Chapter 03: Rachel

I straightened in the stall, giving my body a quick once-over to confirm that all of my body parts had, in fact, returned to their rightful places. Pulling on my clothes, I called out to the others. "I'm clear."

The door swung open to reveal Cassie and Jake, both standing with expectant looks on their faces. "Still there," I said. "Exactly the same as what everybody else heard. The voice goes 'Elfangor, brother, help me,' and then there's like a ten second pause, and then it repeats."

Jake nodded, the muscles in his jaw tight. "Did you mark the angle?"

"Yeah," I replied. "Again, same as what you guys got." I stepped aside so that they could see the two lines I'd gouged with my Andalite tail blade—one in the rough, unfinished wood of the stall wall, and one in the dirt of the floor. "It was definitely coming from under the ground."

Cassie stepped forward, holding the plastic protractor she'd retrieved from her bedroom earlier that morning, when we'd reassembled after a long and sleepless night. "It's tough to be really accurate," she said. "But it looks just like yours and mine. Thirty-ish degrees below horizontal."

"And just a little bit south of west," I added, pointing at the line on the ground. "So unless it's coming from the middle of the planet somehow—"

"—then Elfangor's brother is trapped somewhere in the middle of the Pacific ocean," Jake finished. He sighed, scrubbing at his eyes again, and looked over at Cassie's globe, conspicuously out-of-place amid the hay bales and the dull metal cages. We'd tried extrapolating based on the direction the voice seemed to be coming from, had drawn a circle around our best guess as to its origin. It was about an inch across, a tight little loop in the middle of a wide patch of blue.

Just a little bigger than Texas.

"We're definitely assuming this isn't some kind of trick, then?" I asked.

Jake shrugged. "I don't see how it could be, or why anyone would bother. Elfangor's dead. And we're only hearing the message when we're in Andalite morph. I don't know how hack-proof thought-speak is, but if the signal is somehow keyed to Elfangor's DNA…"

"It might not be his DNA," Cassie pointed out. "It could be his brainwaves, or something. I mean, if what we're morphing is an exact copy of his body, all the way down to the neurons and stuff…"

"Not important," I interrupted. "What's important is figuring out what we're going to do about it."

Jake and Cassie exchanged glances, and I felt a flicker of irritation. "There might not be anything we can do, Rachel," Jake said quietly. "That's thousands of miles away from here. Hundreds of miles from the nearest land. If that circle's in the right place, the globe says the water's over two miles deep."

The flicker turned into a small, bright flame and my eyes narrowed. "So it's not going to be easy," I said, letting my voice go sharp. "Don't tell me you think that means we ought to do nothing." I looked back and forth between them, but neither offered a response. "Elfangor died so that the five of us could get away. We can't just abandon his brother."

"After the mission to kill us all didn't go according to plan, you mean," Jake corrected. "We don't know who his brother is, or what he'll want, or how he'll react when he finds out Elfangor is dead."

"So your solution is to just ignore him? Leave him to drown, or starve?"

"That's not what I'm—"

"Guys!" Cassie broke in. "This isn't—I mean, can we please just wait for Tobias and Marco to get back? Instead of trying to figure it out by ourselves?"

Jake crossed his arms, his mouth clicking shut. I could see him wrestling with his own irritation, struggling to keep his cool. I said nothing, only spun on my heel and began pacing up and down the length of the barn.

It wasn't Jake's fault. I was on edge, overreacting, looking for excuses to argue. I couldn't help it—I hadn't slept at all, and every minute or so, my body would send another wave of adrenaline crashing through my bloodstream. It had been almost fifteen hours since Elfangor's ship had appeared in front of us, and since then, we'd done nothing but stand around and talk.

Okay, that wasn't true. We'd all tried morphing, and we'd gone ahead and acquired every animal in Cassie's barn the night before so that the analysis could run its course. We'd confirmed that the message from Elfangor's brother was, in fact, a message, and not a live communication, and we'd gone ahead and started working out its origin while Marco and Tobias went out into the woods to experiment with the telepathy that seemed to be part of the morphing technology.

But we hadn't done anything, and I was starting to unravel. I could feel the pressure of inaction across every inch of my skin, getting tighter and tighter as the seconds ticked by.

