Just after Lucille halted work on the packing floor, the others in the party, aside from Squints, returned from their errands through the compound’s front gate. All the children turned and beheld the resemblance between the party and the heroes described in the prophesy passed from cohort to cohort of the Advance Instruction Program by oral tradition to comfort them and their aching fingers through their short nights in their underground panopticon cells between long packing shifts. The heroes, the Pied Piper and the Big Man, had at last come for them. Most unambiguously, the children recognized the Big Man: Declan Idrys, now thrice the size of a normal adult whose traps had developed to the extent that his neck, as he stepped into the compound, silhouetted against the red sky lit by the setting sun not as a cylinder connecting torso to head, but rather as a pyramid which his beautiful androgynous face regally rest atop. And beside Declan, Sansan, wooden flute on her belt, had the same short black hair and feline cheek bones described in the oral myth and also illustrated around the city in posters the children could not read, was obviously the Pied Piper. While Omeb and Squints could not be reconciled into the war orphans’ mythology, they were still associated with the prophesied heroes, so some of the counter-culture orphans who feared wanting what others also wanted chose to aim their fanatic hopes and stares at these (in prophecy terms) side characters, because settling for unpopular choices would result in a better chance of meeting their deep and long-unsated needs for attention and love from adults. Hearing the commotion, a man who was either young and quite haggard or quite old and well-aged leaned over the railing of the balcony on the top floor of the three-story watchtower to assess. Beside him, rising to his shoulder, stood an orangutan in red and black combat armor. Just below this balcony was the point where, the night before, Declan had impaled the elder foreman who used to preside over the panopticon by accidentally launching a plank with two protruding nails out the window by yanking it up too hard while freeing 65 from his underfloor time-out crevice. By morning the foreman had disappeared from the spot of his impaling, but this new young-or-old man leaning over the balcony, after seeing the party, turned to whisper conversation with someone else upstairs. The party suspected this hidden third party receiving the whispers was the same old foreman they had impaled. Finally, the young-or-old man on the balcony turned back to the scene on the ground and announced in the timbre of a hellfire preacher, “I see some idle hands down there! You know what I’ve told you children about idle hands! The devil’s playthings, those.” Squints asked Lucille, “That the [[Red Priest]] you were talking about? Big Bother?” “That is him,” she said, less sure of herself than seconds earlier. The other children fell quiet, their religious elation chilled by fear. But she composed herself and continued. “We are ready to act as soon as Big Man is in position.” “And what position is that?” “It was foretold Big Man would topple the watchtower after the Pied Piper led us out of the compound.” Declan craned his neck to look up the tower, which was almost as wide as it was tall, and plenty sturdy. “You know,” he said, “the thing about prophecies is there’s a lot of room for interpretation.” “What happened when we left?” Sansan said to Squints. “You said you were going to keep things steady.” “These folks need some rest,” Squints said. He pointed at Big Brother on the balcony. “That man is nutrition barring them up the wazoo. We've tried these nutrition bars. They give the jitters. And these kids are cranked up on ‘em all day every day. They need to rest. Remember, we were sent here to straighten out this packing facility, and any good farmer knows that to reap a good harvest you've got to follow the seasons. This Big Brother guy acts like it's harvest season year-round, the way he pushes these kids. Look at those dancers behind Lucille. They can't pack anymore. Their hands don't work after all the folding and taping and no rest to recover. Now they can only dance.” Big Brother ignored Squints, said to Declan, “I’ve not seen your hands around here. I’m Mr. Idris. I oversee this facility.” Declan looked at his hands curiously, then up at Big Brother. “It’s odd you focused on my hands from that distance. Boss sent us to straighten things out.” “And by boss, you mean Obadiah?” “Yes. Come down here and discuss with us.” Big Brother turned to confer with whoever he’d been whispering with earlier, then said, “Okay, come on up.” “Why don’t you come down?” “No, you come up.” Omeb cautioned Declan, who looked as if he were considering going up the tower, that balcony man’s behavior was too weird to oblige. This comment kicked off a debate within the party over whether Squints ought to lasso Big Brother down from the watchtower. During the debate, Omeb asked Sansan for the [[wood bender]] mushroom she’d kept from the [[Outpost A]] and withdrew over to the packing floor, where he tore open a box of whiskey and glugged it to wash down the wood shroom. As soon as he’d eaten the entire fruiting body of the mushroom, wood took on a wavy movement in his vision, chromatically aberrated around the edges, and his proprioception expanded to include wood: at his will, he sensed he would be able to shrink and expand nearby wood according to some modest scaling factor. Drunk and stumbling after downing a whole fifth, Omeb shouted, “Chi chi, rally!” Chichi climbed atop a stack of packed whiskey boxes and beat his chest: OOOH OOOH OOOH AH <clap> OOOH OOOH OOOH AH <clap>. It was simple enough for the children to follow along, and they did. The primitive chant educed a latent energy in the mob of orphans. Their synchronized throat sounds and clapping dominated the compound, echoing off the high walls. The only sound that rose above the din was Squints, standing atop a separate stack