r Animorphs: The Reckoning Chapter 38: Rachel, an animorphs fanfic

A few author's notes:

1. This chapter is quite long (a holiday bonus). As a result, I'm adding a week to my update schedule; I expect to post the next chapter three weeks from now, sometime between Jan 10 and Jan 12. My buffer has shrunk a little bit, due to a housing search taking up a lot of time, but I still don't anticipate a hiatus for at least a few more chapters, and it's possible that I'll just keep doing regular updates, but 3 weeks apart instead of 2 once I run out of already-written stuff.

2. reddit user u/paxona did a wonderful job helping me clean up the Portuguese in the recent Tobias chapter. Taking that as my cue, I put a lot of Finnish (both language and culture) in this chapter. I did my homework, and did my best, but I've never been to Finland, so if somebody wants to help me fix inaccuracies, I'm grateful for your help.

3. There's exactly one review of this story on Goodreads that's longer than a sentence! It comes from user Mark and features many memorable sentences like "the author uses this as a vehicle to mine others' notstalgia for their own self-indulgence and misses what made the originals so appealing" and "themes of loss, dehumanization, and the morality of war aren't really carried over" and "the other changes are just fine, I guess, but don't really serve any purpose in my opinion...at best, they make the main characters somewhat one-dimensional" and lots of other interesting claims. If anybody wants to, uh, teach the controversy by adding their own review, that would be Neato Burrito.

(As always, I also heart, star, and horseshoe comments left here and discussion over on r/rational, especially in-depth critique or reaction or theorizing about what comes next.)

See you all in the roaring twenties!

Chapter 38: Rachel

Forcing myself to focus, I began to demorph, straining with all my might to localize the change to just the tiniest patch of my body—the palm of my right hand. At first, nothing happened, and then came the familiar tingle, not just in my palm but across my whole right side—

—it'll be enough, let it be enough—

—and then—

—like a chorus of angels—

‹Garrett. Hello? Did we make it? Over.›

‹Rachel, are we in? Over.›

‹Yes,› I thought wearily, feeling the tiniest tickle as the pair of bugs launched themselves away from my palm, where they had emerged from Z-space. ‹We're in.›

Suddenly, I was awake.

Cold.

Dark.

Quiet.

Lying down—

Some instinct kept me still, kept my eyes closed, even as adrenaline hammered at my nerves. I felt my chest heaving and forced myself to slow down, taking a handful of deep, deliberate breaths.

They might be watching.

I didn't know who they were, had no idea what was going on. But there was a restraint around my waist, and the dull throb of needles in my arm, and even just lying there my body felt weak, my limbs heavy and rubbery.

Drugged?

There had been a battle—

The Yeerk pool, Tidwell and Illim—

Garrett with the explosives, Ax to reverse the shield—

We'd lost contact with Ax, fought our way through to him, taken out the Hork-Bajir troops that had surrounded the control room. Ax had been wounded, had collapsed—we'd made a break for it—

That was all I could remember.

Okay, so we didn't make it out.

Which meant I'd been picked up by—

Yeerks?

Cops?

Spooks?

It all depended on what had happened after—on who had ultimately taken control of the site. I knew that the pool itself had been destroyed—were there enough Controllers out in the community to cover up the whole thing? What about Jake and Marco and Cassie—

Priorities.

I listened.

The sounds around me were soft, muted—the whir of air conditioning, the hum of electronics, muffled laughter from a television in another room. A pair of rhythmic beeps like heart monitors, one fast and one slow—

Hospital?

There was nothing else—no voices, no footsteps, no sounds of traffic outside.

I cracked one eye open the tiniest bit—just enough to confirm that yes, the room around me was dark.

I tried to shift my leg. It was hard, my muscles straining in protest, almost pulling—but there wasn't anything stopping me.

I lay still again, counting to three hundred, to see if anyone would show up in response.

All right. So either they're not watching closely, or they're messing with me.

Either way, it was time to make a move.

I ran through the available morphs in my head. I could try Tidwell, or the woman I'd acquired a few weeks back, if this was the sort of facility where a random human could bluff their way out. I had both Andalite and Hork-Bajir bodies, as well as a bear and an elephant and a tiger. I had a housefly, and several fast birds—

Housefly.

I focused, and felt—

Felt—

Rising panic. I gave it ten more seconds to be sure—ten seconds in which my heart began to pound again, my breath creeping back toward hyperventilation.

Nothing was happening

Nothing was happening.

Okay.

Try another morph.

I focused on Tidwell, whose body I'd occupied just an hour or two before, give or take however long I'd been unconscious. It was easy to picture his face in my mind, the way his muscles had felt from the inside—

Nothing.

Okay, don't freak out, don't freak out, freaking out will NOT HELP—

It didn't work. The harder I fought back against the looming fear, the heavier it became, until it seemed like I was using every last scrap of self-control I had just to keep myself motionless in the bed.

They have me. They have me and I can't morph, I can't fight, I can't get away—

But then, just when it seemed like I might crack, like I might just start screaming and never stop, another voice cut in—one that wasn't pushing back against the fear so much as pulling sideways out from under it.

So what? that other voice said.

So they caught you.

You always knew they would, eventually.

Remember the people in the cages?

The pressure eased slightly, like I'd emerged from the Mariana trench and was now just at the regular bottom of the ocean.

You already won, the voice whispered. The pool is destroyed. It worked. It worked, and you were ready to die for it, if you had to. But here you are, alive. You made it. Everything that happens now is extra credit.

Seconds passed. My breathing slowed once more, my heartrate dropping from a death metal pace back down to mere EDM.

Okay.

I felt silly, and a little ashamed—to have ramped up so quickly, come so close to total panic. But whatever—it was over. Time to focus on the present.

Something is wrong with your morphing.

Maybe it had to do with whatever they'd drugged me with?

I felt a spark of hope. If so, it might be temporary—might wear off, with time.

But I decided to give it one last shot, anyway, just to be sure. Taking in a deep breath, I focused once more—

This body will be one of your primary weapons, Elfangor had said. Use it to hide your identity from the Yeerks. It is strong and fast, more than a match for Taxxons and able to defeat all but the most skilled Hork-Bajir.

The Yeerks had my family. They knew exactly who I was. Elfangor's body wouldn't help with that.

But strong and fast, I could definitely use.

I strained, concentrating harder than I ever had in my life—

Nothing.

For a moment, the desperate panic threatened to loom over me again. But the memory of the people in the cages closed around me like Iron Man armor.

If they think I can't hurt them just because I can't morph—

I opened my eyes.

It was indeed a hospital room, lit by the tiny red and green LEDs of electronics, and the dim blue glow of street lights leaking in past the curtains. There was one other bed opposite mine, with a small, dark-haired figure lying in it.

Garrett?

I couldn't see clearly, but it was about the right size and shape—was definitely a child, rather than a teenager or a grownup. The heartrate monitor beside it was beeping slowly, well under once per second.

Coma?

I felt my own body go cold.

If that was Garrett—if he was in a coma—

Maybe we'd been injured, during the escape? We could have been unconscious for days, weeks—

I lifted my arm, intending to check my head and torso for scars, bandages—

I paused.

There were wires trailing from my arm—not the IV, not the heartrate monitor clipped to my finger, but thin, light wires ending in little adhesive patches. There was one attached to the middle of my forearm, and one to the lump of muscle just below my elbow—two others on my bicep and my tricep—

I felt around under the blanket. There were more of them attached to my abdomen, my sides, my thighs—thirty or forty in all, all over my body.

I grabbed one of them, began to slide my fingers along it, tracing it back to a bulky, rectangular machine standing sentry beside my bed—

Lihasstimulaatori?

I couldn't make out any of the other words, in the darkness. The machine was clearly switched off, its screens unlit. The bundle of wires fed into it on one side, and a thick power cable emerged from the other, leading down to a set of outlets along the floor—

I frowned. It was hard to be sure, but the outlets looked different—weren't the usual two-lines-and-a-half-moon-face that I was used to. Each spot was its own circular depression, with two tiny round holes spaced about an inch apart, and there was a large, old-fashioned switch at the end—

I wasn't in America.

Correction, said Marco's voice in my head. Your best guess is that you're not in America.

I looked up at the TV hanging in the corner.

Later. Priorities.

First things first—I needed to get mobile. The wires running to the powered-off machine could probably be removed without alerting anyone, but the IV and the heart monitor were live and beeping.

That's got to be set up to send an alert to the nurse, or something, right? I mean, if a coma patient's heartrate drops to zero…

Maybe if the whole machine were off?

I looked around the room again.

No choice.

I had to move, and I couldn't do that if I was stuck within three feet of the bed. Killing the heart monitor would either be a problem, or it wouldn't, and waiting wasn't going to make it any less of a problem.

I peeled off the other wires first, groaning with the effort as I sat up and undid the restraint around my waist, making sure to keep my movements slow and steady so that my own heartbeat didn't jump up too quickly. My arms felt like they were made of lead, and my abs burned just from the effort of keeping my torso upright.

Once they were all off, I rolled over and planted my feet on the cold linoleum floor. Kneeling, I followed the power cables from the back of the beeping machines to another set of outlets—

Here goes nothing.

I pulled the plugs, and both the IV and the heartrate monitor went dark.

Moving as quickly as my heavy limbs would allow, I unclipped the monitor from my finger and tugged the IV out of my arm. Straightening, I grabbed an empty food tray from a rolling table between the two beds and shuffled over to lean against the wall beside the door.

Fourteen hippopotamus, fifteen hippopotamus, sixteen hippopotamus…

It was all I could do to keep the plastic rectangle held high above my head, ready to strike. If anything more violent than Cassie came in through the door, I was toast.

Twenty-six hippopotamus, twenty-seven hippopotamus, twenty-eight hippopotamus…

I made it to a hundred and three before I absolutely could not keep my arms up any longer. Trembling—almost shuddering—I lowered the tray.

One-oh-nine hippopotamus, one-ten hippopotamus…

At one-eighty, I finally let myself relax, my muscles spasming as I half-slid, half-collapsed down onto the floor. The door had no visible lock, but with a little bit of effort, I managed to wedge the tray into the tiny crack by the floor. It wouldn't stop anybody who really wanted to get in, but it might buy me a few seconds in a pinch.