On my third lap across the barn, I stopped abruptly. "I'm going to practice morphing until they get back," I said. "I'll use the stall."

I ducked back inside before they could reply, pulling the door shut behind me. Taking my phone out of my pocket, I set it on a small ledge and opened up the stopwatch app, then stripped down. With a deep breath, I pushed start and focused all of my thoughts on my chosen target.

Badger, I thought to myself.

I had actually met the badger before, a scarred old male who'd been pulled out from under a log by a pair of hikers in the national park. Cassie and I had been working on homework together on the day he'd been found, and I'd been conscripted into helping while she and her dad operated on his broken back. Closing my eyes, I pictured his thick, wiry fur, his long, hooked claws, his wide, stubby tail.

The first thing I noticed was a feeling of falling. My eyes shot open as my body shrank down, the rest of the barn rocketing skyward. I was barely three feet tall before anything else started to change.

As I watched, my body began to turn colors—mostly black, but with bright slashes of pure white. There was an itchy, tingling sensation, and suddenly everything shattered and shivered and split, a million tiny hairs forming themselves out of what had moments before been smooth skin.

It was about then that my eyesight started to weaken, the world around me blurring as my eyes shrank and receded, changing from bright blue to the badger's beady dark brown. At the same time, my nose and mouth began protruding, stretching farther and farther forward as the bones of my face rearranged into a long, sturdy snout.

I fell forward onto hands and knees just as my arms and legs began to shrink, sucking up into my body like spaghetti. I felt the connection between my head and my spine disappear as my skull rotated backward, then felt it re-form, the vertebrae clicking into place in their new arrangement. It was like being at the dentist—I could sense what was happening to my body, could tell that it should hurt, but I felt it only vaguely, distantly, as if it were happening to somebody else.

It was a good thing, too, because as my claws ripped their way out of my fingers and toes, I not only saw the bones inside my hands—I smelled them, too. If I'd been able to sense pain normally, I would have been driven completely insane before the morph was even halfway done. Every single piece of me had been torn apart, rearranged, and stuck back together.

With a nauseating sound like cutting meat, my tail pushed out from the base of my spine, and the morph was complete. Holding still, I braced myself for the appearance of the badger's mind.

We'd discovered that our control over the morphs wasn't a hundred percent—which was actually a relief, because it meant we didn't have to figure out how to swim and crawl and fly from scratch. There was a sort of residual awareness, a collection of emotions and instincts that were more than capable of running the morphed body on their own.

For some morphs—like Elfangor's body, or the birds of prey—the effect was pretty mild. There was hunger, and maybe a drive to hunt or hide, and some subtle shifts in what caught your attention, but otherwise, you mostly felt like you.

With the horses, though, it was almost impossible to shake the skittishness. It was like being on five cups of coffee—there would be a sound, and the horse body would have already reacted before your human brain had even registered it. And when Cassie tried out squirrel morph, she lost control completely for almost five minutes, tearing around the barn in a panic. The squirrel's instincts were just too powerful, too ingrained, and it wasn't until Tobias dipped back into hawk morph and communicated with her telepathically that she was able to get a grip.

I was pretty confident that the badger would be easy to handle. It was a big and powerful animal, fairly high up on the food chain, and this badger in particular had seemed more bored than afraid each time I'd seen Cassie give him his meds. But I steeled myself mentally, just in case.

As it turned out, I didn't need to worry. The badger was sleepy, confident, and hungry, in that order. It was like sharing my brain with the essence of Saturday mornings. Other than a slightly-higher-than-usual desire to sniff around in the dirt of the stall floor, I felt completely normal and completely in control.

Rearing, I tried to make out the numbers on my phone. The ledge where I'd left it was only a foot above my head, but the badger's vision was terrible. Everything was blurred, and all of the colors were washed out and subtly shifted. I could see a dark, rectangular shape with something bright moving inside, but otherwise nothing.

Okay, fine. I'd been in morph for—what—thirty seconds? If I demorphed immediately, I could still get a pretty decent estimate of how long the transformation had taken. I was interested in finding out whether morphs of different size took different amounts of time, or whether the technology responded to a harder mental push. Taking one last sniff, I focused on my own body and began to reverse the changes.

