The noise was deafening, like a fire alarm at one of the kids' schools if you had your ear pressed to the bell—only everywhere. I wrapped my arms up the sides of my head and waited for the siren to stop.

It didn't. It wailed on and on.

I looked to Piper. She'd tucked deeper into her steel egg chair, face bitter.

Only our new cellmate, Yves Pomeroy, rose with the noise.

"The alarme primaire!" he cried. "I cannot believe! I thought never again in my lifetime would I hear it."

He canted his ear as though he were appreciating Beethoven's Fifth.

I asked over the screech, "What's the alarme primaire?"

"It means the building has been breached! There is but one explanation: Roche Rivard is under attack!"

Now his excitement caught to me because I knew exactly who must be responsible. Quaid and Durwood. It had to be them. I didn't know how, or where, or have the faintest idea what their plan was.

But I knew it was them—and that we needed to roll.

"This is it, we go!"

On my word, Piper was out of her chair, fetching the mechanical insect from where she'd hidden it behind the toilet. She detached the tail-controller and got it aloft. I hurried to watch the terminal display over her shoulder.

Yves's expression was dumbstruck as the insect skittered below the ceiling, out of our cell and into the oubliette lobby.

The guard noticed nothing, typing busily at his computer. Did he know what to make of the alarme primaire? Was he trying to disable it?

We lost sight of him as our insect veered from the lobby, down a hallway we'd scoped out in advance. Piper worked the joystick with a steady, practiced thumb, guiding, the insect skimming below the ceiling, farther, farther...

"There!" I said, pointing.

Piper had already seen and begun backtracking, spinning the insect around and aiming its eyes/camera at the object.

It was a carafe of some sort, a beaker-shaped vessel sitting in a cutout of the limestone wall. Before it had seemed to have water inside, but now it looked empty.

Piper said, "Do it?"

I nodded.

She jabbed her thumb forward, accelerating the insect toward the carafe. The carafe got bigger in the terminal screen, then very big, then everything turned black.

From our cell, we heard the crinkle-crunch. I hurried to the front of our cell to check the guard. He'd left his computer and was turning the corner, moving toward the sound of broken glass.

"He bit!"

Piper dropped the controller in her egg chair and joined me at the cell glass. I slicked my hand along the glass, waiting for the feathery red pentagram to show itself. A moment later, it did—the spot where you needed to press for entry or exit—and I aligned my palm and fingers.

The security sensor, disabled at the insistence of Leathersby and others annoyed by its frequent malfunctions, flashed green. The cell unlocked. I pushed through.

Piper cut her eyes back. "We taking the oldster?"

I looked at Yves scrambling after us, fighting his palsy. "I think so. We might need him."

We sprinted through the lobby. Prisoners in other cells were clutching their ears against the alarm. One man laid naked on the ground, butt up, squirming as though to escape into the floor.

I kept my eyes forward and feet quiet as possible. A few others must've known the palm readers had been disabled, and I didn't think we should advertise the fact that we were choosing this exact moment to exploit the weakness.

You've seen those kids' movies where all the dogs escape from their evil Animal Control captors? Karen loves them—she'll hop up to her knees and yell at the nice doggies to, "Run, run away!"

This isn't one of those movies. Springing these prisoners? Not a feel-good moment.

At the empty guard station, Piper pivoted for the limestone hallway.

"No," I said. "Not yet."

I stood a step into the darkest, longest tunnel in the oubliette.

Piper said, "We gotta move. You said yourself."

"I know, I know—we do. But first we have to try."

I bulged my eyes meaningfully. Piper sighed.

She did follow, and so did Yves Pomeroy—though he quickly fell behind, unable to keep up the pace. We scampered down the dim tunnel, deadening our footsteps the best we could, relying on the alarm's distraction.

It was likely now that we'd have to overcome the guard. He would investigate the glass, sweep it into a bag maybe, then return to his post. We wouldn't be able to slip by to the bowels—like we could have if we'd gone just now.

Still, I believed this was right.

A healthy hike later, we reached the end: a thin, oblong window. I laid my palm into a reader mounted in the limestone. The cell door opened. Piper and I walked forward into sickly yellow light. A figure was shriveled in one corner beneath either rags or a blanket.

Is it moving? Are we too late?

Piper and I approached the figure cautiously, as though it could be booby-trapped, filled with explosives or a den of tarantulas.

"Mon dieu!" came a voice behind.

Yves Pomeroy had caught up. He rushed forward now, unsteady on old legs, and hunched beside the figure.

"Henri, you live!" he said. "What have they...how did this...why...why?"

He wept and clawed the air beseechingly.

I said, "No time for that."

I dropped to my knees with the two Rivard pioneers. Ninety seconds, I thought. If he can't tell us in ninety seconds, we have to bolt.

Henri Rivard was sleeping, or dead, or in a coma—it was hard to tell. A dingy beard reached halfway down his chest. His feet were unshod, cracked.

Yves shook him by what could've been shoulders until his eyes opened.

"Henri—can you hear? It is me, your great ami!"

The wasting man gradually began tracking Yves's face. He registered the merest shock, then a warm smile spread his lips.

Then, with the scorpion's wherewithal, he ticked his eyes up to me.

I wasted no time. "The Great Safe—where is it? What level? How do we get there?"

Yves reared up at the question—at the audacity of our plan, which we hadn't told him about. Henri's eye glazed back to some inward, unreadable place.

"Let's beat it," Piper said, "Ain't nobody home."

I had to agree. Henri showed flashes of recognition but didn't have the stamina—or comprehension?—to carry on a conversation. How much of this had grown out of the mental deterioration begun when he was still CEO of Rivard? And how much owed to his treatment here?

