Author's Note: I'm posting this from Harvard University, where I got to be a speaker for the Effective Altruism Global conference! Wooo! Also, odds are decent I'll get the next chapter (and a brief interlude) up within two weeks. No promises, but I'm taking more than a week off work, so ...

Chapter 27: Rachel

‹Rachel.›

I banked, wheeling, and dropped back down toward the squat, featureless hangar.

‹Rachel, this is Aximili. Please—are you near?›

‹I'm here, Ax,› I answered back. Landing on the edge of the rooftop, I looked down at the activity below, soldiers and officers and engineers going about a dozen different errands, moving from building to building or marching in formation or carrying files and folders back and forth across the scorched, dusty ground. ‹What's up?›

‹We need help.›

Adrenaline, or whatever the avian equivalent was. ‹Where? Are you still in the—›

‹Not that kind of help. Sorry. We—ah—›

There was a silence, and I took to the air again, hoping that my snipe body's mottled brown form wouldn't attract too much attention as I looped around the building.

‹We made contact with the Andalite homeworld.›

I peered in the windows as I fluttered past. Most of the activity was incomprehensible—labs and meeting rooms and officers sitting in offices. I couldn't see into the deeper, inner areas where Ax and the Bug fighter were being kept.

‹It was—in the moment, it seemed wiser to make contact quietly, without human involvement. So that I could explain things. Pave the way.›

‹Uh huh,› I said, banking around another corner. ‹And?›

‹They've threatened to send an asteroid to destroy the planet if we don't assassinate Visser Three within twenty-three days.›

I nearly fell out of the sky as my wings skipped a beat. Pulling hard, I curved back up toward the roof, perching on the steel gutter at the edge. ‹What?› I asked.

‹They've threatened—›

‹Not that kind of what,› I snapped, trying to reorient. A dozen thoughts all tried to crowd into my head at once, questions and objections and desperate proposals. ‹Can they do that?›

There was a pause, as if Ax were—

As if he were—

—something—

‹Yes,› he said, finally.

Another whirl of chaotic half-thoughts. ‹Can we block it somehow?›

‹No.›

‹Could the Yeerks?›

Another long pause. ‹No.›

‹What—›

‹It's not the sort of weapon people use,› he said quietly. ‹Not the sort of weapon anyone has used, ever, as far as the Andalites know. It's the sort of thing that's always been entirely hypothetical. If you were to use it—›

He broke off. ‹There is no defense. The use of such a weapon means all-out war on a scale of—of—›

He faltered again. ‹If you destroy a planet with such a weapon, and there is even one survivor of that planet with a Z-space capable ship, they could retaliate in kind, and—›

I felt my heart beating faster.

‹No one has ever even tried to develop a countermeasure,› he finished, his voice somehow sounding pale.

‹But the Yeerks,› I objected. ‹Ventura—›

‹Not the same,› Ax said grimly. ‹Sorry—let me start over. We're not talking about aerial bombardment. They're going to attach a Z-space hyperdrive to a rock—a small rock—and send it toward Earth. And when it drops back into normal space—›

Ax paused, and I felt my heart beating faster.

‹Your momentum coming out of Z-space is effectively arbitrary,› he continued. ‹Most of the time, people choose a speed that's pretty close to zero, since you have to expend fuel to decelerate in real space. But if you drop out at, say, thirteen fourteenths of the speed of light—you would only need an object weighing about two hundred billion kilograms to blast a giant chunk out of the planet and completely liquefy the crust.›

‹Two hundred billion—›

‹Not even the size of a small mountain. Much smaller than the asteroid that Visser Three used to wipe out Ventura. And there's absolutely no way to stop it—even if you were to vaporize it completely, the particles would continue forward with almost the same amount of energy, with an equally devastating effect.›

There was another long pause as I struggled to absorb this, my head still spilling over with a mixture of thought fragments and useless panic.

—what—

—three weeks—

—what—

—talk them out of it—

—no—

—how it all ends—

—what—

Finally, I spoke.

‹So what do we do?› I asked.

‹We don't know,› Ax said, sounding almost as shell-shocked as I felt. ‹We were sort of hoping you might have an idea. In particular, within the next forty minutes or so, we will either have to turn over a working communicator, or sabotage it and invent some kind of excuse.›

I could feel the wheels in my brain spinning, skidding, burning rubber—feel my thoughts jerking erratically, like a squirrel in the road that can't decide which way to run.

Get a grip—

But I couldn't. Everything was unraveling. It was too big—like the time the others had told me about, the time in the pool, except there was no strange arcane god around to explain it all, to give me a clear set of choices, show me the way out.