My normal human vision returned in time to see the stopwatch tick over from 2:59 to 3:00, and I kept my eyes locked on it for the rest of the transformation. It read 3:47 when the last of the squelching, schlooping, and grinding finished, and I did the math in my head in a heartbeat.

Just over a minute and a half. No different, in other words, than when I'd morphed into Sara or Elfangor. It wasn't enough to lock in the pattern for sure, but it was pretty solid evidence to start with. Human child, dog-sized mammal, or full-sized alien—apparently, size and complexity made no difference.

Resetting the timer, I focused on the squirrel, and began my second morph. My sixth, in total.

Four minutes later, as I returned to human form, I suddenly realized that my whole body was trembling and tired, my arms heavy as if I'd just finished running through my gymnastics routine. Frowning, I took a step, and was just barely able to stop my knees from buckling.

That was new.

"Guys?" I called out weakly. Reaching for my clothes, I overbalanced, my shoulder slamming against the stall wall. I stayed in that position as I tugged on my jeans, leaning heavily against the wood as I slid them past my hips. Stashing the phone in my pocket, I threw my coat around my shoulders and stepped shakily back out of the stall.

Cassie and Jake were over by the barn door, poring over the globe and a sheet full of scribbled drawings and diagrams. They looked up as I walked out, their faces immediately flooding with concern.

"Rachel!" Cassie shouted, as they both ran over to me. "Sit down!"

I levered myself toward one of the hay bales, feeling tired all over, and just barely made it, my muscles giving way as I dropped heavily into a sitting position. "Tired," I said.

"What happened?" Jake asked. "Are you okay? You're white as a sheet." Behind me, Cassie grabbed my shoulders, pulling me back to lean against her thighs and stomach.

"Morphed and demorphed," I said, each word a weight that had to be lifted individually. "Twice, rapid-fire."

"And it did this?" he said, appalled. "You look like you did when you had pneumonia last year."

I shook my head, trying to clear it. "Not like that." I lifted my arm, let it drop back into my lap. "Not dizzy. Not sick. More like, just ran ten miles."

I felt Cassie's fingers gently buttoning my jacket for me, then twitched when they pressed against the line of my jaw. I realized she was checking my pulse, and held still, noticing as I did that my breathing was normal, neither particularly fast nor particularly slow.

"Heart rate's about fifty-four," Cassie announced. "A little low, but she's a gymnast. Totally normal."

I shrugged my shoulders and tensed my legs. "Not sore, either," I said. "Just really, really—"

I broke off. I had been about to say really, really tired, but in the minute or so that I'd been sitting there, one of the reallys had dropped off. Now I only felt like I'd run five miles.

"What is it?" Jake asked, still sounding slightly hysterical.

"Nothing," I replied. "It's weird. It's already fading." I gently pulled Cassie's hands off of my shoulders and straightened, still sitting on the bale. "It hit me like a ton of bricks, but I'm already halfway back to normal."

"Don't stand up yet," Cassie warned. "You're still looking pretty pale."

I nodded, and stayed seated. "Do you think it has something to do with the morphing tech?" I wondered aloud. "Like, obviously, duh. But with the morphing tech itself. The nanobots, or whatever."

Jake shrugged, his expression still tight. "Could be. Elfangor said something about them having a charge. But I don't see why that would make you tired."

"Some kind of fail-safe?" Cassie suggested. "An automatic shutoff, to stop you from overloading the system?"

"If so, that's something we're going to have to do more experiments with," I said. "Don't want to suddenly run out of morphing power in the middle of a fight."

"Like hell," Jake snapped. "I don't care about some fight, I care about the fact that my cousin just came this close to dying of exhaustion."

I smiled, feeling the last of the strange fatigue draining away from my arms and legs. "Real sweet, Jake, but I'm fine. Look." Standing, I shook out my hands and feet, rotated my shoulders and hips.

"Still," Jake said. "That's—what—ten transformations this morning? Counting both morphing and demorphing? Six in the past fifteen minutes. I don't want you doing any more for at least a couple of hours."

"Who's gonna stop me?"

"Rachel—"

"I'm kidding, I'm kidding," I said, holding up my hands as Jake put on his best stern-dad expression. "I'll hold off for a while. But we really do need to figure out what the limits are." I looked over at the globe. "Especially if we're going to have to chain morphs together all day while we swim or fly across an ocean."

