After the war, Cassie spent two years living in the ocean as an Orca, demorping every two hours, or whenever she came up for air.
She spent a lot of time diving deeper than Orcas normally do, and taught a Giant Squid to use thought-speak. But the only words it knew were, "I love you". They swam around together and the squid brought her food, and showed her caves and nice rocks she had found. In return, Cassie (tried) to teach her more thought-speak words, and defended her from other whales.
When she was closer to the surface, she tended to attract other Orcas, and once spent a few days swimming with a massive old male and his pod, trading stories in something deeper and more expansive than thought-speak. She told him about the battles she'd fought in, and fragments of Dinotopia, and myths about nature spirits. He told her about the song of the currents, the best waters to hunt seals in, and his worry, for more and more boats were trawling the sea, taking more prey than they could eat, and he knew that it would only spell trouble.
Once, she wasn't paying as much attention as she should have been. She was half-asleep, only going through the motions of morphing through sheer habit. She leapt out of the water, as high as she could, in a long arc. Before she even reached the peak she was demorphing, hands shrinking from flippers, tail untwining into legs, the stark black and white patterns of the killer whale blending into a softer, more uniform dark brown.
By the time she was at the height of the jump, fifteen feet above the water, she was fully human. But suddenly, it wasn't water under her, rising up fast.
It was a concrete embankment.
If she hadn't been so surprised, she would have had time to morph to bird. With practice comes speed, and the war had given her speed. The last two years had given her instinctive knowledge of how much time she had left, now that she no longer had anyone else to rely on. If she hadn't been surprised, she would have morphed to a seagull, or an Osprey, and flared her wings to catch herself.
But she was surprised, and confused, and so she hit the ground hard, fully human, the rough concrete scraping her arms and legs bloody as she rolled, and finally slammed into a metal railing.
She lay there for a moment, stunned. Pain was pulsing through her body, and that wasn't unfamiliar. She needed to hunt as an Orca, and sometimes, prey fought back. Sometimes others hunted her. She'd encountered plenty of sharks and dolphins, some of them friendly, some of them not. Sometimes the squid-whom she'd named Love-accidentally brushed her with a tentacle as they were racing, and the sharp, biting suckers stung her flesh. (Of course, Love would always apologize, saying, I love you, I love you, I love you, while tucking all her tentacles close to her body and away from Cassie, so it was obvious that it had been a mistake, and not on purpose.
The cuts and bites and slashes always healed when she demorphed the next time she went up for air. But Cassie knew, from the war, and through various disasters throughout it, that these wounds would not be healed by morphing.
Her fingers flashed with bone-deep agony at the memories.
But the new pain was sharper than the faded memory of teeth slicing through her hand, and she winced, sitting up slowly, feeling the slugging pulsing in her skull where her the back of her head had hit the railing.
Somehow, it felt harder to breathe. And it wasn't just because of the fall and crash landing. It felt like her chest was smaller, her lungs unable to hold onto air. Like it was slipping through her fingers.
But she knew that was all in her head. She'd just gotten used to holding her breath for minutes at a time. She'd gotten used to lungs that could hold on to every last scrap of oxygen she fed them.
If it felt like she was breathing too quickly, if it felt like her heart was fluttering like a bird's, then that was only because she was human now, after spending so much time as a whale. It was normal, it was human.
And suddenly she wasn't alone. A boy was jogging towards her with the sun at his back, hiding his feathers in shadow. He was wearing only swimming trunks and flip flops, and had a boogie board tucked under one arm.
With his other arm, he lifted and hand and waved as he ran, calling, "Hey! Are you okay?"
It only took a few moments for him to reach her side, and he dropped the boogie board to the concrete, and ripped the velcro strap for it off his arm out of the way. Then he crouched next to her, his face and eyes anxious. "Are you okay?" He repeated, his hands held up to show they were empty, "I saw you fall-you hit your head-are you okay? Do you want me to call someone?" And from his pocket he pulled a phone.
