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Chapter 09: Rachel

Letting the blood-soaked handgun fall from my jaws, I turned in a tight circle and froze, listening.

I could hear the shouting and chaos in the distance as the escaped humans continued to struggle against the Yeerks inside the YMCA, the sounds leaking out through the door Marco had smashed off its hinges.

I could hear the lumbering of noisy human Controllers as they tromped through the woods behind the building, searching for me.

I could hear the movements of the alien demon-things, far stealthier as they worked their way from tree to tree, hardly ever touching the ground.

All of the sounds were close, confined to the ten or so acres of park just beyond the lower parking lot. I'd managed to slow them down as they came out of the door, and then I'd led them into the woods before circling back around. As far as I could tell, they'd given up the chase and were now focused on securing the area.

Settling down into a wary crouch, I considered my options.

I was well outside of the Yeerks' search cone, deep within a maze of thorns and brambles almost fifty feet wide. If they stuck to their current pace, it would be at least five minutes before the Controllers reached the edge of it, and several more before they got close enough to notice me. They had left their lasers inside, and even taking the demons' machete limbs into account, I was pretty sure I had plenty of time to think, demorph, and remorph. They clearly didn't have—or weren't using—any kind of heat-seeking or life-detecting technology, and neither the demons nor the humans could see anywhere near as well as the tiger in the thick, dark undergrowth.

What I was supposed to do—obviously—was leave. Jake and Marco were both injured, and the Yeerks were in full red-alert mode. Even in the dark, I couldn't exactly run down the street in tiger morph—common sense said I should morph to bat or snipe and head straight for the rendezvous point.

But—

With a mental movement that felt like cocking a trigger, I stopped the thought dead in its tracks. Careful, I said to myself, slowly and deliberately. That's how you got—

flinch

—how we ended up in this mess in the first place.

For several long seconds, I held my mind in a state of forced quiet, thinking nothing. I listened as the Controllers continued to crash through the leaves and bushes, none of them heading my way.

Okay, but the problem there was that you didn't THINK. It was that you did the WRONG thing, not that you did-anything-at-all.

Another long pause. Far away, through the open door, I could hear the last of the commotion dying down as the Yeerks reestablished order in the area around the pool.

While Jake and Marco were still in danger, the right answer had been obvious—slow the Yeerks down, draw them off the trail, take out as many as I could while keeping myself alive. Simple, straightforward, and—given the power of the tiger morph—easy.

Now, though, things weren't so clear.

I could leave, and head for the rendezvous.

I could stay, and try to re-infiltrate the pool—see how they handled the aftermath, watch them start repairs, maybe find out who was in charge of the whole thing. It would be risky, but with the door smashed wide open and the Yeerks in disarray, I had a one-of-a-kind opportunity to judge them in action.

On the other hand, there were plenty of Controllers outside for me to hunt.

I felt the tiger's claws flex, digging into the mulch and loam next to the stolen handgun. There was blood on those claws, and on my chest, and on my face—some of it red, some of it a deep evergreen. If there had been a thousand Controllers at the start of the evening, there were now only nine hundred and ninety three.

You should not be okay with how okay that feels.

But I was okay with it—there was no point in pretending. After days of just sitting and waiting, it had felt good to finally do something—to take the fight to the enemy, start paying back a little bit of the fear and pain.

I wasn't stupid. I knew that it wasn't going to bring back Melissa, or Cassie's parents. I knew that the people under Yeerk control were basically innocent, and that we weren't going to win this war by killing Controllers one at a time. But they had been pointing guns at my friends, and now—

Now they weren't. With everything else that had backfired, snowballed, and basically gone to crap, I had at least done that part right.

One for two, then.

I shifted carefully between the brambles, peering back toward the distant building. I could see two human Controllers silhouetted in the wrecked doorway, both armed. There was no one else in the parking lot; all the rest of the guards were either in the woods with me, or keeping order inside. Off to my right, I could hear the search teams getting closer, only a few minutes away from the edge of the briar patch.

Time to make a decision.

I began to demorph, keeping my front right paw near the gun, ready to grab it as soon as I had a trigger finger.

Heading for the rendezvous is your default choice. Anything else has to have benefits that outweigh the risk.

By that measure, staying in the woods to hunt Controllers was clearly the wrong move. It would make me feel better, but the risk of getting ambushed was high—and getting higher—and there was no real payoff at the end of it. A dozen Controllers, more or less, wasn't going to make any difference in the overall war. I'd thought about trying to drag one of the demon-things off somewhere so that I could acquire it, but they were moving through the trees in trios, watching one another's backs, and I wasn't at all sure I could take on three of them at once.

That left trying to infiltrate the pool.

After tonight, they're going to quadruple their security. This might be your only chance to gather intel. And besides, they think the attack is over. I mean, they saw you and Marco both trying to escape. They're not going to expect anybody else to—

I cut off the thought, grimacing through half-human teeth. That was wishful thinking—of course they'd be on guard against a follow-up attack. They were probably already scouring the inside of the building for any Andalites who'd stayed behind, doing checks of every Controller to make sure there weren't any morphed impostors.

