Through the eyepiece of a telescope, a rat with would-be-sharp sight (and little else to recommend him) watched a motley collection of ships cross Thorn Lake.

“I still think we shoulda blown their nice new volunteers up on the water. Just like skimming cream off the top.” He curled a lip and twisted at a metal ring, but the image remained a hopeless blur. A short distance away, Geegaw cocked his head to the side, listening to the squeaky ‘scope and chuckling.

“What have you got to laugh about?” the Commander grumbled suspiciously, keeping well back in the shadows of their hidey-hole high up a cliff-face. A few others, farther back down the tunnel, set down the spherical bulk of Geegaw’s contraption. They handled it very gingerly—it was loaded this time, and if it went off in such close quarters there wouldn’t be anything identifiable left.

“Can’t see a thing, sir,” the other rat squinted. “A lot of activity, but I can’t get any detail out of this.”

“Try sticking it up your—urk—” choked Geegaw, as the Commander closed a paw around his throat and squeezed. He tried to kick, but his tormentor pinned his bad leg with one knee and pressed harder. Something in the leg went *ping* and would probably be of no further use.

“Another little mechanical mishap? And who do we thank for this?” hissed the Commander. Controlling pressure, not crushing pressure. Not yet. Still need this one for a few hours. “Has our blind guest touched that telescope?” he snapped over his shoulder.

“I’ll take that as a ‘yes’, then. ALWAYS be watching this one. Remember, what is Stevens watching these days?”

It was an old rhetorical question by now, but the Commander was still known to get angry if he didn’t get the answer.

“He isn’t watching nothing ‘cept his l-lunch through a s-straw,” stammered the lookout, instinctively covering his neck. “Poor old Stevens…”

“Remember that, any time you start to think this old fellow looks harmless,” the Commander released his grip on Geegaw, who sputtered and wheezed.

An end. The end. It was almost all he could think of, and it drove the other thought—yes, the other thought—out of his head. A good spot of revenge clears the mind effectively, but vengeance, ah, vengeance—

Turner had come lumbering down the ladder one day not so long ago with a miniature tape recorder, some notes in clumsy Braille and a couple of sketches to describe. With one of the Commander’s black-and-silver-garbed confidantes keeping close watch on them both from above, Turner gulped as surreptitiously as possible and relayed the Commander’s latest request.

“I might as well buy a ticket straight to Hell. You’re kidding,” Geegaw assumed, quite reasonably.

“No, I am not,” Turner assured him, just as reliably.

Geegaw stood up and began limping around in his leg-irons, wearing a groove even deeper into the floor. When he could think straight to speak again, his reply was unprintable, not to mention almost physically impossible and illegal in three states.

Turner sneered for the benefit of the guard. “The Commander thought you might say that,” he growled. “He also thought this might loosen you up.” Oh god oh god oh god, his mind reeled. He’ll never trust me again—

Turner’s razor-sharp index claw skittered around but found the Play button on the mini recorder.

“Help! Please—” Gadget’s tinny, exhausted voice trickled out of the speaker.

“Gadget?” Geegaw whispered in horror.

The recording trailed off into a scream, and less pleasant sounds. Sounds of flesh being struck, cloth ripping, glass breaking, mirthless laughter. The audio was a little bit from here, a little bit from there, a few bruised and hopeless words from Gadget the only narration. The effect was choppy but told enough of a story. She was in mortal hurt.

Unable to take it any longer, Geegaw snagged a wrench from his workbench and made a two-pawed lunge directly for Turner, screaming in rage. Turner caught him with a foot and jammed him back against a corner, scooping up the wrench as it fell from his slack paws.

“They had their whole treehouse wired for sound. Intercom system. We got a lot of good stuff, even some video footage, not that it would do any good in your case,” Turner chuckled, pegging the wrench into a different corner. The guard laughed along above—this was the best entertainment he’d had since the original recording session.

The tape droned on, propped against the wall of the pit. A voice very recognizable as Turner’s boomed out of it, over Gadget’s wordless moans. “That’s better! You’re no fun if you don’t fight!”