All right. You're awake, you're mobile, there's no one coming. Now what?

The kid.

Hauling myself to my feet, I staggered over to the other bed.

It was Garrett.

It looks like Garrett, whispered Marco. Remember, Garrett doesn't have earplugs.

"Hey," I murmured. "Garrett. Can you hear me?"

There was no response. Under the sheet, his chest continued to rise and fall with disturbing slowness.

I tapped his cheek, gently.

Nothing.

"Sorry in advance," I whispered, and I drew back my hand.

Smack.

The boy didn't move.

All right. Think.

If they left me and Garrett in the same room—

Possibility One was that they were just friendly. No need to keep the two of us apart, since we were all on the same team to begin with.

Possibility Two…

Was there any reason for the Yeerks to play mind games with me?

Leaning on the bed, I tried to force my mind into motion. In the hypothetical world where Garrett was already a Controller—

Unless it's not the Yeerks. Could be the government.

My inner Marco scoffed at the idea that the government would go to this much trouble and not post a guard inside the room.

Actually, now that I thought about it, that probably applied to the Yeerks, too.

Only good guys are this sloppy.

But if that was the case, there should at least be a note or something—

Oh.

Working my way around the bed, I picked up the folded sheet of paper on the table next to Garrett's head and held it up in the dim light leaking through the blinds.

Garrett,

Sorry I couldn't be there when you woke up. There's a lot going on, and there's something I've got to do down where it's pretty.

Koskinen will fill you in if Rachel isn't awake yet. Think of him like Miss Harper.

If I'm not back by 10/10, go to Nordea on Hämeenkatu. There's a safety deposit box there under your name. The password owes me a dollar.

Two, one, zero, and so forth. —yBB

I put the paper down, my thoughts swirling.

The letter was from Tobias, clearly—either that, or it was faked to seem like it had come from Tobias. And there was no mention of Jake, Cassie, Marco, or Ax…

Also, October tenth? Either he was expecting us to wait around for a long time, or I really had been unconscious for months.

I hobbled over to the window and peered out.

Autumn.

It was autumn.

I ran my hands over my own body again, looking for any sign of a serious injury—stitches, scarring, metal plates.

Nothing.

Then how can it be autumn?

The realization hit me all at once—actually hit me, so hard I found myself sinking to the floor, my muscles screaming in protest.

Jake.

Like when Jake had gone down into the tunnel, and died, and come alive again inside of his morph armor—

Something must have happened. Something must have gone wrong, and I'd been injured, and had to reset—Garrett, too—

But the Chee woke Jake up. Why wouldn't they—

In my head, Marco rolled his eyes, his expression a mixture of exasperation and pity.

The Chee aren't on our side anymore.

I took in a handful of deep, slow breaths. That—

That was just a guess, and not even necessarily a very likely one.

But at the very least, something had kept Tobias from bringing in the Chee to help us. Had caused him to leave me—to leave Garrett—alone in a hospital in—

—somewhere—

—without anyone there in case we eventually woke up. While he went off to do something important, something that couldn't wait.

And the letter hadn't said anything about Jake, or Cassie, or Marco, or Ax.

The fear was back—not a looming, overwhelming panic this time, but a tight, cold tension, like electricity. I needed to get out of this room—not for my own sake, but because things were happening and as long as I was in this room there wasn't anything that I could do about them—

"Tunnetko olosi mukavaksi?"

I lifted my head from where it had been pressed up against the car window and looked over at the eyes in the rear-view mirror. They weren't looking back at me—had already returned to focus on the road if they'd ever even pointed at me in the first place.

"Olen kunnossa," I answered, letting the mind of the body I was wearing handle the translation.

Are you comfortable?

I'm fine.

They were the first words we had exchanged in nearly an hour of driving. It was just the two of us in the tiny car, him in the driver's seat and me in the back. The sky was gray and cold, the road narrow as it curved gently back and forth through farms and fields and endless pine forests.

The whole thing was weirdly familiar, like I'd done it a hundred times before—like the long, quiet drive between my uncle's and my grandmother's every Thanksgiving.

But I was about nine thousand miles from Ventura, and the sense of normalcy was just an illusion.

Part of it might have been the morph I was in, the girl's intuitions and expectations leaking through along with her understanding of the language. Her name was Aino Sakala, and she'd lived her entire life right here, except for a school trip to Estonia when she was nine.

But another part of it was that it was normal, in a sense—normal in a way that no longer fit me, since Elfangor showed up. Trees. Highways. Clouds. Minutes crawling by, with nowhere important to go and nothing important to do.

I twisted around in the seat, looking back at the empty road behind us.

"Ei paljon kauemmin," came the driver's voice behind me. "Alle tunti."

I turned my head to look, but he was once again—or still—staring straight forward, his eyes focused on the road ahead.

Not much longer. Another hour.

I hadn't managed to make it out of the hospital. Hadn't even made it off of the floor, between my atrophied muscles and my inability to morph. The nurses had caught me almost immediately, and politely held me, until "lääkäri Koskinen" could be roused and brought in.

Hello, Rachel, the man had said, his English clear and crisp behind a faint accent. My name is Rand Koskinen. I am a doctor here at Hatanpää City Hospital. May we speak in private?

And then, once he'd closed the door behind us, he'd transformed into an elk.

I turned to face forward again, resettling in my seat, watching his eyes in the rear-view mirror. Five minutes might have passed before his gaze flickered, meeting mine for the briefest of moments before returning to the road.

I understand that you're dealing with some disorientation, he had said. If you'd like, I would be happy to explain the situation.

And he had. Ventura. Washington. Marco's broadcast. The bombing of the peace conference, and the subsequent nuclear disarmament. The destruction of the voluntary pool in Brazil, followed by the mass withdrawal of Yeerk personnel.

The eerie, uneasy silence that had followed.

When the Yeerks pulled out, we expected them to curtail the manufacturing efforts that they had been supervising, but they did not. This made many suspicious.

And there had been no communication since, nor any response to Earth messages. In eight days' time, an international delegation was set to launch from Geneva, aboard one of the original Bug fighters, for a rendezvous around Europa two days later—a trip that would have taken an ordinary human spaceship three or four years.

And, as I'd halfway guessed—

Your friends tell me there was an encounter with Yeerk forces, in the summer. Apparently several of you were killed, and the survivors used the morphing technology to regenerate the fallen.

Koskinen knew about the morphing technology because Jake and Tobias and Marco had given it to him—him, and four other members of his staff—in exchange for off-the-books medical care for me and Garrett. And according to Koskinen, he wasn't alone, either—there were apparently upwards of a thousand other morphers, the result of a months-long recruitment effort that I had apparently lived through, maybe even been a part of—

Ah, yes, this reminds me. I am to tell you that they have given the morphing power back to you and Garrett as well. But you will need to begin building your morph library anew. If I may suggest, there is another patient here who bears a strong physical resemblance to you, and whose knowledge of our language and culture you may find useful.

Why? I had asked.

Obviously you are free to go as you please, the doctor had answered. But I am charged with the care of your friend Garrett for as long as he remains unconscious. And this hospital is where your friends will return, if they return at all. I have no special resources, but I have friends and family that I trust, in my home city. It's not far from here. You may stay with them in the meantime, if you wish.

I had looked down at Garrett, placed my hand on his cheek, watched his chest rise and fall with agonizing slowness.

As much as I'd wanted to say no—

As much as I'd wanted to say screw you and stride off into the sunset—

I was afraid.

Not the overriding panic I'd felt upon waking up, or the frantic urgency that had filled me as I'd made my break for the hospital door. This was a different kind of fear, thick and queasy and somehow slow, like quicksand.

I don't think that I can handle this.

Not on my own. Not by myself. Not with absolutely nothing and no one.

It was the same fear I'd felt the first time I spent the night away from home, during a week-long stint at summer camp. The same fear I'd felt getting on the bus to visit my father, that first time after my mom kicked him out. Or the time when I was four years old, when I'd wandered outside and, when my mom came looking for me, had somehow managed to circle the house at the exact same speed, turning around at the exact same times, so that no matter how many times I looked for her she wasn't there, no matter how hard I screamed she was gone, she was never coming back—

It was like that, except this time it was true.

They were dead.

All of them were dead.

My mother, my sisters, my father. My teammates and coaches and teachers—almost everyone I'd ever known, except for Jake and Marco and Tobias.

Even Cassie.

They were dead, and I was alone. Orphaned. Abandoned. Homeless.

And when I thought about walking—

About taking the last, the very last, the absolute last connection that I had left on Earth, and breaking it—

A part of me didn't even care about the possibility that Koskinen was a Controller, or some kind of government agent, or even just a run-of-the-mill scumbag.

If I lost touch with Garrett—if I missed the chance to reconnect with Jake, with Marco—

I didn't know if I could make it on my own.

I knew, on some level, that I was being ridiculous. Knew that plenty of fourteen-year-olds end up on the street and survive just fine. Knew that, homeless or not, as long as I had the morphing power, I was one of the most dangerous and capable people on the planet.

But still. I didn't want that. Didn't want the—the hardness that I sometimes saw in Tobias, when Garrett wasn't around—that look, like a bird of prey trapped inside a building. Didn't want the ocean floor to drop out from under me, leaving me adrift.

And so I'd followed Dr. Koskinen into another room and laid my hands on a strange girl's arm, acquiring her. Then I'd dressed myself in clothes from the lost and found and followed him down to his car.

It was crazy. It was risky. It was putting myself entirely in the hands of a total stranger.

But the alternative was to face the world—the war—all of it—entirely, utterly alone.

It's just for a few days, I told myself. Build up some strength, acquire a few morphs, get your bearings. It's not like they can make you stay—not unless this is a way more serious operation than it looks, and in that case they already have you.

I knew that wasn't an answer, at all—that it was my brain's way of dodging the real questions, questions I wasn't stable enough to handle.

But I was okay with that, for now.

We pulled off the road into a gas station. Without a word, Koskinen got out, set the pump running, and turned and walked into the small convenience store. He emerged a minute and a half later carrying two bottles of orange juice, two packaged sandwiches, and a small, steaming carton of scrambled eggs. Setting them on the passenger seat, he reholstered the pump, then got back into the car.

