And out of nowhere, after months of waiting, comes a wild Chapter 10.
I'm so sorry for not updating sooner, guys. I had a ton of schoolwork to do to finish off my senior year of high school, and then a summer calculus class. Thankfully, school's out for the year, and I will go back to updating this story. There will also be a couple other fics getting posted and updated, but I won't let this one sit for as long as it did.
Unfortunately, as summer is almost over and I've done very little work on it, A Different Fate will not be published any time soon. To counter this, I will not be stopping updates for Sparks when I start college. I don't know how often they'll be, but they'll come.
Also, this chapter utilizes line breaks to represent time skips. New, I know. Hope it's not too confusing.
So, onto the chapter!
I don't own Animorphs.
My name is Marco.
Just Marco. No last name, no location. Marco, period.
I'm sure you can guess why, now. If I let you know my last name, well - let's be honest here. I don't know you. You could be a Controller. Maybe you are. Maybe you will be, at some point. And if a Controller found out my last name, or where I lived, or anything about me, they could find me. And then I would become a Controller too, and the earth would be done for.
It's nothing personal. I'm just really not into the idea of becoming a slave to an alien parasite.
Anyway, I felt kind of disgusted with myself about the night that Elfangor died. I'd thrown up and given away the others and then booked it for home without so much as checking to see if any of them were okay. I'd even, in my panic, left the door to the Safe Zone open.
I can come up with a lot of good excuses for myself. The only one I even halfway believe is that I was worried what my father would do without me. See, a lot of my decisions are influenced by that, and I think about it a lot.
But that night, I wasn't thinking. I was just scared.
So the next morning, I felt like a real jerk. I had to do something to at least make sure the others were alright, and the door to the Zone had been closed, since if either one had gone wrong, it was my fault.
I didn't know where the girls would have gone, and I didn't really know where Tobias lived back then, so I just set out for Jake's apartment, hoping to get there quickly and make sure that he, at least, had come out of last night okay.
I wasn't a complete idiot; after what had happened the night before, I was on high alert. There could be Controllers, those aliens with their weird guns, even Visser Three himself around any and every corner.
So when someone tapped me on the shoulder, naturally I jumped and my hand flew for my gun, which - surprise! - I hadn't brought. High alert or no, guards didn't carry their guns while off-duty, and I was no exception. The attention I got carrying it could be as much of a death blow as anything that I'd need to use the gun as a defense against - assuming bullets even worked against aliens.
I whirled around to face whoever or whatever it was, ready to attack and then make a break for it.
But it was just a woman.
She was in her thirties, with brown hair pulled back into a bun and a crisp Collective uniform on. She held a stack of papers in one arm.
I did my best not to collapse in relief.
"Sorry, I didn't mean to startle you," she said. "I just wanted to give you one of these."
She pulled a sheet of paper off the stack and offered it to me. I reluctantly took it, and scanned the title. "New Guard Positions open in the Collective. High wages, reduced-price housing, free time to continue education."
"I just saw your uniform and figured you might be interested," she said.
Uniform. Right. I may not have been carrying my gun, but I still had my gray guard's uniform on.
"The Collective is really looking to expand its security forces, and we're offering higher pay and improved training to make sure our guards are ready to handle anything," she said. "I'm sure you've noticed that the mutants have started coming closer to the walls lately - surely you heard them last night."
Last night - there hadn't been mutants last night. There had been aliens. But of course, that was how it would be passed off: just mutants. Scary, but not new or surprising.
"Yeah," I said.
"Anyway, in the next year or so we're looking to more than double the number of guards we employ and begin forcing the mutants away from the wall again. You won't have to do anything that dangerous, of course - but if you're interested, make sure to drop by the Collective at any time."
"Thanks. I will," I said.
And as she turned and walked away, I realized I'd been telling the truth.
A higher wage, reduced-price living - that would be better for me and my dad. We could finally move out of the rathole apartment we'd been living in since my mom died and into somewhere nice. We could start buying new clothes again, and better food. It would be a step in the right direction, a step back towards a better life.
I neatly folded up the flyer and tucked it into my pocket, then continued on to Jake's apartment.
