Don't believe the hype. I had a childhood, and a lot of people lost more. Maybe the war cost me an adolescence, I'll give you that. It changed a lot of who I was, yeah, but people change a lot as teenagers anyway. Maybe I lost three years to secrets, hiding everything from everyone. Even the truths of my life from the people I loved. Even my name from the world I fought to save.

If it hadn't been for the war, I could have screamed my name to all the world. That doesn't mean anyone would have heard me.

How long will it take—what do I have to do—until they stop calling me a child and listen to me as an equal? I have seen so much more than everyone else who claims to be in charge. Oh, I can appeal to my reputation if I want. It'd probably be enough to get some people to stop—stop the pettiness, the destruction, the mindlessness that led so many into really losing their minds.

But if I demand that they let my credentials give way and lead without dissent, how long until I become the enemy of all I fought for?

I didn't fight to avenge a relative who was lost to me forever. Or to free a prisoner I lived with every day, or who had always been part of my life. Or even to save someone who I didn't know was alive.

I didn't expect to regain any measure of humanity. And I couldn't have expected to free someone who was never a Controller. I had no expectations and no pretense. And now here I am—here we are—today.

I'd call myself the luckiest man alive except for, you know, the whole "humanity" thing. But this is good enough.

What do they mean, stay out and turn around? Back to diplomacy? As if their posturing has accomplished anything except lies and laws passed too late to matter.

It would be so easy to disrupt things, make progress, I tell them. (Them—I am one of them, except when I am not.) Oh, none of us are creative, brave, desperate enough. We're too old. But we could send children, we'd have to. The Ellimists know there are enough of them craving adventure as is.

Six inept teenagers won us Earth. No one is hopeful, or callous, enough to try winning again.

Funny how your old habits never leave you. We had to be paranoid, looking at everyone we meet, and ask "Could they be a Controller?"

And it's become so much a part of me that I still ask myself the same question. "Could that person be a Controller? The one right there? If the war were still going on, if we'd failed, would this hand shaking mine be unfree?"

And then I remember it was us who made sure we don't have to worry. That this is our planet—still ours, humans, but also ours, us Animorphs. Also mine.

I've been a Leeran. I've been a Hork-Bajir. I've even been a couple of other humans. I know that morphing a sentient creature is not that strange, all things considered. You don't have to overcome some of those overwhelming instincts.

And yet under the lights, all the noises, trying to blink and focus through the flood of cameras, I stiffen sometimes and I can't believe it's me. I don't know what I'm doing here. I feel older than I sometimes expected to grow. And I tense up and part of me wonders if I'm just in morph as a human.