“Oh, don’t worry, she’s alive,” the clear and present Turner rumbled, almost a purr. “And you’ll make the … item the Commander asked for, if you want to keep her that way.”

“You monster…” Geegaw struggled under Turner’s massive foot. “What have you done to her?”

Turner bashed at the Stop button of the recorder—it went mercifully silent. He bent closer over Geegaw. “Make of it what you will !” he hissed, desperately praying that his his meaning was understood. “Please!” he whispered.

“Wha—” Geegaw’s whiskers oscillated in confusion.

“The recording, you half-assed excuse for a blind tinker! Make of it what you will!”

“Okay, enough,” grunted the guard from above. “You’ve delivered your message, now come out of there. No idle chitchat with the prisoner.”

“All done here,” Turner glared up at the other rat. “He’ll dig into his new project now, if he knows what’s good for him, and his tasty little daughter.”

Geegaw flung a useless pawful of dirt after Turner as he hustled up the ladder, leaving the recorder, and a pack of evil plans neatly wrapped up on the workbench. Geegaw heard the lid slam shut.

After a couple of quiet minutes, just to be safe, Geegaw had the guts of the recorder laid out carefully on his bench, twists of wire running into places the recorder’s designer had never intended.

Once or twice, running the tape back and forth, Geegaw was sure he would throw up from fear for Gadget. One of those times, he was right, but avoided puking on the electronics.

A particular snippet near the end of the tape had caught his interest, and he wound it back and forth between the tape-heads.

“You’re no fun if you don’t fight!” Rumble, rumble. Gadget shrieking again. Geegaw couldn’t help wincing.

He untwisted a wire and bent closer over the exposed speaker.

“You’re no fun if you don’t fight!” boomed the recorded Turner. After Gadget’s scream, the rumble resolved itself into a few blessed words.

“Live to fight,” Turner was saying, quiet and desperate, so very like Turner’s hurried words to Geegaw himself. Geegaw tapped a makeshift relay and looped the audio like a first-class DJ. “Live to fight, live to fight—”

“Make of it what you will,” Geegaw thought. So, the Growler’s more than a mere messenger boy. “Live to fight,” indeed.

Sounds like an excellent idea, Geegaw grinned grimly in the dark, feeling dangerous for the first time in a long while. Some of these extra parts are sharp.

Geegaw wheezed back to consciousness like a leaky accordion, back in the tunnel with the Commander and his retinue.

“Troublesome old bastard takes longer to wake up every time I put him out,” sneered the Commander, with just the slightest bit of relief that Geegaw had not yet shuffled off this mortal fur. The other rats laughed nervously.

“…may be old…” spat Geegaw, “but at least I’m getting old slow…”

“Shut up!” snarled the Commander. “Dr. Schultz has that taken care of. I’ll be around long after you’ve outlived your usefulness.”

“...so damn...sure of yourself...” Geegaw shook his head, and decided to save his breath.

The rat with the telescope gave up and bashed it against a rock. It tinkled out of the hidey-hole, down the face of the cliff, and sparkled in a little rivulet of broken glass.

“Get back from there! Someone might see you!” barked the Commander. “Bah--we don’t need a closer look at those bumbling fools from Rescue Aid-- we know right where they’re headed.”

The same could not be said of all the strange collection bunched up at the edge of the lake, and dipping an occasional wary paw in it.

Martin was looking doubtfully at the patchwork fleet of rafts and canoes the Rescue Aid delegates were jostling into.

“I’m going to break my promise—” Martin grumbled. “I swore I’d never come back.”

“Don’t know about promises,” chuckled Timothy. “But I think you’ll break a boat…”

It had nearly broken Tina’s heart to see Timothy hobbling and lurching around—up and walking, fine, but he’d need months of physical therapy to stop falling over—so she made sure the Thorn Valley Institute had a wheelchair waiting for him just when he got off the albatross flight. He’d taken one look at the thing and tried to kick it off its wheels. He took a second look and sat down.