"Nälkäinen?" he asked. Hungry?

I nodded. "Kiitos," I replied. A minute later, we were back on the road, Koskinen holding a sandwich in one hand as he drove with the other.

I looked down at the eggs in my lap. "Aion muuttaa," I said—I'm going to demorph. No point in eating while I was wearing somebody else's body.

Koskinen nodded, saying nothing. Putting the food down on the seat next to me, I closed my eyes and focused.

After my brief panic in the hospital room earlier, it was still something of a relief to feel the familiar tingle of the morphing process sweeping over me. Aino was almost exactly the same height, weight, and skin color, and I was morphing inside of my clothes, so there was very little visible change, but—

"—have some kind of distraction?" Garrett said, his voice tight with tension, both of his fists clenched around his shirt collar as he held it up over his nose and mouth.

"What would you call that?" I shot back, as Ax continued to rip his way through the bakery display, shoveling cinnamon buns into his mouth in front of the horrified crowd. "Besides, we'll be out of here before any big guns show up—"

My arms swelled like marshmallows in a microwave, the skin turning black as the gorilla's muscles bubbled up out of my thin frame. Thirty feet away, the first of the security guards attempted to tackle Ax to the ground, but the alien dodged like a drunken master, sending the man crashing through a nearby glass display case.

"Rachel—"

"I know, okay? Just give me—" ‹—a second.›

Two more black-uniformed guards came running, one of them dropping almost immediately as Ax whirled, smashing an open four-pack of buns right into his face.

God dammit, of all the things we don't need to be dealing with right now—

"Rachel! Can you hear me? Perkele—RACHEL!"

I snapped back to my senses all at once, my whole body aching like I'd just tried to pick up an elephant. I was still in the back of Koskinen's car, but I was down on the floor, wedged into the space between the back seat and the passenger seat. The car was stopped, the engine still running, Koskinen's door hanging open as he sprinted around the front to my side—

"I—I'm—"

I'm okay, I tried to say, but some honest impulse blocked the words before they could leave my mouth. I had no idea whether I was okay—

Koskinen threw open the door beside me, leaned forward to lift me up onto the seat. "Lie back," he barked. "Lie still."

I obeyed, letting him rearrange my limbs, wincing at the twinge and tug of overloaded muscles. "What—what happened?" I managed to gasp.

"Seizure," the doctor said. "I think. You were convulsing, unresponsive. Can you breathe? Airways clear?"

"I—I think so," I said. I felt wetness on my lip, reached up a hand—

Blood.

"Lie still," Koskinen repeated. He held my wrist for a moment, then pressed a hand to my forehead. "Did you feel disorientation before the seizure began? Confusion, spaciness, out-of-body?"

"Wh—no. No, I don't think so. I was just—focused on demorphing—"

"Any tingling?" he asked. "Dizziness? Strange tastes or smells?"

"No."

"Tell me your full name and the date."

"Rachel Ellen Berenson. It's—I think you said it was October first—"

Koskinen vanished from the doorway, and out of the corner of my eye I saw the trunk open. I could hear him muttering to himself—"Kolmekymmentä, neljäkymmentäviisi sekuntia. Lamotrigiini, topiramaatti, valproiinihappo—"

I pushed myself up to a sitting position, glanced at my reflection in the rear-view mirror. It was me—I was back in my own body, my hair a tangled halo, blood running down my chin from a nosebleed. Somehow, I had finished demorphing, even while I was—

What was that?

A dream? A memory? A vision?

It was still crystal clear in my mind, as clear as if I had actually just lived it, moments before. I remembered the look of pale horror on Garrett's face—the ragged, unhinged quality of Ax's human voice—the feel of my own anger as I drew the gorilla's strength around me like a blanket—

"Drink this," Koskinen said brusquely, coming back around to my door.

"What is—"

"Water. I don't have anything else. The episode lasted for under a minute, so emergency treatment is not indicated—do you have a history of seizures?"

"No. I've never had one before."

"Any chronic illnesses at all?"

"No."

"Allergies?"

"No."

"How do you feel now?"

I closed my eyes, running my attention over my body the way my coaches had taught me. "Fine, I think? My muscles ache."

"Can you tell me, please, what is thirty-seven multiplied by upholstery?"

I blinked. "No," I said slowly. "That doesn't make sense. Was that a test?"

The doctor nodded, expressionless. He peered at me for a long moment, and then shrugged. "Onward," he said, pushing the door closed and walking back around to the driver's side.

But—but—

But what? What do you want him to do, take you back to the hospital?

I—maybe?

I collapsed back against the seat, my eyes half-following the pine trees as we pulled back into the road and began to pick up speed.

I guess it just feels like we're supposed to DO something? Not just shrug and say "well, that was weird."

Yeah, but—what?

I didn't know.

What the hell had just happened?

"Kuule, arvostan tätä todella, etenkin näin lyhyellä varoitusajalla. Asumistilanteen selviämiseen pitäisi mennä korkeintaan viikko tai kaksi—"

"Rauhoitu, Rand, rauhoitu—olemme perhettä ja nämä ovat vaikeita aikoja. Jos emme voisi luottaa toisiimme..."

The woman—Sofia, if I'd heard her correctly—leaned in and gave Dr. Koskinen a quick hug, then turned to me, leaving a hand on his shoulder.

"Rachel," she said, her voice warm, her accent thick and clipped and sort of robotic. "Welcome. Rand tells me you speak only English in your—normal body?"

I opened my mouth, slightly taken aback and not sure I had any right to be. I hadn't remorphed after the seizure—

"Of course I told her," Koskinen cut in. "She is my sister, and she is taking you into her home."

The woman smiled. "Your secret is safe, soturikka. Would you like to be called Rachel, or something else? It is a Finnish name too."

"Rachel is fine," I said. "Thank you."

"Please. Come inside. And Rand—äla vetää!"

I followed her across the threshold, only realizing that Koskinen wasn't with us as the door clicked shut behind me.

Sofia was already striding forward through a wide, open, low-ceilinged lobby, lit by bright fluorescents and held up by squat, concrete columns. The place looked shabby, but clean—no grime or graffiti, just cracked, faded paint and a few missing floor tiles. There was a wall of mailboxes on one side, and a cork bulletin board on the other, filled with brightly colored flyers.

I jogged a few steps to try to catch up, stopping almost immediately as my muscles went on strike. "Pahoittelut," Sofia said, when she reached the elevators on the far side and turned to see me lagging behind. "Rand said you were struggling. I will go slower."

We rode the elevators in silence to the fourth floor, stepping out into a long, narrow apartment hallway.

"Number four-zero-eight," Sofia said. "I will give you the spare key. Please be careful with it. You will stay in Petri's old room; she is away at Lund."

Turning the key in the lock, she swept into the unit, kicking off her shoes. I followed and did the same.

The apartment was nice—compact and extremely clean, with cool light shining in through floor-to-ceiling windows on the far side. I cringed a little at myself for thinking it, but it really did look like one of those IKEA display apartments—the ones where they fit a ton of furniture into a small space without making things feel cramped. There was a living area with a sofa and a couple of chairs and a TV, a dining area with a table and four stools, and a kitchen blocked off from the rest by a long wooden counter.

"That door is Petri's," said Sofia, pointing. "The one next to it belongs to Ante. He left for school just before you arrived and will be home a little after fourteen. Your rooms share a bathroom, so lock the door. You are welcome to any of the food in the kitchen; we can go shopping tonight to pick up some things that you like, and get you some clothes. That door over there is mine, and that one is the sauna. For now, please stay within the apartment. I will have Ante show you around the lähiö later."

"Wait," I cut in. "You're leaving?"

"Yes, I have work. Is there anything you need before I go?"

I could feel my jaw hanging open. Everything was happening so quickly, for all that I'd spent two hours in the car and was apparently about to spend another four or five alone in the apartment. It felt like Sofia had said barely a hundred words, and now she was just going to leave me, unsupervised, inside her home—

"I just—um. Is this okay? I mean, you don't—you don't know me."

Sofia tilted her head to one side.

"You are from Ventura, yes?" she asked.

I nodded.

"And Rand tells me, for you it is like yesterday."

I nodded again, my throat suddenly tight.

"We all saw what happened in Ventura," she said quietly. "The whole world, you understand? And then after—in Washington, and Japan, and Brazil—"

She broke off. "This is hätä, child. A time of distress. You are young, you are alone, you are American. My brother tells me you are a soldier, that we cannot go to the police, or to the ministry. Of course I have questions. Concerns. But—"

She fixed me with a close, intent look. "Are you going to run away?"

I shook my head.

"Are you going to steal from me?"

"No, but—"

"Are you a danger to my son?"

I closed my mouth, shook my head again.

Sofia shrugged. "Then it is simple," she said. "Trust, over fear. Later, I will ask you many, many questions, but for now—"

She smiled softly. "Sisu," she said. "For now, it is good for you to be alone. No eyes, no expectations. Take some time, catch your breath. Eat. Sleep. Cry. Be naked. For now, nothing is your responsibility, okay?"

And just like that, she was gone. I heard the sliding of the lock as she turned the key, and then there was silence.

My mother would never.

I clamped down on the thought, and the pain that came with it, even as my brain offered up Cassie's parents would have, though, along with another wave of grief.

For now, nothing is your responsibility.

I took a deep, deep breath.

Held it. Let it out.

It wasn't enough. I let myself sink down to the floor—first sitting, then lying flat out, the plush rug beneath me almost as soft as a mattress.

For now, nothing is your responsibility.

I squeezed my eyes shut.

That was what she had said. Sofia. A grownup. A mother, all the way out here in—

I couldn't pronounce it.

But she'd meant it—I could tell. Had put the full force of her authority behind it. Had really wanted me to hear it, to believe it—was sure that she was right.

For now, nothing is your responsibility.

It was what my own mother would have said, too. My own mother, who had been dead for months, however much it felt like I had seen her just last week—

You mean, when you gave her up to the Yeerks?

The words dropped into my thoughts like a boulder, scattering everything else, leaving behind a horrible, echoing silence. I rolled over onto my belly, pressed my face into the rug, my breath hot and humid and close.

