(Author's note: This will eventually be a full-length book, set in canon around book 35 or so, except that it assumes the series takes place in the modern day. [What can I say? I keep wondering what the series would be like if it took place outside the '90s.] It's a sequel to book #16, from Marco's POV. Rated T, because I always found Scholastic's censorship a little silly for how middle schoolers realy talk. ((Thought speak indicated like this.))

I do not own any of the characters or intellectual property associated with Animorphs and thank KAA for being so cool about fandom in general.)

My name is Marco.

The Marco. Marco the Mighty. Marco, no last name necessary. Marco Jordan. Marco Trump. Marco Bush. Marco Obama.

About that. I can't tell you my real last name. Or where I live. Or who my friends are. Even where I like to hang out. None of us can. It's too dangerous.

See, we're not exactly normal kids. Or rather, we are normal. We're as normal as any kids who have to fight Yeerks in hand-to-hand combat on a daily basis and live without being mauled or tortured or killed. Or worse.

Yeerks aren't from around here. They're aliens. Slugs. Parasites. Like fleas or tapeworms or lice, but scarier. Yeerks don't make you itch or mess with your digestion or gross out girls. They take over your entire body. Your brain. Your free will. Your ability to do anything but watch, helpless, as they completely control you. Everything you say. Everything you do. Forever.

A person with a Yeerk in their head is called a Controller. Anyone can be a Controller. My best friend's Jake's brother, Tom, is one. So is my mother. Maybe your family is, too. Maybe you are.

The Yeerks have been taking over Earth for the past year or so, slowly and secretly, which says a lot when the invasion leader is someone like Visser Three. Visser Three is the boss from hell, a raving megalomaniac with an attitude and a serious body count. Plus the ability to transform into whatever horror-movie nightmare alien creature he's ever encountered, and then kill you with it. This isn't Star Trek. It isn't even David Cronenberg. It's much, much worse.

The major enemies of the Yeerks are the Andalites, another alien species millions of light-years away from Earth. They're like blue centaurs with eye stalks, no mouths and big scary tails. Visser Three's host is an Andalite. So is our buddy Ax. I'll get to him later. You'd think the Andalites would be humanity's only hope, but so far they've mostly blown us off.

Oh, right. Us. There are five of us. Five kids. Well, five kids and an Andalite aristh. A cadet. An intern. Beyond underdogs. But we have something else going for us.

One night, while cutting through an old construction site to impress Jake's crush Cassie, we found a dying Andalite prince named Elfangor. Visser Three found him too, and he... well, you can imagine what he did. But before Elfangor died, he gave us a power. A power all Andalite warriors have. The power to morph. To acquire the DNA of any animal species we touch, and to turn into them.

Insane, right? Messed up. PTSD city. Too much for one man to deal with. Even someone as strong and cute and humble as me.

But I haven't told you the worst part. Every week, while fighting the Yeerks, I have to face something even more horrifying.

PSAT prep.

"The pigeon is a resourceful bird. Though originally domestic creatures, huge populations of feral pigeons have grown in several major cities, such as New York and London. They have learned to scavenge in parks and on sidewalks for most of their food..."

I zoned out. When you've been a bird yourself, when you've had wings and feathers and a beak, when you've zoomed up pillars of hot air - our friend Tobias calls them thermals - and flown, really flown from city to city, when you've dive-bombed aliens and infiltrated their lairs and clawed out their eyes... well, it's hard to focus on PSAT bird passages.

We were in the computer lab, taking these practice tests online. One section on math, one section on grammar, one section on reading, all designed for kids several grades above us. Closed-book. No phones. No notes. No outside help allowed. Not that we had a real teacher checking. The school brought in some outside instructor named Mr. Andrew, who couldn't have been out of college. Mr. Andrew didn't like me. Probably because he caught me cheating off this kid Jesse's screen once. OK, more than once. Hey, you try sneaking math notes into the Yeerk pool.

We had a mission the other night. A bad one. Kind of a failure, really. Tobias was out hunting - we'll get to that later - and found a new entrance to the Yeerk pool. The Yeerk pool is a massive underground facility beneath our town where the Yeerks go every three days to feed. We've only gone down there a couple times. A couple times is a couple times too many.