A weary Teresa was losing her grasp on Sophie, who was talking nonstop in her excitement and claiming she was perfectly capable of swimming across the lake by herself, thank you very much…

There at the shore, they all sat more or less (Sophie) quietly, waiting as it were for their ship to come in. Bernard and Bianca’s already had; a floating ambulance had whisked the still-unstable pair directly off to the Institute. The new arrivals had come to a bottleneck of sorts, some warily scanning the skies, others straining to get a view of the dropoff across the lake and nearer the Falls, where Devin and Gadget had an easier arrival and less luggage.

“I know I’ll see you guys on the other side of the lake,” whispered Timothy, frowning for a second as Tina made a ‘raise the volume’ gesture with one paw. Sorry, Tina, this ‘deaf’ thing is harder than it sounds, he signed. “It’s just—I know things will be different once we’re back, really back.”

“I know what you mean, I think,” rumbled Martin. “Thorn Valley’s got its hooks in us again, just when we thought we might get out and see the world for a while.”

“We brought some—Sophie, leave the ducks alone!—we brought some of the world back with us,” Teresa pointed out, as Sophie rustled by, flapping a couple of ill-gotten feathers.

“We did sort of go for the deluxe assortment, didn’t we?” smirked Timothy. At the nearby pier, a pint-sized fennec fox in a fez wobbled into his boat, remarking to his rat gondolier that yes, his home country was indeed much drier than this, and no, he did not quiero any Taco Bell.

“I’m afraid all we’ve done is pack them into a tighter can,” Martin sighed. “Barring some spectacular stroke of luck, it still comes down to how badly Group B wants to finish the job.”

“Don’t write off the Guard,” Tina reminded him. “Cynthia’s been busy while we’ve been away, I hear—“

“—probably pulling a bunch of paper-pushers off desk duty and marching them into shape,” Martin said doubtfully.

“Nah. Betcha the only thing he’s ever killed is a pleasant mood. Still,” Timothy shrugged, “maybe he can drag the Guard’s communications kicking and screaming into the modern era.”

Martin shaded his massive brow with one paw. “Well, our Navy must have been doing some upgrading, at least. They’ve pressed Mom into service as a paddlewheeler engine.”

Indeed, flailing toward the shore as Justin and three other oar-rats in Guard uniform tried to correct their zigzag path, Mrs. Elizabeth Brisby-Justin was pulling with all her might at a paddle as tall as herself. She did not wait until the boat was secured, but flung herself into the still-frothy water and clawed her way onto the shore, making a beeline for Timothy.

“Timmy, sweetheart, oh, thank God,” she grabbed his arms and dripped on him.

“Good to see you too, Mom, even with the algae--” Timothy chuckled. “C’mon, help me stand up. I don’t want you giving me one of those reachy-graspy wheelchair hugs.”

Elizabeth dragged him bodily out of the chair and squished her soggy red cape against him. “Timmy, just look at you!”

“Look at me? Parts of me work a little different, but I look pretty much th–“

“—forgive me, Timmy, please forgive me,” Elizabeth pulled back and held her son at arm’s length, as he limped in place a little.

“I sent you into that place, you almost didn’t come out!” she sobbed, wrapping him up again.

“Granpa Justin, Granpa Justin!” Sophie beamed, and rushed to him, latching onto his leg like a limpet mine.

Justin pried Sophie off good-naturedly. “I’m surprised you remember me!” He pulled a rope tight against a tie-line post as the other rowers scrambled off to help load more boats. “You could hardly talk the last time I saw you—”

“You made me an eyepatch and I could only walk in circles,” she reminded him.

“That was fun, wasn’t it?” Justin chuckled, and looked back up at Timothy. “Tim--I heard what you tried to do--what you almost did. You’ve got a lot of your father in you--brains, guts, a complete disregard for yourself when others are in danger--”

He looked up past Timothy and took them all in as a group, short and tall, most of them a little damaged in one way or another, and priceless. “Yep,” he nodded. “Brisbys, the whole pack of you. And it’s good to have you back.”

