Mousenet Read online

  Copyright © 2011 by Prudence Breitrose Illustrations copyright © 2011 by Stephanie Yue

  All rights reserved. Published by Disney • Hyperion Books, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Disney • Hyperion Books, 114 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011-5690.

  ISBN 978-1-4231-5459-4

  Visit www.disneyhyperionbooks.com>

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  For Henry, Charlie, and Becky

  There have been many milestones in the history of Planet Earth, like when the dinosaurs went extinct, and ice ages came and went, and the ancestors of humans first stood on two feet. Then there was that afternoon in Cleveland, Ohio.

  The crucial moment came in a cluttered garage, where a big man with a shaggy beard invented strange gadgets under the gaze of a row of watchers on a high windowsill.

  And that afternoon, the watchers were in despair.

  Their inventor had finally started to make something they could use—something that could elevate them from a hole- dwelling, crumb-hunting species to one that could rule the world.

  Then he stopped.

  “The computer!” they yelled at him. “Finish our computer!”

  But they yelled in sign language, and the inventor didn’t see them, and wouldn’t have understood if he had seen them, so yelling didn’t help.

  They could only watch as the human turned the computer over in his massive hands.

  “Way too small for my fat fingers,” he mumbled. “Oh well, I can use the parts for other things.”

  The watchers held their breath as the inventor reached for the tiny screwdriver that would pick the world’s smallest computer apart.

  And they almost turned blue when he stopped with the screwdriver in midair.

  “Wait a minute,” he muttered. “I’ll keep it for the wild child!” And he gave a rumbling laugh that made his beard shake. “I’ll keep it for Megan. She can have some fun with it.”

  As the watchers breathed again, the inventor parked the unfinished computer at the back of his workbench, turned out the lights in the garage, and went off to bed.

  When he was safely gone, the Captain of Clan 1578 led his group down from the windowsill to gather on the workbench. He was aware of a dozen pairs of eyes fixed on him, waiting for his wisdom.

  “What did he mean?” asked one member of the clan. “What’s a megging?”

  “And are there really wild children out there?” asked another. “Young humans who have never been tamed?”

  “A few,” said the captain, not wanting to admit that he had no clue. “Mostly meggings. Take your positions, guys. We’d better e-mail the boss about this one.”

  Twenty-five years before this story starts, the watchers wouldn’t have recognized a computer if it bit them in the foot. Back then, mice didn’t know about anything much, except how to avoid cats, hide from humans, and hunt for Cheerios in the houses where they lived.

  Then came the big breakthrough.

  It happened in Silicon Valley, California, where hundreds of computer companies were just starting up. And these companies were different. The people who worked there were young guys who wore jeans instead of suits, and often ate food at their desks. Some of them didn’t mind the fact that their leftover food attracted mice. Some of them even let the mice watch them work, day after day, week after week, month after month.

  And that’s all it took. After months of watching, the mouse minds sprang to life, recognizing first one word on a screen, then another, then more, until in time these first mice learned to read and write well enough to use computers themselves. They taught their friends, who taught their friends, and soon mice throughout the world had their own version of the Internet, carefully protected by passwords from prying human eyes. Now mice could e-mail each other, and write their opinions in mouse blogs, and post news about themselves on MouseBook, and check facts in Whiskerpedia, and take online courses on nutrition and safety and human behavior and world events.

  But there was a problem.

  Using human computers was a pain, and if there was a cat in the house, forget about it. There was no way mice could take their rightful place as the second most important species on the planet unless they had computers the right size—computers they could use in privacy behind the walls.

  When Cleveland Clan 1578 first saw the world’s smallest computer emerging on their inventor’s workbench, they had e-mailed the news to the leader of the Mouse Nation, known behind his back as the Big Cheese. And the Big Cheese had been very excited indeed. But now they had to tell him that the little computer would be given to a wild megging who would probably hurl it across the room or stomp on it or flush it down the toilet.

  The captain sighed, because who knew how the boss would react to such bad news?

  “Ready?” he said. “Let’s get this over with.”

  It wasn’t easy to use a big desktop like the one on the inventor’s workbench. The two strongest mice balanced on top of the monitor, holding strings that were tied around the bodies of the two smallest, who swung out over the keyboard so they could land on different keys in turn. Two other members of the team pushed the computer mouse, while another rode on top to click it. Still others were ready to jump on the space bar, or the keys for “Enter,” “Shift,” and “Delete.”

  The captain stood in front with a drinking straw, pointing to the key that someone should land on next.

  Dangling, jumping, and clicking, they wrote out their message:

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: Our Computer

  Inventor has stopped working on computer and will give it to a megging, which we believe to be a wild female child.