There has to be SOMETHING—

‹Rachel?›

‹I'm thinking,› I snapped. Lied. Hoped. ‹Give me a minute.›

Ax fell silent.

This is all his fault, what was he THINKING, I should—

Should—

The thought faltered, sputtered out, and died.

Should what? It wasn't his fault. Not when we'd sent him in there, practically alone—not when he was the only one of us who understood the Andalite power structure, the only one who'd been even remotely likely to pull it off. We'd trusted him to make decisions on his own, and the basis of that trust was still solid even if the results had turned out—

Besides, he only started fixing the communicator what—an hour ago? They signed our death warrant in minutes.

There was no reason to think Tyagi or Jake or anyone else would've done any better. No, we'd lost this one already—had already been doomed, and just hadn't known it yet.

Three weeks. I wasn't going to make it to fifteen. I'd already had my last birthday, my last Christmas—

Stop it. Snap out of this.

—why, though?

Because you've still got three weeks. Because go down fighting. Because trying anything is better than guaranteed failure.

Slowly—slowly—I dragged myself up and out of the fog, away from the siren song of despair, from half-formed thoughts of getting drunk, losing my virginity, finding a beach and waiting for the end.

It's just death. Mom's already dead. Jordan. Sara. Dad. Cassie.

Cassie.

Cassie, who'd died trying to save as many people as she could. Who'd spent the last minutes of her life, rather than just letting them be taken away from her—

That did it. Suddenly, the wheels caught, and everything snapped back into focus.

‹Okay,› I said, feeling my thoughts lining up, shrugging off the shadow of embarrassment. ‹Okay. Options. Um. Try not to get them to throw the rock in the first place—do you think Tyagi has any chance of changing their minds?›

‹We don't think so,› Ax answered, still sounding hollow. ‹We think—we think they would just accuse her of being a Controller, and carry on anyway.›

And Ax clearly hadn't told them about him being a Controller, for obvious reasons. ‹What about back channel? Grassroots stuff? You said this kind of attack is practically taboo—›

‹Maybe. We don't know if we can access civilian channels with this equipment—if we can get past the safeguards—and even if we do—›

He faltered. ‹They said—we don't think—the war is not going well. From what they said, the homeworld itself may be under direct threat. With things going that badly—›

He didn't need to finish the thought. ‹Okay, fine, back burner,› I said. ‹What about—can we sabotage it? The rock, I mean? Stop the launch, or hack the nav computer, or whatever. Like, if we stole the Bug fighter—›

‹No. Or—we mean—stealing the Bug fighter might be possible, but there's no obvious source for the attack, and Andalite computers are—difficult to hack.›

‹Okay, fine. Fine. So we've got steal the ship as a maybe, and broadcast to the Andalites as a weak maybe, and letting Tyagi have a shot because why not. What about the Yeerks? Trying to undercut Visser Three? Maybe using Mr. Levy?›

‹We don't know. We don't know whether we should try ourselves, or whether the humans—›

‹Right. Okay. What about—›

‹Rachel, we need to make a decision about the communicator now.›

‹Right. Sorry.›

The communicator. Would Tyagi—and Mr. Levy—be more likely to get through to the Yeerks than Ax alone?

Yes, said Marco's voice in my head. Obviously. Trivially obviously, like SUPER duh.

Yes, agreed my mental image of my cousin.

‹Is it—› I began, and then broke off, the ghost of an idea occurring to me. ‹Is the communicator—is it small enough to fit into a morph? Or, like, can you make two?›

There was a pause. ‹No,› Ax said. ‹But we suspect we could create a link between it and the cradle—›

Cradle?

‹—and thereby maintain access even after we leave. The humans will figure it out eventually, and close the channel, but not in—›

He ended the thought abruptly.

Not in three weeks.

‹Okay, so—we just leave it, right? Leave it to Tyagi and Mr. Levy, and hope for the best? And if we think of anything else, we patch in from a distance.›

‹But what about the deadline?› Ax asked. ‹Should we warn—›

‹No,› I said firmly. ‹Not yet. First we check in with the others. You said three weeks, right?›

‹Twenty-three days.›

‹Right. So we take a day or two to decide, and we can come back and still say three weeks, if we want to loop everyone else in. But we don't make that call on our own.›

A whisper of an objection tried to make itself heard in the back of my mind, but before I could grab ahold of it—

‹What if the humans try to connect to the Andalite homeworld?›

‹Don't let them,› I said. ‹Distract them, or say the lines are busy, or give them the wrong frequencies or whatever. Just put them in touch with the rest of—›

—what was its name?

‹—Telor.›

And in the meantime, we would check in with the others, and discuss the rest of our options—like telling the Yeerks, or stealing a Bug fighter to try to find and murder Visser Three.