I looked back just in time to catch Jake's grimace, and then my own voice filled my head.

‹Eagle Leader to Eagle Nest. Inbound, ETA thirty seconds, Tobias ate a mouse. Over.›

"Short version: thought-speak has a range of about three hundred yards, and shouting or whispering doesn't change the range, but it does change the volume. It clicks on about halfway through the morph no matter what, and you can thought-speak from any morph, including human. It doesn't matter if there's stuff in the way, and you can send things that aren't words, like humming or beeps, but they still translate into the other person's 'voice.' It also has some kind of automatic built-in privacy targeting thingy—I was right next to Tobias and basically thought-shouting, but he couldn't hear me unless I wanted him to. Oh, and side note—we tried acquiring from a morph, and it works. I can now officially impersonate Tobias's cat, Dude."

We were sitting in a circle in the barn, just as we had the night before. Marco was perched on the same high, sturdy shelf where he'd left his spare clothes, his legs kicking and dangling as he looked down at the rest of us. He'd flown in, demorphed in place, and immediately begun talking, a hint of excitement leaking through his doom-and-gloom attitude. Jake and Cassie and I were listening, having already explained about the morphing fatigue while the pair of them were coming out of bird form. Tobias was off to one side, slightly apart from the rest of us, a queasy sort of look on his face.

"Did you check the distress signal?" Jake asked.

"Yeah," Marco said, nodding. "It was just as strong and coming from the same direction even when we went two or three miles out, so it's definitely not just three hundred yards deep underground or anything like that. Oh, and there's something special about it, because when Tobias and I were talking at each other, we couldn't tell where our thoughts were coming from."

I frowned. "A homing beacon? Tied right into the message somehow?"

"Makes sense, for a distress signal," Jake said. "Did you guys run into any trouble with multiple morphs? Like what happened to Rachel?"

"Not really," Marco said. "We got a little tired after a while, but we never did four changes back-to-back like that." He glanced at Tobias. "We did run into a little trouble with the morph's instincts. Turns out they can take you by surprise pretty quick."

Tobias's mouth thinned to a tight line, and his cheeks flushed. "There was a mouse," he said curtly. "It was like flipping a switch. The hawk just took over."

"Which raises an interesting question, actually," Marco said. "Is there a mouse inside you right now?"

I saw Jake and Cassie's eyes widen with surprise. Tobias's face didn't change—he'd clearly already been considering the possibility, and was none too thrilled about it.

"Because the way the morphing seems to happen," Marco continued, "your body changes piece by piece, right? So theoretically, you might have morphed around the mouse."

"Do we really have to talk about this?" Cassie asked, her eyes on Tobias, whose blush had turned slightly green.

Marco shrugged. "No. But the question becomes a lot more interesting when we're talking about bullets, instead of mice."

I shivered. Jake gave a low whistle and stuck his hands in his pockets, while Cassie reached out to put a hand on Tobias's shoulder. For a moment, we were all silent.

Then a thought occurred to me. "Hey," I said. "Actually, that reminds me—you said thought-speak works when you're in human morph?"

Marco nodded.

"You and Tobias morphed each other?"

Another nod.

"What—um. What happened to your clothes? When you morphed?"

"Nothing. We just morphed inside them, basically."

"But they fell off when you morphed into birds?"

"Yeah. They're stashed out by those big rocks, at the edge of the woods. Figured we'd pick them up on the way out."

I frowned. Something was tickling at the edge of my thoughts, but I couldn't quite put it into words.

"What is it, Rachel?" Cassie asked.

I shook my head. "Dunno," I replied. Our clothes had fallen off each time we'd morphed something small. And when Elfangor had demorphed from human to his larger Andalite body, his clothes had ripped and torn. Basically, clothes were completely separate from the morphing process, which was about what you'd expect, if it was based on a genetic scan. Except—

"Elfangor's clothes," I said. "Where'd they come from?"

Marco shrugged. "He probably had some stashed away, right? I mean, he'd morphed human before."

"Those weren't human clothes, though," I said.

There was a long pause as everyone gave me the same blank look. "What?" I asked, a little defensively. "They weren't. The seams were totally weird—they were in all the wrong places, and they didn't look like they were held together by thread."

"Leave it to Rachel to pick up on the finer points of intergalactic fashion design," Jake said dryly.