The pool is always insanely crowded, like Yeerk Grand Central. There are aliens, like Hork-Bajir - tall, raptor-like aliens, normally a gentle, simple species but walking killing machines under Yeerk control - and Taxxons, cannibalistic centipede creatures whose hunger never goes away. And there are humans. There are the voluntary Controllers: people who choose to let Yeerks into their head because they're lonely or apathetic or whatever. While their Yeerks feed in the pool, they sit on couches and watch Breaking Bad and eat pizza and joke with each other. Wanna know what I think about that? It's disgusting. Then there are the involuntary ones. People who are forced to become Controllers. They don't get to watch TV. They get thrown into cages. Screaming. Pleading. Reduced to tears. I don't know if I believe in hell, but whatever it is, it can't be worse than the Yeerk pool.

We knew one entrance to the Pool was in the mall, in a dressing room at the Gap. This one was at the mall too, but behind it, in some dingy shipping area. A semi-enclosed warehouse. You know the kind. Normally the Yeerks have airtight security systems around pool entrances, but Tobias didn't know if they'd installed one here yet. So we were spying as cockroaches. Gross, right? Nightmares for miles. But safe. Nobody cares about a roach in a warehouse. Nobody, that is, except the Yeerks. Because those security systems? They're designed to kill any unauthorized lifeforms. To the Yeerks, a roach might not just be a roach. It could be an Andalite bandit - they think we're Andalites - in morph.

A rent-a-cop spotted one of us by a stray box. A stupid mistake. Stupider still because he was a Controller. The Yeerks know about our cockroach morphs. He closed the metal shutters leading into the warehouse. Dead end. No place to change morphs. No way to escape. He flooded the room with bug poison, then sent another cop to spray around the perimeter and five Hork-Bajir from the pool to finish the job. They say roaches can survive anything, but when you're breathing poison, barely dodging huge, spiked alien feet, that begins to seem like bull. One of them pulled my leg off. I was lucky. Our friend Rachel got stomped. Totally stomped. Guts everywhere. But she was lucky too.

Because she should have died. All of us should have died, really. We would have, too, except that in the carnage, one of the Hork-Bajir slammed into a motion sensor. A loud motion sensor. The kind that attracts outside attention. So they ran. And so did we, dragging Rachel's torn body behind us. And that's what saved my life that day. A motion alarm. A dumb fluke.

It made it hard to think about pigeons.

I couldn't focus, so I looked around the classroom. Everyone was either taking their tests or goofing off on Facebook. No one I knew. We didn't have our normal class assignments for PSAT prep, in case friends tried to cheat. The school randomly assigned us to groups, and the only familiar face was Brown Nose. Jesse, that is, His full name is Jesse Brown, but Jake and I always call him Brown Nose because he always sucks up to teachers. It's mean, I guess, but nobody we know really talks much with him. He's in third grade, see. He's probably a genius or something, but more importantly, his parents have the clout with the school system to get him moved up a couple grades. He's in Rachel's pre-algebra class. Jake's world history class. I don't have any classes with him because I don't take school as seriously as they do, but everyone has to take the PSAT, so here he was, probably scoring dozens of percentiles above me or anyone in the room. Like he even needed PSAT prep. He could apply to Harvard right now and get in easy.

I guess I was kind of jealous of Jesse. Nothing bad had ever happened to him. Nothing bad would ever happen to him, probably. Not like my life. Not now, not even before.

The computer beeped. Oh, right. The test was timed. "What is the main idea of this passage?"

What passage? Pigeons. Food. Something about sidewalks. All I could remember were details. Nothing broad. No main idea. Focus, Marco, I muttered, but my brain was mush. Normally I'd Google the questions - you can do that most of the time - but the test software did something to lock up the screen. My notes were in my backpack across the room - Mr. Andrew took all our bags - and both the computers next to me were empty. They kind of sat me by myself on purpose. See? I told you Mr. Andrew doesn't like me.