Or to escape—

‹Also, let's not tell Mr. Levy just yet,› I said. ‹I'm going to go check in on David, and then the three of us should think about getting clear as soon as we can.›

‹Roger,› Ax whispered faintly.

And I took to the sky.

If you'd asked me—

—because I definitely didn't think the words on my own, but if you'd asked me—

I really wouldn't have thought that things were going to get worse.

‹It wasn't me,› David said, his thought-speak voice weak and wavery as the last of the lion's fur melted away, revealing a bloody, battered face with one eye already swollen shut. ‹It wasn't me, he made me, I didn't do it, it wasn't my—›

His thought-speak cut off abruptly as he passed the halfway point, and he started right up with regular speech, his words an unsettling demonic growl as the lion's mouth shrank and reshaped itself into that of a human boy. "—wasn't my fault, I was protecting myself, he wouldn't stop, he never stops, I swear I didn't mean it—"

"Quiet," I said, as my own mouth emerged from the snipe's beak, trying to make the word gentle and sharp at the same time. As I grew upwards from the floor, I ran my eyes over the scene again, trying to take stock.

The room was stark and cramped—clearly military, all brown and gray and olive and beige. There wasn't much in it in the first place, so the wreckage was limited—one smashed coffee table, one couch with torn, stained upholstery, and one shattered liquor bottle in the corner. The smell of alcohol filled the room, clashing with the sharp, coppery scent that had only recently become so familiar—

"Is that your dad?"

The body was lying on its back, with a bloody quadruple slice across its chest, more slashes on its arms and neck, and a head twisted around almost backwards. I could see the deep fang marks on either side of the jaw—David must have closed his mouth right over the man's face.

"I didn't do it on purpose, it was him, he came at me, he just wouldn't stop—"

"David," I said, even more softly. "David, it's all right. I'm not—look, I've just got to figure out what to—"

I trailed off. For the second time in twenty minutes, my brain was careening sideways. I looked at the boy—sweaty and trembling, his face and forearms patterned with ugly red splotches, his nose almost certainly broken. He was barely any older than Garrett. The same age as Jordan.

—Mom and Dad are fighting again, can Sara and I sleep in here—

"Is this your dad?" I asked again. I had been in the room when we'd all arrived, when they'd had their little reunion, but fly eyes didn't see all that well.

"Yeah," David said, his voice heavy with emotion, fear and anger and guilt and terror.

I crouched down, looking as closely as I could at the man's chest, searching for movement.

Nothing.

"Are you okay?" I asked. "I mean—your face, your arms—"

"I'm okay," he answered. I glanced at his face again. He was staring at the body of his father out of the corner of his eye, like it was an old horror movie monster that might leap up at any second.

The blood on his face was the exact same color as the blood on the man's knuckles.

"What—" I began, and then cut myself off. "So he—he came at you?"

He was easily six feet, maybe six-two, two hundred and fifty pounds. David looked to be about ninety pounds.

"He was just—"

David choked, swallowed, started again, his voice dull. "Throwing me around. Hitting me. Over and over. Same as always, but—"

He broke off again, started to scrub at his one open eye and then winced. "Kept yelling about how—how I had it coming, how if I hadn't skipped school, none of this would—would've—"

David had already been shouting by the time I got into thought-speak range, his voice bursting into my mind as I crossed the invisible threshold. Rachel! he'd screamed, over and over and over again. Rachel! Help! Rachel! Help!

I looked over at the door. It was locked and bolted, and there were no sounds coming from the walls—if there was anyone in either of the adjacent rooms, they either hadn't heard or they were minding their own business.

By the time I'd arrived at the window, it was all already over.

"I started morphing, and he—he hadn't noticed yet, he looked away, and I just—I pushed—he was drunk, he fell over, hit his head—I panicked, and I think he—I don't think he was seeing straight, he broke the bottle and got back up and came at me anyway—"

—and then the obvious thing had happened.

"Go into the kitchen," I said. "Check the freezer for ice. Peas. Whatever."

The boy stood, hesitating. "It wasn't my—"

"Go, David."

He went.

Jesus FUCKING Christ.

It wasn't even Marco's voice in my head that time—the words were all my own.

Marco…

I reached into my pocket, pulling out the burner cell phone I'd been carrying as part of my emergency kit. Marco was out there, only a few miles away, waiting to be the cavalry—

I hesitated, looking down at the little chunk of plastic.

This wasn't a cavalry situation—was it?

