The Ever Breath Page 10

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The Ruin’t Letter

  Binderbee Biggby was small—even for a mouse—but he was quick. He’d been posted by the Office of Official Affairs to a nest in the dirt walls of Miss Spottem’s cellar for only two days, awaiting some kind of proof of illegal activity from a suspected jarkman, Artwhip Ostwiser. Binderbee had curled his long, thin tail around himself to keep warm, his small, pink ears perked.

  And finally it had come, in the form of the nearly ruin’t letter.

  He’d waited for the jarkman to leave, then tipped over a wastebasket, with a good bit of effort, and collected the letter. He’d folded it up and put it in his briefcase and run as fast as he could to the Office of Official Affairs, nearly getting trampled by some galumphing kid and an angry mewler along the way.

  And then he’d slipped along the marbled floors, past all the workers in cubicles and under the humming lights. And talked his way past the secretary into Dobbler’s grand gilded office with its mantel adorned with photographs of Dobbler shaking hands with the most venerable of venerables and his chrome microphone that sent out the alerts and warnings heard from the bullhorn speakers throughout the city. Dobbler even had a private washroom with a lock and key.

  And here sat Dobbler himself, the president of the Office of Official Affairs, a strapping man, thickly feathered. Quills peeked out of his suit-jacket sleeves. His nose curved in a hawk’s beak. He sat behind the enormous mahogany desk on a leather-upholstered chair with thick golden casters.

  Binderbee popped open his briefcase and pulled the letter out. He’d gotten here so quickly that the letter was still damp from the chatterbroth tea, and so he had to be careful. “I’ve got something good in here! I can feel it! I just need time to look over the evidence, piece it together a little,” he boasted, waddling in a frantic half circle to get a better angle on the unfolding of the letter. Binderbee was bowlegged, and this gave him an extra swagger that he tried to live up to.

  “We’re hoping you mice will pay off,” Dobbler said, picking his sharp teeth with a swizzle stick. His desk was covered with blueprints. The sight of them excited Binderbee. The Office of Official Affairs was always looking to expand. On the edge of the desk was a plate with only a smear of gravy and bits of soggy bread left on it. Dobbler smiled at Binderbee. “Do you want to see something?”

  “Um, sure,” Binderbee said.

  “Look at that hat on the peg over there.”

  Binderbee turned around and saw the hat. It was a shimmering white fedora.

  “That’s a gift from an old friend of mine from my youth. And watch this!” Dobbler whistled and then lifted his plate and tapped it on the desk. The hat opened in a burst of wings and scattered, then formed a small, quick cloud of locust fairies who swarmed Dobbler’s plate, finishing off his gravy and bread bits, in a buzzing whir, until the plate was clean. Dobbler whistled a second time, and the locust fairies shot back to the peg and became a hat again. “Amazing, isn’t it?”

  Binderbee nodded. “Yes, sir, amazing. But back to this bit of evidence.”

  Dobbler stood and rolled the blueprints up, tucking them under his arm. He patted Binderbee on the head. Binderbee didn’t like that—not one bit—but then Dobbler said, “I have a meeting upland and will be gone for the bulk of the day, but you can use this office. I want you to work until you’ve gotten all you can from this interception! And remember, Binderbee,” he whispered urgently, shaking his meaty fist, the quills quivering, “Us versus Them! The difference is simple!”

  This sent a shiver through Binderbee. He loved to be included in the Us of Us versus Them. Mice had come such a long way—from being on the outside to being in the inner-most world. Here. A mouse in Dobbler’s office, being treated as almost an equal!

  And then Dobbler added in a hushed voice, “I want to take Cragmeal down—no matter what it takes. This evidence had better point in the direction we need it to. Do you understand me? When people get involved with Cragmeal, it’s strange how quickly they can become enemies of the Office.”

  “I don’t know what kind of evidence it will be, sir, until—”

  “You know what kind of evidence it will be, Binderbee. It will be the kind that helps us nail Cragmeal.”

