AS THE ASSEMBLY BROKE UP, Lucy and Beckett and Phoenix helped Mrs. P. down from the cleat. Mrs. P. hadn’t been this far from her crate since last summer, and on the way back she got a little unsteady, so her three young friends supported her till she collapsed on her favorite cushion. Phoenix then led Lucy and Beckett into the fromagerie, where he pointed out the tainted wheel of cheddar. Though a piece had been cut out of it, they were still able to roll it into the parlor and out the door. It didn’t escape Lucy’s notice that Phoenix turned his head away and tried not to breathe to escape the smell, and after they dumped the cheese off the dock, she pulled Beckett aside.
“Phoenix shouldn’t have to stay in that fromagerie,” she said. “Since Father’s not home . . .”
Beckett approved the idea. But when they offered Phoenix the spare shoe in their crate to sleep in, he said nothing.
“Are you thinking about New Jersey?” Lucy asked, following his gaze to the lights across the river.
He was. The idea of sleeping in an old shoe had made him think of his comfy nest, just a few trees away from his parents. How he missed them! But even if he could find the bridge Mrs. P. had mentioned and cross it, how could he ever get all the way home? How could he negotiate that vast industrial area with the smokestacks? And if he somehow made it all the way back to his beloved woods, how could he show up looking like this? His parents wouldn’t even recognize him. Giselle wouldn’t nuzzle with him anymore—of that he was quite certain. So what was the point of returning? At the same time, why would he want to stay on this doomed pier with a bunch of rats?
As he was thinking he might have been better off sticking to his resolution to waste away and die, his stomach gave a loud growl.
“Er, is it okay if I bring the nuts over to your place?” he asked.
“You like them?” Lucy said, brightening. “I’m so glad.”
Mrs. P. was snoring when Phoenix tiptoed in to get the nuts. He gobbled down a few, then put on the plastic top and rolled the can over to Lucy and Beckett’s. It was getting late; they had already crawled into their shoes.
“Use that one,” Beckett said, pointing at his father’s.
Phoenix hesitated. The father’s shoe didn’t smell bad, but somehow the idea of it made him squeamish. Plus it looked like it would be a pretty tight squeeze.
Noticing his wavering, Beckett asked where he slept at home.
“In a hole in a tree,” Phoenix said.
“On what?”
“My nest’s mostly leaves.”
Beckett got up and ripped apart a periodical he’d already read, fashioning a nest out of the paper shreds. When Phoenix tried it, he was amazed at how much it felt like home.
“Thanks,” he said, snuggling in. “Thanks a lot!”
They were all tired, and it was nice and dark, yet none of them slept. Lucy was worried about the looming disaster, of course, but at the same time she felt strangely excited. They’d never had a houseguest before. After a while she whispered, “Anyone still awake?”
Beckett and Phoenix both grunted.
“That was so interesting, Phoenix,” she said. “About humans and their electricity. Do you use electricity where you come from?”
“Not exactly,” Phoenix said.
He told them about the pylons in the cornfield near his woods, and about Tyrone getting electrocuted.
“He shorted the grid,” he said.
“Come again?” Beckett asked.
“He shorted the grid. All their lights went out.”
“Maybe . . . maybe we could short the grid here?” Lucy said. “Imagine all those buildings at night with no lights!”
“The humans wouldn’t like it,” Beckett agreed. “But, it wouldn’t do much good unless they knew we were responsible.”
After a moment Lucy said: “What if you told them, Beck? We could take that notice off the door and you could write on the back. Then we could tack it up again.”
The idea of using Mrs. P.’s pen to compose an actual message appealed to Beckett. “But how would we get the notice off the door?” he asked.
“I’ve heard squirrels are good climbers,” Lucy said suggestively.
Phoenix allowed that he might be able to do it. “But first wouldn’t you have to figure out how to short the grid?” he said.
“How did your friend Tyrone do it?” Lucy asked.
“By touching two coils at once. But it got him killed.”
“Would you recognize them if you saw two similar coils?” Beckett asked.
“I suppose.”
“Then our first step would probably be to check out that substation.”