But how would they scour the building? Would they have detectors? Robotic drones? Would the Controllers have to give passwords, or was there some kind of special sensor that could scan for the presence of a Yeerk inside someone's head?

Jake had pushed for this mission—pushed hard, against Marco's objections—because he'd recognized that we needed information. We still knew next to nothing about the Yeerks' operation—what kinds of technology they'd brought with them, what their major targets were, how they worked together as a group. The stuff Jake and Marco had relayed to me over the past hour barely scratched the surface of what we needed to know.

And I probably could get inside. I had the fly and the bat, not to mention the human woman, and it was dark in the pool area—dark enough that Jake's lizard morph had gone unnoticed. Given the fact that half of the guards were still out in the woods, this was probably the best chance I was ever going to get.

I tried to picture Marco's face, to imagine his response after he heard that I'd gone back into the pool. But I couldn't pull up anything useful. He'd yell, probably, but I didn't know what he'd yell about.

The long, shallow gash along my flank—a gift from one of the demons—began to knit together and disappear, even as the flesh beneath it halved and halved again, my body going from over five hundred pounds down to my normal one-oh-five.

Are you sure you're not doing this just to make yourself feel better?

I calmed my thoughts again, turning my attention to my body as the last traces of tiger vanished, leaving me exposed and human in the middle of the briar patch. I dropped my mind into my chest, searching for sensation—for the tightness of fear, the vibrating heat of anger, the cold pressure of fury.

I didn't feel emotional.

And we did need information.

And this was the right moment to try to get it.

…right?

I clenched my fists, my right hand curling tight around the grip of the handgun. This kind of double-thinking and second-guessing—it wasn't me. I was used to trusting my instincts.

But those instincts had gotten the Withers and the Chapmans killed.

Well, you can't just sit here forever.

Gritting my teeth, I began to morph again, shrinking down and away from the thorns, focusing on the fly in all of its gross, tiny detail.

It wasn't a decision—not in the sense of knowing what I was doing, of being sure or even confident. I didn't actually know that I would be able to handle whatever was waiting for me beyond the broken door. I didn't actually know that I was making the right choice.

There was no chance, though, that I could just walk away, having let Jake and Marco take all of the risks, pay all of the consequences. Not when this whole thing was my fault to begin with.

Once around the pool, then out. No heroics, no unnecessary risks.

I at least tried to believe it.

The Yeerks were most definitely not stupid.

It took me ten minutes to get past the two Controllers guarding the entrance, both of whom were wielding some kind of wide-beam ray gun and watching the doorway like hawks. I couldn't be sure, with the fly's insanely shattered vision, but I thought I saw them take out a dozen mosquitoes, a couple of fireflies, and at least one squirrel. In the end, I had to wait until one of them sneezed, zooming past at ground level while the other one reflexively said "Bless you."

The interior of the building was lit by over a hundred spotlights, every surface illuminated and shadowless, with no place for a bat or a lizard to hide. There was a handful of technicians busy dismantling the wreckage of the alien archway that Marco had smashed, and another pair trying to repair the door to one of the large cages. There weren't any scanners or robot drones, but there were plenty of regular old humans walking around, each armed with the same wide-beam burner. I stayed as high as I could, hoping to avoid notice.

Unfortunately, this meant that I couldn't even catch the vibrations from the Controllers down below, let alone try to interpret it as speech. I spent three heart-pounding minutes changing bodies on the roof of the shed in the corner, after first circling the area four times to confirm that there were no obvious cameras and that none of the sentries circling below were climbing up to check it. The very last morph that Cassie had given me before disappearing into the mountains was a bird called a white-throated needletail. It was about the same size as a robin, with black feathers everywhere except the throat and the tail. She'd called it the cheetah of the skies, said it could fly over a hundred miles per hour in a straight line.

"It can't hold that speed for very long," she'd told me. "Maybe a couple of miles. I couldn't use it when—the snipe is better, if you need to go farther than that. But if you ever need a quick getaway, this can take you from the school to the mall in about forty-five seconds."

Even so, I'd kept an extremely low profile, forcing the bird body to flatten itself against the roof just below the peak. There was no point in taking chances, after all, and the needletail was perfectly capable of seeing and hearing at a distance.

As it turned out, though, there was almost nothing to see or hear. Nothing that didn't match with Jake and Marco's descriptions, anyway. Other than the repairmen and the handful of extra guards sweeping the space, the Yeerks had already returned to normal. There were only a few children remaining in the cages—it was already after nine o'clock, and the YMCA closed at ten—but there were still plenty of people, most of them wearing the kind of clothes my mom and dad wore to work.

Occasionally, one of the side doors would open briefly. The middle one seemed to be mostly for the demon-things, and the one closest to the entrance mostly for humans, although occasionally one of the demons would come in from outside and go through it—reporting, maybe? Although that didn't make much sense, since they presumably all had communicators.