That's not fair, I whispered to myself.

Cold, bitter laughter.

Louder, more confidently—that's not FAIR.

Oh, really? Then explain to me how—

NO.

The word was loud and unyielding, triggering a second long silence. I felt my fists clench, felt the strain of muscles that hadn't been used in weeks.

When my thoughts began to flow again, they were in Marco's voice, instead of my own.

You do not get to beat yourself up for that. You had about zero point three seconds to pick between saving your family or keeping the box out of Visser Three's hands—

I could have destroyed it, whispered a tiny, traitorous voice. Destroyed it, and gone to save them.

Yeah, well. If you'd done THAT, we'd ALL be dead now, and the war would be over.

It took almost everything I had in me to stop myself from thinking the word good.

I rolled over onto my back, opening my eyes, looking up at the stubbled ceiling.

What are you doing here, Rachel? I asked myself, as other voices carried on the argument in the background. What is this going to accomplish?

Nothing. There was nothing I could do. I couldn't change it, I couldn't fix it, I had no idea what to do next. I was alone, and weak, and I had no morphs and no information—

Then LET IT GO.

I took another deep breath.

Just let it go. Let it go for one damn day. You can pick it back up tomorrow.

I let gravity empty my lungs, my ribcage sagging without any help from my muscles.

Only—

I hesitated, almost too afraid to let myself think the thought.

Would I?

Would I, in fact, pick it back up again? If I let it go now?

We had been planning to rescue them—my mom, my sisters, Cassie's parents, Jake's family. Had planned the raid for a time when none of them would be at the pool. I'd told myself that it was coming, that I just had to hold it together a little longer and then everything would be back to normal, just hang in there, we're coming for you—

What was there to fight for, now?

I knew the thought was wrong, knew that the rest of the world still mattered—that it still mattered to me—knew that I was being selfish, childish, self-centered.

It didn't matter. It still felt true. Right then, it felt true.

How about this, then? argued the voice of Marco in my head. You've ALREADY let it go, and now you're just pretending that you haven't and beating yourself up for it, like you can make up for it if you feel bad enough. Which you can't, so you're not doing any good AND you're also not getting any rest, which is dumbfuck stupid.

There was a kind of silence, even inside my own head.

I sat up.

What is it your kind's always saying? 'Don't think about it'?

I looked down at my hands, trembling slightly with fatigue.

Okay.

Fine.

Fair enough.

For now, nothing was my responsibility.

Say it, whispered my inner Marco. Say it out loud.

"I'm not supposed to do anything about anything."

The words didn't echo. They weren't dramatic. They were flat, quick, mundane. As soon as I stopped speaking, the silence came right back.

But something had shifted. I felt—emptier, somehow. Hollowed-out. Deflated. Like I could just be tired and that was it, there didn't have to be anything else after that.

I pushed myself up to my feet. There was pain, in the background, but it didn't really matter.

I looked over at the kitchen, tried to imagine eating, felt only a sort of gray indifference.

Slowly, shuffling, I walked over to the door to Petri's room and pulled it open. It was clean and spare—just a couple of paintings on the wall, a few keepsakes on the bedside table, a stuffed animal sitting on the chair in the corner. There was a desk with a small bookshelf, and a bed that looked extremely inviting.

There were two more doors inside the room. One was clearly a closet. I tried the other.

It was locked.

Your rooms share a bathroom—

The brother—Ante—must have left the bathroom locked from his side.

Stepping back out into the apartment, I opened the door to Ante's room and—

—

It took what felt like an eternity to even process what I was seeing, at which point my brain just completely gave up on the idea of producing a coherent response.

There were at least twelve different pictures of Marco scattered across the walls of the tiny room. A dozen different copies of Marco's face, staring back at me from a dozen different posters, each accompanied by a caption like Welcome to the Resistance or There's no going back or This is your moment or Change is coming. There were shots of Marco grinning, Marco staring intently straight into the camera, Marco with a dangerous, focused look on his face like a jaguar tracking its prey. In one image, his head had been photoshopped onto the body of some futuristic supersoldier from Starship Troopers or Edge of Tomorrow or something, surrounded by wreckage and carrying a gun that looked like it could kill a spaceship. In another, somebody had taken five or six snapshots out of a crossfade between Marco and a charging bull, and edited them together into a crude representation of morphing.

In between and around the Marcos were a hundred other pictures, posters, and flyers, in a wild mix of English and Finnish and a handful of other languages. There were newspaper clippings, screenshots of Google and Reddit, blueprints and diagrams and maps. Pictures of fighter jets, rows of uniformed soldiers, high-tech assembly lines. Cheesy images of laser beams blowing up UFOs, 1950's-style propaganda cartoons of kids pouring salt on slugs. Down near the bottom was what looked like a satellite photo of the crater where Ventura used to be, with the hashtags #äläkoskaanunohda and #ihmiskuntayhdistyi.

What the—HOW the—

And then it clicked.

Koskinen had told me about the broadcast, after all—that it had gone viral, that "Animorphs" had become a household name. I just hadn't realized—

This is everywhere.

If this was here, in the bedroom of a random teenager in a random suburb in Finland, of all places, then—

The war really had gone worldwide. It was one thing to hear Koskinen say it, in a handful of clipped, terse sentences. It was another thing to see Marco Levy being given the Batman treatment.

Still half-stunned, I stepped into the room, nudging aside some crumpled laundry. The place was messy and cluttered, the bed unmade. There were bits of wire and metal all over the desk, mixed in with tools and scraps of electronics and various half-finished gizmos. On the bedside table was a folding knife, a magnesium firestarter, and a small cardboard box with SAKO printed on the side, half-full of rifle ammunition.

I spotted a picture frame on the corner of the desk, behind a jumbled stack of papers and textbooks, and leaned in closer to see what must have been the whole family. There was a younger-looking Sofia, a man with weathered skin and a bright, crinkled smile, a girl about my age, and a young boy with dark hair and a serious face.

Ante.

A memory unfolded in my mind—from my first visit to the Yeerk pool, in the chaos after Jake and Marco had escaped—

"You can beat them!" the woman yelled. "If you try hard enough, you can take back control! Not for long, but if enough of us do it, there's no way they can keep it a secret!"

It seemed very real, standing there in the middle of Ante's bedroom, surrounded by resistance propaganda. Very real, and very close, as if there was some magical bridge between the two places, and the woman might step out at any moment, leaving Ante huddled in the back of a cage—

Steady.

I swayed, and gripped the desk with both hands. I felt dizzy, disoriented, strangely loose, like a knot on the verge of unraveling—

Did you feel disorientation before the seizure began? Confusion, spaciness, out-of-body?

No.

I sat down on the corner of the unmade bed.

It was crazy.

This was crazy.

I had been in the middle of a war zone—literally right in the middle of a firefight, that had been like five hours ago as far as my brain was concerned, and then I had woken up halfway around the globe and now I was here, and the war was here too, it had followed me, if I could drop out of it in a heartbeat like that then who was to say I couldn't be dropped back in—

I could feel my breathing creeping up again, feel the clinical part of my mind running through a set of flash cards—asthma, panic attack, PTSD, seizure. I took a dozen deep, slow breaths, looked around the room for as many objects as I could name.

Marco, bookshelf, Marco, soldering iron, Marco, underwear, Marco, Marco, Marco—

I closed my eyes.

It's just some dumb kid's bedroom.

Only it wasn't. It wasn't just that.

There is nothing standing in their way except us—did you get that? Just the five of us. If we don't make it, if we screw it up, then the human race will actually lose.

Marco had said that—the real Marco, not the copy in my head. All the way back at the very beginning, during our first meeting, before we'd even elected Jake as our leader. It was the first thing I'd ever remembered him saying—the first time I'd ever really noticed him as anything other than the smartass short kid that liked to hang out with my cousin.

He'd been yelling at me, when he said those things. Because I'd been reckless. Stupid. Because we couldn't afford mistakes, back then, when the five of us were one hundred percent of Earth's defensive forces.

I opened my eyes again.

All right, fine. What about now?

It wasn't a meaningful question. Just some part of my brain, trying to pull it all back together, trying to make it all make sense.

What are you doing here, Rachel?

"Nothing," I said, out loud.

And it was true.

For now, nothing is your responsibility.

I grabbed onto the thought like a life preserver, shutting out everything else. Standing, I stepped through the bathroom and unlocked the door on the far side, then backed out into the main apartment, closing Ante's door firmly behind me.

For now, nothing is your responsibility.

I repeated the words as I showered, as I toweled off, as I set my borrowed clothes on Petri's chair and buried myself in her bed. I kept repeating them, my eyes shut tight against the outside world—but I couldn't quite stop some self-aware part of me from observing that if I had to say them so deliberately, there must be something else that I was using them to drown out.

Fortunately, there was an obvious remedy for that.

"Rachel."

My eyes snapped open.

"Rachel—will you be going to school with Ante?"

I sat upright in the bed, my muscles complaining like I'd spent the whole previous day drilling routines on the spring floor. Sofia was standing in the open doorway, and judging by the light behind her, it was morning.

I had slept all the way through the night.

Focus. School?

I scrubbed at my eyes. "Um," I said. "I don't know. Should I?"

There was a long silence.

"Yes," said Sofia. She pointed. "I picked up some clothes for you. Breakfast in the kitchen in ten minutes."

And with that, she left, pulling the door closed behind her.

School.

The last time I had been at school—

I lunged forward before the boy-puppet could dodge, whipping my tail through the air with rattlesnake speed. I cut off one arm, then the other, the puppet's blood spurting wildly as I aimed my third strike at its legs—

I shoved the memory aside, along with the next four thoughts that followed it, until my mind was something resembling empty and clear.

So. School.

Sofia thought I should go to school.

Of course she does. She's a mom, you're a teenager.

Of course, I didn't have to be a teenager…

Whoa. Slow down.

I counted to ten and started over.

What are you going to do today?

Options: stay in the apartment all day, wander around town as a teenager, go to school, go rogue.

Out of that list, going to school didn't sound too bad. It would be a way for me to get my bearings, at least, given that right now I didn't even know what city I was in. And school would give me opportunities to pick up a few new human morphs without running into any truant officers—

Does Finland even have truant officers?

