"Like a soul without a mind/ in a body without a heart/ I'm missing every part."

—Massive Attack, 1991

I got into work early the next Monday, which meant that I had the joy of catching most of the hate mail when it arrived in our inbox. I didn't do more than skim the fronts of most of the envelopes before dumping them into the trash, but there were a couple bills, donation checks, and expressions of support in there as well.

It wasn't long before Eva got in. She handed me a box of matches and I smiled. While she opened the window and turned off the smoke alarm, I went about burning the entire contents of the trash can. With prejudice.

"Gotta enjoy the little things." Eva sat back, breathing in the smoke like we were in an opium den.

I laughed. "Thanks."

We sat in silence for several more seconds, and then Eva said, "You see they have an investigation going for the murders now?"

"Yeah." I smiled at her through the smoke. "Cops have been by to interview me. Said they're reopening some of the old cases, and that no they will not keep me posted on how the investigation is progressing."

"Silver linings," she said.

The smoke gradually wafted out the window as the trash can smoldered down into ash. I got about halfway through the email equivalent of burning all the hate mail when I was distracted by looking up news stories about the murders. There were no details yet—at least, none the police were releasing to the public—but according to the News-Press website "several leads" were "under investigation." Of course, according to KEYT's site, this guy was cleaning up the streets by cracking down on all the traitors who had walked free, but at least they seemed to believe he really existed.

"So if I accidentally clicked on a link claiming I'd won a Nintendo when I was trying to close the window, and now the computer is frozen, that's bad, right?" Eva said slowly.

I pushed off my desk so that my chair shot on its little wheels across the room and gently bumped into hers. "Yeah," I said, peering at her screen. "Just hold down the 'off' button until it goes into emergency shutdown. If rebooting doesn't work, we'll try shaking it, banging on it, and using my computer to beg the hacker forums for help before we resort to calling a technician."

"How optimistic." Eva leaned on the on/off button until the computer finally shut down.

"Um, I could tell you that I definitely know how to fix it, but that would be a shameless lie," I said.

We both waited around until the fan had stopped whirring, and then Eva switched it back on. The computer spent several minutes scrolling through code and debating whether it really wanted to keep working or not, before finally chugging to life. She opened the internet browser, and everything looked as it had before.

"It's a miracle," I drawled. "So, when's your new Nintendo due to arrive?"

Eva glared. "I wasn't trying to click on it."

"Uh-huh." I smiled innocently. "Well, if you need anything else, I can—"

Eva held up a hand to cut me off, glancing down at her watch. "Hang on."

It took a little clicking around and cursing on her part, but she pulled up a recap of last evening's news broadcast on the CBS website. And thereby displayed more technological prowess than I'd suspected her of having. She clicked around on the play indicator until finally Marco's face appeared on the video display.

Marco was sitting across the table from Dan Rather, smiling cheekily at the camera. "Kind of weird? Yes," he said in response to something the anchor had asked. "Occasionally a jerk? Also yes. Socially awkward? You bet. A voluntary host? Nope. No way in hell. I saw him fighting back for myself, and so did a couple hundred other witnesses."

"You're certain, then?" Dan Rather said. "That he was entirely involuntarily infested?"

"Definitely." Marco rolled his eyes. "Just because he's absolutely terrible in front of the camera doesn't mean he was pro-yeerk. Sorry, but it's a non-story. Trust me. There's absolutely nothing interesting about him."

"Oh," I said softly.

On the screen Dan Rather sat back in his chair. "All right then." He glanced at his notes. "So your fellow Animorph Cassie Day mentioned something in an interview not that long ago about an incident with a yeerk ship that was taking water from local ponds in order to supply their troops?"

"Oh, that is a great story," Marco said, laughing. "First thing you should know is that I absolutely hate tartar sauce."

"I'm guessing this story ends with you turning into a crab?" Dan Rather said.

"See, that?" Marco grinned. "That would have been a good idea. Well thought-out. Intelligent. Because then we could have gotten our own selves from the cave to the stream without having to resort to riding Tobias Air. But, hey, we had no freaking clue what we were doing because at that point we'd been involved in the war for, like, two weeks flat. So you know what? Turning into trout seemed like a good idea at the time. Famous last words, right?"

"You had a trout?"

Marco leaned forward. "Again, you're giving us too much credit. Nuh-uh. First we had to catch a trout. We thought, how hard could it be?"