“Oh, let’s!” Lucy said. “But it’s a big building. We’ll need all the help we can get.”
“We can round up a crew in the morning,” Beckett said.
With that settled, Beckett soon dozed off. Lucy lay awake a while longer, wondering if Phoenix was still awake, thinking what a pity it was he’d fallen into their lives at such a perilous juncture. Phoenix was lying awake, too, wondering if she was still awake and thinking how dramatic life with these rats was. But eventually they both must have conked out, for suddenly it was morning.
As early as she thought acceptable, Lucy went to get Mrs. P. her breakfast cheddar and report on their plan. When she returned, Phoenix and her brother were up and about, but Beckett thought she should round up the scouting party on her own.
“We’d make lousy recruiters,” he said. “I’m a wimp, and he’s not even a rat.”
Lucy insisted they go as a team, but Beckett may have had a point. They explained their plan to everyone they met, but they got no volunteers.
“Where’s your beau?” Beckett finally asked. “He might help.”
Junior was with his parents in their topmost crate, serving as a test audience along with his mother for his father’s campaign speech. The speech was stirring, but when Junior tried to take off afterward, his mother corralled him into helping her hang a new postage stamp in the sitting room. It looked perfectly straight to him, but she kept insisting it was crooked. After adjusting it for her a dozen times, he threw his paws in the air.
“I have to go, Mum.”
“Why?” Helen—such was his mother’s name—could never understand wanting to leave their crate. It was such a showplace that she only left it under duress.
“It’s broiling out,” he said. “I want to take a swim.”
“Just a whisker higher on the right,” was Helen’s response.
But he finally escaped—and soon proved Beckett right again. With Junior on their recruiting team they had no trouble rounding up a platoon for their mission. They couldn’t head for the substation till nightfall, however, so Beckett crept off to practice his writing while most of the young rats followed Junior to the dock for an afternoon swim. It was so hot that even Phoenix went along, and he soon discovered that his insides hadn’t changed as much as his outsides. When rats oohed and aahed over a dive Junior did from a piling, he felt just as annoyed as when squirrels had oohed and aahed over Tyrone’s high-wire act. He figured that even if he wasn’t as good a swimmer as the rats, he was a better climber, so he flailed out to a piling twice as high as Junior’s—as it happened, the same one Martha, the pigeon, had landed on—and scrambled to the top. He had to close his eyes before jumping, but he surfaced to a rousing hand.
Now it was Junior’s turn to feel aggravated, and later on, when they got ready to leave for the mission, he objected to Phoenix’s coming along on the grounds that he might be a spy. This amused Phoenix, who had no stake in being part of the ratty expeditionary force. But it exasperated Lucy.
“He’s the only one who knows what the coils look like, for goodness sake,” she said.
With that, Lucy led them all out into the night. The jogging path was deserted, but the West Side Highway was a torrent of vehicles with glaring headlights. When they finally made it across, they slinked along single-file in the gutters and took detours to avoid sidewalk cafés.
A Con Ed truck was parked in front of the substation. Phoenix and the rats huddled underneath it, peering up at the building’s floodlit facade. The substation had gone up in the lavish era of the great shipping lines, and the corners were embellished with ornate carvings. But the doors were closed, and the place looked impregnable as a fortress.
Around the side of the building, however, they found a ventilation grate just above street level. One by one they squeezed into a duct that led right into the power station. The place was enormous: brightly lit and pleasantly cool, housing three gigantic transformers that towered four or five stories high, each with a floor-level control panel manned by a human. Two other humans sat at a table, one eating a gyro, the other staring into a phone. None of them noticed the troop of rodents touring the premises. Lucy kept Phoenix up front with her, but he saw nothing resembling the two coils that had electrocuted Tyrone.
“Well, it was worth a try,” she said when they got back to the duct.
“Where’s Beckett?” Phoenix asked.
No one knew. Lucy frowned and suggested the rest of them wait while she retraced their steps. When she spotted her brother, partway up a tall spiral staircase in a back corner of the place, he gestured for her to come up. The risers were just short enough to be climbable. When she reached him, Beckett pointed to a diagram of the substation mounted under plexiglass on the wall. It indicated that there was another, smaller chamber above this one.
