Chapter Six

Jake

Marco, Tobias and I had all regained consciousness – or its illusion – out on a field.

"Do you see this?" I asked Marco.

"Oh, yeah. I definitely see this."

Everything was strange, somehow. Shifty. Dark, melted. A place you might expect a thing like The One to be. Play-Doh Man, I corrected myself. No reason to give it a name scarier than it deserved.

I looked over at Tobias. For a second, I didn't even register that anything was wrong – all the proof I needed that this world, wherever I was, was not quite real. But then I saw it.

Marco saw it at about the same time.

He was still in Andalite morph.

"TOBIAS! DEMORPH!" We shouted at the same time. Tobias woke, tried to flare, and rolled up. For a moment, he paused.

‹I-I can't demorph?› he whispered.

Before I could stop him, tell him we could make sense of this mess, Tobias turned and galloped away. I didn't know if our situation was real, or fake, or if Tobias was still in morph – or if he wouldn't be able to demorph when we got back. But we couldn't afford to get lost. Wherever we were...

Wherever we were, whatever this was, we had to find a way out. And hopefully get Ax.

"Tobias!" I cried out. But I couldn't even see him anymore in this shifting place.

"This place is so strange," Marco said, "Do you think this is any form of reality? I mean, look – those aren't Earth trees. But those are. And look up."

I did. The sky didn't look that abnormal. But we had two moons. And the sky was colored oddly. It felt like a mixture of Earth and what Ax had long ago described as the Andalite Home World. He and others in his military had offered to let us visit their homeworld, but we'd refused back then, after Visser One's trial.

Loneliness hit me hard, suddenly.

But it wasn't just those things that made the world so strange. There were things that shouldn't have been there. Or things that just were out of place in the situation. No roads, but restaurants. A house, but no driveway. We felt rain, saw lightning, heard thunder. Everything felt incredibly real, but not the placement or timing of anything. Nothing was right. Nothing was where it belonged. And because of the mixing of two worlds, everything had seemed even further off.

"I hope we find him," I said quietly.

"Who, Tobias?" Marco asked before he looked at my face.

"Him, too, but I more meant Ax."

"Oh, yeah. Well, if anyone can find and rescue Ax – it's the Animorphs."

I sighed. We needed to start a search party. It was time to go ahead and morph.

"Let's morph owl. We might be able to see Tobias or anyone else from up there."

"Yeah," Marco agreed.

We focused. Nothing happened.

"Yikes!" Marco said. "Well, it's too bad Tobias ran off before we tried morphing. So maybe he's completely fine."

I shook my head. "I don't think... I don't think we're really anywhere," I admitted, "Can't you feel it? I think everything about this place is fake. Which means Tobias is still in Andalite morph... Somewhere. Probably. The question is, does the time limit apply in this case? Are we just unconscious? Or is this something deeper?"

Wherever this place was... The problems it had created were building up. I felt stress slabbing off onto my shoulders. Everything about this place felt ominous. Dangerous. I wasn't quite sure how dangerous it was, yet.

Still, the world seemed to settle down, after a while. Marco and I walked off into the darkness. Calling out to Tobias. Since we couldn't morph, we couldn't use thought-speak. But I hoped at some point we would run into him.

We passed more trees. Some strange grasses. More woods here, more restaurants there. A house, at one point. And at another point, a scoop.

Marco and I could have stopped, but I was uneasy. Fortunately, he was on edge, too. Being stuck in a fantasy is fun – when you know for sure where you are. But it was something we didn't know. And it reminded me of the times where we'd been transported suddenly to different worlds, by the Ellimist or the Time Matrix or by weird morphing flukes.

Whatever was going on, who was to say the experiences weren't real?

So we kept calm. Marco and I just kept walking. Looking for anyone, or anything, that could explain this place. Maybe even looking for Ax.

"Hey!" I heard Marco yelp suddenly.

"What?" I asked irritably. I had been thinking about how nice sleep would have been.

"Just... I can't explain it. I thought I saw... Just follow me!"