Suddenly, a plan emerged. It was stupid. Jake would kill me if he found out. We're not supposed to draw attention to ourselves. But if there's one thing about being an Animorph, it's drawing attention to yourself. And getting accustomed to stupid plans.

I raised my hand. "Mr. Andrew?"

"Yes, Marco."

"Something's wrong with my computer. It's some kind of virus! It's redirecting me to porn! There's porn everywhere! I'm being corrupted as I speak!"

Mr. Andrew did not look impressed. "Just move to another computer, Marco."

"Yes, sir! God forbid I allow smut in a fine learning institution like this." The trick to dealing with teachers is to lay it on thick. They secretly like that. Brightens up their day.

I sidled up to an empty seat next to Jesse's screen, and I could have sworn I saw him rolling his eyes. Not my problem. I pulled up the practice test on my new computer - thankfully the timer hadn't stopped - clicked the mouse a few times for show, waited a minute until I was sure Jesse'd forgotten I was there, then snuck a peek at his screen. And glared. He wasn't taking the test at all! He was in some chat room. The little twerp. I was just about to rat him out to Mr. Andrew when my heart stopped.

See, I didn't recognize most of the screen names in the chat. Why should I? But I did notice one name right away. It would have been impossible not to.

Fitey777. Also known as Joe Bob Fenestre. The founder of Web Access America, the biggest Internet service provider there is. Formerly the second-richest man in the world. Presumed dead, in a freak house fire. Yet chatting online with Brown Nose.

Joe Bob Fenestre, the founder of the only anti-Yeerk website in existence. A Controller. Also, a twin. Esplin 9466 the lesser, twin of Esplin 9466 the prime.

Visser Three.

The tab suddenly closed. "Are you trying to cheat off me again, Marco?"

"What? No." I forced a laugh. "You know me! I'm a paragon of academic integrity! A model student, through and through! Also modest," I added, praying he didn't suspect anything more.

"I'm telling the teacher." Typical Brown Nose. This was bad. I looked around the room again to see if maybe I could get out of this. The period wasn't over yet, but we had the computer lab in shifts, and another group was starting to file in early. Jake's group! I shut the screen off quick and bolted over, nearly knocking him into the door.

"What the hell, Marco?"

"We have problems."

Jake looked annoyed. "What problems?"

"Brown Nose problems. You know what this kid was doing?" Jake blanched suddenly. "This kid was in Joe B-"

"Marco, look behind you." I turned. Mr. Andrew was standing by the door. He was not happy.

"Can I see you outside the classroom for a minute, Marco?" This wasn't bad anymore. This was very bad.

"Backup. Now. Just be ready," I whispered, then followed Mr. Andrew into the hallway. No one was around. I gulped, then gambled that Mr. Andrew didn't have our class schedules memorized.

"You know, Mr. Andrew, I have a really big math test next period. Half our grades! On - on systems of inequalities! Advanced stuff, man. Wouldn't want to be late for that!"

"Next period is lunch." So much for gambling. "Marco, I know you were looking at Jesse's screen. I know what you saw."

My veins were ice. "Why, you must be mistaken! That would violate the Honor Code! I would never do such a thing." Mr. Andrew's face was unchanged. "Right?" He knew what I saw, which was too much. Any minute now, he would get Chapman, our vice principal and a high-ranking Controller, and stick a Yeerk inside me. A Yeerk who would soon know all our team's secrets. I glanced nervously down the hall. No Jake. No windows, either, so no Tobias. I had singlehandedly lost the war. During a PSAT exam.

"This is the fourth time you have cheated off Jesse's screen all semester."

All the energy left me. "Fourth? No way! It was only this once. OK, twice. I mean, Mr. Andrew. Mr. Andrew, man. You know what pigeons eat? You know what pigeons eat?" No answer. "No? See! It's rigged! You can't win! The only way to pass is to cheat!" I was babbling. But you try sounding smart after imagining your own doom. "Maybe it was three times?"

And that's how I got detention all week. Not that I cared, really. When your main extracurricular activity is fighting the Yeerks, a little detention doesn't register anymore.