“What’s that say?” Lucy asked, pointing at words written across the upper chamber.
“High voltage area,” he said.
“What’s that mean?”
Beckett didn’t like to admit it, but he had no idea. Lucy looked up and saw that the spiral staircase rose all the way to the distant ceiling.
“Think that’s the way?” she asked.
“Stands to reason. But it doesn’t look like the stairs go through, does it?”
Knowing it would be too much for Beckett, Lucy went to check for herself. It was an exhausting climb, and at the top was a trapdoor that wouldn’t budge.
On the descent she had to feel her way down each riser, hind feet first. By the time she reached her brother, she was totally frazzled. But Beckett had noticed something while she was gone.
“It shows an elevator,” he said, pointing at the diagram.
They climbed the rest of the way down, and he led her to a metal trash can. Peeking around it, they could see gleaming elevator doors. Before long a human in blue coveralls walked up and pressed a button in the wall. The doors swooshed open. The human stepped into a chamber and set down a canvas tool sack he was carrying. The doors closed.
“Not promising,” Beckett said. “They’re unobservant, but even they would notice if we got in with them.”
“Maybe we could use the elevator on our own,” Lucy suggested.
“But how would we get to that button? The wall’s too slick.”
Remembering how Phoenix had climbed the tall piling beyond the dock, Lucy went back to fetch him. But Phoenix needed just one look to know that he could never reach the button unless they moved the trash can over to give him a leg up. Lucy dashed off again and returned with the whole squad. They all put their shoulders to the metal trash can while Beckett counted down from three. On “one,” they all pushed. The can didn’t move a bit.
They slumped back to the duct and made their way outside to the sidewalk, where it felt hot and sultry after the substation. Lucy led them to the front of the building and surveyed the facade.
“Maybe there’s a way in from the outside, up near the top,” she said. “Though it doesn’t look like an easy climb.”
“I got it,” Junior said, marching over to the northwestern corner of the building.
Junior started making his way up the relief carving, which extended all the way to a cornice seven or eight stories up. It was late enough that the sidewalk was free of humans, so the rest of the party stood in a clump, watching. A rat named Emily, who’d been nursing a secret crush on Junior all summer, was sure she’d never seen anyone so agile. Phoenix, on the other hand, thought little of Junior’s climbing technique. There was no natural agility, no lightness of footpad, no deft redistributions of weight. The rat seemed to be clawing his way up, grunting with the effort.
Sure enough, Junior didn’t even reach the level of the streetlamps before his grunt turned to a shriek. When he hit the sidewalk, Emily rushed over and threw herself on him. She was a pretty rat but had a chip on her shoulder because, like everyone in her family, she was very petite—so petite that some suspected a touch of sewer rat. With Junior dead, however, her true feelings conquered her insecurities.
But rats are resilient creatures, and while the fall shook Junior up badly, it didn’t actually kill him. The severest injury was to his pride—though he had to admit that it helped to have a pretty young rat draped over him, weeping.
When Emily felt him stir beneath her, she screeched with gratitude. “Thank goodness! You should never have tried it, Junior!”
Junior grunted with as much dignity as possible under the circumstances. “It’s windy up there,” he said, testing each limb before getting to his feet.
“But nobody could climb all that way!” Emily said, shooting Lucy an icy look.
As other rats agreed, Lucy looked suitably chastened. Phoenix felt a strange impulse to defend her. All she was doing was trying to save their home for them! He peered up at the limp Con Ed Electrical flag dangling high overhead and remarked that it didn’t look windy to him. He stepped over to the corner of the building and started right up.
“It’s too dangerous, Phoenix!” Lucy cried. “You’re not fully recovered yet.”
But in fact, awful as he looked in the compact mirror, his muscles were regaining their spring. His furless tail didn’t make nearly as good a counterweight as his bushy one had, but he adjusted to it and felt a touch of pride as he passed the spot where Junior had lost his grip. Some of the building’s relief work was actually quite deep, making for good paw holds, and there wasn’t a breath of wind. Mainly he had to concentrate on not looking down.
