"Chipendale!" Ratigan snarled, he and Basil glaring up at the chipmunk. "How dare you steal my time machine! How are you doing this, commanding these rodents?!"
"I may be the size of a beetle, but we're still kin," Chipendale said, spreading his arms wide. "All they needed was a little persuasion."
"Well done Kady!" the cicada woman said, hovering a little lower towards the crowd of huddled ants. "You got all these ants to drop their guards! At last, Hopper will finally be avenged!"
Kiara's head snapped around to Kady. He was backing away from the other insects, away from the crowd, closer to the line of grasshoppers. The cicada woman had the exact same coloration as him. "That's your mom," she breathed.
"…Yes," Kady said softly.
"Then… her old boyfriend, the one who died, that was—!"
"I didn't mean for things to go this far. I, I wanted to tell you." He stopped when he reached the grasshopper line, and his face hardened. "But this is the man I need to be. What I'm supposed to be."
The prairie dogs and grasshoppers herded the ants into even rows. From among the multitudes, Queen Atta, Prince-Consort Flik, Ratigan, Basil, Hayley, and Kiara were pulled roughly to the front, their hands held behind their backs as they were forced to their knees.
Chipendale jumped to the ground in front of them and marched down the line, a bounce in his step. "Tomorrow, you're all invited to a grand ceremony! We will be celebrating the reunion and reinstatement of the alliance between ants and grasshoppers, as both return to their rightful places! And to symbolize that, we will be executing the queen, the prince-consort, and the former human-mouse Kiara, first thing in the morning!"
Great wails rose up from the crowd, the most audible of them coming from the former queen and Princess Dot. With a jerk of Chipendale's head, Kiara and the others were led away, while the crowd of other terrified insects were herded another direction. Kiara passed Kady as she went, and he turned his face away.
Ant Island's prison was stressed to maximum occupancy, each of them locked to a single narrow cell. Flik and Basil both paced in tight circles, Hayley kept fiddling with the lock on her cell door, Atta was poking at the sealed walls and corner of her cells for somewhere to start digging, and Kiara alternated between pulling on her cell's bars and kicking at them. Ratigan sat in his cell, fiddling with his pocket watch.
"Could you at least pretend you care about escaping and saving our lives?" Hayley huffed, glaring at the rat.
"This is hardly my first time behind bars," he said dryly. "The only thing you're all doing is wasting energy."
"I just can't wrap my head around it," Flik said. "His actions aren't those of a man prioritizing revenge by killing someone, it's as if he's trying to achieve something else entirely. Like helping the grasshoppers, it would make sense if they were coercing him somehow, but he seems like he has all the power. So why help them get revenge for Hopper? What are we to him?"
"Who knows what he wants anymore?" Basil said. "Trying to fathom the criminal mind is a fool's game. What matters now is that we find a way to escape."
Kiara sighed, leaning her head against the bars. "This is all my fault. If I had just—"
"Don't steal credit that doesn't belong to you," a new voice spoke. They all looked up, peering out their cells. Kady stepped into the dim light of the mushrooms, his expression unreadable.