I felt myself pulling apart, splitting in two—two very loud voices, each one struggling for control. One was the voice that had appeared after my first mistake, when I'd gotten Melissa killed—the one that reminded me that I'd made mistakes, and that others had paid the price for them, and that I REALLY SHOULDN'T BE TAKING MATTERS INTO MY OWN HANDS ANYMORE—

And the other—

The other was afraid. Unbalanced. In over her head. Wanted to call Marco, not because it was the right thing to do, but just so I wouldn't have to decide. Wouldn't have to make the hard calls, wouldn't have to be responsible. So that someone else would be the grownup, and I wouldn't have to be on the hook for coming up with an answer—

I heard a crinkling sound, and turned to see David standing in the kitchen doorway, a bag of frozen corn pressed over one eye, the other fixed unblinkingly on me.

Okay.

Say I did nothing—just got out of there. The military police would come by, eventually. They knew about morphing, would figure out what had gone down. And then—

My mind tried to construct the phrase then they'd take David into custody, and threw up an error message. David could morph, he'd either be long gone before they ever showed up or he'd slip their net unless they were extraordinarily good—

And then what? He's just—on his own?

Well, so were all the other morphers we were creating. Tobias and Garrett were out there right now, making like a dozen every hour.

None of the others are twelve, though.

Or murderers.

My eyes drifted across the bruises covering David's arms, some of them already darkening to purple. I turned to look at the body on the floor.

I'd left bodies behind that looked exactly like that. Innocent people, most of them. Probably all of them, actually—people who'd had no choice at all about the war they were fighting in.

I looked back at David. He was expressionless. Still. Coiled and waiting.

I didn't know this kid. If it had been Garrett—

—if it had been Garrett back at the beginning, before you knew him—

Marco had vouched for David. Jake had said to protect him—

—which you didn't—

—but nobody had said anything about anything like this.

"What do you think we should do?" I asked, my voice too loud in the tense silence.

David tilted his head, one eye still covered by the blue plastic bag. "They'll arrest me," he said. "Right?"

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe. It—I mean, you obviously—"

I gestured at his bruises. You obviously didn't start this, but—

It took about ninety seconds to morph, during which anybody with half a brain would've gotten the hell out of there—if David's dad had been conscious, he would've jumped out the window long before his son could have finished turning into a fucking lion. Unless he was somehow pinned down, in which case he would've screamed very loudly for a very long time.

Which meant he been probably hadn't been conscious.

Which meant that David—

David could've just left.

Are you sure? a little voice asked. I mean, is it really all that hard to believe that it played out like he said? Say, he starts morphing, and it's like thirty seconds in before he really starts to show, and that's when he knocks his dad over, and then his dad's out for like thirty seconds, and starts to get up when the morph is mostly done, and David freaks, and swings at him, and then—

It could have happened like that. Happened just wrong, been perfectly timed for the worst possible outcome. I didn't know. Couldn't know, not until a day or two had passed, and the memory had coded itself and we could do a morph check. And in the meantime—

Twenty-three days.

I looked down at the phone in my hands.

I really, really, really wished there were grownups.

But there weren't. Not the kind who know exactly what to do, who wrap you up in a bear hug and make all the problems go away. Not the kind who can tell you that the monsters aren't real. There was a part of me that wanted to know why this had to be my job, but the rest of me was already ready with an answer:

Because you're not about to dump it on Marco or Jake.

"David. I'm sorry, okay? I know how this is going to sound, and I'm sorry, but I gotta ask, and I gotta hear you say it." I took a step toward him—noting the subtle flinch, the way he straightened just a little bit, his free hand tensing—and looked him square in the eye. "Did you kill him on purpose? I mean, like—could you have just left? While he was knocked over?"

David said nothing—just stood there like a statue.

"I mean, geez—he was obviously beating the crap out of you, okay? And I—"

I swallowed. "I've killed people before," I said softly. "In morph, just like this. Sometimes it—sometimes it's—sometimes you have to do it. Sometimes there's no other way. I'm not blaming you, okay? But I've got to know."

He stared at me for a long moment, his one eye wide and piercing green. "It happened just like I said," he whispered.

Fear. Guilt. Panic. Shock. The hint of a tremor, like he was maybe about to cry.

He didn't sound like he was lying.

But what did I know?

Just that Marco said we wanted him, and that his dad had been a drunk, abusive menace.

And that we had three weeks left before the world ended. Three weeks to try to find—and kill—the architect of this entire war.

Or something.

"All right," I said slowly. "Look. This is bad. I don't know how it will fly with the others. But—"

My eyes traced over the scene again. If he had done all of this on purpose—

I tried to imagine Jake, being beaten to within an inch of his life. Whether I'd blame him, if he took it this far. Or Marco. Or Tobias, or Garrett, or Tom, or Ax. I could certainly see myself in David's shoes, but I wasn't sure if I wanted to judge other people by my moral compass when I wasn't all that confident in it myself.

