FYS: Mouse Maze

"It's clear," Tim said, pulling his skinny frame back up through the access hatch. Kim already had the precious roll of copper wire out of her backpack and was splicing it to the line leading back to their parent's housing unit.

"You disabled the cameras?" she asked.

"Not exactly," he said, double checking the looper modules plugged into their morphs. "There weren't any."

"No cameras," she repeated. She quirked up a disbelieving eyebrow. "In a utility tunnel big enough for a human to crawl in?"

"Nope." He shrugged. "And before you ask, there weren't any microphones, motion sensors, pressure plates or laser tripwires. Nothing. I checked three times."

Kim set the wire wrapped spindle down carefully. "It's a trick, y'know. It has to be a trick."

Tim glanced up automatically, looking for overhead drones, even though they were safely under the cover of the thick tree branches. "Of course it is. An access hatch to a major utility junction, unguarded and secured with a padlock? It's screams 'trap'. But the Groupmind doesn't play stupid games like that. If it could see us we'd have been hauled off to a reeducation center a half hour ago."

"So what's it doing?"

He shrugged again, and started squirming back down into the hatch. "Don't know. But I sure want to find out!"