  Binderbee stared at Dobbler. Was this how the Office operated? “I can’t guarantee that, sir—”

  “I’d hate to see a cage with your name on it,” Dobbler said with a smile. “You know?”

  Binderbee nodded.

  Dobbler gave a whistle and the locust fairies flew to him, reforming as a hat on his head. “Darnedest thing, this hat! Amazing!” And then Dobbler strode out of the office.

  Binderbee got down to work. You’re a mouse of science, he told himself. You work for the Office. You’re just doing your job. He pretended that he’d misunderstood Dobbler. Surely Dobbler didn’t want Binderbee to tamper with any evidence, did he? And then Binderbee pretended that the conversation had never happened.

  He set the letter up to dry by the fire in Dobbler’s fireplace. He jumped on the intercom button and asked the secretary to bring in some supplies—including a tincture known for its ability to seek out original ink marks. He’d studied chemistry at Wesslon University of Technology, where he’d graduated at the top of his class.

  By the time the letter was dry, the secretary had delivered the supplies on a silver tray.

  “Thank you,” Binderbee said, but he didn’t even look up, his claws skidding on the shiny surface of Dobbler’s desk. The suspected jarkman had told Miss Spottem that she needn’t apologize for spilling tea on the letter, that it was likely only from his mother and not very important. Indeed! That was meant to throw any spies off his trail. Binderbee knew better. The letter was important. It had to be.

  Binderbee picked up the bottle of tincture, squeezed the rubber head of the dropper, and then cautiously let three droplets fall on the page—two small ones and then one big one. He sat back and gazed at his work. The words bloomed on the page.

  It looked like this:

  Binderbee said to himself, Children are coming? Fixed World protector? Ever Breath has been … stolen? He stared at the letter intently until his eyes felt like they were burning. This letter was even more important than he’d thought. He picked up the tincture again. This time he let a droplet fall at the bottom of the page, and there the signature appeared:

  He’d intercepted a letter—concerning a mission, no less—from Cragmeal himself! Public Enemy Number One! Maybe this was exactly the evidence needed to put Cragmeal away for good—where he deserved to be!

  Binderbee quickly doused the rest of the letter with the tincture until all of it appeared.

  Binderbee’s heart was racing, but he paced slowly around the edges of the letter. He stared at Dobbler’s tall bookcase of leather-bound books—books on Office procedures, laws, accounting, the educational parameters of the Academy, and some sanctioned novels and a few collections of patriotic poetry. Then, trying to see with fresh eyes, he glared at the words on the page. The Ever Breath had been stolen. Cragmeal wasn’t conspiring with enemies. He’d been trying to find the Ever Breath! Could it be that Cragmeal was good?

  As a child, Binderbee would pretend he was surrounded by bad guys—jarkmen, mostly—and had to fight his way out, pretending his tail was a sword. Back then, mice were denied even simple rights. His family, the Elite Biggbys, had to burrow out in the squatters’ fields near the shanties. When someone decided to build a home right over theirs, well, so be it. They could move or the diggers would dig them out. There was even a nursery rhyme about it:

  Mama and Papa going to build a big house.

  A house to the sky,

  A house without a mouse!

  Shoo, shoo, shoo, little measlings!

  Diggers a-coming!

  Shoo, shoo, shoo, little measlings!

  Shoo, little measlings, shoo!

  This nursery rhyme had dogged Binderbee all of his childhood. And now it rang in his head. How ma
ny times had his family been out for an evening stroll only to have some child—no matter what kind—come up and start taunting them with it? “Don’t listen!” his father had always said. “Chin up! You are Biggbys!” And Binderbee had learned to hold his chin up high and not cry, though he’d always wanted to.

  He’d also always wanted to be on the inside, and now here he was. If he tampered with this evidence a little, maybe he’d be promoted. He’d prove to Dobbler he could be trusted. Binderbee clasped his paws, one on top of the other, to stop them from shaking.

  Binderbee looked at his reflection in the shiny mahogany of Dobbler’s desk. He was a Biggby. He knew what he had to do. He pressed the intercom button and asked the secretary to bring him a cup of chatterbroth tea. It was going to be a long night.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Lost Mission

  Truman, Praddle, and Artwhip were stalled in the middle of the bustling restaurant, the death warning crumpled in Artwhip’s fist.