"Come on, answer the door," I muttered. I'd knocked on the door to Jake's apartment twice now, and I was starting to get worried. What if he hadn't made it back safely? What if he had gotten hurt, or killed, because I'd been a coward?
"Open the goddamn door already, Jake," I muttered.
There were footsteps inside - I couldn't tell whose, Jake's or his parents.
The doorknob turned.
And there was my best friend, undoubtedly whole and alive.
He stepped out into the hallway and shut the door behind him.
"Glad to see you made it out alive," he said, but his voice was flat.
"I'm glad you did, too. Do you know about the others?"
"Kind of," he said. "Cassie came with me - she's inside right now. I don't know about Rachel and Tobias though, they ran off ahead of us."
Okay. Two were safe, two were unaccounted for.
"Any idea where they would go?" I asked.
"I assume Tobias would take her to his orphanage, but I don't exactly know where that is," Jake said. "This is all so out of hand, it's - "
"Insane?" I offered. He smiled.
"We need to find them," he said. "We need to get everyone together and talk about this. What happened last night - we can't just ignore it."
Oh, we could. We could have ignored the threat of the Yeerks, ignored the possibility of morphing into animals, even ignored Rachel and Tobias and just focused on having normal lives. But I knew what could happen if you ignored dangers you knew about, what had happened. It wasn't pretty. Walking down the street, you could still see people with scars from the plague.
"Yeah, okay," I agreed. "Any idea where to start?"
The door came open behind Jake, and Cassie came out into the hallway.
"You guys really need to talk quieter," she said.
"So, any idea where to start?" I asked her, deciding not to be pissed at her for interrupting - after all, better she overhear than Jake's family or the neighbors.
"Are you kidding? I barely know this place, and Rachel knows even less. I have no clue."
"Okay," I said. "Well, I was going to check on the door and make sure it's locked - "
"It is," Jake said. "I locked it last night."
Well, that was a relief.
"Still, it's as good a place to start looking as any," I say. "Both Rachel and Tobias know where it is, at least."
"I guess you're right," Jake said.
"So, it's settled? We're heading to the door?" Cassie asked.
"Yeah, just hang on a second," Jake said. He ducked back inside the apartment, and I could see that he scrawled a quick note on a pad of paper. Cassie watched too, but she just looked puzzled.
"What's he doing?" she asked.
"Making sure his parents know he's going out," I replied. I could remember doing the same thing years ago, but that was before my mother died. Now, my father hardly seemed to care where I went, and wouldn't read a note even if I left one.
Jake came back out into the hallway and locked the door.
"Ready?" he asked.
"Ready," I said.
When we got there, the door was pretty dead.
I mean, it's not usually the life of the party or bustling with commuters or anything. But the only people there were the guards on duty and an older woman hanging some wet laundry out the window of a nearby apartment building.
On the bright side, the door was indeed locked.
On the other hand, Rachel and Tobias were nowhere to be found.
"Well, this is great," I said. "The only place we know to look for them and they aren't here."
"Maybe they're lost, or they don't know we're looking for them. Maybe Tobias went to work and took Rachel with him or something," Cassie suggested. "I'm sure if we wait here they'll get the idea to drop by sooner or later."
"Maybe," Jake said, though I could tell he didn't really believe it. On the way over here I'd noticed that he'd been acting weird, like something was making him uncomfortable, but he hadn't told me what it was, and I didn't know how to ask. I got the feeling maybe it was how I'd ditched him and the others last night. I wouldn't have blamed him if it was.
"Do either of you know another place to look for them?" Cassie asked.
"I don't," Jake said, but Cassie's comment about Tobias taking Rachel to work got me thinking.
"I might," I said. Jake and Cassie turned to look at me, Jake surprised, Cassie hopeful.
"If it's like you said, maybe he took her to work with him," I continued. "Tobias works at the greenhouses, so it couldn't hurt to check there."
Jake nodded in agreement. Cassie smiled, then turned and headed for the streets before stopping.
"I don't know where that is," she said.
"Come on," Jake said, walking forward towards her. "I can lead."