It was touchscreen. The time and date was emblazoned on the lock-screen in bold white letters. 11:56AM, Saturday, June 20th, 2015.
Two years since she'd entered the water and lived in it.
Almost two decades since the war had ended.
"I'm-" It was strange, to be speaking with sound instead of thought-speak. She almost forgot not to speak in thought-speak. "I'm okay. Thank you."
And to prove it, she stood herself upright on her human legs, and didn't even waver or stumble. She was human. She knew how to move her own body. Just as she knew to move the Orca's, or the osprey's, or even the giant squid's. They were all her bodies, all equally hers now, even if they'd been copied from an original that belonged to someone else.
But still the boy-young man-she corrected herself, looked at her with worry, as he got to his feet and picked his board back up. "Are you sure? It looked like you hit your head. I can call the hospital for you-I can even go with you, if you want." He held the phone up in invitation, the date once more blazing at her. Saturday, June 20th, 2015.
Two years. Two decades.
Rachel's voice, saying, "Cassie, I'm worried about you. Just, just-what is this, a vacation, or a mental breakdown? Are you leaving because you want to, or are you running away from something?"
And her response, "I don't know, Rachel. I don't know. But I have to go. I have to leave. I can't stay. I don't know if it's-if it's for fun, or if it's because I'm afraid, but I just...I need to do this."
And Rachel's voice saying, "You know I'll go with you if you ask. You know that, right? I'll go with you. You don't have to be alone. I'll come with you if you ask. But I won't follow you if you tell me not to. You just-you don't have to be alone, Cassie. I'm here for you. And so is everyone else. Jake, Marco, Aximili, David, Frankie, they're all here for you. We're all here for you. Look, I'll even call them for you if you want. We can all get together. Or we can all go together. I don't think they'll begrudge you this. You've been there for us, let us be there for you too."
But she didn't want Rachel to go with her. She didn't want Jake, or Marco, or David, or Aximili, or Frankie. This was something she had to do alone. She needed to be by herself, without any reminders of what had happened. She didn't resent them, she didn't blame them. But sometimes their presence made things worse, made the memories sharper, the feelings realer.
"I'm fine." She said again, but gently. Then, "You saw me fall?"
The young man-his skin was even darker than hers, their feet stark against the pale concrete when she noticed that the heat of it was burning her and glanced down-smiled, and she wasn't sure if he was embarrassed or sheepish or what.
"Yeah," He said, playing with the strap for the boogie board, peeling the vecro off and sticking it back on repeatedly, not looking her in the eyes (which she suddenly noticed, he hadn't done once since making he first came over). "You jumped out of the water, and you morphed. I could tell you weren't expecting to hit the ground. You were going too fast, too far. If you'd meant to land, you would have jumped from farther away." He glanced at her face, eyes only meeting hers for an instant, as though shy, before he looked away again. "Are you sure you're okay?"
She wanted to say yes, yes she was fine. But her arms hurt, and her legs hurt, and her head hurt, and her heart felt like it was beating a mile a minute, and it felt like she was suffocating, so quickly did she have to draw in and out each breath.
She wanted to say yes, she was fine.
But she looked at the ocean, at the choppy blue-green waters. At the endless, endless sky.
And suddenly, it no longer seemed inviting. Suddenly, it no longer felt like an escape. Suddenly, it was different.
She would not morph the Orca again, she slowly realized, as she stood there on the ground, with her bare feet burning against the concrete, and the wind burning and cooling the bloody scrapes on her arms and legs simultaneously, and the shadow of a young man shielding her, if only slightly, from the glare of the sun. She wouldn't escape back into the water, to forget about the war, and her friends, and her life as a human, as Cassie, the Animorph.
So even though she wanted to say, yes, I am fine, she instead reached out her hand and said, "Actually, could I borrow your phone? I want to call my friend."