"Excuse me," Cassie interrupted, holding up a hand. "I don't mean to butt in, but can we back up for a minute? I mean, we've been doing experiments and figuring stuff out all morning, but we haven't even stopped to talk about the big picture."

"What big picture?" I asked.

"Everything!" Cassie said, and suddenly her voice was no longer strong and steady. "All that stuff that Marco was talking about last night! The alien invasion going on in our hometown! Mr. Chapman infesting those police officers! You guys are talking about bullets and—and rescue missions to the middle of the ocean, and we just watched someone get eaten,and—we're just a bunch of teenagers in a barn! What are we going to do? What's the plan?"

"We fight," I said.

"Fight who? Fight how? None of us know anything about how to—to wage war. I haven't ever even punched anybody. And how are we supposed to fight anything when we can't even leave the house without telling our parents where we're going? This is too big, you guys. Too big. We—we could die. Elfangor died. Those cops got turned into slaves right in front of us. How are we supposed to do anything about any of this?"

"Okay," Jake said, springing to his feet and holding out both hands. "Everybody hang on a sec. Please. Just hang on and take a deep breath." He looked around the circle for consent, then nodded grimly. "Okay. First off—Cassie, you're right. We need to start at the beginning. And we need to go slow, so that we all have a chance to talk."

He paused again, glancing at each of us in turn. "Anybody mind if I talk first?"

"You're in charge, boss-man," Marco quipped.

Jake winced, and I raised my hand. "Actually," I said, "that's maybe the first thing we need to figure out. Who is in charge?"

"Aren't we all in charge?" Tobias asked. "Democracy, and all that?"

"Democracy means voting," Marco pointed out. "Which means majority rule, which means if it's four against you, you shut your mouth and toe the line."

"I'm not doing anything just because the four of you tell me to," Cassie said, and there was steel beneath the tremble in her voice.

"Stop," Jake said, and everyone fell silent again. He took a deep breath, then another, then a third. "I—okay, look. Just for right now. Just for five minutes. You all know me. Rachel, you're my cousin. Marco, you're my best friend. Tobias, we've been hanging out all year. Cassie—you trust me, right?"

Cassie nodded.

"Okay. So I'm the common link. I'm the one that everybody knows best. For the next five minutes, I'm in charge."

He paused again, looking around the circle as if giving us a chance to object. None of us did.

"Okay. I'll go first, then I'll call on somebody." He stuck his hands in his pockets, looking down at his feet, his tone neutral and flat. "Okay. Three things. First, are we even going to do this—are we going to fight."

I felt another flicker of irritation, this one accompanied by a healthy dose of impatience. Of course we were going to fight. What was the alternative—just stand there and do nothing?

But I suppressed the emotion, looking around the circle at Marco and Cassie and Tobias, looking at the weight that seemed to press down on Jake's shoulders.

They were afraid.

"And everybody gets to make their own decision," Jake continued. "No guilt. No pressure. We all saw what happened to Elfangor. I can't—we can't ask anybody to face that. Not if they aren't ready. Nobody's in unless they want to be."

All four of them, terrified. Dealing with it, yeah, but the fear was there, written right across their faces where anyone could see.

Why wasn't I afraid?

Should I be afraid?

"Second, are we a team. Like, are we in this together, or not. Because if we are, we're going to have to trust each other. And if we don't, it's not going to work."

I dug down into myself, trying to get a finger on the pulse of my emotions. I had to be feeling something, right?

"Third, what should we do. What's our first step. Because we've got Elfangor's brother out there somewhere, and we've got vice-principal Chapman, and we know the Yeerk pool is underground in the middle of town, whatever it is. And we don't know who else we can trust."

And then I realized. I wasn't afraid, but it wasn't because there was no fear inside of me. It was there, deep down—a whole ocean of it. I'd just refused to let it up. Looked away from it. Covered it up with a layer of cold resolve.

Like in gymnastics, when I'd been too scared to do backflips until I'd worked myself into a frustrated rage. Like when my mom and dad got divorced, and I didn't talk to either of them for two months. Like last night, when Tobias and Cassie had been in tears, and all I'd felt was fury.

"Fourth, I guess. Sorry. What are the rules. How do we make decisions. What are the lines we can't cross. What do we do if one of us—if somebody—if everything goes wrong."