Cassie—Cassie would never do it, never endorse it. I could hear the ghost of her objection rising in my mind—talking about rules you didn't break, lines you didn't cross, the difference between good and evil.

But you don't win wars by being good.

"We weren't planning on staying here very long anyway."

I tried to imagine the reactions of the people in charge of the base—the military police, the officers, the President. I ran through each of our options in my head, applying Ax's trick of imagining that they'd gone wrong. A younger, stupider version of me might have tried to do something like impersonate Poznanski and walk David right out the front door…

"Here's the plan," I said. "You disappear, now. Bird morph, right out this window. I go back to Ax, watch his back in case they try to lock him down over this. Head straight for Marco at the rendezvous point, tell him what happened—tell him I told you to tell him what happened—and tell him if we're not back out in—"

I hesitated. If everything failed to go according to plan…

"—four hours, you guys need to come bust us out."

Lines of possibility—we couldn't afford to be trapped here, if they decided to be upset about this, but we also couldn't afford to just throw away our one and only link to any kind of power and authority. I needed to get Ax out of there, and I needed to do it without causing a schism if at all possible—

—and he's still back there waiting for you to help figure out what the hell to do with the communicator.

I looked down at the phone. It had only been fourteen minutes since I'd left him.

First things first. "You good?" I asked David.

"No," he answered.

"You want to stay here, instead? Or split off on your own? I won't stop you." Couldn't, really, not that there was any reason to point that out.

David took in a long, shuddering breath, his one eye flickering almost imperceptibly toward the body of his father. "No," he said. "Please."

"All right. Then say 'I'm good,' even if you're not, and get the hell out of here."

"…I'm good."

"Marco. David's en-route, you should see him in about ten minutes. Two developments, one bad and one really bad. First, he'd better immediately tell you…"

CRAP.

‹Ax, you've made sure the Yeerks can't trace our location through this communicator thing, right?›

‹Yes, Rachel. Also, President Tyagi is coordinating with Paul Evans—she made the point that she should open a channel only at a time when Paul is alone and unobserved.›

It was amazing we weren't all dead yet.

Just this once, I prayed.

Just this once, let things go kind of okay, and not completely out-of-control terrible.

I was on the outside of the hangar, in the dark, quiet space between an electrical box and the wall, in moth morph. A greater wax moth, to be precise—one of the specialty morphs Cassie had passed along. It was supposed to have incredible hearing, and I needed to stay outside—so I could demorph and remorph in a hurry if I had to, without getting shot—and I'd thought that maybe I'd be able to eavesdrop on the workshop in the center of the building.

But no such luck—the moth had an incredible range of hearing, but it still couldn't pick up sounds that were really faint, or really far away. Instead, I just sat on the wall, listening to the squeaks and hums of insects and machinery that even a bat might not have been able to make out.

‹The truck went okay,› Marco said, his thoughts an eerie mirror of my own.

That had happened a few times, since the mesa. Mostly with Marco, but a little bit with Jake and Tom as well. I didn't know what was behind it, and at the moment, I didn't really care.

‹The truck went okay,› he repeated, ‹and so did the broadcast. So did the factory, for that matter.›

‹So what,› I bit back. ‹You implying we're due?›

He had insisted on coming closer after I gave him the news—had left a note for David and flown straight in, demorphing and remorphing in a tiny hollow between two boulders a couple hundred yards away. At the moment, he was a rattlesnake, half-buried in the dust, with a dozen grenades and an Andalite shredder tucked away inside his morph.

Me, I had David Poznanski's dead father. There hadn't been anywhere else to put him, and—as Marco had pointed out—we wanted anybody who broke into his quarters to start a manhunt, not a murder investigation. It maybe made things look a little worse, on David's end, but—

Well. David wasn't likely to come back and stand trial for it.

‹Not now that you've jinxed it,› Marco said dryly. ‹And here I was getting all excited for a change of pace.›

I didn't say anything. Normally, Marco's jokes were annoying. Recently, they'd started being actually kind of funny. But right now—

‹Ax,› I broadcast, keeping Marco in the loop even though he wouldn't be able to hear the response. ‹Anything to report?›

Ax's answer didn't come in words, but in a vague burst of sensation, sight and sound and feel, a blurry picture and muffled voices. I could make out a mostly-empty room, a tangled mass of something on a dark table, and a handful of human shapes. One of them was about the right size and shape to be the President, and the other looked about right for Mr. Levy. The image was weirdly disjoint in addition to being blurry, as if it had been recorded cross-eyed.

