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While her companion Tracy napped within the metal-shielded room that served as their prison, Mouse reached out telepathically again to detect the life that she knew permeated the world that surrounded them. Through her telepathic probing she had noticed something important: The solid metal screen that surrounded them extended only three feet deep around the edge of the room. The concrete below their feet featured steel rebar spikes that did not fully enclose her probing thoughts in the downward direction. In the down direction she very faintly detected life: only a few insects and other simple creatures, but it was something! Where there were small simple creatures, there would be others that would come to feed on them, she knew: creatures with larger brains that she should be able to communicate with.
Faintly, she detected something larger along and below one wall, a small burrowing creature, perhaps a mole or other mouse-like rodent. Its thought patterns were simple and crude, but Mouse had communicated with such creatures before, and now she 'listened' to its thoughts and learned until at last she could send it a message: "Food and warmth!" she told it, in a form the creature could detect and understand, again and again. "Come!"
The creature responded by gradually digging down and under the barrier and inch-by-inch upwards towards the concrete floor of the prison.
What then? Next to the thin sleeping pad where she lay huddled next to Tracy there was a thin crack in the floor under her, Mouse noticed, likely due to settling after the concrete dried. It was just the sort of crack that Stone-Coats around the world were now fixing in human constructions. It wasn't much of a weakness, but it was a start. She took off the tribal necklace that she always wore which featured a huge pointy diamond with an attached gold chain. In times past the chicken-egg sized gem would have been worth many millions of dollars, but Stone-Coats now made diamonds by the ton for human applications. This gem was a gift from her life-long Stone-Coat companion Stone Runner, and held great sentimental value for Mouse.
Entire buildings were now being made of diamond, but not this floor. This floor was essentially composed of hard grains of sand and gravel held together by softer amorphous limestone: traditional concrete. It wasn't built to last for centuries; no Stone-Coat had made this floor! Hidden and muffled under the rolled-up shirt of Tracy's that she used as a pillow, Mouse used the sharp hard edge of the diamond to break off a tiny chunk of concrete floor, enlarging the crack. And then another. And another.
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