Inside the Shadow City by Kirsten Miller Page B

city’s subway tunnels, searching for unlucky transit workers who’ve become separated from their crews. And you don’t have to live long in the city before you hear a story about a giant rat that climbed into a cradle with a sleeping baby and feasted on its fingers and toes.
    If, on some future visit to New York, you happen to come across a solitary rat in an alleyway or on a subway platform, odds are it will scamper away. Don’t be misled by this behavior. If you remember nothing else, remember this: New York rats aren’t afraid of people. They consider us a delicacy.
    I had only to skim a couple of the books I found under the kitchen sink before I realized the hopelessness of my task. As I read from a book entitled
The Devil’s Army,
I began to doubt whether six girls could ever be a match for the rats of the Shadow City.
    Nature’s super-villains, the powers of the rat are humbling to behold. The beady-eyed beasts can scamper up the slickest surface, leap three feet in the air, and squeeze through openings the size of
gumballs. With their sharp teeth and amazing powers of concentration, they are able to gnaw through an astounding variety of materials. Entire buildings have been known to collapse after rats have eaten through the support beams.
    Once they have invaded a home, rats are almost impossible to expel. Traveling in groups called “mischiefs,” they outwit all but the most ingenious traps and employ taste testers to identify poisoned food. Many a frustrated apartment dweller has resorted to flinging them out of a window, only to discover that rats can survive falls from as high as six stories.
    Mankind is in danger of losing our war against rats. To avoid defeat, we must stop underestimating the cunning of our enemy. We should avoid thinking of them as lowly rodents, and realize that they are more intelligent than we have ever imagined. Recent university studies, for example, have shown that rats can count—though they rarely make it past the number five. What other secret skills might they be hiding?
    As I shut
The Devil’s Army,
I noticed an old spiral notebook tucked between
The Scourge of Europe
and
Rat Fancier.
In the corner was my grandfather’s name, Hubert Snodgrass. I thumbed through the notebook’s brittle, yellowing pages. The first, rather dull section was devoted to sketches of rat ears in various shapes and sizes. When I flipped to the second section, however, I found an intricate drawing of a device that resembled a battery-poweredkazoo. The title, written in a fancy script, read,
Invention #466. The Reverse Pied Piper
.
    I knew I had found what I needed. My eyes scanned the smaller print at the bottom of the page.
An effective rodent-removal device that does not cause injury or death
. Reading on, I learned that my grandfather, in the course of his studies, had discovered that rats could be driven to distraction by sounds that the human ear can’t even detect. He developed the Reverse Pied Piper, a miniature megaphone of sorts, which could emit a blast of sound that would have no effect on a human being, but would cause a rat to run as far as possible in the opposite direction. They would abandon their nests—even leave their food and helpless offspring behind—just to escape from the noise. Amazingly, laboratory tests had proven that just the memory of the sound could keep rats at a distance.
    Apparently, my grandfather had considered even this too cruel, and his notes showed that he had abandoned the project. Fortunately for the Irregulars, I was no rat-lover. Once I had studied my grandfather’s drawings, I decided to ask Luz if she could make a Reverse Pied Piper. I said a quiet good-bye to Hubert Jr. and left to join the rest of the Irregulars.
    On my way to the living room, I bumped into my mother and father, who were leaving for their lecture.
    â€œWe were just chatting with your little blond friend,” my mother said,