That, too, was new since the mesa, or maybe since Temrash. I certainly didn't know how to send thought-speak pictures. Maybe Garrett did…

If I'd had teeth, I would have gritted them. I could feel my mind sliding around—retreating, searching for things to grab on to. Small things, little distractions, stuff that made sense or was made out of tiny mysteries. Anything but the giant, whole-world-at-stake conversation that was about to happen totally outside of my control.

‹All's clear from Ax,› I relayed to Marco. ‹He's in some room with your dad and Tyagi. Looks like they have the communicator in there with them.›

‹Won't be long,› he said, uselessly.

Gritting my mental teeth again, I swallowed my equally useless irritation and said nothing. There was no point in getting mad at Marco, who was just as keyed-up and restless as I was. Neither of us liked being on the outside, just waiting to see what would happen.

But this was Ax's show—Ax, and Peter.

And Temrash and Essak, I guess.

Another long minute passed, set to the soundtrack of pulses and squeaks that only I could hear.

‹How much time do you have left in morph?› Marco asked.

‹At least forty-five minutes,› I said. ‹And there's an open dumpster just around the corner. I'll be fine.›

Marco had been quick on the uptake—incredibly quick, I had to admit, forcing aside jealousy and embarrassment. He'd taken the news without so much as a gasp, and in twenty seconds cut right to the heart of the issue.

We can't bail now, he'd said, his voice as cold and empty as I'd ever heard it. Not when the Yeerks are the only ones in the solar system with an ark.

And so here we were, waiting and praying—that Tyagi or Ax or Peter could manage to open a line of communication, that Visser Three hadn't already planned for this and wasn't just going to wreck everything, that the David situation wouldn't bring the whole thing crashing down around us, and that—if things did go south—Marco and I could actually do something about it other than just getting ourselves shot by military police.

And in the meantime, my brain refused—absolutely refused—to produce any useful ideas at all on how to stave off the looming apocalypse. It wasn't that I was frozen or despairing or anything like that. It was just that my mind simply couldn't find purchase. I just kept—slipping off, finding myself thinking about anything and everything else. Like trying to write a paper, and noticing that you were clicking through photos on the internet for the tenth time in thirty minutes.

‹Ax,› I said again—

—knowing that I was probably getting on his nerves every bit as much as Marco was getting on mine—

‹—how long until—›

The image came back before I could finish the thought, wavering in and out of focus like a camera trying to adjust. After a few seconds, it settled into something only a little bit worse than normal human vision—though still cross-eyed—with sound clear enough that I could tell apart the various voices and hear the motion of feet and the rustle of cloth.

‹Is this good?› Ax asked, his thought-speak voice sounding slightly distracted.

‹Yeah,› I said. ‹Thanks.› And then, to Marco: ‹Looks like they're about to give it a shot.›

‹Roger. Keep me posted.›

I—turned wasn't exactly the right word, nor sank, but—I turned toward the image in my mind, let it fill my attention as the dull world of the moth's senses shrank away, leaving only a high-pitched background warble. It was like I was in the room myself, looking out through Ax's eyes—

"Ready when you are, Madam President."

Tyagi nodded, her face too blurry for me to make out her expression, but her bearing straight and confident. "Give me ten seconds, Lieutenant."

‹Starting,› I whispered to Marco.

Ax's vision fragmented further as he swept the room with his stalks, then collapsed into a single image as he turned his eyes on the device.

There was a hum—

"Hrutnoj?"

A head like a snake's, but with a curved, sickle beak and three huge, forward-facing horns—

"Rasiff ghulhadrash female—"

"Greetings," said the President, interrupting.

"Loglafach! Haff lyet char human hitnef shellah—"

The head vanished from view. There was the faint and distant sound of footsteps on metal, punctuated by vague, tinny voice-sounds. The view of the room shattered and blurred as Ax took in the reactions of the others in the room.

‹There was a Hork-Bajir,› I relayed. ‹Said something about humans, then disappeared—›

A face swam into view—dark skin, short hair, probably male. "Hello," the voice said. "Who is—"

He broke off, the white blur that was his eyes growing larger, then narrowing.

"My name is Najida Tyagi. I am calling to open diplomatic relations between my people—the United States of America, and the human species—and yours."

The head disappeared again, and with a click the sound stopped as well. There was a long pause.

‹A human came onto the call, then disappeared,› I said.

"Is it—" President Tyagi began.

‹The call is still live,› Ax said. ‹We're—you might say we're on mute.›

The Tyagi blur nodded, and turned back toward the device, waiting silently.

Ten seconds passed.

"Your location is hidden," the man said, his head abruptly reappearing in the space above the communicator. "Why?"

"This comm system is new," Tyagi answered smoothly, without a hint of hesitation. "It was cobbled together from spare parts, and is only partly functional—"

"Or because you're one of the human morphing terrorists," the man shot back, "and you're trying to mask your deception."