We sat there and watched in silence for several more seconds. I swallowed, trying to ignore the enormous burst of warm fuzzies I was now feeling toward Marco.

"I mean, we're not there to hurt anyone, right?" Marco said, and Dan Rather laughed. "No, really." Marco's eyes widened. "We're just trying to go along our little fishy way, and out of nowhere—"

"They never killed the humans." Eva spoke suddenly.

I glanced over. She was still looking at the computer screen, fiddling with one of the bracelets she always wore to hide the ligature marks on her wrists. She had an odd, mechanical way of fidgeting, like she was concentrating too hard on reminding herself to do it rather than just letting it happen automatically. Now as she twisted the silvery cuff around and around, her motions were a little too precise to come off as entirely natural.

"What?" I said at last, when she didn't elaborate.

"That was how Edriss—Visser One—figured it out." She didn't look away from where Marco was relating some anecdote about wolf-Jake feeling the need to pee on half the trees in the county as Dan Rather gave one of those overly enthusiastic TV laughs. "They didn't kill controllers if they could avoid it, period. But when they did... Taxxons. Hork-bajir, sometimes. Gedds, Leera... but never humans. Not even when it would have made more sense to..." She moistened her lips, looking down as if it took all her concentration to keep turning that ring of silver over and over at the base of her hand. "They always left the humans alive."

"They were just doing the best they knew how," I said softly.

She glanced up at me, and then quickly away to the computer screen. "They're just children. Everyone keeps forgetting that..." She gestured to the video still playing. "He's been shaving for less than a year. His voice still cracks when he's angry about something. He never graduated high school, or held a real job, or had a relationship that lasted more than two dates." She wasn't talking about Dan Rather. "I think people forget that sometimes."

"You're saying the Animorphs didn't realize," I said. "What leaving the humans alive would mean." I'd suspected the same thing.

"I'm saying they still don't."

I couldn't count the number of times it had happened: word went out through the yeerk grapevine that there had been another andalite raid on a yeerk pool entrance, a community center, a gathering place. The "andalites" would barely have had time to disappear before the Sharing Relief Services vans would be pulling up, and controllers would be swarming the scene looking for bodies.

It was the ordinary humans we found. The ones who would throw themselves into my arms, babbling about how there had been an elephant and a gorilla and all these weird things, they were so tall and they had spikes on their heads...

"It's gonna be okay," Essa 412 would murmur, in that trust-me tone that rolled so smoothly from the back of my throat. "I believe you. We're just going to get you checked out, okay?" He'd put my arm around the shoulders of the traumatized witness, still murmuring reassurances, and guide the human to the back of the van.

"I got you, it's all okay," the yeerk would say gently. "I just need you to hold still while my colleague here scans you for concussions... You're going to feel a slight pinch in your left ear..."

That was how they had gotten half the ex-hosts who showed up to Matter Over Mind every week, twice a week.

I'm not sure how the Animorphs rationalized the fact that they'd done everything from destroy a haunted house at the Gardens to mop the carpet while in morph at a Colorado office building without it ever making the news that there was half a zoo running around on the loose. The truth was, of course, that they had left trails of dozens or even hundreds of human-controllers in their wake everywhere they went. All it took was a disaster report and the yeerks were there to collect the witnesses.

It had always angered me, that the andalites apparently couldn't be bothered to kill the human witnesses quickly and spare them all that pain. If only I had known.

If only they had.

"They're probably never going to," Eva said.

"Hmm?" I'd missed something.

She smiled. There was no happiness in the expression. "They're never going to graduate high school. Have normal relationships. Hold down real jobs."

I shrugged. "On the other hand, there are all the advantages of being rich and famous."

"You're saying you'd want this for your kids?" She raised her eyebrows.

"Of course not."

"The, um." Eva took a second in stillness. "The violence alone. The fact that in order to protect us, what they had to do..."

Yeah, I knew.

It was one of the many reasons I never wanted Jake coming to any of the meetings. (He technically qualified. Temrash 114 had made a side detour after leaving my body behind and before reaching the governor, and for three days the other Animorphs had stashed Jake God-knew-where while Ax hung around our house pretending—badly—to be Jake and they all waited for the yeerk to starve. I knew, and Jake knew that I knew, but it wasn't something we'd ever really talked about.) But I'd never offered. Never asked if he wanted to talk.

