THE GORILLA SPEAKS

My hand shook as I reached up to ring the doorbell. I took a deep breath, steeling my nerves, and pushed the button.

Almost immediately, a butler answered the door. "Greetings, madam," he said. "Unfortunately, Mr. Black is not allowing visitors at this time. Please try back another time." He moved to shut the door, but I interrupted.

"Please, just go and tell him that Jordan Berenson is here."

"I suppose there is no harm in telling him," the butler said reluctantly, "but I do not expect it to make any difference. I shall return momentarily."

I leaned against one of the pillars on the porch and looked around the grounds of Marco's estate. I'd never seen such a high concentration of pointlessly frittered money in my life. It stood in sharp contrast to the rest of the country I'd seen from the taxi windows on the ride from the airport. Poorly paved streets, dilapidated housing, and very little industry or agriculture as far as I could see. The house was set just far enough back from the gate that it wasn't possible to see the town from the porch.

It made me kind of sick.

Finally, the door opened. I turned to see Marco Roussos – Marco Black now, I guess – walk through the door, arms open. "Jordan! I haven't seen you in years! How are you?"

"Better than the last time," I said, not moving.

Marco sobered. "Yeah, well, funerals are never fun," he muttered. He made his way over to the pillar opposite me and leaned against it, nearly missing. "Sorry. I'm a little drunk."

"At ten in the morning?"

"You know what day it is."

Of course I knew what day it was. Earth Liberation Day. The only holiday to be recognized by every country on Earth.

The day my sister had died.

"I'm not drunk," I pointed out.

"You, my friend," Marco said, "had to fly over from the States on an orbital hopper. If you had been drinking, none of it would be left in you." He gestured toward the door. "Come on in."

I followed him into the absurdly ornate mansion. "What's up with this, anyway?" I asked.

"What's up with what?"

"This." I waved a hand around, encompassing our surroundings. "People are living in hovels out there, and here you are, King Marco the Magnificent."

He sighed, grabbing a bottle of Jack Daniels off a counter as we walked and gulping some down. "Jordan, I don't think you understand how incredibly rich I am."

I looked around and made an incredulous noise in the back of my throat.

"Yeah, okay, there's all this," he said. "Jordan, I don't even see half of the money I make. That goes directly into whatever this government's equivalent of the DPW is."

"Then why is everything out there so shitty?"

Marco plopped down on a couch and patted the seat next to him. I sat in an easy chair facing him instead. He shrugged. "Suit yourself. Anyway, right now they're working on infrastructure stuff in the north. You can't just renovate an entire country at a time." He took another gulp of whiskey. "You want a drink?"

"I'm good."

We sat in silence for a few minutes, he with his whiskey, I with my thoughts.

I shouldn't have come here, I thought. Not today, anyway. This is a bad day for both of us. But maybe that was why it was important to come today. Maybe it was time for today to have some happy memories attached to it.

"Music?" Marco asked suddenly, jerking me out of my musings. He grabbed a remote off of a nearby table and aimed it at the wall, hitting a button.

"-violence in your heart/I want to recog-"

Marco turned the music back off. "Wrong playlist," he muttered.

"I want you to tell me about my sister," I blurted out.

He blinked. "What? You mean, now? Here? Me?"

I nodded.

"Here isn't a good place." He rose and offered me his hand. I ignored it and stood up. "There isn't nearly enough alcohol here. We need to head to the bar."

"So, Rachel," Marco said. He was visibly drunk now, having drained the bottle of Jack on the walk up to the bar and halfway through a glass of vodka. "Fuck. I don't even know where to start."

"Start at the beginning," I prompted, pouring myself a glass of wine.

"Right. The beginning. Right." He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. "Right. I didn't really know her too well until, you know, the war. She was pretty, obviously, and I knew she was Jake's cousin, but, y'know." He drained the glass and poured himself some more. "She was the bravest Animorph." He paused. "Pfft. Animorph. Stupid fuckin' word. Did you know I came up with it?" I shook my head. "Yeah. Animal morphers. Five teenagers with-" He sighed. "Anyway, yeah, she was the bravest. Always getting us going, always the first one in. We were more confident because she was there.

