Prologue

My name is Hope.

I am twelve years old.

And I am about to die.

I'm holding the gun to my own head, screaming something unintelligible at the Hork-Bajir around me. We're in a Yeerk Pool, one of many, underground and dark. The power got cut a while back. We can only see anything because of the fires over by the store sheds, lit by rioters, and fed by them. I can hear screams and smell burning flesh.

Things have gone downhill pretty fast since the Yeerks made their presence know almost a year ago. They didn't mean to; things leaked out. It wasn't like they could've kept a full-scale invasion secret for very long.

The Animorphs – the only human resistance – didn't mean for the secret to come out either, and it wasn't like either of them could have predicted what happened.

Panic. Riots. Death.

When people heard the news – when they believed it – everyone was trying to get to safety. But there was none, and now the Yeerks were out in the open, they knew they had to move fast. Bombing various parliaments, gunning down enemy troops, they used their superior weaponry and spacecraft to devastating effect. Then, once there was nothing to oppose them, they moved in, built their Yeerk Pools, and infested everyone still alive.

The Animorphs did what they could, hiding, saving few, staying alive. They could not go up against Bug Fighters and the Blade Ship. But they tried. They blew up a Yeerk Pool. They got hundreds to safety. They destroyed the Blade Ship. And they survived.

Now they are raiding this Yeerk Pool. It is the central one in a place once called New York City, though it is but a ruin and a wreck now. I was caught but a week ago, on the outskirts of the city, and have been awaiting infestation ever since. With so many new hosts, management problems ensued for the Yeerks, resulting in a delayed shipment of new yeerks to the Centre-City pool. One more week of freedom for me. Five months I have lived alone in the destroyed buildings and the rubble. Five months of scavenging, terror, and pain. My parents were taken long ago, my brothers and sister also. But I escaped.

The Animorphs attacked here, hoping to free us, I suppose. Or to kill Visser One, the Andalite-controller. He makes his base here, ever since they destroyed the original pool. But something went wrong. I don't know what. The cages containing us poor unfortunates were opened, and we ran – to nowhere. For the Yeerk Pools are sealed to us. So someone started a fire . . . broke into the store sheds and threw Dracon beams to the rest of us . . . ran stampeding into the corridors and labyrinthine passages of the place . . .

They're still rioting, getting beaten back and surging forward against the Hork-Bajir and humans who still have Yeerks in their heads. It's impossible to differentiate between friend and foe. It won't last long. We'll all be dead or captured soon. No knowing what's happened to the Animorphs.

I will not be infested. I'm cornered by some Hork-Bajir, on a balcony above the pool. I have a gun – an old-fashioned, human gun – and I am holding it to my own head. If they take one step closer, I will shoot.

Then there is a rush, a roar. The fire has reached something explosive.

Everything is silent to me. Like a dream I see the fire surge, throwing people away, blasting through walls. Then it reaches us. I feel the heat, but not the pain. I see the screaming of the Hork-Bajir as they are consumed. But I am thrown clear of the blaze as a second explosion sends shockwaves through the building. There are two more blasts, then the fire rages unaided. I am lying against a wall, half-destroyed with stone and mortar falling everywhere. No strength left to get up, but it's okay. Death would come by another hand anyway.

The heat is awful. It presses against me like the rock. I hope that the smoke kills me before the fire does. I'm partially protected by the rubble; the wall fell at such an angle that it's mostly blocking the inferno. My cage is my protection.

Then I hear a roar in the distance – not the fire; an animal in pain. A grizzly bear comes crashing out onto the landing beside me, howling in rage. The fire is still strong here, but it ploughs through, regardless of burning fur. Three Hork-Bajir and a number of human-controllers follow with Dracon beams ablaze. The bear turns to fight. I do not see its fate, as at that moment, a strange and awful creature bursts through the wall on my other side. It is Visser One in morph, or a hallucination. But the blue box, shining with an internal light that is such a sweet counterpoint to the searing of the fire, the blue box that is thrown free of the blaze – that is no mirage. It lands by my broken and burnt hand. It is the Escarfil device. I know this from the months of terror, when information was survival. How it has come to me, I cannot say. Perhaps the room under whose wall I lie trapped was some secret storeroom of the Visser's, where he kept the device that was stolen from the Animorphs? Perhaps he was carrying it with him when they attacked the Yeerk pool. All I know is that it came to me. And when I have put my hand on it and taken its power, a Hork-Bajir, too, comes to me; slumping newly dead within my reach. I stretch out my hand . . .

Once I have morphed the Hork-Bajir, forcing my way out of the confining rubble, I am no longer burnt and crushed. My bones have healed, but the smoke is already creeping into my lungs.

I do not remember how I got out. The power of the Hork-Bajir morph helped me force my way to freedom. But I did get out. And I survived. And with me I took the Escarfil device, to help me in this new war.

The Animorphs fell there, in the flames and terror of the Centre-City Pool. At least, I never saw them again, nor heard of them, but when I tell the stories I say that they are out there somewhere, still trying, still helping.

I can only hope that it is true.