Hopper's Destiny

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  To my godson, Cameron Thomas. Your adventure awaits!

  PROLOGUE

  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, which had already given 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 seem.

  “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.”

  Th
e 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, keeping 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. 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.

  CHAPTER ONE

  LA ROCHA’S JOURNAL—FROM the Sacred Book of the Mūs

  I, the mystical and revered La Rocha, look down now upon the remains of the once-prosperous city of Atlantia. It has been a fortnight since the battle—a mere two weeks, yet it feels like two thousand years. Below me the city smolders. The factories no longer produce, and the streets no longer bustle with Atlantia’s fortunate citizens, who so recently went about their business, blissfully secure in the guarantee of safety and prosperity.

  Safety purchased at an unspeakable cost.

  The rats who dwelled here were not directly to blame; they were ignorant to all of it. But then, if they never thought to wonder or investigate, do they not share a fraction of the guilt? The Atlantian citizens only knew that their emperor, Titus, had arranged a peace accord with the feral cats that provided the rodents with comfortable lives and untroubled minds. They never bothered to ask the true cost of that peace.

  Now the city is overrun with the refugees who would have been sacrificed to keep the ferals from preying upon Atlantia. These were mice and rats and squirrels and chipmunks found wandering in the subway tunnels by Titus’s soldiers and offered up to the feral queen in exchange for peace. These are the ones who were liberated from Titus’s death camps and have now taken up a precarious residence behind Atlantia’s once-impenetrable walls.

  The rebels acted in good faith when they liberated the camps, but the results are grim. It must be said: they did not think far enough into the future. They were so determined to end the tyranny that they never considered what would happen in the aftermath. Such small crusaders are they! Such high hopes they had! And I count myself among them.

  When this rebellion began, long ago, the goal was for all creatures to coexist in peace. A true peace in which we would aid one another, regardless of our species, as we struggled against the daily strife that comes of being tiny and hunted, or far from home and hungry. Of being loved once and then forgotten, turned out, abandoned. For this is the condition of the poor souls who find their way here, to the belly of the earth.

  At the heart of this campaign was the belief we could learn to refrain from preying upon one another. Alas, I see now that this may have been too much to hope for. Because I have come to understand that even in the presence of justice and fairness, nature overrides all. Hunger must be fed, and nature has designed us so that such instinct and need can rarely be entirely quelled. I have learned that there is no evil in the true course of nature, there is only what must be. We form a living chain, from the enormous humans who dominate the upland world to the most humble creatures among us—rodent, insect, reptile.

  The so-called peace that Titus brokered was self-serving and entirely against nature—animals were taken randomly from this life before nature deemed it their rightful time. There is no denying that to each of us who walks or hops or crawls or slithers upon this earth or under it, there will ultimately come that moment when we must bid our farewells and breathe our last breath. But what form our exit will take is for nature and destiny, not government, to decide. Nature determines what will come and when it will come, and how. That is the great mystery of being.

  Titus upset that fragile balance by attempting to outwit nature, and now all that he twisted and manipulated must be repaired.

  Below me the blare of a horn rips through the smoky silence. I recognize it well. In the past the rebel Firren would use this horn to summon her Rangers in a se
cret call to arms. Now the horn is a warning, and the few rodents who have been scurrying amid the city’s shambles—looting, scavenging, begging—scamper off hastily to conceal themselves behind crumbling walls.

  “Incoming,” a guard’s voice bellows. “Ferals approaching. Seek cover!”

  I watch in horror as one young mouse, who has been hauling a wagon filled with rotting food scraps, freezes in his tracks in the middle of Atlantia’s town square. My heart breaks to see him trembling and unprotected there in plain sight. I wish I could run to him, or at the very least shout out a command for him to run away. But to reveal myself would wreak even more havoc on this forsaken place. I must bide my time and do what I can from the shadows.

  Two feral cats stalk into view. They are new to the tunnels, I am sure, for they still have a sense of upland scruff about them. They must be recent additions to Felina’s ranks; I can see in their eyes that they remember daylight. And this makes them even more dangerous, because beneath their hunger lurks the need to prove themselves.

  The larger of the two felines is reaching out to slam one heavy paw down on the cowering mouse, when from the corner of my eye I spot a flash of silver, a blur of blue and red.

  She is here! The rebel warrior. With her she brings a royal heir.

  And a Chosen One.

  He is the smallest among them, this Chosen One, but he is first to attack. Sword drawn, he barrels toward the startled cats, crying out in a familiar call: “Aye, aye, aye!” He swiftly delivers a warning cut to the larger cat’s hind leg. As the cat yowls and sputters, the petite rebel in her silver cape catches hold of the other villain’s tail and sinks her sharp rat teeth into it. The bitten one hisses and roars.

  Now the royal heir steps forward, brandishing a dagger.

  “I’d really rather not kill you two,” he says. “There’s been far too much bloodshed already. But I will if I must.”

  The larger cat licks a trickle of red from his leg and speaks with an upland accent. “We gotta eat,” he says in his own defense.