Chapter 3

I landed in the woods only minutes later. Owls are quick like most birds, but the biggest advantage to flying wasn't sheer speed but how direct you could go from Point A to Point B. No streets, no turns, no detours.

The Moore Creek Preserve is mostly open fields and hills, but there are small creek valleys that are basically small forests. The trees aren't huge, but they're dense groves. Dense enough that even with owl eyes, I didn't see the fire till I was surprisingly close. Elfangor had crashed near one of these valleys, and had chosen to stay here because the leftover energy signature of his ship apparently masked the energy emitted by some of the strange alien stuff he left behind.

One of those things was the Andalite communications array, the device that had allowed Elfangor to call his brother in the downed Dome ship. We knew very little about Aximili and even less about the ship he was in. Elfangor had given us very few details. We knew Aximili was a cadet more than a soldier, and we knew the Dome ship was huge and relatively undamaged, but apparently inoperable. Elfangor had given us a rough idea where the ship had gone down, but that was it.

There wasn't much here save for an old tent borrowed from Cassie's storage room, a crudely-built fire pit made from stones pulled from the creek, and two fallen trees that had somehow been pulled up to serve as benches near the fire.

And sitting by the fire ring, cooking a hot dog on a stick, was Tobias.

‹I was worried I was going to be the first one here,› I said.

Tobias almost dropped his hot dog. "Shit, Rachel, warn a guy."

‹There's a way to warn you without thought-speaking randomly?›

"Yeah, good point," he said, pulling the hot dog from the stick. Thought-speech is non-directional, so Tobias didn't even bother looking around. He kept his eyes on the fire. "There's a duffel bag in the tent if you wanna demorph and change."

I landed on the log opposite the fire pit and demorphed. The process was as unsettling in reverse, but coming out of morph was a lot easier, took less focus. The night became dark again as I lost the night vision, and I welcomed the smell of the fire, the scent of salt on the air.

Little fun fact here: with the exception of a few notable outliers - mostly vultures and the kiwi - birds as a group have no sense of smell. It makes sense when you think about it. Birds rely on eyesight to find food. A scent trail is useless when you're hundreds of feet in the air. Actually, because of that, owls are one of the few things in the wild to regularly eat skunks.

You learn some odd things about animals when you can actually become them.

Tobias didn't look at me even after I was back to human. He put another hot dog on a stick and handed it to me. "Want one?" he asked. "I have marshmallows too."

I shook my head and he held the frank over the fire again. He was still not really looking at me. I'm not so vain that I demand attention or anything, but I was the only one there and he seemed like he was… not ignoring me, but like he had some moment going on with the fire and my presence wasn't enough to break it. I liked that, actually. He was being himself, and he didn't put that aside even when a cute girl showed up.

Marco used to flirt with me. Not really flirting, if you get me. We knew we were never going to date each other. But Marco had made it a thing for years where he'd lay some heavy exaggerated game on me and I'd call him a misogynistic ass and we'd have a laugh. I used to think it was immature. Hell, it still was, but I missed it when it stopped. Dynamics change. That's life.

I didn't really have a dynamic with Tobias. He was quiet most of the time. He listened more than he wanted to talk. I knew he grew up poor and unwanted, and I didn't know how to interact with that. I have my issues with my parents, and maybe they're legit, I don't know. But my family stuff pales compared to the things Tobias has endured. I have never gone hungry in my life. Tobias has. It was hard to see him shirtless, either morphing or at the beach, and think he had grown up with great nutrition. I had never been hit by a parent. My parents barely believed in spanking, and at that, only when we were very little and time out hadn't worked. A last resort. Tobias had known what it felt like to be hit by a guardian. He had the scars of cigarette burns on his arms. He didn't talk about it, and I didn't ask. Maybe I was supposed to ask. A few times, he'd been at school and I'd seen the bruises. I wasn't sure if it was the assholes at school or the human shitstain that was his uncle.

What bothered me most about Tobias was how little these things seemed to bother him. I was pissed just thinking about it. It wasn't right, and it wasn't fair, and he deserved better than that. But Tobias never seemed angry. He never really seemed to care about how fucked up his life was. It just was what it was to him. It didn't seem to occur to Tobias that he didn't deserve this, and that more than anything made me want to scream.

But I didn't.

I never knew what to say to Tobias. But the long minute of silence made me uncomfortable. I looked around, trying to find something to focus on. The camp, and it was hard to find another word for it, had been cleaned up. The miscellaneous Andalite canisters were stacked neatly next to the comm array only Tobias knew how to use. The leaves, pebbles, and detritus of the ground had been meticulously raked away so that only grass and bare earth remained. The fire ring had been shored up with mud and new rocks. A pile of firewood and gathered sticks rested nearby. An old hatchet and a bucket of sand were left next to the pile. The blankets and pillows in the tent were folded, there was a backpack left just inside the open flap. A stack of notebooks lay on top of the folded blankets. And next to Tobias was an old party-sized Igloo cooler.

"Tobias?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said, looking at me for the first time since I'd arrived.

"Are- Are you living here?"

Tobias looked embarrassed. He shook his head, though. "No, yes… I don't know, kinda."

