I turned on my phone’s flashlight and held my arm up the shaft, hoping against hope that I’d butted into a minor obstruction. Wrong. The shaft had been designed to keep people and animals out of the silo. A rat could get up and down, maybe a badger, but not anything as big as me.

I wanted to lie on the counter, cry myself to sleep. Cry myself to death. Is this the way you wish to go into that night? Mewling like a lost kitten while Roswell gloats over your plague-infested body? My cousin Boom-Boom used to chant Julius Caesar before he took to the ice: Cowards die many times before their deaths; / The valiant never taste of death but once.

I slid off the counter. Third period, coz, a minute on the clock, down by two goals, that’s when you really start to fight. My pep talks weren’t helping. I was demoralized, unable to think.

I stopped at the monitor to check the time. Six-fifteen. The shift would change—the shift had changed. The man in black was sitting upright, another man in black shouting at him. It was a silent movie, but the second man pointed at the computer screen on the tabletop: they could see the lab, they knew that something was amiss. Roswell came into view, wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants. He started gesticulating as well. The room began filling, men in body armor, men carrying massive weapons.

My heart thudded so violently it shook my chest and arms. I looked around wildly. The rats.

“We’re buddies now, right? You’re hungry, maybe you’re sick, let’s get you food.”

I grabbed the bag of feed pellets and spilled it on the floor, made a trail that ended at the bottom of the ladder I’d been carried down. I could hear the men above me start to unscrew the hatch cover. I made my legs carry me, made myself run in a wobbly waddle back into the lab, opened the cage doors, and waddled back across the anteroom to the launch-control center.

I shut the door, slid a heavy lock into place, shook Cady awake. “They’re coming, a whole platoon of them! Get up, we need to go down this other ladder!”

I was screaming with fear. Cady shrank from me. It was gunfire outside our door that finally roused her into motion.

The door was heavy, but we could hear the men bellowing, could hear the shrieking of the rats, who were as terrified as Cady and I were. I hoped they were frightening the men in black.