The door on the right gaped open, its frame twisted out and away from the wall where Marco had burst through. Inside was a tunnel of the deepest black, flanked by six demon guards carrying ordinary human guns. Occasionally, I thought I heard the scrape of something moving inside, but it was impossible to be sure over the sounds of sobbing and screaming.

It was those sobs and screams that kept drawing my attention. They weren't quite what I had been expecting—the way Jake and Marco had described them, it had sounded like there would be nothing but horror and despair. And maybe there had been, forty-five minutes ago, but now there was a different quality in the chorus of voices.

Defiance.

"Fuck you!" one man was shouting, his face wild and sweaty, his suit in disarray. He was pressed up against the bars, as close to his captors as he could get, occasionally reaching through to swipe at the passing guards, or to throw up his middle fingers. "Fuck all of you, you fucking slugs! You're going to die, every last motherfucking one of you! I'm going to pour salt into your fucking pool and swim in it!"

"You can beat them!" yelled a middle-aged woman in a floral dress. Her hands were cupped to her mouth as she called across the pool to the other cages. "If you try hard enough, you can take back control! If enough of us do it, there's no way they can keep it a secret!"

"Sam!" cried a young boy, his voice breaking. "Sam, don't worry! It's going to be okay! I'm here, Sam! I'm not going to leave you!"

Farther back within the cages, small groups had formed around individuals who were crying or screaming, men and women offering what comfort and solace they could. I could see a trio of teenage girls—just a few years older than me—huddled together in a corner, their expressions grim but determined as they spoke in rapid, low whispers.

Once, a man began taking off his belt—whether to use it as a tool or a weapon, I couldn't tell—only to be stunned by one of the human guards. As his body sagged, the rest of the prisoners surged forward, spitting and hissing and throwing change. Each time the demon-things came to open the door, they had to activate some kind of force field that rooted everyone in place, and twice the people packed themselves so densely around the door that the whole group had to be stunned and heaved aside.

I had expected it to be bad.

I hadn't expected it to give me hope.

Still flat against the roof, I turned my head, sweeping my gaze across the five half-filled cages. I wanted with all my heart to call out to them, to offer some scrap of encouragement or support. Or better yet, to join them—to put on Elfangor's body and carve my way through the enemy, breaking open the cages and setting every last one of them free.

But that already happened, whispered the tiny voice in the back of my head. Marco let them out, and the Yeerks just rounded them up and put them right back in.

Balance of power—there were just too many Controllers. Twenty or thirty running the reinfestation process, another twenty or thirty sweeping the space, another twenty or thirty outside, and who knew how many lurking behind the doors or in the rest of the building.

We couldn't win this war. Not with just me and Jake and Cassie and Marco and Tobias and the kid Jake said Tobias had recruited. Not against a thousand of them, with twenty thousand more just waiting to crawl out of the pool.

I clicked my beak and fluffed my feathers. It was time to get out of there, to catch up with Jake and Marco and start planning our next move. Staying low, I turned my attention back to the entrance, measuring the danger. There were enough Controllers between me and the door that it might make more sense to morph back to—

I paused, letting my thoughts coast to a halt as the seed of an idea blossomed in the back of my mind. I looked back at the cages, at the people still shouting their contempt. I looked at the guards, at the pattern of their movements, the spread of their formation. I counted quietly in my head, watching as a human Controller swept past the shed, her burner at the ready.

One hundred miles per hour times about five thousand feet per mile is five hundred thousand feet per hour divided by sixty minutes in an hour is about ten thousand feet per minute divided by sixty seconds in a minute is about two hundred feet per second. Double it for the time it takes me to get up to speed, and double it again for dodging and slowing down at the door—

Four seconds.

I could make it through, even if the Controllers were on alert. It could work.

NO, said the tiny voice, suddenly not so tiny. Not like this. You know what happened last time.

This is different, I argued, straining my ears as I trained my eyes on the farthest cage. It wasn't easy, but I thought I could make out the voices of two of the loudest people, even from over a hundred feet away. They're not going to kill ALL of them.

How do you know that?

Slowly, carefully, I pushed myself up to my feet, standing a few inches back from the peak of the roof, resisting the urge to flap.

I didn't know that. I couldn't, couldn't be sure, not after what they'd done to the Chapmans, and to Cassie's parents. But there were over a hundred people spread out between the five cages. Even if the Yeerks had doubled their presence in the week since the construction site, they couldn't afford to lose that many hosts.

Could they?

You can't, the voice insisted.

But it was wrong. Marco couldn't. Jake couldn't. Cassie and Tobias couldn't. And maybe I could learn a thing or two from them, from the rest of our ragtag little army. One week in, and my mistakes had already cost us more than I could ever repay. A part of me had been screaming never again nonstop since Saturday.