"But you know all that."

"Yeah." That's what all of the history books said about her. It was basically the extent of what Marco had written in his autobiography and what Cassie had said in interviews. "I was hoping there was more to her than that."

Marco squinted at me like he was trouble seeing me. Although given the amount of ethanol floating around his bloodstream, he actually might have been.

"You look at Rachel, right, and you see this thing, don't you? This big legacy that you're expected to live up to - this sort of more-than-human brave warrior that nobody could possibly escape the shadow of, right?" I looked away and finished my wine. "Hey." I looked back at him. "Listen to me. You're a lot like Rachel in some ways, y'know?"

I sighed. "I hear that a lot."

"Yeah, but, I mean it." He grinned his infectious PR grin. "You know why? Because you're sitting here scared shitless that it's going to turn out that you really can't live up to the Rachel legacy, but you've got your brave face on and you're sitting here and listening to me ramble anyway." He drained the rest of the vodka bottle. "Rachel wasn't fearless. She put on the act for us, but I know she was fucking scared to death as much as the rest of us. Hell, you probably saw more of that than we did, even though you didn't know it."

Realization hit. "Maggots."

Marco gave me a blank stare. "What?"

"One night," I explained, pouring myself another glass, "I think really early in the war, Rachel woke up screaming about maggots."

"Ah, right." Marco nodded. "That was the shrew morph, I think. She really got shook up by that. First time any of us did a rodent." He cracked a bottle of bourbon and poured two shots.

"I don't drink bourbon," I protested.

"The hell you don't," Marco insisted. "This is a day for copious amounts of powerful liquor."

I shrugged and took the shot, then coughed as it burned its way down my throat.

"You get used to it," he said, downing his own shot. "Anyway, yeah. You came here to hear about Rachel, and in my mind, that means you're already as brave as she was."

I drained my wine glass to hide my misty eyes. "Thanks," I said once I had my emotions under control again.

"There was more to her than that, though," Marco said, now starting to slur as he drank straight from the bottle of bourbon. "She was... she was a good friend, even though we weren't real close as far as the Aninorphs, uh, Animorphs went. I mean, she and Tobias were, yeah, they were kind of had a thing going, going on, but after my mother died for the third time, or didn't die, or whatever, she was the only person other than Jake who visited me to talk about it. She cared, you know? Even though we didn't always get along."

I wasn't sure exactly what Marco was talking about anymore, but I understood the sentiment. I held out my wine glass and he filled it with bourbon.

"I worried about her," he said, suddenly a bit more coherent. "A lot. I mean, she could take care of herself in a fight, obviously. But she was always a lot more into it than the rest of us. She liked fighting. It was kind of messed up and sociopathic and shit, and I was scared of what she might become." He took another swig. "She was scared too. All the fuckin' time, she was scared of how much she enjoyed the battle, how alive it made her feel. And I sorta understand, because I had moments like that too, when I came up with a really brilliant plan, something really ruthless, I understood the way she felt in battle. But she had it a lot worse than me." Another drink. "Really, I don't know how she would've reacted if she'd survived the war., addicted as she was. Maybe she would've gotten more normal. Maybe she would've become a stunt person or something. I don't know." A horrified expression crept onto his face. "Fuck. Fuck. I shouldn't have told you that. I'm too drunk to be talking right now. I meant to tell you that some other time. Goddammit, now wasn't the time. Fuck. Sorry."

"It's okay, Marco, really, I promise." I was starting to slur a little, too. And everything was going all fuzzy and sleepy. I poured myself some more bourbon. "I never got a chance to really know Rachel, you know? I wanna know everything." I drained the glass again and looked at Marco. "Stop moving around so much, you're making me dizzy."

The last thing I remembered was Marco trying to focus long enough to tell me a rambling story about some mission he'd gone on with her as I laid my head against the cool wood of the bar.