Marco took off. I chased after him.

I was getting exhausted. But as I caught up with Marco, I saw that we were chasing a girl. A young woman, really. Our age. And for a split second, I thought: Rachel?

Impossible, of course. The girl was brown-haired and didn't have the same figure at all. Average legs, built thicker. But we had no reason to not catch up to her. We needed someone who knew this place better than us. Whoever she was... She'd have been here – wherever "here" was – longer. I kicked up the pace and began to try and get her attention.

"Hey!" I called, "Hey! Stop! Please stop!"

I was totally out of shape. We'd been on a spacecraft for months before finding the Blade Ship. I could barely get the words out. My chest ached.

Was this really a dream?

Still, the girl slowed. Stopped. Turned around and stared at us with large brown eyes, shocked. Quickly, she jogged back up to us. She gave us a long look, one that seemed to try to see inside us as well as just who we were.

"Who are you?" this girl demanded of both of us. She was our age, but I couldn't help but think of her as a girl. Just part of my veteran experience – I couldn't seem to relate to the people my age.

"Jake," I said, "And this one is Marco."

She stared. A weird look, like she had been expecting us, but not believing we'd ever come. Like we were Santa Clause or something.

"You're really Jake?" she asked me.

"You know, your own name or how you know ours would be -," Marco started, but I silenced him with my hand. Not trying to be rude to him, but trying to get answers from her were more important than etiquette 101 at the moment.

"Yes. I am Jake," I said, "Can I ask who you are?"

The girl blushed. She obviously hadn't meant to be rude with her over-active excitement.

"My name is Leah," she said, "I was one of the Human-Controllers on the Blade-Ship-"

Marco tried to grab her arms to hold her down.

"Yeerk! You're the stupid reason we're in this -"

"Hey! I said was, you stupid son-of-a-"

"Quiet! Quiet, please. Marco, stop that," I said as he kept trying to grab her and hold her down – like she had even been trying to grab anyone. "Okay, you're an ex-Controller. That would explain why you're here. Maybe you can explain to us. What is this place? And who were you running from? How were you freed?"

Leah looked at me, her expression fierce. But it softened.

"This is the place where everything that is isn't," Leah murmured sadly, adapting a quote from Alice in Wonderland. "I don't know much about it myself. It's artificial, a creation of The One. It froze most of us, but only kept necessary Yeerks for operating the Blade Ship remotely. At least, for a long time.

"My Yeerk was, fortunately, expendable. But everything here is just another world of enslavement."

"As for who I was running from..." Leah continued, "I think, maybe, I should just take you there instead. It's a surprise."

She grinned, looking more like the kid I would have thought than someone my age, and turned to walk back where she had come from.

I wasn't sure how to take all this information. It felt overwhelming. I had thought this world was fake. But I didn't get exactly what it was, and I saw Leah had no intentions of telling me more until we followed her back. Maybe it was just too long a story. I was still worried about Tobias...

"My friend," I said, "He was upset by... Something... And he ran off. Is he in danger here?"

"No, there's no danger in off-time. And even in a Scenario he would know what the danger was before he started, probably," She looked curiously at Marco and me, as if really looking at us for the first time. "Do you know where he is?"

Do you know who he is? I thought curiously. I was so confused by everything. This girl was being so cryptic. She seemed clearly to think she knew who we wanted to see, and I felt annoyed. This was an emergency and she was trying to treat useful information like some sort of surprise party. Really, we just wanted to know, we wanted to know now, and go through none of the bull. Unless she was trying to make sure we knew as little as possible. Either for our safety or to cause us more harm than we'd already had today.

And I wasn't sure which it was.

But Marco and I weren't getting anything more from Leah, who was walking the other way.

"This place just gets weirder and weirder," Marco muttered under his breath to me, "And I think this girl here might just happen to be weirdest at the moment."

I agreed with Marco, right then. But we needed answers. And she thought we'd like knowing who had been following her.

And so, we started to follow Leah back from where she had started from.