But this was just the kind of crazy risk that the rest of me had been crying out for, ever since the moment Elfangor's ship decloaked in front of us. It was all-or-nothing, win or lose, with me and a couple hundred captives balanced against maybe the whole war effort. If the needletail was fast enough, I'd be outside in minutes, and if it wasn't—

I looked back at the first cage, at the middle finger man. He was still shouting, his voice showing no sign of giving out.

Well. At least this time, the consequences would fall on the willing. On me, and my fellow warriors—the ones who refused to give up.

I waited on the roof while the guards made a few more rounds—considering the timing, practicing the words in my head. I tried to recall the huge strangeness of Elfangor's voice, the heavy, prophetic tone.

Don't do this, the voice whispered, one final, quiet plea.

But we needed information, and this was the right moment to get it.

Flexing my wings, I pushed my thoughts out into the air, willing them into the heads of the prisoners in the cages, leaving out everyone else—the people on the piers, the Controllers, the stalking demons. I made my voice as loud as possible, forming each word with careful precision.

‹HUMANS,› I bellowed, and the air fell silent. ‹My name is Elfangor.›

The guards paused in their rounds, unnerved by the sudden and unexplained calm.

‹I fight the Yeerks,› I said. ‹I and my fellow Andalites. You fight them as well, and for that I honor you.›

Somewhere in the background, an alarm began to wail. The middle door opened, and a dozen of the demon guards poured out onto the floor, their heads turning in every direction. I was above them, between them and the spotlights, hidden by the glare.

‹I cannot free you today,› I said. ‹But if you hate the Yeerks—if you would see them gone from this planet—then search your memories. You have seen their plans—they have used your bodies to carry out their foul purpose. I need information—the identity of highly placed Controllers—the locations of their major targets—any tactical detail that might allow us to strike a blow against them. You will suffer for this. Your controllers will punish you for speaking out. But if you have the knowledge I seek, shout it—shout it now! I will hear it, and I will make them pay!›

There was a pause, a silence like the gap between lightning and thunder, and then the voices rose once more.

I listened, my heart breaking.

I listened, and then I flew, leaving all of them behind.

"Marco!" I cried out, emerging from the woods. "Sorry—I stayed behind, went back into the pool. I heard—I found out—"

I broke off as Marco turned, felt all of the strength go out of my legs as I saw the tears on his face, glistening in the light of the campfire.

Taking in a breath, I padded closer to the flame. I could feel the tiger's indecision, the mix of fascination and fear.

It's just pain. It isn't permanent.

Slowly, hesitantly, I reached out with one giant paw, feeling the heat of the fire soak its way into my muscles. The sensation peaked, spiked, and I jerked back reflexively, the claws unsheathing themselves. Gathering my resolve, I inched closer and reached out again.

Pain, you can handle.

Every muscle of the tiger's five hundred pound body began to tremble as the air filled with the smell of burning flesh and hair.

Just pain.

The heat traveled in waves up my leg—fire—followed by liquid ice—followed by white-hot lightning—followed by a horrifying nothingness as the nerves began to die.

You are stronger than the pain.

I watched, with clinical interest.

I watched, with screaming horror.

You can do this.

A pitiful shriek tore its way out of the tiger's mouth, a primal expression of rage and terror that could not be suppressed. It wasn't just the pain. It was the damage. It was the loss of power, of movement, of freedom and speed. It was an antelope, escaping across the plain—a charging rhino that couldn't be dodged—a disinterested mate, loping away. It was a lesson learned again and again over a billion years of evolution—somewhere, deep within its soul, the tiger knew that this was death.

But the tiger was not in control. I was in control, and I was not afraid.

Not of mere pain.

I pulled the ruined paw away from the flame, set it down on the rocky earth, forced myself to put weight on it. Waves of agony smashed into my brain, my vision darkening and narrowing as the tiger body begged me to stop, to roll over, to do anything else. I took a few careful steps, and the body rebelled, threatening to collapse.

I tightened my grip.

It was getting easier. The first time, it had taken me half an hour just to get close enough to blister, and I had demorphed almost in a panic, some part of me halfway convinced that the burn would still be there on my human hand. Now, I was able to run even as the tiger screamed in protest.

I circled the clearing at a sprint, taking in the sounds and smells, returning to the campfire where Jake lay motionless inside his sleeping bag. Turning, I placed my other paws in the embers, one by one, steeling myself as the flesh burned. Bending down, I seized a red-hot coal with my jaws, held it in my mouth until it stopped sizzling.

You deserve this.

The thought was just a whisper, but I moved to crush it immediately. This was not about guilt. Guilt would not bring Melissa back. It would not bring Cassie's parents back. It would not undo the disaster at the pool, wake Jake from his coma. The only thing to be gained from punishing myself was absolution, and I didn't want absolution.

I wanted—

‹Rachel?›

Dropping the coal, I stepped away from the fire and began to demorph. ‹Here,› I called out. ‹Give me two minutes.›

"Those were burns," Marco said tonelessly, emerging from the forest two minutes later clad in gym shorts and a t-shirt. The smell still hung thick in the air, and there were dark footprints glistening wetly near the fire.

