Later that afternoon, after I'd changed into the outfit I'd agreed on with Anifal, I was sitting on my bed stroking Lapkin and trying to sort through all the different thoughts that were nagging at me. Double-solitaire games, turtle instincts, unidentified decisions, Andrea, Sarem, and Abraham all whirled around in my head, refusing to fit together. It was like looking at a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces had nothing but bumps on them.

I tried to figure out when this whole thing had started. Was it just a side effect of crossing between the two universes? No, because I hadn't felt any sense of an impending decision on Apollo. In fact, I couldn't remember having any inkling of this feeling until I'd woken up on Saturday morning. Had something happened while I was asleep?

Maybe you've been infected by a hostile memetic parasite, I thought to myself, only half-joking. I'm sure Richard could give you all kinds of precedents for…

But I never finished the thought. A sudden, searing jolt of pain shot through my body, and every other thought was blasted from my brain.

It only lasted for a moment, and then it was gone. Gone as though it had never happened. But, in that moment, I must have let out some kind of scream, because Lapkin looked up at me in that quick, attentive way cats do when you startle them, and Josh called from his bedroom: "Elly, what was that?"

"Nothing," I called back. "Just… just a bug. It startled me for a second. I'm fine." But my voice was shaking, because now I was scared.

The next jolt of pain came about five seconds later. It might have actually been a little worse than the first one, but I was expecting it this time, and I managed to keep myself from screaming. Just barely, though. I'm not a sissy when it comes to pain (I used to be, but that was before the Morph Force), but this was different from anything I'd ever felt. Imagine if every cell in your body simultaneously caught fire, and you'll have some idea of what it was like.

I clung tighter to Lapkin; he mewed in protest, but I barely noticed. What was the matter with me? Was there some sort of virus in my brain, that had first messed up my ability to think straight and was now playing havoc with my pain sensors? Was I having some kind of allergy to the matter in this universe? Was I – then came another burst of pain, and suddenly the reasons didn't seem so important anymore.

It went on like this for almost half an hour. At several points, I almost broke down and called to the parallel Josh to call a doctor, or come and hold my hand, or something – but I didn't dare risk it. In the state I was in, I couldn't trust myself not to let him know who I really was – and there are worse things than having every cell in your body set on fire, and falling into Visser Three's clutches was about five of them. (Not that I thought the parallel Josh was a Controller, after his comments about the Sharing the other day, but, in the Morph Force, paranoia is a survival skill.)

I can't remember when I caught on to what was happening. It was obvious in retrospect, but forming logical thoughts isn't easy under those kinds of circumstances – and, even in retrospect, I wasn't quite sure why it was happening. I mean, I hadn't been feeling anything else that the other me felt, and hosts don't usually feel their Controllers' starvation pains, anyway. But so many weird things had been happening lately that there didn't seem to be much point in questioning this one – not that I was in much of a state to ask questions, anyway.

So there I was, lying on my bed with my cat curled up next to me, and sharing in the agony of a Yeerk that was dying inside another me's skull about a mile away. I suppose I'm the only person that's ever happened to.

Lucky me.

After about half an hour, the memories started. I'd been expecting this; Yeerks lose telepathic control during their deaths the way we lose muscle control, and they start pouring their own memories, along with those of their old hosts, into whatever brain they happen to be attached to at the moment. It was kind of a relief, actually; some of the memories were so vivid that they left no room in my brain for the starvation pangs, and I went from feeling like one of the locust victims in Revelation 9 to drifting dreamily through a series of half-remembered scenes, some touching, some scary, some just plain weird.

For instance, there was the one where I saw how Taxxons reproduce. Apparently, my double's Controller had infested a Taxxon at some point in her life, and she (actually, she was a he at that point) had been assigned to help create some new Taxxon hosts. That was one of the scary memories.

But there were some good memories, too. In fact, there were a bunch of good memories – lots more than I would have expected, considering the source. There were memories of her early youth, of swimming around soaking up Kandrona and not being afraid; there were memories of infesting her first Gedd, when she got to see the world through real eyes for the first time; there were memories of riding something called a limner across the grasslands of some neutral race's main continent, and feeling genuinely happy for the first time since her promotion to human-Controller status. (Funny, how all Yeerks seem to want the chance to infest humans, and then, when they get it, they go around terrified of what high-profile targets they've suddenly become. There's a moral there, I guess.)

And then there were the memories that I just couldn't make head or tail of. There was the one where her Taxxon host was licking a path along the floor of his burrow so another Taxxon could walk on it; I couldn't figure that one out at all. And there was the one showing the Yeerk's pride when she finally succeeded in "breaking" my double; I knew how I ought to feel about that, but, seeing it from the Yeerk's point of view, I could barely help being impressed. (I'd never realized how willful I could have been, under the right circumstances.)

I didn't see many memories from her Gedd host. The ones I did see were kind of sad, after my own experiences as a Gedd; I remembered loping along the surface of Apollo, with the rain tingling against my skin and the smell of vegetation in my nostrils, and I felt sorry for the old, tired animal that had never seen anything but the inside of a Yeerk farming combine. I suppose Richard feels the same way when he watches documentaries about industrial cattle farms.

And I didn't see any of my double's memories. That was natural, of course, since it was my double's brain that she was using, but it disappointed me just a little. I had kind of wanted to know what had happened to me between the day I didn't meet Elfangor and the day Ninno took me over. Still, that's life, sometimes.

It was in the middle of an early-youth memory that the end came. I was clicking out a message to one of my spawn-mates, talking about all the great things I would do once I had a host, when suddenly the whole world seemed to go faint and misty, and a series of random, irrational images swam past me almost faster than I could register them.

I saw Visser One holding a baby that had the face of the late Visser Three, and looking down in alarm as it squirmed and wailed in thought-speak.

I saw Josh and me playing last night's double-solitaire game, except that Josh was beating the pants off me because every card in both our decks was the eight of diamonds.

I saw two aliens I'd never seen before – one that looked like a wise old hedgehog, and one that didn't seem to have any features except a giant eye – sitting next to each other on thrones in an ancient stone hall, and discussing how you play chess with a fifth knight that doesn't belong to either side.

I saw the four of us watching Cleopatra as a family, and Octavian shouting from the screen, "Ninno is dead! Ninno Five-Six-Three of the Klaath Niar pool lives no more!"

I saw stars…

I saw turtles…

I saw green…

I saw yellow…

Then my brain simply turned out the lights, and for a while I saw nothing at all – not even blackness.

When I came to, a few minutes later, the world looked fuzzier than I remembered. It took me a second to realize that I had knocked my glasses off; I groped on the floor, found something that felt like them, and slipped them on.

My bedroom was just the way I remembered it. Lapkin had moved up to the head of my bed, and was looking down at me with concern, but nothing else had changed. Yet, somehow, everything was different.

"It's over," I whispered.

And it was.