How does Fabienne Rivard sleep at night?

Yves insisted, "Give him time! He has been rotting here who knows how long? He deserves time to—"

"No," I said. "From what I've heard, he doesn't deserve anything—and we have no time to give anyway. Escape is our first objective. The kernel is just a bonus, if—"

"Shaaaaafft."

The interruption was barely audible over the bleating alarm. Piper, Yves, and I all bent to Henri, who grimaced from the effort of speaking.

"Shaft?" I said. "The inner shaft, you mean? The Great Safe is in the inner shaft?"

He managed a slight head shake. "Elevator. B—bottom shaft."

His hands clutched his throat as though these words had parched his throat of its last moisture.

The bottom shaft? I thought back that lowest elevator, its car dangling in the irregular void. Quiet. Damp. Fathomless. So very black.

"The Great Safe is underneath the third elevator shaft?"

Henri Rivard bobbed his head.

"But that's—how deep does it..." I tried remembering, visualizing. "How would get down there?"

Using two gnarled fingers, the old man simulated a running jump.

Piper said, "Hell no. I'm supposed to dive into some hole because some evil mastermind says so?"

Yves Pomeroy quivered with excitement. "No, no—it is brilliant! He is brilliant! Below the bowels, one reaches the water table. The greatest secrets encased in water, of course!"

I said, "So you swim to the Great Safe?"

Henri joined his hands and, weakly, split them in a breaststroke pantomime.

"Hell no," Piper said again.

I rubbed my eyes hard. The idea of retrieving the kernel was tantalizing, but I wasn't wild about diving blind into an underground reservoir—then swimming for who knew how long, then facing whatever else security Rivard had around the Great Safe. Swinging scythes? Killer bats?

"We don't have to decide now," I said. "Let's get out of the oubliette first. We need to surprise that guard—if he sees we're gone, he'll be ready for us."

Piper and I stood to go. Yves tried boosting Henri by his elbow.

"No chance," I said. "He's gotta stay, he'd slow us way down."

"We must save him!" Yves said. "Look, his condition is beastly!"

"Yeah, but he dreamed this place up himself." I looked around the the chamber's unseen corners. "What goes around comes around."

Yves protested further, but even Henri seemed to understand the impossibility of joining us. He patted the cheek of his friend.

"Go," he croaked. "Bon chance."

Yves kissed the wrinkled fingers. "I will never forget the Rhône valley. Spreading jam over fresh baguettes with those twins, the farmer's daughters of tremendous breasts and eyes from Heaven..."

Henri smiled at the memory.

"Oh, spare me the sexual plunder," I said. "We're going, Pomeroy."

I led the way back to the oubliette lobby, moving quickly in a stoop. The purple tube lights fizzed in and out. The alarme primaire continued blaring, and now faint rumblings and sharp pops—gunfire?—sounded in the distance.

Reaching the hall the guard had taken to investigate our mechanical insect's broken glass, I stopped. I edged up to the passageway and, exposing just one shoulder and half my face, peered in. I didn't see a guard.

"Damn," I heard behind me.

Piper was looking straight ahead, past me, through the lobby to our cell. A group of people were standing at the entrance, examining the door, eyes roaming to the corners of the empty cell. Fabienne Rivard. Blake Leathersby. Thérèse Laurent.

And behind them, bound and gagged, Quaid and Durwood. Even at a distance, I saw Durwood had been roughed up. His face was half purple, and one shoulder seemed to sag. His hat brim was charred.

The guard was inside the cell, gesturing defensively to Fabienne.

Piper said, "We can get by. They're arguing, let's go."

She began scampering, low to the ground. I opened my mouth to object, but there wasn't time. Anyway, she was right. We needed to hustle.

I hugged the far wall through the lobby, past other cells, past the guard's computer. I saw out the corner of my eye Leathersby holding the insect controller Piper had left behind, twisting it in his hands with a thick expression.

We reached the oubliette exit. It was swinging open. We dashed out to the limestone hall. Before Piper could start uphill or downhill, I grabbed her wrist.

"Wait! We have to help the guys."

"How you figure?" Piper's eyes zipped up the ramp, then down.

"They came for us!" I said.

"And? I don't owe them a thing."

I argued we had to do something—signal to them, leave a weapon they could discover. If they hadn't tripped the alarm, we'd still be captives.

"And if I'd have turned and run the first time I saw 'em," Piper said, "I never would've been here in the first place."

Yves chimed in, "People are not perfect. One accepts the good with the bad."

Piper and I looked at each other.

She said, "Guess he's the expert on that."

Before we agreed on a course, the sound of pebbles rustled interrupted. I flattened myself instinctively to the limestone. Piper joined me. I felt wet moss between my fingers.

The pebble noise followed a slow, halting rhythm. It got closer.

Sue-Ann trotted up.

She carried a bag in her mouth.

"Sue!" I whisper-shouted.

She smiled, even as her whole body crimped toward the bad hip, and dropped the bag at my feet.

I unzipped and looked inside. It was stuffed with weapons—guns, grenades, ammunition cartridges.

"Oh. My. God! How did you even carry this, Sue?"

She kept smiling. Smiling and panting.

Piper said, "This is some weird Benji stuff, but it doesn't change a thing. I'm going."

When she started up the limestone, in the direction of the ground floor and freedom, Sue-Ann unleashed a low, hard howl.

I knelt and rubbed under the dog's jaw. "Aw, Sue. What is it? What do you want?"

She limped one step toward the oubliette, shaky but resolute. She wanted her master.