I shrugged. "Building up pain tolerance," I said. "Based on what you told me about what happened in the cave, it sounds like it's probably going to come in handy."

Marco held my gaze for a long moment, and I prepared to defend myself—I did a sweep, there was no one around, I can still fight on burnt paws, that's the whole point—but he said nothing. Shifting, he nodded toward the sleeping bag. "Any change?" he asked.

"None," I said. "I spent most of the afternoon dripping smoothie into him. Took forever, but I got it all in."

"I picked up some baby wipes," Marco said. "I didn't get any more diapers. I figure if the box we've got doesn't last…"

He trailed off, turning to gaze into the fire. "His folks are getting worried. They kept me right up to the time limit at dinner today, wanting to talk. They kept saying I wasn't acting like myself."

"Are they sending him—you—back to school on Monday?"

"Maybe. Right now, I'm more worried about tomorrow. They said they wanted me home by ten tonight, and I get the sense they're thinking about taking a road trip out to the cabin, now that all the funerals are over."

I felt my heart sink. "That's a three hour drive, isn't it?"

Marco nodded. "And you know Jake's dad. No bathroom breaks. I'd have to demorph under a blanket. With Tom right there next to me."

I looked over at my cousin, still lying exactly where I'd left him when I finished with the smoothie. His breathing was slow but shallow, the movement of the sleeping bag barely visible in the fading light.

Just like it had been two nights ago, when I'd finally arrived after escaping from the pool, five minutes too late to say goodbye.

Stop it. Don't you dare.

"Then we take him to a hospital ourselves. You can leave a note or something, saying he ran away."

Marco shook his head. "First thing they'll do is just bring him back. St. Mary's has the best neurological department in the state. I checked last night."

It also had over four hundred doctors, nurses, technicians, and analysts, of which nearly half were Controllers. According to the prisoners, the Yeerks were planning to use the hospital for a major infestation push that would start in a little over a week. It was the third most disturbing piece of information I'd managed to fly away with.

Of course, there's nothing to stop them from starting the push sooner, now that they think the Andalites are watching.

Or would they do something completely different instead, now that their plan was compromised?

I wasn't sure. Figuring out that kind of stuff was Jake's specialty, not mine.

"So we fall back to plan B," I said brusquely, refusing to let my voice waver. "We tell his parents the truth, get them to take him somewhere out of state."

Marco didn't even shake his head this time, just slumped a little further as he stared into the fire. "Can't," he said dully. "They either listen, or they don't, and either way—"

He sighed, as if too tired to finish the thought. "Trust me, it doesn't work out."

I waited, but he said nothing more. After a dozen heartbeats I began to pace back and forth, kicking at the rocks and leaves that were scattered across the little clearing.

Either way—

Trust me—

You wouldn't understand if I explained it to you, Rachel, so I'm not going to bother.

For the hundredth time, I found myself fighting back against my brain, against the sneaking, slithering, corrosive despair it kept trying to push into my thoughts. Marco was just tired. Tired and burnt-out and grieving—it had nothing to do with me.

Still, though, I did want to understand. Gritting my teeth, I pulled my mind away from its defeatist monologue and forced it to focus.

They either listen, or they don't—Jake's parents would either believe us, believe in the threat, or they would think we'd gone crazy and try to get us locked up.

But that didn't make any sense, because we could morph right in front of them. There's no way they wouldn't believe us after that—Marco must have meant something else.

What else would they not believe us about?

The Yeerks? I mean, morphing doesn't prove that.

…and if they didn't buy into the threat of the Yeerks, or even if they just underestimated it a little…

They could try to go public. Here, in town—which would get them killed or taken—or elsewhere, which would either get them locked up or maybe actually work, in which case the Yeerks might give up on their slow infiltration and just glass half the planet…

And if they did listen?

Oh. Right.

"You think they'd pull us out of the fight?"

"No, I think they'll be totally cool with letting a couple of teenagers who can't even drive repeatedly risk their lives in mortal combat with brainsucking aliens. I mean, hey, it's the twenty-first century, right? Kids gotta learn sometime."

There was no humor in Marco's voice, no spark of laughter or happiness. He said the words as if he were reading off of a script—as if he didn't have the energy to come up with something real, and was falling back on sarcasm by default.

I knew how he felt. It's why I was angry, after all.

"We have to do something," I bit off, trying to keep my words level. "We don't know how to take care of a coma patient. If he doesn't wake up soon, and we don't get help, he's going to die out here."

"He's already fucking dead!"

