"Not bad."
I grabbed at one of the straps holding the Kandrona in place. Under my orders, a team had loaded it in the back of the grocery store's cold storage supply truck. The meat hooks came in handy, seemingly locking the giant device rather firmly in place, but I wasn't taking any chances, so I ordered bungee cords and straps all along the side edges, too. A few of the Controllers were mildly suspicious, given the Blade Ship's impending arrival, but totalitarian empires are nothing if not efficient harbingers of fear-based persuasion. A few strongly toned "are you /questioning/ my orders" responses were all it took to keep the rabble in line.
"Does it have to be so cold?" Eric wondered, wrapping his arms around himself for effect.
I patted the alien device. "She gets very hot when she's active," I explained. "The Visser is likely to try heat tracing when he gets here and it's not here." I glanced back at him. "You sure about this 'Erek King' fellow?"
Eric nodded. "Illim said if he and Mister Tidwell were ever discovered or executed, everyone in the resistance should contact this 'Erek' for regrouping. It's a fair bet that's where any resistance survivors will be."
The clattering of the ramp alerted us to Chance and Jek coming up it. Jek was holding one of those mini pianos they sell in grocery toy sections and tapping each key giddily, like it was the greatest thing in the universe. Chance was holding five strands of rope and cloth, along with a cell phone, which he placed on the back edge. "Pay as you go, got it off the shelf. Our number's written on it. You sure cell phones are going to keep working? I mean, they're aliens, can't they just jam it?"
I shrugged. "Visser One's not really the type to worry much about what petty humans say to each other." I put my hands behind my back, obligingly allowing Chance to start binding them.
"I wish you'd just come with us," Chance complained, trying to sound mostly nonchalant and failing miserably, which made me smile. It was nice that my brother was worried about me.
I shook my head. "Remember, be nice to her, but don't let her see where this Erek's hideout is. I'm hoping the Animorphs will see my side of this thing, but they've been fighting the Yeerks for a long time, so I want to be able to return her to Jake /without/ giving away the location of the Kandrona."
I tilted my head back so that Chance could easily gag my mouth. «Well, this is it,» I told my host. «Thanks for the hospitality. Sorry about our little disagreements, but we're still mostly on the same side, y'know.»
«You're a stupid boy,» Jean responded, seething. «You could end the Yeerk threat right now by destroying this thing.»
«Jean,» I replied, still desperate to reach her, «Two days ago we saved each other's lives. You told me 'think', remember? You knew that panicking was going to get us killed, so you got me to stop and see the big picture and because you did we were able to take shelter with this thing in time.»
«So?»
«So that's all I'm doing now, Jean,» I insisted. «Thinking. We've got a much better chance getting the Yeerks to work against themselves than we do pissing them all off and uniting them against us.»
She was hardly convinced. «They can't unite against us if they're starved to death, Chris. Because of you, the Yeerks may still have a chance to reclaim their technology. Because of you, my son's efforts might be in vein.»
«Yeah, well… we'll see if your son agrees. I'll be sure to say 'hi' for you.» With that, I disconnected myself from Jean's nerve endings and squirmed my Yeerk body out of her brain. Chance was ready to catch me, and I could feel his hands gently lowering me to the ground as I started demorphing.
Half a day, I had now done nothing but constantly morph in and out of the Yeerk form. It felt like I had walked the proverbial mile in their shoes, and I wondered if Jean wasn't right somehow, if maybe my last experiences with Orkath and my time spent as a Yeerk was blinding me to hard truths. But it wasn't something I pondered too heavily – I was committed now. If it was a mistake, it was too far in to call it back now.
Besides which, I was /damned/ tired. I would have given anything for just an hour of sleep at that moment. I was running more on autopilot than anything else.
I took the cell phone and we sealed up the truck, the Kandrona and Jean hidden securely inside it. Chance and the policeman Controller got into the cabin, and they took off towards the southern edge of town, where the King hideout was supposed to be.
I patted Eric on the back. "Just you and me, now, love."
Eric grinned, jerking his thumb northward. "And about three hundred Yeerks." I followed his pointing, where, sure enough, the Yeerkish rescue contingent was following the Visser's orders and marching to the supermarket to merge with our group.
I sighed. "I don't want to morph yet."