He handed it to her without a single moment of hesitation, with only the comment of, "You have to swipe to the side to unlock it, and the phone is at the bottom corner."
She opened the phone option, and started to dial Rachel's number, before a sudden thought struck her. He spoke English, in an accent not too different from her own, but he might have been a tourist, or visiting family, or on vacation. "Um, where are we exactly? What country are we in, I mean?"
Maybe she wasn't the first person he'd met who'd traveled in morph. Maybe that was just a normal thing these days. He hadn't seemed surprised or shocked or afraid to watch her morph from killer whale to human woman. Or maybe he was just so weird that he expected everyone else to be weird. Or maybe the world it self was used to weird things. Maybe weird was the new normal. It had been two years since she'd gone into the ocean as an Orca, and the war had lasted only a few months.
A few months, that was all it took for her life to be changed irrevocably.
A lot could have changed in two years.
Either way, no matter the reason, he answered again without hesitation, as though this were normal. "We're in America-the United States that is. Just outside of Neskowin, Oregon." He pointed, over her shoulder, past the end of the embankment. "It's that way, if you want to visit. That's where I live."
And then, for the first time since he'd ran up to her, he hesitated. His eyes met hers again, for just a moment. They seemed to snag, catching on her gaze. He tore them away again, and turned his head to look out at the ocean. "Um," He said, and his voice was awkward now, as she held his phone, and he refused to meet her eyes. Suddenly she realized how young he was, compared to her. He was still a child. He spoke, softly, but quickly, as though afraid to take the words back. "California is that way."
And he turned to point behind himself, away from the city in the distance.
He pointed away from his home, and towards hers. She looked at his face, still turned away from hers, as though he was afraid that he'd crossed a boundary he couldn't step back over, and she knew.
He knew who she was. He knew she wasn't just some random morph-capable girl. He recognized her.
Probably, she realized with quiet, numb shock, because she'd barely aged in the two years since she'd left civilization to live as a whale. She'd only spent a few moments human every two hours. This was the longest she'd gone without re-morphing in years. In two long, long years.
Her mouth went dry. Words caught in her throat, and refused to move. She gasped in for air, filling lungs that felt too small. The boy-because she was older than she looked, and he was just a kid compared to her-hunched his shoulders up, and took a step backward, every line in his body saying, sorry, sorry, sorry, just the same way Love curled her tentacles to herself and said, I love you, I love you, I love you to lessen the sting of a stray touch.
She gave him back his phone. She forced herself to speak, even though there was a lump in her throat that made her eyes burn and her head hurt even worse. "Thank you." She said, half crying, suddenly, with too many emotions to sort through, "Thank you."
And then she took off running, on her burned and bleeding human feet and human legs, past the kid whose name she hadn't even asked, and then she leapt into the air, already light as a feathers, and spread the wings of and Osprey, and flew on towards home.
Back to Rachel, back to Jake, and David, and Marco, and Aximili, and Frankie. Because even though sometimes their presence made the memories worse, made the feelings sharper, they were her friends. They were her comrades in arms. They were her family.
She didn't know why she'd run away, after so much time had already passed. Why hadn't it happened sooner? Rachel has asked her, is this a vacation, or a mental breakdown? And somehow, it was both. Why hadn't it happened right when the war ended? Why hadn't it happened when Tobias died, alone and afraid? Why hadn't it happened when the hosts were all freed, and a permanent Yeerk embassy set up? Why hadn't it happened when the Andalites finally arrived, only to find that the war had ended without their intervention?
Why had it taken her so long to feel the fear? Why had it taken so long for it to become overwhelming? Why did it take two years to escape from a few months of damage?
She would never know. It was too complicated, too tied up and twisted in her heart.
But she knew why she was going back. She knew why she would beat her osprey wings as far as they could take her. She knew why she would demorph and remorph even in mid-air. She knew why should would push herself as hard and fast as she could until she reached speeds no normal bird could.
She knew why she was going back.
Because she was going home.