I blinked at the unexpected outburst, blinked and almost missed Marco leaping to his feet, his face wrenched in anguish, sudden tension tightening every muscle. He closed the distance between us in a flash, thrust a finger into my face, seeming six inches taller than he really was. "He died two days ago! You just don't want to fucking admit it! Whatever alien dimension his body was in, it's gone, okay? He's gone. And that thing—that fucking body over there—just because it doesn't know it's supposed to stop breathing—"

For a moment, I thought he was going to hit me, hit Jake, lose all control and just start tearing things apart. He raised his hands, his fingers curled like claws, and let out a wordless cry of anger and frustration. Then he spun on his heel, walked straight to the nearest tree, and punched it—hard.

I heard the crack of something breaking, stood there stunned and speechless as I waited for Marco to yell again.

But he said nothing. Not a word, not a whimper. He just stood there, looking down at his knuckles, his shoulders heaving silently.

Yes, I knew how he felt.

This is your fault, too.

"I'm not giving up," I said finally, after a full minute of silence. "Not on Jake, and not on the war. We know what they're up to, now. We can figure out a way to stop them. And in the meantime—as long as you're breathing, there's hope."

Thanks, Mother Theresa.

That's what Marco should have said. Instead, he just slumped again, leaning against the tree, his face pressed into the rough bark, his eyes brimming with tears.

I wanted to join him. To let go, and grieve—to start dealing with the fact that I didn't really know if my cousin would ever wake up again.

But I couldn't.

I had work to do.

The bell rang, and the room filled with the sounds of binders snapping and zippers zipping, the shriekscrape of chairs on linoleum. Swinging my bookbag onto my shoulder, I followed the crowd out into the hall.

It was Monday, the second day of school since the Chapmans' car accident, and my first day back since Elfangor. I walked through the hallways on autopilot, surrounded by a bubble of silent, awkward sympathy. Nobody knew quite how they were supposed to deal with me, so instead, they simply didn't.

I didn't mind. It made it easier to slip away unnoticed to morph.

So far, I'd skipped two of my seven classes, stashing my clothes in a Ziploc bag in the tank of the toilet in the girls' bathroom each time. US History had been spent skittering through the ceiling in the lizard morph, while PE had given me a chance to eavesdrop on the teacher's lounge for almost an hour.

Neither excursion had turned up any new information. If the prisoners in the Yeerk pool were to be believed, every single faculty member was now a Controller, and there were plans to take the whole student body in the very near future. Yet even in private, their conversations were mundane and boring and depressingly human. Mr. Plumblee, the AP Biology teacher, was going to have to cancel his vacation so his wife could visit her father, who was going through some kind of surgery. Mrs. Tilman, who taught Spanish and French, was trying to talk the rest of the staff into un-cancelling their surprise birthday party for Ms. Vickers, because it wasn't her fault that people got into car accidents. Three teachers I didn't know from the math department spent almost twenty minutes shipping various combinations of their students, before getting sidetracked on how awful the new state standardized tests were going to be.

Just once, while peering through a vent at our principal, Mr. Krouse, I thought I heard the word "Visser." He was talking on the phone, his voice low and serious, but I couldn't make out what he was saying, and I didn't want to risk crawling out of the vent to get closer.

If they were all Controllers, they were keeping up the act—probably to prevent the very thing that I was trying to do. After the second round of spying, I'd given up and morphed back into my self-copy, resigned to a regular day of school.

Or as regular as possible, anyway. It was lunchtime now, and I headed for the cafeteria, dropping my stuff off in my locker and dodging the compassionate stares of my classmates. I sat in the corner, eating quietly, and my presence was like a force field, keeping the space around me empty for three seats in every direction.

How many of them had already been taken? I looked out across the tables, at the mix of conversation, only a little more subdued than usual. It was hard to believe that any of them had an alien slug lurking behind their eyes.

But Melissa had. For days, maybe weeks. And I hadn't noticed.

They could be doing their big push right now. How would you even know? Maybe it happened during PE. You walk into the locker room, they zap you, you come out a Controller. You could already be one of the very last ones.

I shook my head, trying to clear my thoughts. It was true, but it wasn't useful. According to the prisoners, I had at least until Friday, and even if they'd pushed up their timetable, they weren't likely to be making their move today. I needed to stay focused on things I had the ability to do something about—worrying about nightmare scenarios only helped if it led to some kind of action.

Raising my cheeseburger to my mouth, I took a bite just as someone slid into the seat right next to me. I turned to look and saw Erek King, the retired dog trainer's kid. Mouth full, I simply raised an eyebrow in greeting, chewing as fast as I could.

Erek nodded back. "Hello, Elfangor," he said softly.

Time stopped.

I sprang to my feet, barely stopping myself from choking as I swallowed the entire mouthful half-chewed. Around me, the rest of the cafeteria had frozen in place, all laughter and conversation cut off as if a switch had been flipped.

"Wait!" said Erek, and rounding on him, I saw that he had disappeared, replaced by a gleaming, chrome-and-ivory robot with six limbs and no head, just a little bit smaller than me and very obviously alien.

I tried to jump backward, out and away from the table, and found myself caught as if I'd come up against a vertical wall of glue.

