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investigator coming. She needed her old sharpness back.
    Still, she followed the smell to the living quarters instead of heading for the lab. She pressed her eye against the grate. The grate was high up, twice as high as in the boy’s room. The door into the lab section was shut tight. The scientist sat at a table with a square pan in front of her. The pan held something yellow as the sun, whose surface heaved and cracked, patterned like sunspots. Rat detected egg and milk and corn and sugar. Raw and cooked.
    On a counter along the wall rested a bowl with a coating of pale yellow stuff clinging to it. The raw smells came from the bowl. There was a stove. In the lab, the scientists used stoves to heat things. Rat made the connection. This scientist mixed and cooked her own food, something Rat had never seen before! It smelled better than anything the boy had ever brought from the food machines.
    The scientist cut a square from the pan, split it, and slathered it with butter. Rat nearly swooned at the fresh rush of smells. The scientist took a bite, and her cheerful voice spilled out through the crumbs. “Oh, Lordy, Bett, this cornbread is to die for!”
    How Rat wanted those crumbs!
    Stupid thoughts.
    She would never get any. Not from a scientist.
    Rat hurried back along the air shaft to the lab.
    Rat peered through the grate into the lab. What about the boy? Was he here somewhere? She could not see him. She sniffed. There was too much air in the room to tell for sure: Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. It did not matter. She did not need his help.
    A puddle of red light glowed in the center of the darkened room. The dimness reminded her of the Rodengenics lab after hours, when all the scientists had gone away, leaving her alone with the red glow from the EXIT sign.
    Where did they go and what did it mean, that word EXIT? Rat wondered and wondered until the day one of the scientists made a mistake. He brought Rat into his office and set her cage on the windowsill. There, for the first time ever in her whole life, the yellow light of the sun touched her lavender coat. The surprising warmth sank down to her skin and into her bones. A miracle! She had discovered the outdoors and the answer. From that moment she dedicated herself to getting through the door under the burning word that meant freedom.
    She would never go back.
    The laser would make sure of that.
    Time to get it!
    The door to the living quarters was still shut tight. Rat pushed the clips off the grate and swung it open to lean out into the lab. Shapes bulked in the dim light far below, round and tall as the boy. Along the floor, thick cables snaked between the deep shadows. She could not see very well. She did not have to. Every detail of this place was mapped in her head. The only unknown here was the machine itself, this LB thing. It was not a robot, she had found out. It had no arms or legs or even a head. It was trapped down there inside the console next to the laser source, immobile and helpless. Unless there were alarms—the diagrams did not say—or it called the scientist.
    Rat must work very fast.
    Kicking off with her good hind leg, Rat leaped. She soared several feet to the top of a big pipe. She scurried along it, then dropped over the edge. The slow-motion fall landed her lightly on the console next to the lid of the laser source.
    The lid was sealed with a simple number-coded electronic lock. Good. She did not have to waste time trying to hack passwords. Using the screwdriver, she pried open a tiny crack where the lock casing met the lid. She slid a hair-thin copper wire from the spyvest, then wiggled it into the crack. Recalling the diagram of the lock’s circuit board, she moved the wire along the electronics inside the casing. A little tingle of static electricity fluffed her hairs, then— sizzle, pop —the lock clicked open.
    Rat grasped the handle and lifted, but the lid was too heavy for the weak leg.
    Job for a