Was it better to be angry? Or afraid?

I looked around the circle again.

"That's it, I guess. Who wants to go next?"

Angry.

I raised my hand.

"Rachel," Jake said. "Your turn."

I stood up. "I don't have a whole lot to say," I began. I deliberately kept my hands out of my pockets, kept my chin up and my eyes forward. "I've never been in a fight before, either. I don't know anything about war. But right now, we're the only ones with our eyes open. We're the only ones who know, who are free, and Elfangor died to make that happen. Died a billion miles from home. I don't know what good turning into a badger is going to be, but—"

I stopped and shrugged. I looked across the circle to Cassie—my best friend, and the sweetest, gentlest person I knew. "But they can't have my sisters. And they can't have my mom. They can't have my dad, or my friends, or my coach. Not if there's anything I can do to stop it. I'll do whatever it takes—if one of you guys has a plan, count me in. But even if you don't. Even if I'm on my own. Even if it's hopeless. Because thanks to Elfangor, the worst they can do to me is kill me. And I'm not going to run away from that—not when everybody else is up against something so much worse."

I sat back down, and silence filled the barn.

"Anyone else?" Jake asked. Cassie raised her hand, and he nodded to her.

"I'm not arguing with any of that," she said. "But how can you possibly fight when every single bad guy is living inside an innocent human shield?"

By the time we finished talking, the sun was already halfway to the horizon. Tobias left on foot, Marco on his bike. Jake stayed behind to have dinner with Cassie's family, who would drop him off at home afterward. We had all agreed not to risk flying home—not to morph at all, unless somebody's life was at stake.

We hadn't accomplished much. Nobody was out, but only Jake and Marco were really in. Cassie still had too many questions that no one could answer, and Tobias had mostly stayed silent.

We'd managed to agree that Jake was our leader, although nobody really knew what that meant, least of all Jake. In the end, it had boiled down to the fact that he was the only one who linked us all together. And—as Marco pointed out—that he was pretty much doing the job already, and it was working out so far.

We were going to meet up again tomorrow afternoon, at the Gardens. Cassie was fairly certain she could get us back door access to most of the animals, and if she was wrong, we were going to use the trip to scope things out for a possible night mission afterward. Her condition: it would be a non-morphing, non-violent operation. Anything we couldn't accomplish in our own, regular bodies would have to wait. Marco had joked that we should bring spray paint and marijuana as cover; everybody had laughed until Tobias asked how much we would need.

Somehow, that had made it all a little too real.

About halfway through the conversation, I'd started to feel that pressure again, the itch of inactivity that made me want to get up and pace, made my fingers twitch and cut my patience in half. It had grown worse and worse as the others bickered and dithered, until finally I'd had to step outside to get some fresh air. Luckily, an idea had come to me, and I'd spent the rest of the discussion fleshing out a plan in my head.

For everyone else, the war would start tomorrow.

For me, it started tonight.

My house was a couple of miles away from Cassie's, a walk I'd done hundreds of times. There was a small boutique in a strip mall right at the halfway mark, where I'd drag Cassie every once in a while when she showed signs of being willing to wear something other than overalls. They knew me there; it wouldn't be at all out of the ordinary to stop in on a Saturday afternoon and try on some blouses.

More importantly, their dressing room doors went all the way to the floor.

Elfangor had read our minds from inside his ship—had pulled Jake and Marco's names right out of their heads. And whatever was actually going on with thought-speak, it had noticeable, physical effects—if words were showing up in our brains that wouldn't have been there otherwise, then there had to be neurons firing that would have otherwise been dormant—right?

I worked through the implications as I thumbed through the racks. Andalites didn't have a mouth. Thought-speak, for them, wasn't technology—it was how they naturally communicated.

Right?

So they had to have some kind of organ that would let them sense—and alter—thought. That would let them monitor and manipulate the firing of neurons—or whatever it was that aliens had—in someone else's brain. Like the way sharks could sense electric fields, only in both directions.

Which meant that maybe—just maybe—we could figure out a way to detect Controllers from a distance.

I headed for the dressing room, armed with enough items to guarantee myself at least half an hour of privacy. I felt a slight twinge of guilt over the fact that I was already breaking my agreement not to morph, but I pushed it aside. Besides, technically, I was justified—lives were at stake.

