"The topic of the show is 'the animal within'," Miss Dradzky explained. "I want pictures, stories, poetry, whatever! Let your soul fly free as we show off the creativity of the student body! You have one week."

I exchanged a glance with Rachel. She grinned. Neither of us had to say it: this was going to be easy.

"Yes, Marco?" Miss Dradzky asked with a sigh. We both looked over to see that Marco was indeed waving his hand enthusiastically in the air. Jake, sitting next to him, looked like he wanted to disappear.

"Can we bring pets?"

"No. No, you cannot. Any other questions?"

After we were dismissed, we caught up with the boys, trying to look casual about it. We didn't really want to be seen as 'a group'. "You don't even have a pet," I told Marco.

"I can get one." He grinned. "Ax – "

"No," Jake said firmly.

"Why are we getting involved in this, again?" Rachel asked.

"Because we could all use the grade boost after all the missed homework?" Marco pointed out. "It's hard to fight aliens while in detention. And also grounded. Score on the topic, though, right?"

"I hope I don't need to point out that if we all just draw or write about ourselves in battle morph – "

"We're not idiots, Jake, give us a little credit."

—-

We had a week to come up with something for the art show. Rachel, as it turned out, had no problem with the topic. On the bus ride home, she was already doodling. She was no great artist, but the bold pen lines were easily distinguishable; a tall, long-haired girl leaping toward the viewer with big animal teeth and bear claws. Her paws were stained with blood, and something was caught in her teeth.

"You're going to… what, paint that?" I asked.

She nodded. "Easy one, right?"

"I wonder how many animal puns I could make sound vaguely dirty," Marco said thoughtfully. "Not enough for detention, just enough to be funny."

"What are you going to do?" I asked Jake. He shrugged.

The others all got off the bus long before I did, so I was left wondering about my own project.

Easy one, Rachel had said.

I had no idea what I should do.

—-

The third time in a row that I'd not done my English homework, Mr Joneson told my mom I'd be better off seeing the school counsellor. I got out of those meetings as fast as I could. Our school counsellors are Controllers, and their job is a recruitment drive; they try to get people into the Sharing. Mom didn't force me to join, but I think she was a little worried that I didn't want to. I promised I'd pull my grades up.

So the extra-credit project needed to be spectacular. It needed to make a difference. It might be ludicrous that we were putting off a yeerk pool spy mission to sit around and do high school art, but that's the price we paid for having secret identities. Somehow, for now, homework was more important than enemy intel.

By Friday, two days into the project, Rachel had a decent template for her painting. She wasn't a great artist, but there was something mesmerising about the passion clearly visible in each stroke; the teeth fit strangely in the girl's mouth and the blood obscured her face, but her beauty and strength would somehow be incomplete without them. Technical skill aside, it was a work of art.

But then, I know Rachel. Perhaps to anybody else, it would just be a clumsy painting.

Marco seemed to have given up on a dirty poem, but he definitely had a poem, filled with as many animal puns as he could find. He stayed away from the whole theme as much as he could and used wordplay to fulfil a technical requirement. I supposed that it was smart not to have everyone do half-animal stuff, especially if Rachel was going for the bear.

I asked Jake about his project, but he shook his head.

"It's private," he said.

"Jake, it's going to be on display in the school," I pointed out.

After a moment, he shrugged, and handed me a small notebook. "I've been reading my grandfather's war journals," he explained. "I thought… well, war kind of brings out the worst in everyone, doesn't it? Not just shapeshifters fighting aliens. But in good old human wars, people… even good people… do terrible things…"

I flipped through. He'd written a short story about a World War II soldier in the trenches. I wasn't sure how much of it was made up and how much was directly from his grandfather's journals. But it was as chilling as anything we'd ever done. And I wasn't sure that Jake would have been so vivid with the imagery if he hadn't been through what we'd been through. He'd probably get a grade boost for creativity.

"What about you?" he asked me.

I looked about the barn. Animals, animals everywhere. I'd been some of them. The others, I could be at a touch, if I wanted to. I could convey the sheer ferocity of combat if I wanted, of sinking my teeth into an innocent slave's throat. I could just us a morph I didn't have, so that my art and Rachel's together wouldn't tip anyone off. The war had dug its claws into all of us, and the thing was, the war didn't make us ferocious, it just brought out what was already inside us. It peeled away humanity – or at least what we'd been taught to think of as humanity – it dug its way in and let barbarism seep out the puncture wounds.

There was no way I could put my inner self – the parts I'd spent my whole life locking away and denying until survival was on the line – on display like that.

"I'm not sure," I said.