"You're kinda living in the woods?"

"I'm not living here, Rachel," he said, a touch more emphatically. "I don't have electricity or any kind of bathroom here, for one. I go back to the apartment a few times a day. I just spend most of my time here."

I thought about that for a minute. "So, what, you went to school the last four days and just came back here?"

He shrugged. "It's either hang out here in peace and quiet or be at the apartment with my uncle. And after that car mysteriously vanished, he's been… twitchy."

"Twitchy?" Among other revelations, we'd found out that Tobias's legal guardian, his uncle, was the owner of a shady auto body shop that dealt in stolen cars on the side. And Tobias had stolen a car in their inventory.

"Honestly, I think he thinks there's a rival shop. Or it was a bait car. He's paranoid, he owes people money, and… I don't know, really. Mostly he just likes to sit and drink, and now he has all this extra shit on his plate. Kinda funny really. Keeps him out of my hair for now."

"Things any better?" I asked, stupidly.

"Depends on your definition. He's been in and out of the apartment at all hours and I'm not worth his time. I've gone from being an unwanted burden to being a non-issue, and I count that as an improvement."

I was about to ask him why he put up with it, why he didn't just report his uncle or get emancipated or any number of options, but I didn't. "Oh, screw it," I said, "toss me the marshmallows."

It was a while later before the next owl descended. Marco and Jake would be the last two to show up, so I knew it had to be Cassie even before she demorphed. She had apparently opted on volleyball shorts and a sports bra instead of her swimsuit. Probably in the laundry, I realized.

"Damn, you're going to make Jake happy," I said.

"Think so?" she said, teasing. "Tobias, duffel?"

"In the tent," he said.

She came out with a pair of shorts and a purple t-shirt. "What?" she asked, noticing that I was staring at her.

"You knew there was a duffel," I said. "Like you knew Tobias was living in your backyard."

"He's not living here, exactly," she said, though she didn't sound very convincing. "But Aximili could call at any time and he kinda volunteered."

"Fair enough. Any luck with that?" I asked.

Tobias shook his head. "He hasn't called back… that I know of, any way. I don't have a user manual for this thing and I have no idea if it has voicemail."

"Have you tried calling him again?" I asked.

"No, Jake said to give him time. I didn't want to bother him, and if I'm being honest, if I was going to call him, I wanted the rest of us here in case he actually answered."

Made sense. "Cassie, what time is it, anyway?"

"It was a little past midnight when I left, maybe ten, fifteen minutes after." She settled next to me, grabbed a stick, and stole the bag of marshmallows from me.

I nodded. Shouldn't be long now, maybe an hour or so. Then Jake and Marco would be here and we would start to find an answer for the biggest question Elfangor's death had left us: Where do we go from here?

The closer we got to it, the more the anxiety pressed in on me. I was scared, and I didn't like it. Yeah, I know, no one likes being scared, but it had been a long time since I'd felt this far out of my element. Spying on my friend's dad, that made me feel skeevy, but it was doable. It's not like I wouldn't have wanted to hang out with Melissa anyway.

Going to the Yeerk pool, that had been something else, and I'd seen it as an endgame at the time. Hit the pool, hurt the bad guys. Elfangor told us before we got there that nothing we did would really stop them. But we knew more Andalites were on the way. But we're talking astronomical distances here, and even with warp drive or whatever, it was going to be at least a year before Andalites arrived. Now… Now it looked like we had one last mission, and it was something Elfangor had put on the back burner as he tried to find solutions to other problems.

And I wasn't sure how I was supposed to feel about that.

On one hand, I wanted to be done. The constant nightmares sucked. Hiding my emotions from my sisters sucked. Being one of five humans on the whole planet to know about the Yeerk invasion, oh that sucked. We had killed people, mauled aliens, watched aliens eat the dead and injured. We had barely escaped as squirrels in an access shaft. An access shaft used to bring rancid meat down to feed the rampaging alien worms that had attacked us with laser beams.

Now, though, I wondered what it would mean if this was the end of the line. Going back to normal, if we could ever be normal again, seemed like a lie. Of all the people in the world that could have found Elfangor, fate chose five teens coming home from the movie theater. I didn't even really believe in fate, not really, but this was different.

It made me special. Not just because I could turn into animals, no, that was just a bonus that came later.

Before Elfangor, I was a big sister and a lacrosse player. I was good. Our team had made the state quarterfinals. And if I gave it my all the last two years, maybe I'd get a college scholarship. The University of Maryland had the best women's lacrosse program in the country. And it was thousands of miles away, which was a plus. I wasn't sure what kind of major I'd get. It had been my sisters and lacrosse for so long, it was hard for me to imagine a different life. I didn't want to do what my parents did, I knew that much. Well, dad travelled for work, and that was cool. But I didn't think much about going into advertising, and I wasn't sure I wanted to be a lawyer. I wasn't ever having kids. I loved my sisters, but I wasn't a nurturer. But beyond freedom, I hadn't put much thought into what I would do with it.

What we were with Elfangor, that mattered. It made us important, made me important. And for as dangerous as it was, part of me was worried that it was about to go away.