  “What are we going to do now?” Truman asked.

  The small waiter with the pointy ears was the one to take charge. He seemed to change in an instant, his features quickly turning steely, his nervous awkwardness gone. He said with authority and urgency, “Let’s get you out of here.”

  Not knowing what else to do, Artwhip nodded at Truman. Truman scooped up Praddle and the snow globe and, together, he and Artwhip trailed the waiter into the kitchen.

  The place was steamy and smoky. Chefs shouted over the loud sizzle of meat on long, flat grills, stirred frothy pots, and chopped tuberous roots with fast knives. Waiters came and went, carrying their heavy trays.

  Truman looked at the waiters and the chefs. Which one had swapped the baked hen for a broiled rat complete with a death warning? In this confusion it could have been any of them. He hoped that he could find one—just one—wearing a guilty expression. Artwhip was glancing around too. But the kitchen was too fuming, too overrun to be able to tell.

  The waiter led them out another door, turned down a hall, and took them through a storage closet filled with boxes of jars and cans. “What are you doing here, anyway?” the waiter asked.

  “What do you mean?” Artwhip responded.

  “I just don’t know why you’d sit there having dinner with your father! That old dough-fart!”

  “Hey,” Artwhip said. “Watch it!”

  Truman stifled a giggle.

  “It grates my flesh that you can sit there when there’s such an important task to be done. I don’t know why he chose you at all. Look at you! You’ve already gotten a death warning!”

  “I haven’t been chosen for anything. What are you talking about?” Artwhip asked.

  The waiter paused a moment. “Isn’t that boy half of it?” he said, pointing at Truman. “Right there.”

  “Truman?” Artwhip said, arching an eyebrow.

  “Half of what?” Truman asked.

  The waiter shot Artwhip a dirty look. “Right,” he said. “As if you didn’t know!” They came out the other side of the storage closet and passed an open meat locker where a woman stood in the cold mist, holding a chain of frozen chickens.

  “Good day,” the waiter said, in his shy, nervous voice, the one he’d used earlier.

  “Hello, there,” the woman said gruffly, swinging two frozen chickens by their stiff necks.

  Once she was gone from their sight, the waiter looked at Artwhip again and said over his shoulder, “I been in this for five years. You know that? Five years, and not one real thing to show for it!”

  “You’ve been in what for five years?” Artwhip asked, impatient. “And where are you taking us, anyway?”

  The waiter shook his head, disgusted by Artwhip’s stupidity. Finally they arrived at a wide loading door. The waiter opened it to a burst of cold air, and there, down a long alley lined with caged creatures, was a ruckus tent, pulsing with music and noise. “You need to get lost in there,” he told them. “Shake off any trail and then get back to your mission. Collect the other half.”

  “Do you have a mission?” Truman asked Artwhip.

  “I don’t think so.” Artwhip looked at the waiter. “Why should I trust you?”

  The waiter smiled and then bent down and lifted his pant leg. There, strapped to his leg by a leather harness, was a dagger just like Artwhip’s, with a silver hilt in the shape of the snake with flared plumage on its head. A jarkman’s dagger.

  “You’re a jarkman too?” Truman said.

  “Hush,” the waiter said, peering around. “I’m Coldwidder.”

  “I’m Artwhip of Hindman near Toot Hill—”

  “I know who you are.”

  “And I’m Truman.”

  “I know that too,” Coldwidder said, and then he gave a low bow.

  Artwhip looked at Coldwidder and then back at Truman. “What’s that for?”

  “I’d have bowed when I first saw him in the restaurant, but that would have tipped people off,” Coldwidder said. “Don’t you think?”

  “Tipped people off to what?” Artwhip asked.

  Truman was pretty sure this had to do with his father—the King of the Jarkmen. He was nervous. Even though Artwhip seemed to be devoted to Truman’s father, Truman didn’t want to be pegged as the son of Public Enemy Number One. If news got out, he’d have people hunting him too.

