It was called Soupwater Prison for good reason. From a distance, the swamp that surrounded the concrete fortress looked like pea soup. Up close, the water had a thick, goopy consistency with mysterious lumps floating at the surface. Every so often, one of the lumps moved on its own accord.

“Disgusting,” Madame la Directeur hissed between clenched teeth. Waist-deep in the swamp, she grabbed an overhanging tree branch for balance. A water snake slithered past, leaving a fleeting pattern in the muck. Madame took a deep breath and pushed forward.

That morning, while she was sitting in the prison cafeteria, there’d been a press conference on the prison television. A pink-haired girl had told the world that she possessed an important treasure map. And the girl had said, “If you want your map, Homer, you know where to find me.” A malevolent laugh had risen in Madame’s throat. The Pudding kid wouldn’t be able to ignore the invitation. Revenge was close at hand.

The escape had been so easy. Whoever had designed the prison’s security system had ignored an obvious fact—that the best way to hide is to simply blend in.

Rumpold Smeller the Pirate often used this technique, which is known as camouflage. While searching foreign ports for treasure, he would leave his pirate clothing on his ship and wear whatever the locals wore, even if that meant donning a grass skirt and coconut-husk shirt. When traversing a forest, he’d stick branches into his hat. And while his competitors preferred to sail their pirate ships right up to their victims’ ships and jump on board, Rumpold covered himself in seaweed and swam to his target. This cunning ploy was always successful, for no captain ever pointed to the water and hollered, “All men to battle stations! A pile of seaweed is coming our way!”

While working in the prison kitchen, Madame noticed that the biscuit-mix bags were blue and white, just like the prison pajamas. Biscuits were a staple of the Soupwater diet. The tasteless lumps of cooked dough were fed to inmates at every meal. Breakfast biscuits were drizzled with cold gravy. Lunch biscuits had a slab of ham shoved into the middle. Dinner biscuits came with an extra dollop of cold gravy. The prison warden knew that if people suddenly stopped committing crimes and Soupwater Prison was no longer necessary, he could easily turn it into a biscuit factory.

Hundreds of biscuit-mix bags were emptied each week and tossed into the garbage bin. The garbage truck collected the bin at precisely 3:00 p.m., when the security gates opened. So Madame la Directeur, wearing her blue-and-white prison pajamas, decided to simply blend in.

Once the garbage truck had left the prison yard and was headed over a bridge, Madame jumped. The truck’s engine masked the sound of her splash as she landed in goopy swamp water. She spat out a pollywog and wiped a few more from her face. “Ewww,” she said with a shudder. The prison alarm hadn’t yet sounded, but she knew she had no time to waste. She needed to move away from the road as quickly as possible.

Because her wristwatch had been confiscated by the prison warden, Madame had no way to tell how much time had passed before she reached the first signs of human life—a little shack and outhouse. She stepped out of the swamp and sat on a log. After rolling up her soggy pajama bottoms, she gasped. In the old days, when she’d been a member of L.O.S.T., she’d owned a pair of leech-proof socks. They would have come in handy, seeing as her calves were now covered with leeches. Flicking the fat, blood-filled pests onto the ground, she mumbled to herself, “I will never forget this. I’ll show him. He’ll wish he’d never been born.”

A bucket of paint and a paintbrush sat on the shack’s half-painted porch. Whoever had been painting it was probably taking a break. Trying to muster some dignity, Madame tiptoed past the shack and stopped at a clothesline. Stealing was no problem for her. It was a skill she’d honed over the years, and she’d been good at it—until that rotten Homer Pudding kid got in the way. She snatched a pair of jeans and a cotton T-shirt. Then she changed behind a tree. She’d never worn such garish clothing. She missed her pearls, tailored suits, and designer heels. She picked moss from her hair. How long had it been since she’d had her hair washed, trimmed, and styled at the posh Parlor de Beauty? She stared in horror at her ragged fingernails. How long had it been since she’d had them filed and shellacked at the Fingernail Emporium?

A baseball cap lay on the shack’s front stoop. She grabbed it and pulled it over her wet hair.

She knew she might not make it. When the police learned of her escape, she’d be hunted like a fox. Breaking out of prison was a crime that would add years to her sentence. But she had to try. She craved revenge as a leech craves blood.

Dressed as a “normal” person, she walked down a narrow driveway until she came to a dirt road. She glanced down the road, then up the road, wondering which way to go. An engine hummed in the distance. Then a motorcycle appeared on the horizon, churning up a cloud of dirt in its wake. “Well, this is fortunate,” Madame said to herself. She held out her thumb as the cycle approached.

“You want a ride?” the driver asked.

“Yes.”

“Where to?”

Madame la Directeur slid onto the seat behind the driver and wrapped her arms around his waist. “Take me to The City.”