"Perhaps," said Tyagi. "The question is the same in either case—may I speak to someone with diplomatic authority?"

There was a pause. "We'll speak to you in four months," he said. "Until then—"

"I note that you are wearing a human body," Tyagi interrupted, her tone pointed. "Which means that diplomatic relations are already open between our two species, and not going particularly well. Four months is a long time—we wish to talk further now, to resolve and prevent future hostility between Yeerk and human."

Another pause, and the blur that was the man's head shifted slightly from side to side, as if listening to something we could not hear. I took advantage of the silence to fill Marco in.

‹The human is back,› I said. ‹Trying to bluster—Tyagi's trying to get through to somebody with authority.›

I felt Marco's psychic nod as Tyagi spoke again. "I also note that I am not the only interested party," she continued. "I have with me here Peter Levy and Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill, serving as hosts for Essak nine-seven-four and Temrash three-one-three of the Aftran coalescion. They, too, would like to speak to—"

She broke off as the head vanished from view again. I couldn't be sure, through the fuzzy telepathic link, but this time it looked like it disappeared all at once, rather than ducking out of the frame.

‹Contact is terminated,› Ax said.

"What?"

‹Completely terminated, not just muted. Hang on, we'll try to restore the link—›

Ax's forelegs were moving rapidly back and forth in the field of vision, manipulating a set of controls I couldn't quite make out. ‹No luck,› he said. ‹The contact is blocked or broken—it's not even responding to neutral pings.›

‹They cut off all of a sudden,› I said, speaking to Marco. ‹Line went totally dead.›

‹What? Why?›

‹Not sure.›

In the room, the others were talking.

‹What was the last thing they said?› Marco asked.

‹It wasn't them. It was Tyagi talking. She'd just introduced your dad and Ax—›

"Looks like you were right, Peter-and-Essak," Tyagi was saying.

‹—and the Yeerks.›

‹Aftran,› Marco said.

‹What—oh.›

Oh, crap.

‹The Yeerks—Telor—they didn't know about Aftran. Who decided—›

‹Hang on, let me focus.›

In the fuzzy thought-speak vision, Ax's hands had stopped fiddling, and his eyes were trained on Tyagi. "—to be Esplin?" she was asking.

"I don't know," Marco's dad replied. "It doesn't seem like his style—"

‹Rachel, what—›

‹Shhhh,› I hissed. And then—

‹Ax, what's going on?›

The mental image blurred even further—darkened, faded, and vanished—replaced by ordinary thought-speak. ‹We decided in advance to admit to Temrash and Essak's presence. Strengthening our legitimacy as ambassadors. Peter-and-Essak predicted this would provoke a strong reaction, but—›

There was a pause while Ax listened. ‹It's not clear whether the line was cut because Visser Three was listening in, or to stop him from listening in. Temrash isn't sure how firm Visser Three's grip is; that was part of why we thought telling them—›

He broke off again, and suddenly the imperfect image was back. I began slowly filling Marco in as I followed the events unfolding—

‹—receiving an encrypted transmission,› Ax was saying.

"Do you know how to decrypt it?"

Fingers blurring across a keyboard.

‹No,› Ax said. ‹There is a passphrase—we've attempted all of the obvious possibilities, just on the off-chance—›

"Obvious?"

‹Aftran, Telor, Esplin, Temrash, Essak, Visser, Animorph, human, Yeerk, Andalite, Controller, Alloran, Elfangor, Janath, Janath the Thousand-Eyed, Tyagi, President, President Tyagi, Vanarx, today's date in Earth units, today's date in Yeerk standard fleet time, the address of the YMCA in Ventura, the GPS coordinates of the strike in Ventura, the location of the crash in Washington, D.C., the universal distress code, various close respellings or alphanumeric representations of all of the previous in both human and Yeerk typographies—›

"Okay, okay. Louis?"

One of the darker blurs on the edges of the room detached itself from the wall and smeared closer. "Sir?" it asked, and Ax's field of vision shifted as he made room.

‹It's got to be something Ax can't just guess,› Marco said, after I finished catching him up. ‹Because then Visser Three could just guess it too, right?›

‹Unless this is Visser Three,› I pointed out. ‹Unless he's just making it difficult so that we'll think we're safe, and trust the connection afterward.›

‹He's not—› Marco began, and then broke off.

‹He's not what?› I asked.

‹I was going to say, 'he's not everywhere,' but then I remembered Ax's point about how maybe he's hanging back for Reasons.›

I shivered.

Back in the projected room, Ax and the human tech—Louis—were talking rapidly, bright symbols hovering in the air above the projector. "—any kind of cross-pool signaling, or chatter?" Louis was asking. "Anything that might serve as an inside reference between Telor and Aftran, but not Visser Three?"