Does Finland even have truancy laws?

I didn't know, which was another point in favor of going, at least for a day.

There were some benefits to just sticking around the apartment, too, but they came along with a lot of time to just sit and think, alone with myself, which—if yesterday's panics were anything to go by—was not necessarily a healthy thing for me at the moment. And the thought of going fully rogue was still too terrifying to seriously consider.

Okay, so school.

School.

I stood, stretched, and was halfway through dressing when it occurred to me that I didn't speak Finnish.

So go in mor—

Oh. Right.

I glanced at the clock. There were seven minutes left of the ten Sophia had given me. Three minutes to morph and demorph, ninety more seconds to remorph after that, if it all went well—

I had a little over a minute to think it over.

As it turned out, I only needed about ten seconds.

If the seizure thing is going to happen again—if there's a problem with you, or with morphing in general, or with morphing into that person in particular—you're going to need to know that anyway, so why wait?

Actually, there were at least a few good reasons to wait, two of which occurred to me immediately—

No.

I had slept a whole day away. A part of me needed to not-wait the same way I needed water or food. I finished pulling on my shirt, closed my eyes, and focused.

The familiar tingle began at the small of my back this time, spreading and trickling across my skin, seeming to move with agonizing slowness, though I was pretty sure that was more about watched pots than anything else.

Forty-five hippopotamus, forty-six hippopotamus, forty-seven hippopotamus…

As I passed the halfway mark, I felt the tension slowly leak out of my shoulders. Forty seconds later, I opened my eyes to see the face of my Finnish doppelgänger in the mirror over the desk.

I let out a sigh. So far, so good.

Closing my eyes again, I refocused on my own body, wishing as I did that I could morph away the soreness, the lingering weakness—

Maybe do something about that bed-head, while I'm at it?

I counted in my head as the morph proceeded. I was exactly forty-one hippopotamuses in when—

It was maybe midnight by the time the moon rose, backlighting the dust that filled the sky over northern New Mexico, and we settled by silent, mutual agreement on top of a shattered sandstone mesa in the middle of the wide, cold nothingness.

No one spoke as we demorphed, our bodies rising shivering from the uneven rock. There was a kind of supernatural seriousness in the air—a ritual silence, dark and heavy, the sort of thing I'd imagine feeling at Stonehenge or the pyramids or those sacred catacombs in India. Words just—didn't fit. Weren't appropriate.

There was a soft crunch as something invisible landed at the edge of the pillar, and suddenly the air around us grew warm as Erek dropped his holographic camouflage and expanded his force field to include us all. I looked at Jake, who looked at Marco, who looked at Garrett—who for once kept his eyes up and looked back—and slowly we mingled and drifted, acquiring one another, dipping in and out of the strange alien trance as the technology did its work—

OUCH.

The transition was instantaneous, as if I'd been teleported straight from New Mexico to Finland. My hand flew to my forehead, where there was already a lump the size of a strawberry, blood trickling down my cheek to join the flow from my nose. I had fallen off of the bed—must have slammed my head on the desk on the way down, or on the hard wooden leg while on the floor—

Okay. Okay, think.

I was two-for-two on the whatever-it-was, memory or hallucination or what—

Think FASTER.

Right. Okay.

Assume it happens whenever I demorph.

Unless it's something about Aino's body in particular—

Irrelevant, since if I was going to morph again right now it was going to be into Aino's body anyway—

Negative side-effects: spasm/seizure, muscle cramps, bloody nose—

How about risk of losing an eye? Or of making enough noise that people came running?

Any lasting damage?

I closed my eyes and checked over my body, just as I had done in the car the day before. I felt drained again—my muscles must have been clenching and cramping during the seizure—but nothing felt broken except for my head.

Which meant I could walk out of the room in three minutes as Rachel—

—with a bloody nose and a giant lump on your forehead—

—or I could go out there as Aino and have another seizure in two hours.

Heads I win, tails you lose—

"Terve, Rachel," said Sofia, as I emerged from the bedroom.

"Kiitos, Sofia," I replied. "Samoin."

The boy at the table—recognizable from the photo, but four or five years older, and with longer, messier hair—lifted his head. "Moro," he mumbled.

Sofia crumpled up a paper towel and threw it at him. He batted it aside, rolled his eyes, and spoke again with a tinge of sing-song mockery. "Tervetuloa, Rachel."

"Nyt on parempi," Sofia said, her eyes twinkling. She pointed, and I slid into the seat across from the boy just as she set down two bowls of some kind of porridge, followed by a pair of open-faced sandwiches on rye bread.

I was half-expecting some kind of interrogation, or at least the usual get-to-know-you small talk, but Ante dug into his porridge without a word. In the kitchen, Sofia continued to bustle around in near-silence, making coffee.

Not big talkers, then.

That was fine by me—picking up my spoon, I turned my attention inward, mulling over the new vision-memory I'd acquired during the seizure.

It seemed that whatever-it-was wasn't just a scene that I had watched—it was more like a complete memory that I had recovered, somehow. Like I had forgotten it, and then remembered it again. I couldn't bring up anything before or after, but I could delve into the narrow slice that I'd seen, and draw out new detail that hadn't been a part of the brief hallucination. I was sure, for instance, that—real or not—the scene took place a day and a half after we'd invaded the pool, while we were on our way to Washington, D.C. I was also sure that Jake's brother Tom and Marco's father Peter were both there, and that Tobias wasn't.

And—

—this part was less sure; it felt true but who knows what was really going on—

—both of the visions had taken place inside my own body. Like, not just from a random first-person perspective, but inside my body—the body of Rachel Berenson. By this point, I knew what it felt like to wear someone else's skin and bones, and both visions had carried that quiet but unmistakable note of familiarity and comfort.

Which meant that, if they were real—

If, I reassured my inner Marco, who was spluttering. If.

If they were real, then—

The most straightforward explanation was that I was somehow recovering memories from the previous Rachel—memories that the earlier version of me had lived, but that hadn't been transferred during my resurrection. Events that had taken place after this version of me had been acquired.

Which—

I didn't know.

I didn't know so hard that I couldn't even form a question.

But if it happened every time I demorphed—

"Ante," said Sofia, breaking my reverie.

"Mmm?"

"Osoitatte häntä ympäri, peruskoulu jälkeen? Kirjasto, markkinat, nuorisokeskus..."

It wasn't that I understood Finnish, while I was wearing Aino's body. It was more like, Aino understood Finnish, and I understood Aino. The meaning passed perfectly from her dormant mind to my own, without the need for word-to-word translation, and I was able to convert my own thoughts into Finnish sentences via the same channel.

Will you show her around, after school? Sofia had asked. The library, the market, the youth center…

"En tiedä," Ante replied, and though I could make out the individual sounds if I tried, mostly I just heard I don't know.

"It's Friday," he continued, still speaking in Finnish. "The Territorial Forces are coming by."

"After, then."

"I was going to go past the fence with Elias and Juhani."

"So take her with you," Sofia countered, a note of impatience creeping into her tone.

Ante turned to give me a look, sizing me up. "Does she even want to go?" he asked.

I felt a tiny spike of indignation. "Olen täällä, tiedät," I said, my eyes narrowing. I'm right here, you know.

"No niin," he replied, shrugging. "Do you, though?"

"What's past the fence?"

He squinted. "What do you mean?"

"What's out there?"

"Past the fence."

"Right."

"What?"

"Enough," Sofia broke in. "Ante, you will look after her today, understand? She is from Tampere, she doesn't know her way around. Stay in town or go past the fence, I don't care, but you take her with you. No reading the Bible like the Devil."

"Manu has done his job," Ante intoned. "Manu is dismissed."

The last two lines meant no loopholes and your wish is my command, more or less, which made me grateful all over again for my decision to remorph Aino, because seizures or no seizures—even if they'd said those words in straight English, I don't think I would have been able to figure out what they actually meant.

There was silence for the rest of the meal—not awkward or stilted, just the same comfortable silence that had come before. When Ante finished, he stood and brought his dishes over to the sink. I did the same.

"Oh, Rachel," Sofia said, as Ante vanished back into his bedroom. "Rand called with a prescription." She held out a hand with a small plastic bottle. "He said to take these for your muscle pain and nosebleeds. And here's the spare key."

Right.

"Thanks."

"We'll talk more tonight, okay?"

"Okay."

I pocketed the items as Ante reemerged, wearing a black jacket and a brown knit hat with a small backpack slung over his shoulder.

"Do I need to bring anything?" I asked.

Ante shook his head, then jerked it in a come on sort of gesture and headed for the door. "'Bye, Mom," he said, his back to the kitchen where Sofia still sat.

I waved awkwardly, ducked into Petri's room to grab the coat and hat that Sofia had left for me, and followed him out into the hall. He said nothing as we walked, as we waited in the elevator, as we exited the lobby out into the crisp, cold sunlight.

"How far is school?" I asked, breaking the silence. "Are we taking a bus?"

He shook his head. "Walking distance."

The roads were wide and quiet, with clean sidewalks and large, green lawns glistening with frost in front of every building. The buildings themselves were low and spread out, most shorter than three stories and none taller than six or seven, with leafy trees planted here and there between them. The whole thing felt a little bit like a college campus, or a nice suburb in an uncrowded state—empty and spacious compared to the dense neighborhoods of Ventura.

We passed a playground, another apartment building, another playground, and a small, modest church, all without a word.

"Will I be in your class?" I asked finally.

I knew from Aino's memories that Finnish schools were divided by age, just like American ones, but I wasn't sure how old Ante was.

Then again, I wasn't sure he knew how old I was, either, so maybe he wouldn't know the answer in any case—

"We're not in classes," Ante scoffed, his pace slowing as he threw me a sort of bully-flavored look, half-disgusted and half-disbelieving. "We're taking part in the Common Endeavor."

Yhteinen Yritys, he had said, the capital letters audible in his tone along with the unstated duh. I felt my heartrate tick up. Aino had no idea what that meant, and suddenly it occurred to me that I had no idea how long she had been in the hospital—

"Right," I said. "Obviously. In the city, we were still separated by age, though."

Ante's look deepened into suspicion, and a totally automatic part of my brain began planning what it would do after we punched him in the nose and ran away—

"Hei, Ante!"