"Well, you can't be seen in your natural body," Ewell remarked from inside Eric's head. "Most people know you were the Sub-Visser's old host. They'll kill you."
With a grim nod, I closed my eyes and focused on one of the dozen human morphs I had floating around in my system. I picked the out-of-shape computer tech from the camping trip because the changes would be mild and less exhausting, and because even though his body felt lazy and lead-weighted, he was also a generally optimistic person, and I needed a little of that uplifting instinct to get me through. I felt myself get a little taller, and the pores on my face open up and shoot out hair follicles like a Chia Pet on steroids. My stomach grew out like a baby was growing in there as fat cells nestled themselves in between the muscles. I found that interesting, because it made me ponder how the Andalite technology did it's work. The original computer tech's dental hygiene was horrible, his teeth were damaged and broken all along his mouth. When I morphed him, though, I got the fresh DNA minus the "injuries" that his teeth had suffered, leaving me with a set of perfect pearly whites. I'd actually had to be careful about kissing his wife too passionately, for fear that she might notice the teeth had become suddenly perfect. (Hey, for one, it was Orkath driving, and for two, any good undercover agent will tell you you do /whatever/ it takes to keep your cover. You can't afford to let anything be too sacred.)
Yet the fat cells were cloned perfectly. I could understand that overeating was a genetic trait, just like being too lazy to take care of teeth probably is, but why were the /effects/ of the overeating part of the morph? Why did I have the same beer belly that the original had? And was I only thinking this way because I was now thinking with a computer tech's instincts, approaching it all like a puzzle to be solved?
"I'm going to write a book when all this is over," I told Eric, marveling for a moment at the contrast between the deep, booming male voice I was hearing come out of myself and Jean's voice, which I'd been using all day. "The Philosophy of Morphing. I bet it sells big."
Eric gestured towards the store. "Tell you what, you've probably got an hour before the Blade ship arrives. Why don't you let me take this, use that morph to get a power nap."
"I love you," I replied, giving Eric a quick kiss.
Eric wrinkled his nose. "Ugh. Beard." He pushed at my frame. "Go, go, sleep."
With a yawn, I scuttled myself upstairs, suddenly feeling a surge of loneliness. I wanted to go over the plan one more time but I suddenly realized that there was no one in my head, and I wasn't in anyone else's head, so there was nobody to bounce it off of. I think it was the first time I was truly alone in quite awhile.
And then I made the mistake of looking out the supermarket window. Down into the sinkhole that used to be the Yeerk pool.
I cried.
Even the technician's optimistic instincts weren't enough to stop the flood of grief from hitting me all at once. I cried for all the people who died down there, and for Cassie, who had to endure the stain of setting it up on her conscience. I cried for Chance and everyone who'd been cattleherded out of their homes in the last few days. I cried for my mother, who, if she wasn't dead already, was living out there somewhere with no idea that either of her sons was alive. I cried for Jake, who didn't know if his parents or brother were okay, and for Jean, and for all the completely oblivious humans still on the planet and all the Hork-Bajir and the Yeerks and everyone in the entire universe, especially myself. I cried until I had no tears left to cry, and let my grief and pain carry me off to sleep.
It was over a day before I was given a host body. It was a man in the National Guard who'd been captured trying to escape from one of the train stations during the battle for the pool.
Accessing his memories brought me up to speed quickly. I saw that the explosion I'd felt had been a train full of explosives jackknifing into the pool. I saw the man's apprehension as he waited in a cell for one of the Yeerks rescued from the pool to be well enough to infest him.
The host heard two Yeerks talking about how lucky I was, how I had been found outside the pool, badly charred. They had no idea how I had survived. I had a guess – from the sensations I'd felt, I guessed that I was out of the direct blast zone, probably thrown under a heat resistant metal, and I was still in the process of demorphing, so the most severe of my injuries were probably repaired by the morphing process. Still, it was eerie to think of how close I'd come to death.
"Who are you?" a human-Controller girl with a clipboard asked, once I'd gotten control of the man.
I groaned slightly. I wasn't sure if it was the pain in my host's arm or the leftover pains in the synapses of my natural body. "I'm Orkath One-Seven-Two," I told her. "Sub-Visser Eighty-Three."
The Yeerk girl blinked. "That's impossible."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because our camp was just ordered to march south and join up with… well, you."