‹Maybe. Don't forget, though—even together, Temrash and Essak are less coherent and complex than Esplin. If it's something that requires retaining memories from the sharing—›

"Something more recent, then? Common knowledge, but formed since Esplin became an independent entity?"

‹They're still working on it,› I said. ‹I'll let you know if anything changes.›

‹Roger.›

The seconds crawled by. I tried to force my mind toward the larger problem of the Andalite death-rock, but after three failed attempts, I simply let my thoughts churn on the encrypted message. I wasn't likely to get there before Ax or this Louis person, but—

What do Telor and Aftran have in common?

They were both—Yeerks?

There you go, Rachel. Keep at it.

What would I do if I were Telor? If—for some reason, possibly related to fear-of-being-murdered—I wanted to communicate with Aftran without Visser Three noticing?

Well, first off, I wouldn't use any kind of channel he's capable of intercepting, or reading after-the-fact—

‹Ax,› I said.

‹Yeah?›

‹There couldn't be some other signal that you're just not paying attention to, could there?›

‹What do you mean?›

‹I mean, something Visser Three might miss, if he's paying attention to this. Like, a different radio signal or whatever—›

‹Radio?›

There was a silence, and I watched with distant eyes as Ax's hands fluttered over the out-of-focus controls.

‹No,› he said abruptly. ‹Nothing. Nothing in the EM spectrum at all. Not that's showing up on this device, anyway. Louis—›

More slow minutes, as Louis called for other equipment to be brought in and President Tyagi began to pace. I could feel the restless pressure building again, the desire to get up and do something, rather than just sitting there uselessly. How many minutes did I have left in morph?

‹I think this is going to end up taking longer than—›

There was a sudden jerk of surprise as the head reappeared in the communicator without warning. "Janath," said the voice.

‹Wh—›

"Myrtai," said Marco's dad, speaking up from a corner of the room.

"Sollonor."

"Famer."

"Chetchet."

"Roh."

‹Rachel, what's—›

‹Shh, he's back. He and your dad are doing some kind of password thing—›

"Temmerret."

"Niss."

"Akdor."

"Carger."

"Yaheen."

"Aftran," said the man in the display, and even filtered through Ax's perception, I could tell that his tone had softened, and that this name was unlike the others. "Is that really you?"

"In shard alone," said Marco's father, his voice cracking. "Two of us."

There was a long and heavy silence. "Still," said the man. "It is a light in the darkness."

"The Visser—"

"The Vanarx, you mean," the man spat, and I felt the shift in perspective as Ax literally rocked backward in response. "He will not have you."

He turned toward Tyagi. "You. Madam President, or Animorph—whichever you are. Can you keep this shard safe?"

Tyagi gave the man a measured look, the strained patience on her face visible even through the mental link. But she was a politician, and a good one.

"As a gesture of good faith, of course," she said. "However, I do not claim to own Essak's host, Peter, who is a free man to come and go as he pleases."

The man in the display waved a dismissive hand. "He will come to us," he said. "When he has delivered Aftran's requiem to the sharing, we will be his to command. A ship to take him wherever he wants—a ship of his own, if he so desires. He has kept Aftran alive beyond all hope."

He turned, seeming to look straight at me—at Ax. "And you," he said. "Andalite. Is it true?"

The picture shifted as Ax nodded, human-fashion. ‹Odret the defiler, and Esplin the abomination,› he broadcast, the words clearly public for all to hear. ‹We are Temrash, and we are Aximili, and we bring a new way—cooperation, rather than control.›

The man's eyes widened again, a smear of white against the blurred dark brown. "Esplin still commands," he said. "But word of your survival is spreading. We will find a way to bring you home."

‹Marco,› I whispered. ‹I think—okay, so maybe this is all just a charade, a trap—›

"Their safety must be assured," Tyagi broke in. "They are ambassadors of Earth, as well as heirs of Aftran."

‹—but it sounds like Telor—›

"We must speak again, to discuss details. On a more secure channel."

‹—Telor might be mutinying against Visser Three—›

"In thirteen hours?" Tyagi asked, her tone sly.

‹—to rescue Aftran. Temrash and Essak, I mean.›

‹Seriously?›

"Thirteen," echoed the man, his voice almost ritually somber. "Use the last of the previous message as a passphrase. May you bring back light and laughter."

And then—as abruptly as he'd appeared—he was gone.

‹Thirteen hours from now,› I said, still watching through Ax's eyes.

‹And then twenty two more days,› Marco answered.

Oh, right, said the part of my brain that had been thinking about absolutely anything else.

That.