Jake and Marco showed up after a point. We'd added more wood to the fire, and Cassie and I had gone through more than half a bag of marshmallows. Luckily, it turned out it wasn't the only bag, and there were plenty more hot dogs.

Marco grabbed sweats and a shirt from the duffel, and when he saw us roasting marshmallows, he drew a blank. "Are you kidding me?" he asked.

Tobias shrugged. "There are buns, ketchup, and mustard in the bag."

Marco smiled and shook his head. "Ah, hell, give me a stick."

Jake just smiled, got a stick, and sat down. "Hot dogs are a nice touch," he said. "I guess we should get this moving. Where should we start?"

"Tobias?" Marco said. "Can you get the stuff we worked on?"

Jake raised an eyebrow, but I was the first to call him on that. "You and Tobias worked on this without us?"

Marco waved his hand dismissively. "No, not really. I just tried to do some research. Here, let me show you."

Tobias handed Marco a roll of paper and the two of them rolled it out on the ground and weighted the corners with rocks. All of us huddled around to see by firelight. Tobias had his cell phone - the one Jake had bought for him - and turned on his flashlight. It was a bathymetric map of the Pacific, from British Columbia down to Baja California.

"Where did you even get this?" I asked.

"I checked with the library and the hall of public records, told them it was a summer project for school. They put me in touch with some marine institute or something, but this is what I got."

"Okay," Jake said. "Show us."

"Alright, so here's the Monterey Bay and Santa Cruz," he said, pointing to a star drawn in red Sharpie. "Elfangor said he was about four hundred and fifty miles southwest, so I started there."

In white colored pencil, Marco had apparently pulled a length of string or found a really big compass, but he had a series of white arcs. "These are between four hundred twenty miles out to four seventy. There are more seamounts out there than I would have thought, but if I had to put money on where he landed, I'm thinking right here," he said tapping.

"Okay, what's that?" Cassie asked.

"I could be mispronouncing it, but this is the Fieberling Tablemount. I actually haven't found much about it, save for some website that thinks it would be a good seasteading location."

"Seasteading?" Jake asked.

Marco rolled his eyes and made a maturbatory gesture with his hand. "Anti-government whackos with money that basically want to create their own sovereign city on the high seas."

"You're kidding," I said.

He shrugged. "Apparently, the ability to do it isn't that far off of offshore oil rigs. It's more of a legal-sovereignty debate. But anyway, for the distance and depth that Elfangor gave us, this seamount is the best fit I found. I even have longitude and latitude."

"Okay," Jake said. "So we have an idea of where we're going. But the real question is how do we get there?"

"It's not just getting to coordinates, either," Cassie said. "There's the depth, too. How deep did Elfangor say?"

"Four hundred meters," I said. "More than thirteen hundred feet."

Jake shook his head. "This is going to be a nightmare, isn't it?"

"Better than bombs," Marco said. "Look, I see it in three parts." He counted them off on his fingers. "We need to get there, that's part one. Then we have to dive a quarter mile down… somehow. And the last part is we have to then bring an Andalite up from that depth."

There was some silence as we thought about that.

"Well, it doesn't solve getting there, and getting it is going to be a challenge on its own, but I do know a way down there," Cassie said.

"Okay, what are you thinking?" Jake asked.

"Well, there's only so many animals that can dive that far. But a sperm whale can do it and then some."

That information came rushing back to me. I remembered watching Blue Planet on Netflix with my sisters. "They can hold their breath for more than an hour, right?"

Cassie nodded. "Almost two. Maybe more. Males have bigger lungs than females, so they can go deeper and stay down longer."

Marco started tearing it down. It wasn't malicious, but every proposed solution offered its own complications. He actually said the same thing I was thinking. "How do we acquire a sperm whale? That's not something we're just gonna find at the Monterey Bay Aquarium."

Cassie shrugged. "I don't know. We're going to have to do some research."

Jake nodded. "So we do some research, figure out how to acquire a sperm whale." He paused, realizing that this had already ballooned from one mission to a bunch of smaller missions. "Any idea how to get there. I mean, we can fly, right?"

Cassie shook her head. "Not as owls or ravens, no. I mean, we get albatrosses in this part of California, and they can spend a lot of time at sea, but they top out at sixty, seventy miles an hour. Let me think… so yeah, assuming the high end and ideal wind conditions, it would take six and a half hours, flying over feature-less ocean, with no watch to time morphs."

"Plus," I added, "we'd have to ditch in the Pacific in the middle of nowhere to demorph. That's probably something we should be prepared for anyway, but maybe try to limit that."

"I'm not a great swimmer," Tobias said.

Great.

"How bad are we talking?" Jake asked.

Tobias shrugged. "I mean if we're just talking a few minutes while we switch morphs, that should be fine, but I just figured I should put that out there before it becomes an issue."

Marco gave him a friendly jab to the shoulder. "We're not acquiring a whale tomorrow. I can take you to the beach if you want." Tobias pushed him back.

"Okay, I think we made some progress on the logistics," Jake said. "Distance… that's going to be something we need to work on. But we need to move on to the next part." I looked at him, but he was looking at Tobias.

"Yeah," he said. "It's time to call Aximili."