—-

I was thinking of eagles when I passed Mr Tidwell in the hallway on Monday and bumped right into Erek. I had 24 hours left, and I figured I'd probably just write a poem on the freedom of an eagle or something. I'd never been one, which was probably better; I didn't think any Controllers would be suspicious of a too-familiar portrayal of what it was like to be a nonhuman animal but the counsellor still had me in his sights so I couldn't take chances. Mr Tidwell gave me a brief nod and a greeting as I passed him, which I returned, both of us pretending I hadn't been inside his brain and read his thoughts and memories that one time. There were enemy eyes everywhere. It might have been Illim giving me that nod; the difference wasn't important. What they had seemed to work for them and it wasn't any of my business, I supposed.

Erek looked at me with no real recognition as I apologised and moved on. I behaved the same, although I'm not as convincing – I haven't had centuries of practise. Erek and Mr Tidwell paid no special attention to each other, but I could only assume they were each taking the same stock that all of us took around Mr Chapman – not being suspicious, playing their part. Pretending that they didn't each know that the other was the enemy.

We'd never told either that they were on the same side. Secrets are precious when you're fighting mind readers, and the Chee were practically defenseless should they be discovered. I for one didn't want to be responsible for giving the invaders of our planet ridiculously powerful technology and wiping out a pacifist species all in one fell swoop.

Eagle. Freedom of the eagle. Half a page. That should satisfy Mom, I hoped. I knew I was avoiding the point of the project, like Marco. But I didn't care. There was no time to come up with anything better.

—-

I decided to write on the beach.

We'd been to the beach a lot as Animorphs. I used to love going for fun as a kid, but now it was just missions. Spying on the Sharing. Racing the yeerks to some sunken alien ship. Turning into freshwater fish and nearly dying. The forest was the same; I never went camping any more. It was all killing people and spying so we could kill people and figuring out how to blow stuff up, killing people in the process.

I wandered down to the shoreline. I was in my bathing suit, which felt enough like my morphing suit that it basically seemed like regular clothing these days, and tried to think of some freedom-of-the-eagle rubbish that didn't have any blood in it while the waves lapped up the shore and sucked at my toes. Dolphins were free; I could write about being a dolphin. Although they did tend to beat baby seals to death for fun. The first time I was a dolphin, I'd killed a whole bunch of sharks. With my face. And Marco had nearly died. I could pretend not to know they were violent though, and just write about them playing in the water or something.

Or whales. Blue whales were peaceful, beautiful. I'd sort-of spoken to one once. Even the memories brought me nearly to tears. The huge, ancient grazers of the ocean. They didn't need to fight. They had so few natural predators. Until humans came along. Until we started killing them, and they had no way to fight back. I didn't want to fight either, but we had to; we couldn't let the yeerks take us like that. Not that the yeerks were any less trapped; the Peace Movement proved that. The last time I'd seen a whale in person, I'd been waving goodbye to Aftran.

Aftran…

The beach was the wrong place. I needed a canvas.

—

"What will you give up, if I give up everything?"

The art room was incredibly easy to break into as a mouse. I found a canvas. Pulled out some paint.

"You ask me to become this worm again. You ask a lot of me, Cassie the Animorph. You say we can make peace between us, just you and me and Karen."

I'm not a great painter, but the project wasn't that ambitious. Besides, I knew better than most what butterfly wings looked like. I knew their size, how they moved.

"Will you give up nothing?"

Aftran's conditions had been simple: she'd give up her unwilling host, bid farewell to the senses and autonomy of a human body, if I did the same. But it hadn't been that straightforward. Aftran hadn't been making me choose between her life within a host body and her life out of one; she'd had me, been in my brain, and she'd let me go before outlining her conditions. She would have been so easy to kill. She was making me choose between killing her or letting her live. And she'd had my life, all the Animorphs' lives, in her hands; she'd chosen not to sell us out, and put her life in my hands instead.

And I'd taken that deal. I'd given up my own life for that peace. Chance had saved me, a loophole in the morphing rules. She later told Illim that I'd proven myself to her by taking the deal. But she'd proven herself to me first. And she'd gone on to start the Peace Movement. What about me? What was I doing for peace?

I finished dabbing the Monarch Butterfly's coloration onto the vast wings and watched it dry before starting on the human figure in front.

I'd gone back to save Aftran. Of course, that had saved my friends too. I'd kept secret the identities of those I did know within the Peace Movement, and mostly tried to stay out of their way. But if I wanted peace, I couldn't just feel bad about killing. Maybe I couldn't avoid killing, but I could try something more.

I gave my butterfly girl big butterfly eyes too, on a whim. Then I painted flowers around her shot with pale violet, the closest thing I could find to represent ultraviolet. Technically, ultraviolet to a butterfly is no more similar to violet than yellow is to blue for a human; nevertheless, it would match the color of my room. I could hang it over my bed after the art show, where I'd see it every morning, and never forget.

When I was done, I stood back to admire my work. It was rushed, the paint dripping and uneven; the odd proportions made it look unreal, like a dream. I smiled.

Dreams didn't have to stay unreal.