mission was, in a way, a balm to Kit but kind of a poison to Eeni, at least to her feelings.
But Eeni, like a true friend, was trying not to let her hurt feelings show. She was as committed to helping Kit as ever. Was that what the Rat King had wanted Kit to know? That feelings were complicated?
Like Eeni would say, Duh!
Or was it that creatures were complicated, that creatures were more than one thing, and maybe that a friend could be an enemy or an enemy a friend?
And that’s when Kit started to form a plan.
He turned to Eeni. “Remind the rest of the Moonlight Brigade to rest up, because tomorrow night we go back to the zoo!”
“You look like you just had one of your big ideas,” she told him.
“I did,” he said. “Before we get some rest ourselves, we’ve got to chat with an old . . . friend.”
Eeni sighed. She saw Kit’s eyes go through the bakery door across the alley to the windows of the People’s houses and she knew exactly what “friend” Kit meant.
He wanted to talk to his worst enemy, the Flealess leader, Titus.
“I sure hope he doesn’t try to kill you this time,” she told Kit.
“I’m sure he’ll try,” Kit said with a shrug. “But he hasn’t managed it yet.”
“What if he gets lucky?” Eeni couldn’t hide her worry.
“Don’t worry, old pal of my paw,” he reassured her. “I’m a raccoon. I make my own luck.”
Part II
THERE ARE NO ZOO ANIMALS
Chapter Nine
MISNOMERS
TITUS was a miniature greyhound, twice as vicious as he was small, and he was quite small indeed. His People spoiled him, which made him look down on any
animal who wasn’t equally spoiled, and most of all he looked down on the Wild Ones, who lived free in the alley behind his home. He’d tried to destroy them over and over but he had failed every time.
Titus blamed Kit for all his failures, so it was no surprise that he began barking the moment Kit scratched at the rear window of his house.
His People, however, were deep sleepers and didn’t stir at his alarm.
“They’ve gotten used to your yapping,” Kit said, loud enough for the dog to hear through the glass. “Maybe it’s time you learned some new tricks. Although maybe you’re too old to learn anything new.”
“Go away, Kit,” Titus snarled. “I’ve got nothing to say to you!”
“Come on, Titus,” Kit taunted him. “You can do better than that. Or have you gotten soft in your old age?”
“Soft! Old!!” Titus snapped. “I’m tougher at nine than when I was a pup and I could tug your tail off if I wanted to!”
“Nine!” Kit scoffed. “I didn’t think dogs could even get so old! Then again, you do look like a dog on his last legs . . .”
“How dare you insult me, you flea-filled sack of worm meat!” Titus replied.
“Well, you’re a shampoo-stinking leash lover!” Kit taunted, which made Titus howl furiously, just like Kit wanted.
The lights in the house snapped on and a tired-looking Person stumbled to the door, muttering something. Kit hid himself as the door was cracked open to let Titus out.
Titus charged into the dark, barking, and the Person vanished back inside.
“Say that to my face, Kit!” Titus barked. “I’ll turn your head into a chew toy!”
“Whoa, calm down.” Kit held his paws up in surrender. “I don’t want to fight. I just want to talk to you.”
“Well, I don’t care for talking,” Titus growled, and lowered his head, preparing to pounce.
“I thought you’d say that,” Kit told him, then whistled his signal to the rest of his gang.
The Wild Ones--Great Escape Page 5