Three of them, to start with.

It was cramped in the dressing room. Elfangor's centaur-scorpion body was easily six feet long, not counting the tail. But I didn't need to move—I just needed to think.

‹ELFANGOR. BROTHER. HELP ME.›

I closed my four eyes and sat as still as I could, feeling the hyperconscious Andalite brain ticking and churning away beneath my own stream of thought. I reached out, visualizing the brains of the people around me, hoping to catch a glimpse, an echo, a spark.

‹ELFANGOR. BROTHER. HELP ME.›

Nothing.

I tried relaxing instead of focusing, letting my own mind recede, allowing the Andalite brain to take over. It was like turning my thoughts over to a computer—I could feel my reaction time shrinking, feel my attention dividing into multiple tracks, each capable of running at full efficiency. But there was nothing new there—no new senses, no ESP.

‹ELFANGOR. BROTHER. HELP ME.›

Frustrated, I resisted the impulse to lash my tail back and forth. There was something I wasn't seeing, some missing piece to the puzzle. Maybe there wasn't an organ for listening to other people's thoughts at all? Just the projector—just the "voice," and it worked on top of whatever inner monologue was there to begin with?

But Elfangor knew Jake's name. It sounded like he knew exactly what Jake was thinking.

‹ELFANGOR. BROTHER. HELP ME.›

Sighing inwardly, I began to demorph.

Giving up already?

No. But I was pushing it already, morphing in a public place, and there was no sense in risking it any longer than I had to.

Besides, I had a Plan B.

One of my neighbors, Mr. King, used to work as a dog trainer for the local police department before he retired. Whenever one of the dogs got too old or got injured on the job, he'd take it in. He usually had about six or seven of them living in his big, fenced-in backyard.

Every now and then, I'd run into him as he and his wife or his son—a kid named Erek, who was in my grade—walked them around the neighborhood. The last time, I'd gotten an earful about his newest acquisition, a German Shepherd named Buzz who'd recently torn a ligament bringing down a drug smuggler on the other side of the city.

A drug smuggler they'd identified when Buzz sniffed out the traces of cocaine from a shipment the guy had moved two days earlier.

I'd heard about dogs who could take one sniff of a person, and tell if they had cancer. My mom had told me about dogs that were trained to bark a warning whenever their diabetic owners' blood sugar dropped too low.

I was willing to bet that Buzz would have no trouble sniffing out an evil alien slug sitting in the back of my vice-principal's head.

One hour later, and I was lying on my paws on the sidewalk in front of Mr. Chapman's house, a cheap, dollar store collar loose around my neck, absorbing the warmth from the last rays of sunshine.

I hadn't brought it up in front of the others, but Melissa Chapman had been a friend of mine since elementary school. We'd been on the same gymnastics team for years, and had spent entire summers sleeping over at one another's houses. We'd drifted apart since I'd started hanging out with Cassie, but she was still one of the most important people in my life. She knew me better than anyone, had helped me through my parents' divorce, knew the passwords to all my accounts.

And her father was an alien slave.

As I waited, watching the sun slip below the horizon, a fierce battle raged inside me. Half of me wanted to believe that Melissa was safe, that the Yeerks didn't have any use for her this early in the invasion, that I'd have noticed if they'd taken her. The other half had already gone cold as ice, and was planning ahead.

To how I would kidnap her, and take her away.

To how I'd hold her, somewhere up in the mountains, until the Yeerk in her head died of kandrona starvation.

To how I'd give her the morphing power, and make her our first recruit.

To how we'd come back, and take her parents, and set them free, too.

But first, I had to be sure.

It was twilight by the time Mr. Chapman's mini-van pulled into their driveway, coming back from their weekly family dinner out. Leaping to my feet, I let out a friendly bark and began wagging my tail. As the doors opened, the German Shepherd brain seemed to hesitate, a wordless question forming in my head.

Friend?

I stepped forward cautiously, nostrils flaring. With a smile, Mr. Chapman reached down, holding out his fingers. I licked them gently, and he scratched me on my forehead.

Yes, I told the dog brain. Friend. But I continued to sniff, my human brain digging through the information as quickly as it could.