"Don't panic! I won't hurt you!"

"Let me out," I growled. "Let me go right now, or we'll see who hurts who." I was already poised on the edge of morphing, my brain flickering between gorilla, elephant, and rhino. The robot looked tough, but not two-tons tough.

"I can't," it said, its voice still distinctly that of a teenage boy.

"Now," I barked, my fists clenching as my heartrate continued to rise.

"I can't," it repeated. "If I let you out now, it's likely you'll hurt yourself or someone else. I literally can't let that happen."

My brain began catching up with my body, and my eyes darted around, taking in the frozen tableau. "What did you—how did you—"

How did you stop time? I wanted to say. I suddenly felt very stupid for having tried to threaten the robot ten seconds earlier.

"I didn't," it said simply. "You're inside a holographic force field. Everything's normal outside it. As far as anyone else can see, the two of us are just sitting next to each other, talking." Some movable parts near the top of the robot shifted, giving the impression of a frown. "Couldn't you—can't you tell? Our sources told us that Andalites are familiar with this kind of technology."

I took several deep breaths, my nostrils flaring as I struggled to get myself under control. "What's an Andalite?" I said lamely, trying to stall for time.

The robotic frown deepened. "The odds of that being a genuine question are low," it said. "Maybe one-in-forty-six-thousand-six-hundred-fifty-six low. I can see the energy from the Z-space interlink lighting up that skull you're wearing."

I tried to pull free of whatever was holding me, found that I could move inches but not feet. A part of me was following up on what the robot had just said—morphing gives off detectable energy? Do the Yeerks know?—while the rest of me scrabbled uselessly for something intelligent to say. "I don't know what you're talking about," I said.

"Please," the robot answered back, a note of pleading entering its voice. "Trust me. I'm incapable of harming you, even if I wanted to, and I don't. You're resisting the Yeerks. We heard your voice in the pool on Wednesday. We've been trying to find you ever since."

They had heard me?

The robot tilted its top section, and a piece of ivory plating slid back, revealing a compartment containing a thick, gray slug, suspended amid hundreds of delicate wires.

If I hadn't already been glued to the air, I would have jumped three feet in shock. "You're a Controller?" I blurted out.

So much for pretending to be clueless.

"No," the robot answered. "I hold the Yeerk in stasis, drawing on its knowledge. When it's time to release it into the pool, I adjust its memory so that it thinks it's been controlling me." It paused, and somehow its body language conveyed the sense of someone mustering courage. "I'm sharing this information with you in the spirit of compromise. Now you know who I am—you know my public identity. If you wanted, you could call your companion to come and destroy me. Can we please talk calmly for a bit? As allies?"

My heart was still hammering away inside my chest, but some of the adrenaline had leaked back out of my bloodstream, and I could feel my panic slowly ebbing. "Let me go," I said slowly, my voice still slightly shaky. "Let me sit down, and let me see what's going on around me. If you do that, I'll stay and talk."

"Deal."

I felt the pressure around me ease and vanish, and I slid back into my seat, pressing my sweaty palms against the smooth, cool surface of the table. Around me, the frozen cafeteria suddenly snapped into motion, a wall of sound washing away the temporary quiet. I let out a breath I didn't realize I'd been holding, feeling my shoulders relax—until I realized that this could just as easily be another hologram.

"They can see us, but they can't hear us," the robot said. "I'm projecting an image of us talking about the human girl's friends, Cassie and Melissa. Speaking of which—"

It straightened noticeably, its movable facelike parts rearranging into something resembling seriousness. "What did you do with the girl whose form you've taken? Did you harm her? Is she somewhere safe?"

I blinked, my mind racing as I struggled to assemble an appropriate answer. This whole thing could be a Yeerk trap, a part of me whispered. It doesn't feel like one, but a smart trap wouldn't.

"She's safe," I said finally. "We offered her protection in exchange for information and the use of her body."

It wasn't the best phrasing I could have come up with, but the robot didn't seem to notice the double entendre. It simply nodded, its limbs relaxing with a gentle whirr. "Good," it said. "You'll produce her, at some point? So we can confirm?"

"I don't see why I should," I shot back. "If this is a—"

"It's not a trap."

"So you say. And I say the girl—Rachel—she's fine."

The robot held very still for a fraction of a second. "Fair enough," it said, still sounding perfectly human. When it spoke again, its tone was distinctly dry and bitter. "I'll note that if you have hurt her, you're probably better off lying to me about it."

I frowned, opening my mouth to ask—

Something in my brain clicked, and I closed my mouth again. Incapable of harming you, even if I wanted to. "You have some kind of block against violence?" I asked.

"Unfortunately." The robot turned away and sort of fidgeted, its body language signaling frustration loud and clear. "We can't take any positive action that results in harm to a sapient being, and we're sometimes compelled to act if violence seems imminent. There's a limit to how far ahead that chains—we don't have to worry about low-probability consequences that are weeks in the future—but anything directly intentional or even just relatively likely is completely off the table."