Ante's head swiveled around. "Hei," he called back.

There was another boy jogging up to us from a side street. He was maybe Jake's height, slender-looking—though it was hard to tell with the bulky coat he was wearing—with longish, shaggy blond hair sticking out from under a bright red hat.

"Juhani, Rachel," Ante said, gesturing. "Rachel, Juhani."

"Hei," Juhani repeated, giving me a small wave.

"Hei," I said. "How are you?"

The boy's expression flickered momentarily, the ghost of a frown passing through his mouth, his eyebrows—

"Rachel's visiting from Tampere," Ante said, cutting him off. "I'm her guide today."

I felt another flash of irritation. Turista opas, he'd said, with a sour twist—tourist guide.

"I'm not a tourist," I growled, the words popping out of me by sheer reflex.

Hey, um. Why do we care what this random kid thinks?

"No niin," Ante said, shrugging.

He turned and began walking again. Juhani offered me a brief, sympathetic look and a shrug of his own, and then followed.

We traveled in silence for another five minutes or so, as the apartment buildings gave way to more of a midtown vibe, parks and houses and small, isolated strips of three or four shops in a row. There were other kids on the sidewalk, now, all flowing in the same general direction. One of them joined us and was introduced as Luukas.

As we passed the library, the school came into view, a squat, two-story brick building with a playground and athletic fields on one side and a small parking lot on the other. Even from a distance, I could see decorations filling the windows on the second floor, each classroom distinct from the next as one set of artwork gave way to another.

The trickle of kids was now starting to resemble a flood, and I glanced back and forth between the street and the building, running numbers in my head. Two classrooms wide times maybe ten classrooms long, times two floors, times twenty kids per classroom—

Eight hundred kids?

And from Aino's memory I knew that the youngest student would be seven and the oldest sixteen, so—

Around eighty kids per year, give or take. Four classrooms per grade.

And you need to know this why? grumbled the part of my brain that was still busy being annoyed.

Be prepared? Know your ground? Take advantage of any information that's just lying around? We did die last time, you know.

If there were eight hundred kids, that meant there were—what—three or four thousand people in the whole lähiö, maybe? Five thousand, if most families didn't have very many kids?

I thought back to some of the buildings we had passed. One bank, one dentist, one grocery store. And the streets we had been walking ended in two directions—the school at the end of the road we were currently on, and the library at the end of the road we'd just turned off of.

So unless there were two schools, two mirrored neighborhoods—

The whole lähiö couldn't be more than maybe a square mile, maybe a little less, with what looked like dense forest on at least two sides.

Which meant it wouldn't be that hard to disappear, in a pinch.

I glanced at Ante as we approached the double doors of the main entrance. He had said something about wanting to go past the fence, which now sounded like it might have meant outside the lähiö—

A calm, detached part of me noted that the rest of me was running on yellow alert—tense, attentive, as if something might go down at any second.

Nerves? Habit? Or something else?

What's the matter, boy? Did you see something?

I tried to mentally backtrack as we squeezed through the double doors, see if I could figure out what had put me on edge. The crush closed around me, sweeping me down the hallway, the flow of students all moving in one direction. For a moment, I thought about asking Ante where we were going, what I should do, but my inner toddler vetoed.

Little snot could have explained everything by now if he'd wanted to.

We rounded a corner into what looked like the main hallway of the school, lined with lockers and alternating doors. The crowd stretched ahead of us all the way to the end, where it turned and vanished through a side door.

"Take off your hat," Ante hissed.

I blinked, realizing that all of the other heads around me were bare. I reached up, pulling my own hat off—

That's it. It's too quiet.

Ante's voice had been barely louder than a whisper, yet I'd easily been able to hear it. The crowd wasn't silent—far from it. But it was quiet in a way that would have taken serious threats, if this had been an American school. Most of the students weren't talking at all, and the few who were were speaking in soft, muted tones, like we were in a restaurant, or a movie theater before the movie had started.

And before that, on the walk to school—

And before that, in Ante's apartment—

And before that, in the car with Koskinen—

Okay, so—Finnish people are just quieter?

I felt my brain relax a little as the explanation sunk in, felt myself downshifting from yellow alert to mere everyday readiness as we turned through the doors and into the gymnasium.

Hey, uh. Even 'mere everyday readiness' might be overkill. This is high school, after all.

The gym was just like any school gym—polished wooden floor, basketball hoops on either end, fold-out bleachers covering the length of the two longer walls. There were doors at the back, presumably leading to locker rooms and storage closets. The kids were sorting themselves into groups via some complicated mechanism I didn't quite understand; Luukas and Juhani peeled off as Ante grabbed me by my shirtsleeve and pulled me over toward one of the adults.

"Mrs. Virtanen," he said. "This is my cousin, Rachel Koskinen. She's visiting for the week."

The teacher nodded. "Welcome, Rachel," she said. "Have you checked in at the office?"

My jaw dropped a little, my mouth hanging open—

"My mom called yesterday," Ante said. "They did all the paperwork then."

"Ah, good. Just have her travel around with you for today, then. I'll make sure she's marked present."

Ante nodded, and I followed him to a spot in the bleachers. Again, I felt the urge to ask questions, to extract some kind of orienting information out of the boy, and again some stubborn part of me put its foot down.

After all, the stakes are so high.

I looked around at the nearby kids. They were a near-even mix, ranging from tiny seven-year-olds up to my age and a year or two older. Most of them were just sitting quietly, but a few were playing games or chatting or reading books.

Actually—

I looked closer, sweeping my eyes around the bleachers.

Every section had a near-even mix of ages. And there was just a little bit of a gap between each section—kids leaving just a little more space than they were anywhere else, as if the boundaries between the groups was important—

We're not in classes, Ante had sneered.

Mixed-age groups? As a part of 'the Common Endeavor,' whatever that was?

Movement on the gym floor caught my eye, and I turned to see a woman in a gray suit stepping out into the center circle. Almost instantly, all conversation ceased, all eyes turning to point toward her.

"Hyvää päivää, opiskelijat," the woman said.

Some of the younger children called back in response, and she smiled warmly. "I see you have all found your families. Please, take a moment to check for absences."

"Yksi."

"Kaksi."

"Kolme."

"Neljä."

All around me, voices were calling out numbers, one after the other, each section of the bleachers turned inward.

"Where's Fanni?"

"Sick, her mother called my mother this morning—"

"Viisitoista."

"Kuusitoista."

"Seitsemäntoista," called Ante. "And I have an extra with me—Rachel."

"Tervetuloa, Rachel," chorused two dozen voices.

The counting continued for maybe a minute, with children double-checking absences, occasionally assigning someone to follow up where there was no known story. One student stood up from each section of the bleachers and delivered a sheet of paper to one of the teachers on the floor. Eventually, the gym fell silent again.

"Good work," said the woman in the gray suit. "Now, announcements. Remember that there will only be three full periods today—third, fourth, and fifth. First period, we're going to stay here in the gym; our guest Mr. Lampi has a bit of a demonstration for you. Second period, you'll be practicing what you learned from him together with your family. After that, you will be back in age groups, and you will rotate between Engineering, Sustenance, and Classical Education. Don't forget that on Monday, we will be holding the final judgment for the competition on water capture systems."

There was a small rustle of what might have been excitement, or maybe apprehension.

"In the meantime, Mr. Lampi has a lot of information to cover, so we're going to skip the rest of morning announcements and get to work. Sisu, my students."

"Sisu!" called out eight hundred voices in unison.

I couldn't help it—I jumped, in my seat, and Ante smirked at me again.

Sisu. The meaning drifted up out of Aino's mind, refusing to match with any single English word. It meant courage, but also persistence. Endurance, but also action. It conjured up a sense of adversity, of overwhelming odds, a sense of boundaries being broken and obstacles being overcome.

I was surprised. I hadn't known there was a word like that. But it fit, with what I'd seen so far—of Koskinen and Sofia, and the walls of Ante's bedroom.

I liked it.

Sisu.

There were a bunch of adults out in the middle of the gym floor, now—laying down tarps, setting up tables. One of them was carrying a giant, empty, plastic tray, the sort of thing you'd use to mix concrete; two more were following behind with large bags of what looked like playground sand.

"Hello, children," said a short, balding man, stepping slightly away from the bustle of setup and sweeping his gaze across the bleachers. "My name is Mr. Lampi. I work for a welding company in Jyväskylä. Can anyone tell me what welding is? Yes, you—in the red."

His words were slow and clear, the tone and cadence of a children's television host. Down in front, the kid he'd pointed to stood up and answered. "It's when you stick metal together by melting it."

"Correct," Mr. Lampi said gravely. "Thank you. Ordinarily, children, my job is to fix pipes and build buildings. Sometimes I repair machines. But today, I am going to teach you about something called termiittiä."

It was a word Aino didn't know, and judging from the looks on the faces around me, she wasn't alone. I glanced at Ante—

Huh.

Ante's face was bright, almost wild with delight.

"Before we begin, I must ask you to make a very serious promise. It's so serious, in fact, that I am going to ask you to make this promise more than once, to each of the people around you. Are you ready?"

The entire gym seemed to hold its breath.

"The promise is this: I will never, ever be silly with termiittiä. I will never play with it. I will not use it for games, or pranks, or just because I am upset with someone. Termiittiä is a grownup thing, and I will treat it with the utmost respect. That is a lot of words, but you can promise using just the short version, which is I promise I will never use termiittiä in a way I know Mr. Lampi would not like. Okay? Promise, now, please, to the person in front of you and the person behind you and the people beside you—everyone whose hand you can shake without getting up out of your seat."

The air filled with voices—nervous voices, excited voices, uncertain voices, curious voices.

Dynamite? I wondered. But no—Aino knew the word for dynamite—dynamiitti.

"Thank you," said Mr. Lampi, as the voices died down. "Now please—look around. Is there anyone next to you who did not promise to you? We cannot proceed unless everyone has promised."

A moment of weighing silence.

"Remember that, please. You have promised, not just once, but four or five or six times. Look again at every one of the people you have promised to. If you break your word, you are breaking your word with all of them."

Another silence, more somber this time.