Buzz's sense of smell was nothing short of extraordinary. Lying there on the sidewalk, I had been able to detect every single person and animal that had passed by since the last rain, a week earlier. I'd been able to smell the food in each of the nearby houses, the water running through the sewers under the street, the gasoline burning in the cars driving by. I could pick apart odors as easily as my human eyes could pick apart colors, and there were if anything more smells than there were shades.

But Buzz's animal brain didn't come equipped with a dictionary. There was no way for it to tell "natural" from "unnatural." The suburban world was a crazy mix of organic and artificial, with plenty of perfectly ordinary smells that would have been utterly alien to a wild dog who'd grown up in some forest somewhere.

So I'd expected it to be difficult—maybe impossible—to identify the smell of Yeerk on my first pass. Especially since I didn't really know if all three Chapmans were infested—a strange smell coming from all three of them might have just meant that they all used the same detergent or the same shampoo or whatever.

There was one thing, though, that my dog brain was entirely qualified to detect. Something that millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of breeding had made automatic, instinctive, and immediate.

Mr. Chapman was terrified.

It was subtle. Suppressed, as if the Yeerks inside were tampering with the process, shutting down the pathways by which the fear would express itself as sweat and hormones and dilated pupils. I probably would have never noticed, as a human. But to Buzz, it was like an alarm bell. I struggled to maintain control, to keep Buzz's hackles from going up, to keep his own empathetic response from taking over. Friend, I told myself firmly, and I forced myself to roll over onto my back, exposing my belly. Mr. Chapman laughed and began rubbing my short, clean fur.

Melissa and her mother came around from the other side of the van. "Who's this?" Mrs. Chapman asked.

Melissa crouched down, offering me her fingers. Friend, I told the dog brain again, as I leaned forward and sniffed.

Fear.

Rage.

Despair.

"Must belong to one of the new neighbors," Mr. Chapman said. "There's no tag on the collar."

I sprang to my feet again, letting out another short bark and bowing onto my elbows as if eager to play. Mr. Chapman laughed again, and Melissa turned back to the van, reaching inside and rummaging around for a moment before drawing out a tennis ball.

"Here, boy," she said, her voice sounding perfectly normal and happy. "Fetch!"

I reared up onto my hind legs, maintaining the illusion as rage threatened to shatter my control. She threw the ball, and I was after it like a shot, snatching it out of the air and racing back toward the three of them, where I dropped it and began sprinting in circles around the minivan.

My friend.

They'd taken my friend.

Taken her, and her father, and her mother. Taken three people I'd known since I was a little girl. People I'd eaten with, gone on vacations with, shared Christmas mornings with. Trapped inside their own heads, not even able to scream.

Melissa threw the ball again, and I tore after it, this time continuing to run after I caught it in my jaws. "Hey!" Melissa shouted. "That's not yours, boy!"

But I ignored her, cutting across yards and leaping past hedges until I was half a dozen blocks away. Only then did I relinquish my iron grip on the dog's instincts, allowing my anger to bleed through, allowing Buzz's hackles to rise and his lips to curl back, allowing his instincts to lead us to a dark hedge corner, where we didn't have to worry about anything sneaking up behind us.

It was funny. The German Shepherd's reaction to fear was basically identical to my own. Buzz wasn't cowering, he was coiling. Preparing to strike, to lash out.

He didn't want to run. He wanted to fight.

I waited for a few minutes, letting my anger turn from fire to ice, feeling the lightning draining out of my canine veins. Padding back toward Melissa's, I began circling the neighborhood, checking for other signs of infestation. I stopped to greet three kids, one old lady, and a couple out for a walk. No trace of that sick, suppressed fear.

Just the Chapmans, then.

I slipped into the yard of the house behind theirs, lying down out of view behind a stack of firewood. Marco had said that thought-speak had a range of about three hundred yards, and that it would auto target, being heard only by the intended recipients.

I focused on Melissa and her parents, mentally excluding the Yeerks they were carrying. The alien slugs would hear it anyway—they'd have to. But if my guess was right, they'd be unable to tell it apart from any other thought. It would sound just like Melissa, just like Mr. and Mrs. Chapman, my message translated into their own internal voices, just as Elfangor's voice had been translated into mine.

‹Enjoy it while you can, Yeerk,› I thought. ‹The Andalites are coming.›