of crates with his fist high overhead, fanning the flames with rhetoric. “This Red Sheriff Priest you call Big Brother is not one of the people! Do not buckle! Do not yield to the cruelty of this world! My orphans, cry out! My orphans, RAGE!” The children’s energy erupted into mania. Some spilled saliva from the corners of their mouths. When Sansan blew into her flute, the orphans shed manic tears and became inarticulate. Tens of children poured out the mouth of the tunnel to the panopticon, like water rising over a levy, a never-ending stream following Sansan out of the compound gates. Declan, preparing for the worst, pushed his fingers into the wood of the base of the watchtower, but pushed a little too hard. His arms shot through, lodging him in elbow-deep, and cracking the load-bearing column on the gate side of the tower. A tremble climbed up through the structure and tilted the upper levels a few degrees. The stream of children flowing out of the underground panopticon eventually ended, but what followed was another stream, not of children but of little war orangutans. Omeb, swaying drunkenly about, said, “Oh my god, they’ve turned the children into orangutans!” Mr. Idris ran out of the side door of the watchtower, having hurried down the stairs from the balcony, then stopped to wipe sweat off his forehead. He feared heights and unstable buildings. After him, his war orangutan also exited the tower, then sprinted after Sansan and the fleeing orphans. When Mr. Idris gathered himself, he looked up at Declan. All expression evacuated his face. “It cannot be,” he said. “They told me you died.” To Declan, whose arms were still stuck in the tower, Mr. Idris seemed familiar. “Who’s ‘they’?” “Our parents.” “What’s your mother’s name?” “Senora.” Declan let his eyes unfocus, let himself see beyond the haggard countenance of this man and recognize his own younger brother “Dear gods, Kraven, is that you?” From the packing platform, Squints interjected, “That’s like, a super evil name.” “Kraven, brother,” Declan said, at last freeing his arms from the tower. “Call off the war orangutan. Let’s sit down and talk this out.” “No, brother. I have obligations here now. After you left home ten years ago, the [[Rabbit Guard]] decimated the village, and to eat I joined a band of Red Priests on their raids of small western towns around Ilnam. After we robbed a house, we’d cast a spell to scramble the victims’ vision so they couldn’t identify us, or read, ever again. Then the unspeakable things I’ve done since I started here… There’s a reason no other child has ever graduated from the Advance Instruction Program. I have bound my soul to this path, brother.” Sansan stood in the compound gates after the last of the orphans crossed through, and blocked the way so that Mr. Idris’s big war orangutan and the buffoonery of little war orangutans could not pursue them. Though the orphans were behind now, she bravely continued playing her flute to hold high their determined spirits, and with her spare hand (she was able to play certain melodies with just one hand) threw a dagger straight into the sternum of the big war orangutan. But this only angered him. He beat his chest (to either side of the dagger, so as not to bury the knife deeper), which energized the little ones behind him. But all was not lost. Squints, having given up any hope of Mr. Idris calling the war orangutans off, tapped into the magic weather (`avenging echo`) and cast a spell on the sound waves emitted by Sansan’s flute, magically amplifying them into a powerful, directional contact blast against the orangutans attempting to pass through the gate. The immense power of these enchanted waves represented the rage of all the imprisoned orphans: an echo of their pain. The waves lifted the orangutans into the air, along an arc, across the compound courtyard. Omeb shouted at them in the air to just chill and leave the kids alone, hiccuped, and took another swig of whiskey. The orangutans did not hear him due to being contained and lifted inside a stream of enchanted sound waves. The arc of the buffoonery ended at the base of the watchtower, at the load-bearing column Declan had damaged just minutes before. Upon impact, the orangutans cracked it in half. A rumbling told of the tower’s inner structures folding and splintering. It bent inward and fell across the courtyard, immobilizing all of the orangutans under the rubble. Declan, who pulled Mr. Idris out of the tower’s trajectory just in time, took his brother by the shoulders. “Brother, you have to stop this madness. Yes, you've sinned. But you were taken when you were young and inducted into this creepy order. You can choose now, from this point forward, what you do with your life, and the mark you leave on this world. Do you really want this place to be your legacy?” “For my soul it is too late. I can’t join you. But brother, you could join me. Obadiah treats his loyal servants with just that same loyalty in return. And the research facility that funds our experiments on the orphans pays generous per diems for work travel. There are no better war orangutans in all of Pangolune than those we create here, Brother. Together we could be powerful, which is what really matters in life.” Declan hung his head for his brother’s fallen soul, and held out his hand, a gesture Omeb intuitively understood. Omeb tossed Declan a rag doused in chloroform. In one second, quick due this [[higher ape]] muscles, Declan came around behind Mr. Idrys and grabbed him, pressed the rag (which he called the “night night rag”) over Mr. Idrys’s mouth, and after thwarting brief (futile) resistance, sent him unconscious. Lucille, who had returned with the other orphans after they saw from a safe distance that the watchtower no longer stood on the dusk horizon, stood at the head of a sea of children, centered in the gate, clutching her hair, tears raining down her cheeks. “You did it!” she shouted, and fell to her knees. “By the king, it is as was written!” Next: [[team 7's path 6]]