"Remember, there may come a day when you have yourself a fiendishly good idea, and all you need to pull it off is a little bit of termiittiä. When that happens, you will remember me, Mr. Lampi, standing there with a frown, shaking my head. And you will remember all of the people you have promised to, and then you will either be good, or you will be bad. Which do you think you will be?"

"Good!" shouted hundreds of voices—mostly the younger ones. Ante's lips didn't move, and neither did mine.

It has to be a weapon, or something. Something dangerous.

"All right, then, let us begin. First, I need you to remember two numbers. The first number is twenty-seven, and twenty-seven is the first number because it is smaller, and because it goes with the letter A. A is for alumiini, and what is the number which goes with A?"

"Twenty-seven."

"Good. The second number is eighty, and it goes with the letter R, for ruoste. What is the number which goes with R?"

"Eighty."

"Good. So we have alumiini, twenty-seven, and we have ruoste, eighty."

I frowned. Aluminum and rust?

"So now I will come over here to the table, and I will show you my ingredients, which will not surprise you. This first bucket is full of aluminum dust—do you see? It is the same metal that makes up your soda cans, only it has been chopped up and ground down into a fine powder. This powder is very very bad for you to breathe, so you see I am putting a mask on, as you will also do if you must ever work with aluminum dust."

"Ante," I whispered. "What is this?"

"Shhh," he whispered back, not looking at me, his eyes wide with anticipation. "You'll see."

"—bucket is filled with rust, just like you would find on any old piece of iron lying around. When you leave to practice with your families, you will talk more about where you can find these things, aluminum dust and iron rust. Now, I do not have time to careful-count out twenty-seven measures of aluminum and eighty more measures of rust, so I am going to do a simple thing which you might have to do, if circumstances call for it. I am going to grab one measure of aluminum, and three measures of rust, because twenty-seven times three is eighty-one, and that is very close to eighty, yes?"

As he talked, Mr. Lampi was using a scoop and a digital scale to measure out each of the two powders, dumping both of them into a large, metal bowl. He then picked up a large fork and began to stir.

"I stir, stir, stir, many times. Let's say one hundred and seven times, twenty-seven for the aluminum and eighty for the rust. It is very important to stir until it is all one single, smooth color—no bright silver or dark red, okay? And once I have stirred one hundred and seven times, what we have left is called termiittiä. Say that word for me, please."

"Termiittiä," chorused the students.

Mr. Lampi placed the bowl down onto one of the tables. "Now, for sure by now you are asking yourself, what is termiittiä? I will tell you, now. Termiittiä is fire. It is one of the hottest fires you will ever see. It is a fire so hot that you must not look straight at it, or you might hurt your eyes. It is a fire so hot that it will burn straight through this bowl, straight through this table, and down through the floor—except that, as you see, I have this tray full of sand beneath, to catch it."

He nudged the tray with his foot. "This sand is very important," he said. "It is part of a rule: never put anything underneath termiittiä, unless you want that thing to be destroyed. Just like your father's rifle, yes? Never point a rifle at anything you are unwilling to kill—this is the same rule, except for termiittiä the dangerous direction is down."

Mr. Lampi reached into his pocket and pulled out something I couldn't make out, from a distance.

"Now, there is one other thing you must know about termiittiä. Termiittiä, my children, is sleepy. It does not like to wake up. Watch—"

There was a collective gasp as he pointed the object in his hand at the bowl of dust and pulled a trigger, igniting a narrow cone of bright, hot flame. Several people flinched, and one of the younger kids shrieked.

"You see?" he said calmly, sweeping the flame back and forth across the surface of the powder. "I am burning the termiittiä with all of my might, burning and burning, but nothing is happening. That is because you need an extra special spark to wake up your termiittiä. And so, we have one more ingredient, which is magnesium."

He held up his other hand, and I thought I could see a glint of something silvery.

"Now, children, prepare yourselves, for magnesium is bright and termiittiä is bright also. You must squint, hold your eyes almost all the way shut, and if it is too bright, you must look away. See how I am putting on special sunglasses? I am much closer to the light than you, and so I need the sunglasses to be safe."

Again the feeling that the whole room was holding its breath, eight hundred pairs of eyes locked firmly on the bowl of dull red powder. Mr. Lampi stuck the piece of silvery metal into it like a wick and stepped back, holding his lighter out at arms' length.

And then, without any further warning—

HSSSSSSSSSS—

FWOOOOOM.

I lowered my arm from where it had instinctively flown up to cover my face.

"Ah, yes," said Mr. Lampi, sounding artificially sad. "It is as I had feared. Look."

Using a pair of tongs, he picked up the remains of the bowl—a warped, still-glowing ring of twisted, dripping metal. He held it up, spun slowly around so that each of us could see it—could see him through it.

"And of course, our poor table, as well," he said, gesturing.

The smell was beginning to spread, now, a mixture of smoke and plastic fumes. Down in the front row, someone was coughing. There was a hole in the small folding table about the size of my head, as if the bowlful of powder had turned into lava and dropped straight down.

What do you mean, 'as if'? That's exactly what happened.

"You understand, yes, why it was important to me that you promise?" Mr. Lampia asked. "That you will not play with termiittiä? It is a powerful tool, and a dangerous tool. Imagine what happens, if you are not careful, and it falls on your foot."

Another hiss as several hundred children sucked in their breath.

"But it is an important tool, as well, and one which you might someday need. A cupful of termiittiä on the outside of an unshielded hyönteisten alus—"

Insect vessel?

Oh. Bug fighter.

"—more than enough to disable it. You can use termiittiä to cut metal, burn away locks, open doors, destroy vehicles and weapons—raise your hand if you remember Iowa, in the United States? The oatmeal factory?"

Hands went up, and I felt a tickle of vertigo, as if the world had tilted by half a degree. He'd used the same tone of voice a teacher might have used to say remember Tiananmen Square?

"It was termiittiä that the American resistance used to destroy that factory."

Mr. Lampi continued to lecture as my mind—slid. Somehow, the mention of the factory mission—a mission I had probably been on, all things considered—that brought the surreality of the whole situation into focus, broke the spell of the balding man's calm, reassuring voice.

"Ante," I whispered. "Is this normal?"

"What do you mean?"

"Learning about—about how to make bombs."

The boy gave me a flat, inscrutable look. "It's the Common Endeavor," he said. "No civilians. Six million soldiers."

But bombs?

I couldn't make the words come out, and after a moment, Ante shrugged. "Last week it was driving lessons," he said. "The week before that, field medicine. Next week, who knows?"

I looked down across the bleachers, at the seven- and eight- and nine-year-olds still riveted, fixated on the small, balding man as he held up a pair of Ziploc bags—one about the size of a sandwich, the other smaller than a playing card, both already full of powder. In front of him, on the table, were a handgun and a laptop.

But they're just kids, a part of me wanted to say.

I squeezed my eyes shut as my brain threw up a memory—the same memory, the memory I returned to over and over again, the pool and the cages and the people trapped inside.

"Sam!" cried a young boy, his voice breaking. "Sam, don't worry! It's going to be okay! I'm here, Sam! I'm not going to leave you!"

I remembered the boy's face. He couldn't have been more than eight or nine years old. The same age as Jordan.

And now he was dead.

I gritted my teeth, holding my head still against a mounting pressure to do something, to get up, to shout, to move. It was too much to contain, too much to digest—felt like it might melt its way out of me at any second, burning down through the bleachers beneath me.

These people—

They were serious.

They weren't just plugging their ears and getting on with their lives and hoping it would all go away. They were turning their entire culture on its head in a frantic attempt to ready themselves—to ready their children—to arm their children against the coming storm. And this was just school—who knew what the rest of them were up to, out in the lähiö?

And yet—

At the same time—

I hated the thought, hated myself for thinking it, but I didn't let that stop me—

What good is a bunch of nine-year-olds who know how to make pipe bombs, against an enemy who levels whole cities?

The first thought established the pattern, and a dozen more came nipping at its heels, the words falling into place like puzzle pieces.

What good were cars, against spaceships?

What good were rifles, against force fields?

What good was a militia, if the Yeerks had all the nukes?

What was the point in a common endeavor, when the enemy could be anyone, anywhere—could slip in unnoticed at any time, and cut off the resistance at the knees?

Yeah, well. What's the point of giving five idiot teenagers the ability to turn into horses?

I felt my body go still.

I mean, it's the same thing, isn't it? said my inner Marco—said the part of me that liked to pretend it was Marco. You work with what you've got. Sometimes it's enough, and sometimes it isn't. That's all there is to it.

I opened my eyes again, looking down at the kids in the bleachers below me. Looking sideways at Ante, whose face was still flushed with excitement, his eyes locked on Mr. Lampi below like he was some kind of celebrity.

Sisu, I thought. I guess they're not any better off NOT knowing how to make pipe bombs.

Except—

Except when I saw that look on Ante's face—that look of pure excitement, of eagerness, like he couldn't wait to get his hands on some termiittiä and get started—

They weren't ready.

These kids. These kids were not ready. And backwoods redneck military expertise was not going to make them ready, but it might make them think they were, and that would be ten times worse—

Hey, check your privilege. We can't all watch a legendary Andalite war-prince get eaten alive on day one.

But that was the thing—even with that lesson, I had still screwed up. Overreached. I had gotten Melissa and her family killed by thinking I was ready when I wasn't.

Okay, but would they really be better off with nothing? What's worse, a little overconfidence, or a total lack of resources?

I wasn't sure. I didn't know.

I fight the Yeerks, I had said, to the people in the cages. To Sam and his brother, along with all the rest. You fight them as well, and for that I honor you.

I had said that, and then I'd left them all behind.

And now they were dead.

I held still, for a moment—mentally, emotionally—let the echoes of the thought settle before trying to respond.

You can't save everybody, Rachel.

But it felt like I should. Like I should at least try. Like I should have something to say to these people, stuck way out here in the suburbs, trying to prepare for a war they barely understood. It felt like I should do something about them. Do something for them. Like I shouldn't just sit there and watch as they fumbled around blindly in the dark, shouldn't let them waste their time and effort—

For now, nothing is your resp—

Yeah, yeah. But still.

I let out a breath, shook my head, tried to set aside the confused, jumbled tangle of my thoughts.