  When the message was finished, the captain gave the signal to send it, hoping he looked more confident than he felt. Would the Big Cheese blame him if the computer fell into the hands of a megging?

  At Headquarters in Silicon Valley, a mouse from the Information Technology Team brought up the captain’s message on the Big Cheese’s computer and watched nervously, because you never knew. The boss had a quick temper, and if he got mad at you, it could shrivel your whiskers big-time. But he did not look too upset at the news.

  “Bring in the Google team,” he said.

  When his best Googlers had arrived, the Big Cheese set them to the task of finding out more about this wild child. First they dealt with the problem of the name, and found that the closest human name to me
gging was Megan.

  Next they Googled “Megan” and “wild” and “Cleveland” together, and got a big hit—a newspaper story that had run in the Cleveland Plain Dealer the previous week:

  CHILD IN THE WILD

  Megan Miller, 10, and her mother, Susie Miller, have spent two years on the island of St. Hilda in the Atlantic Ocean, where Susie Miller does research on wild sheep in a changing climate. She says: “Living in the wilderness wasn’t easy for Megan at first, but now she’s almost wild herself!”

  The pair will be returning shortly to Cleveland, where they will reside with Ms. Miller’s brother, the inventor Mr. Fred Barnes.

  And there was a photograph showing a snowy landscape, with a girl-child all bundled up against the wind as she pulled sheep wool off some thorn bushes. The caption read:

  Megan Miller, age 10, gathers wool that she and her mother will spin into yarn to make warm sweaters.

  The Big Cheese did the slow pirouette that is the mouse equivalent of a huge smile.

  “Bingo,” he said, in the silent language mice use. “You are ours, Megan Miller, age ten. Together we will make history.”

  It was mid-August when the mice on the windowsill got their first good sighting of the megging. She burst into their garage like a blaze of light, looking very wild indeed as the afternoon sun lit up her red hair, glinting off the front part that stuck straight up while two braids trapped the rest of it.

  “Hey, Megan!” said the large inventor, holding out a bag of the chips he always kept around. “How was the doctor?”

  “Great,” she said, taking a handful of chips, “if you like needles.” She showed him the Band-Aids on both arms. “He said I had to get two shots before they’d let me into fifth grade.”

  “Ah, fifth grade,” the man said. “Bet you can’t wait.”

  Megan sighed. “Know what, Uncle Fred? I can wait. I’m so out of it! There were some kids in the waiting room, and I had no clue what they were talking about. And they kept staring at my hair like I was from outer space.”

  She batted at the front part of her hair, which had stood straight up in front ever since her mom decided to cut it short all over, but stopped when she realized she was doing a really, really bad job.

  “Not your fault that your mom gave you a bad haircut,” said her uncle. “And don’t worry about school. You have two weeks to get ready, right? Plenty of time for me to tell you what’s hip, so you’ll be up to speed. And another thing…”

  He paused and reached for the tiny computer while the mice on the windowsill leaned forward so far that they were in danger of falling off.

  “How would you like to be the coolest kid in the school,” he asked, “with the smallest computer in the world?”

  He held it out to show her.

  “Wow!” she said, poking at it. “Does it work?”

  “It will if you help me finish it,” he said. “My fingers are kind of big for this sort of thing. Hey, wipe that chip grease off your hands, and let’s get started.”

  Neither of them noticed a row of mice on the high windowsill, all doing slow, happy pirouettes.

  The Big Cheese had e-mailed:

  Learn everything you can. Observe humans at all times for clues as to their plans and their character.

  So while some members of Clan 1578 were watching Megan and the inventor in the garage, the captain had ordered three others to keep an eye on the full-grown female who had brought the child to this house at midnight.

  The female moved into the inventor’s kitchen that first afternoon, shifting the piles of magazines and DVDs that had been comfortably roosting for years on the table, the chairs, and even the range top. Then she got out her laptop and began to write.

  One brave mouse climbed onto the counter so he could read over her shoulder, hoping to glean some useful information about the wild child. And yes, the word “wild” did turn up, but it was only applied to sheep—special sheep who lived in changing climates. Not to meggings.

  The mice felt more hopeful about picking up clues to the megging’s wildness later that afternoon, after the big female had spent some time doing things to food that they’d never seen happen in this kitchen—slicing, steaming, chopping, mixing. When the girl and her uncle came in to eat, the mice looked anxiously at their inventor to see how he’d react, because the dishes that the big female had put on the table didn’t look at all like his usual dinner, which tended to be either delivered or thawed.

  But all the inventor said was, “Lucky us! Two vegetables—no, three—and salad!”

  And the girl just said, “Wow, Mom.”

  The big female laughed. “Didn’t know I had it in me, did you? I got a bit carried away, having a whole kitchen again—not just that wood stove. Get some water for us, will you, Meggy?”

