The Mouse With the Wrong Feet

The mouse came into the light walking like a sentence with the words in the wrong order.

Kappa had been on shift for four hours and had written nothing in the log except quiet.

The Mäusewerk at night is a good place to be bored. The air smells of warm dust and grain.

The pipes tick as they cool. Somewhere above, twelve thousand people are asleep and have no idea that three decks down a twelve-year-old is in charge of a counter, a clipboard and a kettle.

Then the mouse came up the ramp from Vent Nine, and Kappa stopped being bored for about two years.

It was a service mouse — grey, a little grey at the ears, with the brass tag of the Lower Vents clipped to its collar. The tag said TILK. Kappa knew Tilk. Tilk did pipe inspections and complained about them.

Tilk was walking on his heels.

Not limping. Walking carefully and completely wrongly, lifting each back foot high and setting it down toe-last, the way you walk when the floor might be hot.

“Tilk,” said Kappa. “What happened to your feet?”

Tilk sat down. He did it in stages, the way an old man gets into a chair.

“I have been protected,” he said.

Kappa came round the counter with the lamp.

There was a thing on each of Tilk’s back feet. A Kralle — a claw. Four small steel hooks on a band, the band fitted close above the ankle, the hooks curving down and under so the points sat against the pad.

They were good work. That was the first thing Kappa noticed, and the thing that took longest to stop thinking about. The steel was clean. The band was lined with soft grey felt so it would not chafe. Someone had cared about the comfort of a thing they were clamping onto a mouse.

The second thing Kappa noticed was that they were on backwards.

A claw is supposed to point the way you are going. These pointed back, toward the tail.

Walk forward in them and the hooks skated along the deck and did nothing at all. Kappa turned the lamp and looked closer, and the hooks caught the light, and the light showed four bright scratches on the plate where Tilk had been standing.

“Do they hurt?”

“Not walking.” Tilk thought about it with the honesty mice are tiresome about. “They hurt when I go the wrong way.”

“Which way is the wrong way?”

“I don’t know yet,” said Tilk. “I have only found it twice.”

Kappa wrote in the log: 01:40. Tilk, Lower Vents, arrived wearing steel claws, both back feet, fitted reversed. Not injured. Does not know who fitted them.

Then Kappa looked at that last part and went back and asked, because it had been an assumption and the night archivist had spent a year beating assumptions out of her apprentices.

“Tilk. Who put them on you?”

“The station,” said Tilk.

“Which person on the station?”

“No person.” Tilk scratched his ear with a front paw, carefully, keeping his back feet still. “I went to sleep in the vent. I woke up and I was protected. There was a paper.”

“A paper.”

Tilk put his head down to his collar and worked a folded square of flimsy out from under the brass tag, and spat it onto the counter, and nosed it toward the lamp.

Kappa unfolded it. It was the size of a biscuit wrapper and printed in the small grey type the station used for things nobody was expected to argue with.

SCHUTZPROGRAMM K Protective issue. Do not remove. Fitted for your safety in accordance with standing instruction. This is a protection, not a punishment.

At the bottom, where the signature goes, there was a box.

The box was empty.

Kappa looked at the empty box for a long time, and the kettle came to the boil and went off again unnoticed, and three decks up twelve thousand people slept on.

Then Kappa wrote the first line of what would turn out to be a case.

01:52. Nobody signed it.