[I'll kill you all, andalites! Run away, it doesn't matter! Whatever it takes, I'll kill you all!]
We were of the opinion that it did matter. We were alive. And if we could help it, we'd stay that way. We hadn't succeeded in saving Tom, yet. But we were alive. We knew where, and who, our enemy was. And the policeman who'd been suspicious of me... was no longer an issue.
I counted. One, two, three, four. Rachel, Jake, Marco, me.
[Tobias?] Rachel called down through the collapsed, still-burning tunnel.
[I'm fine.] His voice was very faint. [Lying low until I can leave without suspicion. Go.]
[We're not leaving without – ]
[If you come back down here, all of us are in danger. Get out. I'll see you later.]
Rachel was growing next to me, expanding, shifting back towards full elephant. She dug at the tunnel with her tusks, but it was cut off. It'd take her hours to get through.
[Rachel,] I said.
[We're not leaving him down there.]
[No, we're not. But we're cut off. It's easier for him to escape without us.]
[And if he gets in trouble?]
[Unless you know another way down there,] Marco cut in, [there is absolutely nothing we can do here except get caught by the yeerk forces that are definitely on their way by now. Let's get out of here!]
Reluctantly, Rachel started to demorph. Reluctantly, so did the rest of us.
Reluctantly, we left.
The school was still crowded, but we managed to slip out before any alarms were raised. Nobody stopped us.
We didn't talk much on the way home.
I couldn't sleep. I was too worried about Tobias. Instead, I took a little notebook, a pen, and a torch. I grabbed a watertight box from the barn and then headed out through the back paddock, towards the National Forest.
There was a tree on the edge of the forest that was easy for me to find, even in the dark. A tree I'd marked years ago. Even through regrown bark, the inscription 'Cassie + Jake' was clearly visible. I counted three trees to the right and dug a little hole. That should be a safe enough place to hide any suspicious materials.
I recreated my previous night's notes, as well as I could remember them. I added everything I remembered from the yeerk pool, and started a list of known Controllers. If we were going to do this, I was going to make sure that we knew our enemies. Eventually, though, I ran out of new information. There was no choice but to bury the box and head home. To curl up under my warm blankets and be alone with my thoughts.
Tobias tapped on my bedroom at about three in the morning, in red-tailed hawk form. I pulled the window open to greet him. "Tobias! Are you okay?"
[Uh, sort of, yeah. I already saw Jake but I figured he wouldn't call everyone in the middle of the night...]
"What's wrong? Tobias, what happened?"
[I just... waited in a crevice high in the wall until things calmed down.]
"Oh. Good. Can you get home tonight? Do you need somewhere to sleep?"
[That's not really... It took longer than two hours, Cassie.]
"There were warehouses in there. Warehouses without people in them."
[I couldn't get to them without being seen.]
"I'm... I'm sorry."
[It's ok, I think. I mean, we made them scared, right? We're gonna make a difference here.]
"Yes. Yes, we are." But would it be enough? Five kids, one of them a bird. Against an empire.
Tobias seemed to guess what I was thinking. [The andalites will come,] he said. [Until then...]
I nodded. "Until then, we fight."