"Who's we?" I asked.

"We are the Chee," it said simply. "The last remaining legacy of an ancient, peace-loving species—the Pemalites, who designed and built us. We came to this planet thirteen million, five hundred fourteen thousand, one hundred and seven days ago, at the end of the Howler war, and settled here on the orders of the last surviving Pemalite."

"How many of you are there?"

The robot fixed me with a look. "How many of you are there?"

I hesitated, but only for a moment. "Six," I said honestly, noting a tiny shift in the robot's posture as I spoke. "Maybe seven, if we can recover one of our comrades, who crashed in the—who crashed somewhere else."

"There are one hundred thirty-nine thousand, three hundred and twenty-one Chee, including the One Who Is Remembered."

I could hear the capitals as he spoke, and I filed the obvious question away for later. "How many of you are fake Controllers?"

"Very few. We're scattered across the planet, in groups of six or twelve or at most eighteen, and the Yeerks have yet to spread beyond this city. More of us are gathering—slowly, so as to avoid suspicion—although it's not yet clear whether anything will come of it."

My head was spinning, trying to make all of the numbers mean something. "What—" I began, and then I faltered. Taking a breath, I tried again. "Why have you—I mean, why are you telling me this? Showing yourself to me?"

"Because you resist the Yeerks. Because everything we know of them tells us that they must be stopped. Until now, we'd thought that we would have to rely on human strength, human ingenuity. We watched the battle ten days ago, and we saw the Andalite dome ship fall into the sea. We assumed that no more help was coming, until we heard your voice in the pool."

"I didn't see you in the cages."

"If one of us sees something, the rest of us can remember it, unless there's a reason to forget. And I might have been in the cage—like yours, my outward form is a deception." There was a flicker, and suddenly the robot vanished, replaced by the familiar face of Erek King, which them smoothly aged until it appeared to be seventy, and then morphed into my own. "I can take on a lot of different shapes, though for the sake of reasonable caution I usually stay within my established identity."

I scrubbed at my eyes, trying to think. I had the feeling that there were a hundred questions I should be asking, a hundred things that Jake or Marco or even Tobias would identify as crucially important.

But that wasn't the way my brain worked. I couldn't just think my way into being smarter, or more perceptive.

"You want to—to form some kind of alliance?"

"Yes."

I looked around the cafeteria, at the other students sitting and eating and laughing. Lunch was short; it would be ending in fifteen more minutes. "This isn't the time or the place," I said slowly. I couldn't quite keep the reluctance out of my tone—the part of me that hadn't learned anything over the past week wanted to charge ahead at full speed. "And I can't make this sort of decision alone. I think the answer is probably yes, but—can you meet me at"—I hesitated—"at the playground at Magnuson park? Tonight, after dark?"

The image of Erek King frowned. "Time's pretty short, after what happened at the pool," he said, his voice sounding somehow less formal now that it was coming out of a human mouth. "I think everything the Yeerks were planning for next week is going to happen in the next couple of days instead. There's a chance that even a few hours might make a difference. Is this something you and your companion could decide together?"

"Probably," I answered, "but I'm not going to see him until after school anyway."

Erek went suddenly stiff, his eyes widening, muscles seeming to tense beneath his holographic skin. "Um," he said, sounding more human than ever. "Um. I don't understand. Is the other Andalite not a part of your group?"

I felt my own eyes narrow as my heartrate spiked once again. "What other Andalite?"

He pointed openly, and I almost shouted before remembering that we were both safely hidden behind a hologram. I followed the line of his finger to a boy I didn't know, sitting alone near the middle of the cafeteria.

"That one, there," Erek said. "He's got the same kind of radiation signature as you. It's different, like a fingerprint—that's how I knew you were the one we saw at the pool. But that's not a real human."

I don't know if it was the adrenaline, or the fear, or the practice I'd been putting in over the past week as I tried to learn from my mistakes. It might have just been a chance flash of insight, a lucky intuition. But for a moment, I felt like Marco as all of the pieces clicked into place at once.

We'd guessed that there might be Andalite bandits, other survivors from the crash. If there were, it was only natural that they'd make their way to this city—to the center of the Yeerk operation.

But the odds of one being here, in the middle of my school cafeteria—

Zero, or close enough that it made no difference.

They know. First Melissa, then Cassie—I'm the obvious next person to investigate.

As I watched, I thought I saw the boy's eyes linger on us for just a moment, as if he were trying to keep an eye on us, and also trying not to be obvious about it. Even though I knew we couldn't be seen, I felt a wash of cold that ran from my spine all the way down to my fingers and toes.

"Erek," I said. "That force field you used to hold me in place. Will it stop a laser beam?"

"Yes. But if you're thinking of doing something violent—"

"Not me," I interrupted. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a voice was whispering, running down a list that was starting to become all too familiar—gorilla, rhino, elephant, tiger. "I think that boy over there is Visser Three."