When he reached the cornice, a gratifying cheer wafted up from below, but it was sadly premature. The cornice had two ledges. The lower one wasn’t much of an obstacle, jutting out less than a squirrel-length, but the upper ledge stuck out three times as far. There was no way he could get past it without glue on his footpads.
Arggh! In his haste to show off his skills he hadn’t given a thought to getting back down. How could he climb down backward with all those spectators? Of course, they were just rats. He shouldn’t care what they thought of him. But he could just imagine Junior’s scoffing and Lucy’s disappointment.
Then something caught his eye: a surveillance camera mounted on the opposite side of the facade, just under the cornice’s upper ledge. Maybe he could use it to get up. As he traversed the narrow ledge, he again missed his old tail, feeling like a tightrope walker without a pole. But he made it to the other side—and stretched a paw for the camera.
It was no good. The thing was out of reach. Disheartened, he started back. But in the middle of the lower ledge something else caught his eye. A support wire ran from the tip of the flagpole, which jutted straight out from the building just below him, to somewhere above the cornice.
Though it was only a short drop to the flagpole, gauging the jump meant looking down, and the sight of the upturned rat faces so far below gave him the willies. He tried to narrow his focus to the pole, telling himself that if he missed it, it would be a lot quicker way to go than a hunger strike. But he still procrastinated for a long time, heart thumping, before finally forcing himself off.
He landed safely, if not gracefully. After that, getting to the knob at the end of the pole should have been easy, but again, without his bushy tail, it was harrowing. And once he got there, he found that the reinforcing wire wasn’t even as thick as the power cables over the cornfield back home. He gave the wire a twang. At least it was nice and taut. Feeling the rats’ beady eyes all trained on him, he grabbed the wire—and his squirrel instincts magically kicked in. As he shinnied past the cornice, he felt a twinge in his bad shoulder, but Tyrone himself would have been proud of the way he zipped up the wire.
The wire was attached to an iron staple in the base of a balustrade. There were gaps in the balustrade, and Phoenix squeezed through one onto a narrow balcony. The top part of the building was windowless too, but when he followed the balcony around a corner, he found a hole in the stonework: the end of a pipe used for electrical cables in the days before they were all buried. It led straight inside.
The upper chamber was smaller and dimmer than the lower chamber, and a lot hotter. There were circuits and conductors and crisscrossing wires everywhere, but, luckily, only one human: the man in the blue coveralls, bent over a circuit switch, his face flushed and sweaty as he adjusted something with a pair of pliers. And beyond him—aha!—a pair of humming coils that looked just like the ones that had killed Tyrone, only ten times bigger. Phoenix paused to think. Even if he’d been in a self-sacrificing mood, the coils were too far apart for him to touch at the same time. He looked around. On the floor behind the human was his canvas tool sack, with a promisingly long wrench poking out of it. Phoenix sneaked over and climbed onto the sack. But the wrench was too heavy to budge.
The human cursed and swiveled around. Phoenix dove into the sack headfirst. As he squirmed between a hammer and a voltage tester, the human dropped in his pliers, and when they landed right on the still-tender part of Phoenix’s tail, it was all he could do not to yelp. On the plus side there was an Almond Joy bar in the sack.
He’d finished half the Almond Joy when he heard receding footsteps. Poking his head out, he watched the human go into a closet near the elevator and come out with a pair of needle-nose pliers. The human didn’t close the door, so once he was back at work on the circuit board, Phoenix went to check the closet himself. One side was devoted to brooms and mops and cleaning materials. The other side was all tools, including a level. The level looked long enough to make contact between the two coils, and it was light enough that Phoenix was able to push it gently out of the closet and hide it behind a bank of conductors.
With the human at work Phoenix figured he would have to come back tomorrow to try to short the grid, so he returned to the pipe and scooted out to the balcony. The cooler air felt nice, and sliding back down the wire to the flagpole was almost fun. But when he got back to the end of the cornice and sneaked a peak down, his heart sank. The rats were all still on the sidewalk, waiting and watching—leaving him in the same predicament as before. Climbing down the stonework headfirst would be too terrifying, while climbing down tail-first with all those beady eyes on him would be too humiliating.
He was stuck up there.