He put a paw on Martin’s shoulder and looked him in the eye. Don’t even have to look down to do it, either. “No matter what’s passed between us. It’s good to have all of the Brisbys back.”

“I’m not a Brisby, not yet,” Tina reminded him. “And you’d need Cynthia here for the group portrait.”

“You forget I’m not a photographer,” Justin chuckled. “With a tapestry, I could put Bigfoot in the picture and make it look good.”

“We see Bigfoot more often than we see Cynthia anyway,” shrugged Timothy. “Even if there is a little bit of resemblance…”

“Be kind, Timothy,” Elizabeth chided him. “She’s not here to defend herself, but she’s out defending all of you.”

“She wanted to be here to meet you, but security preparations are taking longer than we thought. She swears she’ll be at the signing ceremony tonight,” Justin put a paw over his heart.

“Ceremony?” groaned Timothy. “Can’t they wait until everybody’s settled in?

“Consider it an official welcome for Rescue Aid,” sighed Elizabeth. “Besides, we can’t have all the delegates stumbling around Thorn Valley without watching our little orientation film.”

Martin winced, Teresa putting a questioning paw on his shoulder. “Oh, God, mother… not ‘Don’t Wander Off And Get Eaten, The Musical’?”

“Fifteen minutes of practical advice never hurt anyone,” Elizabeth narrowed her eyes at her gargantuan son.

“Water under the bridge,” Justin got in edgewise. “And we’d better get water back under all these boats, or we’ll be late to the ceremony ourselves.”

Almost before they realized it, the band of Brisbys were broken up into manageable chunks and shooed onto separate boats. Timothy, for one, was afraid his boat itself was going to break up.

“Are you sure this is technically a boat?” Timothy cautiously rapped the side of the oversized but rather crowded canoe. “I see popsicle sticks.”

Roger, the Thorn Valley shipmaster, looked back over his shoulder and shrugged. “We only use them for patching up holes, Mister Timothy.”

Timothy blinked hard, trying to read Roger’s lips. Tina tapped Timothy on the shoulder and made an “eyes here” gesture, then translated Roger’s answer. “Great,” Timothy nodded along with her signs, and signed back at her. Oh. This boat’s had holes in it before. We’re only over the deepest part of the lake, that’s really useful information.

“I’m sure it’s a fine boat,” Tina said for Roger’s benefit. “And passengers can read the little jokes printed on it, to pass the time.”

Ship of fools, ship of jokes, signed Timothy, not comforted at all. He shifted uneasily on one of the popsicle-patched sections and did a double-take.

Roger laughed and shook a little lakewater back at Timothy from his oar. “Funny, innit? Didn’t you ever wonder what always happens to the winning ones?”

Tina’s smile dropped a bit as she looked out across the lake to the distant cliffs above one of the rivers that ran into it. A light glinted twice, and did not show again.

“What, out there?” Roger squinted, gesturing with the oar. “Probably just a shiny rock in the sun. We don’t go out there much. Best mention it to Arthur and Cynthia anyways, they’ve got the whole Guard checking and closing tunnels leading off from the caves. Opening a few, too,” he added, scratching his head quizzically.

“They run that far out?” Timothy whistled. It felt funny to whistle and not hear it. “Never heard of tunnels running out under the lake. It’d be a mess if the lake drained into them.”

“I’d be out of a job,” nodded Roger, grinning happily. “Landlocked! Marooned!” His grin fell like an interrupted soufflé as he thought it over. “Nah. I used up all my luck a long time ago. I’ll die with a paddle in my paws and sink straight to Davy Jones’ locker.”

“Screw you, Cap’n,” smirked Timothy. “You’ll retire to Phoenix. You’ve got the brochure.”

Tina half-smiled, glad to see Timothy was back in slightly grating form, but couldn’t help thinking about the light in the cliffs. A signal? Light on sharp metal? It would bug her until someone went to check, probably wake her up at three the next morning—maybe she’d have to go and check for herself to get any peace of mind. But not alone, no, never alone.