"Thanks," I said.
"You're welcome." Cassie was standing up, which probably meant she'd only recently arrived. After all, it's easier on the legs to sit down than to stay on your feet for the whole two-and-a-half to three hours it takes yeerks to feed.
"Hey," I said. "You want to heckle the guards?" The question came out more roughly than I'd meant it to. I realized my nails were digging into my palms and that my heart—now that Silat wasn't piloting my body—was racing.
"Sure," Cassie said with more force than I expected. Now that I was looking for it, she seemed tense. She was shifting her weight from one leg to the other. Cassie had her hands behind her back, but her shoulders looked tight. I wondered what was wrong, but questions like that can be a little private for hosts. I wasn't really prepared to talk to Cassie about her problems anyway.
We spent the next fifteen minutes or so yelling first at the pool guards, then at hosted yeerks who were either standing in line to feed or leaving after returning to their hosts. Insults. Swear words. Even a few phrases in Galard, the common galactic language. Before this, I hadn't known how skilled sweet, gentle Cassie was at heckling, but she knew her stuff. Well, she'd had a lot of opportunity and incentive to learn.
One of the hosts stood up from kneeling over the pool and walked over to the voluntary section of the yeerk pool complex. I was halfway through a tirade about his parents when I realized Cassie had fallen silent. I looked over at her. Cassie was gripping one of the bars to the cage door so hard her knuckles were almost white. She was staring at the ground outside the cage. I realized she was keeping her gaze away from the voluntary guy who was now sitting on one of the couches. I think the guy had a Coke in his hand.
"Cassie?" I asked tentatively.
"The voluntary controllers are victims of the yeerks, too," she said in a voice just a few octaves above a whisper.
Don't be a jerk, a little voice inside me said quietly. You can tell she's upset. I looked over at the section for voluntaries. At the couches, the minifridges, the TV sets. At the traitors who were having the time of their lives several dozen feet away from the cages full of people like me and Cassie. "My heart bleeds." On the heels of that acid-tinged sentence, So much for not being a jerk.
"Do you know how the Sharing works, Marco?" Cassie demanded. Her face pressed close to mine. "Do you know what the Sharing does to convince people to lower their heads into that sludge and let one of those slugs crawl into their ear?"
"No, I don't," I admitted. Sillat showed new kids around, played video games with them, used my wit and charm to get them interested in coming back. He wasn't involved in persuading anybody to turn their lives over to the yeerks. He didn't even get to help pick out who might be worth trying to win over.
"Well, Marco, the yeerks compile data about everyone who enters the Sharing. Some of that data comes from the surveys the yeerks have new members fill out. Some of that data comes from the people who direct troubled youth into the Sharing. Some of the data comes from handlers like your yeerk. I'm given a portion of that list. I take my section of that list of vulnerable people, and I learn about them. I talk to them. I listen to them. Some of those people aren't worth trying to persuade. They aren't vulnerable enough, or they're too suspicious. The yeerks infest those people by force. With the people who might be willing to hear me out, the yeerks arrange a private meeting. I explain about yeerks, about the invasion, and I tell those people how the yeerks can help them. I've met with alcoholics, gambling addicts, pregnant teens, gay teens, bullied teens, bullied adults, abuse victims, and people in situations I can't even remember right now. These are people who couldn't find help in any other place they looked, or who didn't know how to look for help in the first place. I give those people—who couldn't solve their problems—solutions to their problems. I promise them that hosting a yeerk can help them control their addictions. I offer places to stay for anyone who isn't safe in their homes, intervention for anyone being bullied or abused. I give prospective voluntary hosts whatever they most need."
I. As though Cassie herself had done those things. Cassie was glaring at the cage floor, her hands clenched into fists. She'd sounded so self-loathing during her speech, like she'd been personally responsible for what her yeerk did. "Cassie," I said softly. "The thing inside your head does all of that. Not you." I looked at the area cordoned off for voluntaries. I didn't care about them or their sob stories. I knew they'd felt hopeless before the yeerks offered them help, but I just couldn't find it in me to be sympathetic to them.
Cassie looked at me. "I don't really do anything to stop her. I used to fight back more, but—" She broke off.
I could guess the gist of what she hadn't been able to say. Yeerks can play back any memory of yours they wish, in vivid, lifelike detail. Yeerks can show fantasies—yours and theirs—in that same realistic sharpness. Yeerks can simply stimulate your pain centers without bothering with making a hallucination. They can dig into your mind and find all your secrets and humiliating thoughts, and then throw those private things in your face until you'd do just about anything to make them stop. That's not even getting into the access they have to the people you love and the possessions you treasure. I can't think of anything as horrible as being at the mercy of a yeerk who wants to make you suffer.
"That isn't your fault," I told her. "I know what it's like to be tortured by a yeerk. Believe me, there's nothing wrong with you for giving in."
"Pretty much all of us know what it's like to be tortured by yeerks. That hasn't stopped Rachel."
"Rachel is either a superhero or a lunatic," I said firmly. And to myself I added, If Rachel isn't already crazy, she'll go crazy at some point during this nightmare. I didn't get too many chances to interact with Rachel, but I'd occasionally seen her down at the pool. She tended to spend the first half-hour of her freedom howling and thrashing and throwing herself at the guards and at the cage bars. Rachel would eventually calm down if one of her friends was in the cage with her, as far as I'd seen.
"Telling yourself 'I should be able to resist yeerk torture because Rachel can' is like telling yourself 'I should be able to revolutionize physics because Einstein did,'" I continued. "She's Rachel. There's nothing wrong with not being her."
Cassie was silent for a long time. At one point, the hork-bajir guards dragged some poor sap out of the cage and back to the pool for reinfestation. The sudden absence of one person didn't open up too much space in the cage, but it did leave a decent-sized gap along one of the sides. Cassie and I both rushed over too it and sat down, leaning back against the bars. I deliberately looked away from the prisoner the hork-bajir were dragging down to the pool.
"I wish I were stronger." Cassie's voice sounded hoarse and quiet. "I hate being their tool."
"Yeah." My stomach felt funny. "Me too."
Cassie took my hand in hers. I squeezed it gently. We didn't say anything else for a long time.