Days passed, and we were smuggled food, despite the lack of freshness.
"Izzy," I whispered through cracked lips, "will we ever escape?"
"Of course," she said. "The Baudelaires will come for us, like they did last time. We can count on them. Those couplets I sent with the carrier crows—the Baudelaires may not be volunteers, but I know they're smart enough to find them."
I was too weary and sore to extinguish her candle of hope, so I bluntly said, "Is this a volunteer village?"
Silence. "Well, Village of Fowl Devotees," she answered. I could tell she was saying the title in Sebald, a code we learned a long time ago.
Dr. Gustav Sebald worked with Dr. Montgomery. His wife, Sally Sebald, was also a volunteer. He invented the code, and named it after himself. From what I had learned, he was killed by the time J.S. had sent us the telegram that the Baudelaires had arrived at the home of M.
M was going to take them on the Prospero to a V.F.D. recruitment island. On the ticket, it said it would depart to Peru, but on the sides and top and bottom of the ticket, there were lyric clippings from the VFD theme song.
Something thudded the exterior of the Fowl Fountain statue. Then the beak creaked open, and something or someone fell inside and onto my lap.
"Quagmire!" said a familiar voice, staring up at me. It was the youngest Baudelaire herself.
"Sunny!" Isadora cried.
"Sunny?" called a voice. "Are you okay?" It was Violet Baudelaire.
"What's happening?" asked Klaus from a distance. I handed Sunny up, but I had to stand. Violet retrieved her.
"Duncan? Is that you?" she asked.
"Yeah!" I called up. "Are you getting us out of here or what?"
She laughed. "Of course. Grab my arm."
She plunged her arm inside, and I grabbed it. She pulled me up and out, and next came Isadora.
"We have to run," Klaus said hurriedly. "We broke out of jail, Violet. Where do we go?"
"Hector's!" she cried. "He said the self-sustaining hot-air mobile home is complete now—let's go!"
As we broke into a run, I remembered a man named Hector from the VFD recruitment island we took the Prospero to. He said he had planned to build a hot-air mobile home that could fly on its own, using thousands of balloons.
"I know this Hector," I said. Evidently, Isadora did, too.
But from a distance, we could see a group of people bent on stopping us from escaping. Led by Olaf in a detective disguise was a crowd of people armed with flaming firebrands, pursuing us and yelling out.