  Coldwidder considered Artwhip for a moment, as if trying to gauge whether he was kidding or not. “Don’t you know that he’s the son of Cragmeal?”

  Artwhip gasped. He looked at Truman’s blue pajamas, the handmade shoes and jacket made of leaves, and the snow globe curled in one arm. “The son of Cragmeal?”

  Truman lifted his hand and wiggled his fingers. “Hi.”

  Artwhip ripped off the blue hat, showing his horns, and bowed.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Truman said. “I’m just a kid. An ordinary kid!”

  Artwhip rose. He and Coldwidder smiled at each other.

  “Ordinary!” Artwhip said.

  “Ha!” Coldwidder said.

  “Well, I’m not completely ordinary. I mean, I have medical issues. I have a lot of allergies, and I’m lactose intolerant and I have sports asthma….”

  Coldwidder and Artwhip stared at him, baffled.

  “I don’t follow,” Coldwidder said. “What’s all that you just said?”

  “Never mind.” Truman took a deep breath, one that flowed in and out of his lungs, clean and clear. He was used to rattling off a list of his ailments to teachers and camp counselors and coaches, but none of that mattered here. “Let’s get back to Artwhip. Does he have a mission or what?”

  Coldwidder looked at Artwhip, annoyed by him once again. He threw his hands in the air. “You don’t know? What kind of fool are you? You are wearing the hat,” he said slowly. “That’s how we all can know that it’s you. It was in the note.” Artwhip wore a blank expression. “You have to know! Didn’t you get your note?”

  “What note?” Artwhip said, and then Truman remembered the story of Artwhip’s landlady spilling tea on the letter that had come with the hat.

  Artwhip remembered too. “Oh, no,” Artwhip said. “It was ruin’t. I never read it. Miss Spottem, you see, she only has paws and …”

  Coldwidder stared at him. “Cragmeal,” he whispered. “Your mission is from Cragmeal himself.”

  “Cragmeal himself?” Artwhip repeated.

  “Have you heard from him?” Truman blurted out. “Is he okay?”

  Coldwidder looked around in every direction, and low and high too, just in case there were any mice listening in. He motioned for Artwhip and Truman to lean in close.

  “You’re in charge of Cragmeal’s children,” he whispered to Artwhip. “You’re their guide!”

  “But—but—” Artwhip stammered. “Where was I supposed to find them? This one found me! And I don’t even know where the other one is—”

  “Camille?” Truman said, his pulse racing. “She’s not here. She’s at our grandmother’s house.” r />
  “You’ve got to make it to Ickbee’s in the Ostley Wood,” Coldwidder said. “Ickbee tends the passageway. You’re an Academy boy, aren’t you? Rich kids!” He snorted. “They don’t teach you the truth in that expensive Academy. Only Office of Official Affairs facts and figures. Their own prissy cleaned-up version of things.”

  “I know plenty,” Artwhip said, indignant.

  Coldwidder’s face grew serious. “It doesn’t matter now. You just have to keep them safe.”

  “Cragmeal’s children …” Artwhip was still stunned.

  “You got half of your charge right here. You got to find the other fifty percent,” Coldwidder said. “And fast.”

  “I’ve seen my father in my snow globe,” Truman said. “He’s all bound up in a museum of strange things. And he’s a kid.”

  “In your snow globe?” Coldwidder asked. “Those things are oldfangled nuisances. You could have been looking at something that happened twenty years ago or twenty years from now.”

  Truman glanced down uncertainly at the snow globe.

  “That’s right!” Artwhip said happily. “Maybe I won’t get stabbed today! Maybe—”

  “He saw you get stabbed in a globe? I’d keep in mind that the death warning is pretty fresh. It still smells like the broiled rat it was tied to,” Coldwidder said.

  “But still, are there any museums—dark, spooky ones with chopped-off fingers and dead stuffed creatures?” Truman persisted.

  Coldwidder shook his head. “Not that I know of.”

  “This is what I don’t understand,” Artwhip said. “Why are Cragmeal’s children here now?”