Because the people coming in to the Matter Over Mind meetings missing fingers, or whole hands, or scarred almost into unrecognition by andalite tail blades or hawk talons or tiger claws... Those were the rare ones, the lucky ones. The ones who had been allowed to live. Every time the Animorphs had tried to leave a human witness alone, they had created a new controller. Every time they had tried to injure a human-controller instead of killing, they had spared yeerk and human alike a fast death and thereby guaranteed a slow and terrible one.

To get an inkling of what happened to the victims of the Animorphs' mercy, you could look at the keloid lines covering Eva's entire body. You could listen to the way she gasped for air after walking less than thirty yards.

"He's seeing someone."

"Who, Marco?" I said. I wasn't sure why this was news. Marco's latest fling was usually every gossip rag's go-to topic for slow news days.

Eva's hand on her bracelet was moving faster now: turn, turn, turn. Like a lot of ex-hosts, she only broke the stillness with this kind of repeated tic—biting one's nails, fidgeting with one's clothes—to remind herself who was in control here. I did it all the time, slowly bending and straightening the fingers of my right hand one at a time.

No wonder everyone thought we were a bunch of weirdos.

"His name is Jack," she said after a while.

"Hmm?" I said.

"Jack Merridew. The boy he's seeing. I've met him. He seems all right. Like a good person."

I didn't say anything. I needed to figure out why she was telling me this before I responded.

The motion of the bracelet slowed, but it was harsher now. The metal was digging into her fingertips. "I love that boy. More than anything. Literally more than I love my life. Or anything else, for that matter." Turn, turn, turn. "And I don't want anything that will make his life more difficult, for any reason. Much less anything that will get even more paparazzi following him around. He's been through enough. More than. So what I can't understand is, if he's attracted to girls as well as boys, why he can't just date female partners instead. Why he has to make things so difficult for himself by experimenting with all this... bisexuality."

The first thing that came to mind was something my ninth grade English teacher had said about Romeo and Juliet: the point of the story wasn't that the main characters had this great love, or even that they were immature idiots who had gotten married the day after meeting each other. The point of the play was that they should have had the freedom to get to know each other and find out if they liked each other the normal way—and they didn't, because of a bunch of adults with a bunch of dumb prejudices that eventually got a bunch of people killed. Including those two immature idiots, all because they'd tried to make love not war.

However, I didn't think bringing up some Elizabethan suicides would be the best way to go with this conversation.

"It's not like he's doing anything wrong if he wants to enjoy some time with someone," I said. "And I know other people might make his life difficult for that, but that's his choice to put up with it or not."

"He doesn't know what he wants." Eva sighed, trailing her fingers over the bracelet but not moving it anymore. "He's sixteen years old."

"So maybe that's what he wants," I suggested. "To be sixteen. To date people."

On the computer screen, Marco said something that caused Dan Rather to fake-laugh so hard he threw his head back and slapped his knee. Marco looked surprised but also pleased with himself. At some point Eva had turned down the volume; they were just shadows flickering across the surface of the screen.

"But couldn't he just date girls?" Eva asked.

"Why?" I said. "So other people won't say dumb shit about him? People already say dumb shit about him, in case you hadn't noticed."

"Trust me. I noticed."

I pressed my lips together, trying to think this one through. "If this person he's dating seems like a good person, and makes him happy, couldn't you just focus on that being a good thing and worry about the rest of it later?"

Eva stood up slowly, bracing herself on the desk. "I don't want him to be hurt. I know that probably sounds... After everything, after all the ways I've already failed to keep him safe, what gives me the right to think of him as my child?"

"That's not—"

"Thanks," she said, cutting me off. "How's it going with the modification to the 501-C3 form?"

"We're still too political for their tastes, but I'm working on it," I said. "You remember how you told that one lady Laura that she needed to stop blaming herself for getting infested? You ever think of taking your own advice?"

"Do as I say, not as I do." Eva handed me a stack of tax exemption forms. "Go fight the IRS for me, will you? I'm going to see about getting some good press out of all this nonsense."

"Have you considered rebranding us as a religion?" I asked, flipping through the long lists of policies. "I mean, it'd probably have to be a cult, since we definitely don't have enough members to count as anything else, but if we did set you up as a false god then we'd have no problem qualifying for tax exemption."

Eva gave me a long, steady look.

Smiling innocently at her, I pushed off the desk and rolled back across the room.