  Megan found some glasses and started filling them, though it took a while because she kept turning the faucet off and on, marveling at it.

  “No water in the cabin, huh?” asked her uncle.

  “Not in it,” said Megan. “But just outside, in the creek.”

  “So no showers?” he asked.

  “Sure we had showers,” said his sister. “Right, Megan? In the waterfall.”

  “And the rain,” said Megan. “Remember, Mom? That great storm when we washed our hair?”

  The mice watching from the crack beside the range looked at each other. Was that what made humans wild? When you took away their plumbing?

  Their inventor was talking as the humans sat down to eat. “Well, welcome to Cleveland, land of faucets. Bet you’ll love this city, Megan, like your mom and me did when we were growing up.”

  “I dunno,” said Megan. “I think it’s trying to kill me.”

  “True,” said her mother, with a smile. “We had an adventure on our way to the clinic. Megan had forgotten about traffic, hadn’t you, my love? She started to cross the road right in front of a bus. Lucky I was there. You’ll have to be a bit more careful, kiddo, when you walk to school.”

  At the mention of school, Megan drooped.

  “Do I have to go to school?” she asked. “Couldn’t you just keep on homeschooling me? It worked great, didn’t it? I bet I’ve kept up in everything, except maybe fractions.”

  “Oh, those fractions.” Her mother laughed. “All our stuff came up from the coast on a mule,” she told her brother. “Including Megan’s textbooks. One day he sort of lurched and the math book fell into the creek. Some of the fraction pages stuck together and we never did get them all apart.”

  “We had a deal,” said Megan. “Me and that mule.”

  Which made the full-grown humans laugh loudly, but puzzled the mice because, as far as they knew, they were the only species (apart from humans) who could make deals.

  “On homeschooling,” Megan’s mom was saying, when the laughter stopped, “the short answer is no. For one thing, I have to finish my paper on those sheep. Did I tell you, Fred? That Megan kept track of statistics for me, like rainfall? We have wonderful data, but it will take a while to write it all out. And I have to look for my next job. Another thing—you need to get socialized, young woman. A couple of months ago you said it would be great to go to a real school, remember? Make friends?”

  “Seemed like a good idea at the time,” mumbled Megan.

  “And it’s a great idea now,” her mom said firmly. “You’ll love fifth grade. I know it. Now, tell me what you two are working on, in that garage.”

  The listening mice leaned forward to catch every word as the inventor and the girl described the little computer, which they said should actually be finished sometime next week.

  That gave the captain something to put in the daily report that the Big Cheese had demanded, even if he still had no clue what might happen to the computer if and when the wild child got control of it.

  The humans soon fell into a routine. While Uncle Fred went to the computer shop, where he worked in the mornings, Megan and her mom sometimes shopped, sometimes did laundry, but mostly
worked on the sheep paper. Megan would read out figures from the data she’d collected, while her mom wrote them into her laptop.

  In the afternoons, Megan’s mom usually went out looking for a job, while Megan and her uncle worked in his garage—which Megan thought might just be the coolest place on earth.

  It wasn’t like any garage she had ever seen. Uncle Fred had decorated one corner with big old pictures of himself playing football for Ohio State, and furnished it with comfortable chairs and a popcorn machine. He also had a stack of science fiction movies to watch when he took breaks. Actually, he claimed they weren’t really breaks, because the movies gave him great ideas for things to invent—like the remote-control ant-zapper he’d made after watching Planet of the Ants.

  The ant-zapper wasn’t going to make his fortune, he said, because it could only zap one ant at a time, and it usually missed. He’d hung it from the ceiling on a piece of fishing line, with the corpses of other inventions that hadn’t quite worked out, like the electric eyebrow tweezers that could give you a nasty shock, or the telephone in a barrette that sounded as if you were talking underwater.

  One day Megan’s mom came into the garage to see where Megan spent so much of her time. It was late afternoon, and a ray of sunshine penetrated the dusty window, making the fishing line glow like spider silk as the inventions spun gently in the draft from the open door. Megan thought they looked magical, but her mom wasn’t so sure.

  “Those tiny things you invent,” she said that evening, ladling a second helping of lentil soup into Uncle Fred’s bowl, “they’re cute, but everything is so small. I can’t help wondering…”

  “Let me guess,” said her brother. “When am I going to hit it big?”

  “Well, I’ve been waiting,” she said, laughing. “Ever since that perpetual motion machine, remember, when you were six?”

  “Yeah, well, not my fault the hamster got tired,” he said. “I’ve learned a few things since then. And the computer will work, right, Megan?”

  “Right,” said Megan. “And I’ll get half the profits for my college fund.”