Just for today. For one day, you can wait, and watch, and do nothing.

A sudden hush fell over the crowd, and my eyes snapped open.

While I'd been thinking, Mr. Lampi's demonstration had continued. He had burned a hole straight through the laptop, had almost completely melted the handgun, and had cut through the surface of the table in two more places.

But that wasn't why everyone had gone quiet.

Oh, no.

Another adult had emerged from the doors at the end of the court, a grim look on his face as he pushed a rolling, rectangular cart in front of him. On that cart was a wire-frame cage with a thick, black top, just like the cages in Cassie's barn back in Ventura.

And in that cage was an animal.

A vole, a rat, a possum of some kind—I wasn't sure. Couldn't tell, from this far away. Might not have known even if I'd been up close. It was definitely a rodent, though—a big one, almost the size of a Corgi.

No, no, no, that's too much, too far, don't—

"Your attention, please," called out Mr. Lampi—uselessly, since every person in the room was already transfixed. "We come now to a sad, but necessary part of the lesson. For you see, it is not quite enough for you to promise with words. It is important that you know that termiittiä is dangerous. Not just with your head, but with your heart also—that you feel the danger in your bones."

A rising clamor—expressions of dismay—

"You must watch," said Mr. Lampi.

Shouts of fear, of anguish—several students had leapt to their feet, were being held back by others around them. I felt my own jaw hanging open in shock, felt the blood draining out of my face—

What was it you were just thinking, about having to watch Elfangor die?

Mr. Lampi lifted a pint-sized bag of dull-red dust and placed it on top of the cage as the shouts grew louder, wilder, poked a magnesium wick into the plastic as even some of the adults turned away, looking sick. Inside the bars, the animal was terrified—quivering, squeaking, turning circles, looking for some place to hide—

"Remember," said Mr. Lampi.

There was a burst of light too bright to look at—a shower of sparks—a hundred strangled cries—

I blinked, trying to clear away the afterimage as the sudden horror gave way to confusion.

The animal was fine.

The cage was fine.

There was a molten puddle in the middle of the black top, slowly dimming from white to orange to red.

A hundred voices stuttered into silence.

"This is a cage that I built myself, for this lesson," said Mr. Lampi, his voice still calm and slow. "It is made with a secret that I will not teach you. You do not know how to build a thing which termiittiä cannot destroy. This animal is alive because I chose to save it. If it were not for me—if it had been just you, and the animal, and the termiittiä—"

He broke off, shrugged, reached over to the ruined bowl from the first burn and held it up. "Remember the power of termiittiä," he said. "Remember what it did to this metal bowl. Remember what it would have done to this poor animal—what it would do to you. To your face. To your hands. To your genitals. Look at this."

He held the bowl up higher. "Repeat after me," he said. "Termiittiä is not a toy."

Nothing. Stunned silence. Not a single person spoke.

"Good," said Mr. Lampi, with a dry little chuckle. "I see that the lesson is learned."

Taking a deep breath, I locked the door to the teachers' lounge, turned off the light, and groped my way back toward the space I had cleared on the floor by the sofa. I lay down, arranging the throw pillows and the duvet around my head.

Sisu.

I began to demorph, ears alert for any sign that someone was coming. The lounge had been unlocked and empty, the upper floor abandoned with everyone else down in the gym, but there were still eleven minutes left in the break between first and second period, and for all I knew someone was going to come looking for a cup of coffee or—

"Cassie?" I croaked, my heart suddenly in my throat. "Cassie, oh my god, it's—"

And then my brain caught up, recognized the dirty green t-shirt, the baggy jeans, the shoes so scuffed and muddy it was hard to tell they'd ever been white. I felt a pain in my gut like I'd been shot, felt my knees go soft and rubbery.

"Jake?" I asked, my voice trembling. "Is that you?"

She—he—the face turned to me, tears glistening in the moonlight, skin already fading from brown to peach, hair lengthening and softening.

"Hi, Rachel," Jake said hollowly, his voice still halfway hers.

"Jake, what—what—"

I couldn't finish the sentence, didn't even know what the rest of it might be. For one moment—one single, precious, beautiful moment, she had been alive again. I could still taste it—how possible it had felt, how reasonable and believable, of course she'd made it out alive, had come to find us—

Anger and misery fought over the steering wheel as I stared at my cousin.

"I'm sorry," Jake whispered, burying his face in his hands. "I just—I just—I have to talk to her, sometimes."

I didn't know what to say. I felt frozen, stretched, pulled taut between the vast weight of my own grief and the sudden horror I was feeling, a horror so neatly summed up by those two little words, 'have to.'

And then—

—just then, as if that wasn't enough—

—that's when my brain decided to make the connection, to realize that I had Sara's morph tucked away in my collection, that she wasn't fully gone, that some part of her could be brought back, and then I had to wrench my thoughts away from that option, focus everything I had on my determination not to do it, or I might have fallen to pieces right then and there—

"Hei," said Ante, as I stepped up beside him, his breath making little clouds in the cold morning air.

"Hei," I replied.

And then nothing—nothing for the next twenty minutes, as the teachers explained the safety procedures, handed out the materials, and watched us mix and bag termiittiä.

I could really get used to this not-bothering-people thing.

I had come out of my morph-hallucination gasping, the muscles in my legs knotting and seizing. It was worse than before—with how quickly I'd remorphed earlier that morning, I'd spent less than two minutes total in my real body, which meant that as far as my muscles were concerned, I'd had two seizures in about three minutes. I needed time to rest and recover or a third morph might end up actually tearing something.

Unfortunately, I'd had no idea what kind of trouble Ante might kick up if I didn't come back for second period, so time to rest and recover had ended up being about five minutes. I'd massaged out the cramps as best I could, taken some of the pills Sofia had given me, stolen a banana from a bowl of fruit in the teachers' lounge, and put Aino's body back on before rejoining the other kids in the parking lot outside the gym.

Now, I had a little more than an hour and a half before it happened again.

I'd gone around in circles for a while, asking myself a bunch of useless questions like how and why and what, exactly and for how long? But ultimately, those questions had gotten me nowhere, so I'd fallen back to nuts and bolts.

One. If this was going to happen every time—and it looked like it would; I hadn't tried morphing into some other body yet but the thing was only happening when I got back into my own body, so I didn't see what difference that would make—

If this was going to happen every time, then I had way less flexibility in how I used the morphing power. If I needed a wide, flat, safe place every time I demorphed—if I was going to be, for all intents and purposes, fully unconscious every time I demorphed—

Two. I needed to find out whether these visions were real in any meaningful sense. The second and third had both been in private—I would need to talk to the others, to Jake and the rest, assuming that their own resurrections hadn't wiped out the memories.

But the first one—the incident in the grocery store—that might have made the news. It wasn't for sure; if I couldn't find any record of it that didn't prove that it hadn't happened. But if there was some public record—

I needed a computer, and some time to search.

Three…

Well. Assuming the visions were real—

It wasn't exactly seeing the future. Everything I'd witnessed had already happened, to some other version of me. There wasn't any way for me to win the lottery or prevent an assassination or any other shenanigans like that.

But all of those things had happened in my future. They'd happened to a Rachel who was older than me, who'd lived through everything I'd lived through and then some. There was knowledge in there that I could use, and perspective, too—already, my relationship to what had happened in Ventura was changing in response to what I'd seen in that brief, horrible glimpse of Jake. If these weren't just random fever dreams—

—or worse, some kind of low-key mind control—

Yeah, okay, but if they weren't that—

Then I wanted more. Wanted all of it, in fact—wanted to see as much as I could of this alternate-timeline Rachel, to get as much as I could out of the things she'd seen, the missions she'd been on, her experiences, her mistakes.

Which brought me to four:

I really couldn't be sure that this wasn't killing me.

It was one thing if it was just muscle cramps. But the nosebleeds had me scared. And I was no expert, but I thought I'd heard that grand mal seizures left cumulative damage, got worse over time.

Which meant—

I don't know why you keep going 'which meant' when there are only two options and it's obvious which one you're going to pick. You don't have enough info to make, like, an informed decision, and you're not gonna get that info way out here in a Finnish suburb.

Well, that wasn't entirely true. I could go back to Koskinen, see if he was willing to run some brain scans, maybe get a neurologist colleague to take a look.

Come to think of it, why hasn't Koskinen followed up? He was there the first time.

No, that was putting too much on him. He'd sent the medication, after all. He was probably just acting on the completely reasonable assumption that I'd contact him, if it kept happening.

Which I probably would do, sooner or later.

Only—

What if it turns out it is hurting you? What if it's lethal, or crippling?

Say I had—I dunno—twenty morphs left in me. Say Koskinen told me that, and I believed him.

What then?

I wasn't sure. I especially wasn't sure in the world where the visions were real, and there was a tradeoff between how-long-I-stayed-alive and how-much-information-I-could-recover. There was more to this war than just me, after all, and it's possible the old Rachel knew enough that it was literally worth dying for, if I could pass it along to Garrett or Jake or the others.

Plus, if they'd brought me back once, they could do it again, right?

That's a lot of ifs all stacked up on top of each other, my inner Marco observed.

Fine. I wouldn't make plans—at least, not the kinds of plans that meant locking yourself into a course of action in advance.

You mean like going ahead and morphing back into Aino's body when you could've just left and walked back to the apartment?

I clenched my feet as hard as I could, a trick I'd picked up at family dinners where I couldn't get away with clenching my fists.

What was done was done. Every period was forty-five minutes, with a fifteen minute break, and school let out at 12:45 under Common Endeavor rules. It was 9:30 now—if I demorphed and remorphed at 10:45, that would be enough to take me to the end of the school day. Two more times through the ringer probably wasn't enough to kill or cripple me, and if it was, then honestly I was already screwed.

One of the teachers blew a whistle, signaling the end of prep time, and Ante and I gathered our bags of termiittiä and lined up with the rest of the children. Our group had six testing stations and about fifty kids, so it wouldn't take long to rotate everybody through.

"Hei, Rachel," said Ante suddenly, making me jump a little bit.

"Mmm?"

"How totally awesome is this?"

I glanced over at the older boy, his eyes still bright and eager. Up ahead, the first of the students had lit her magnesium, and the brilliant light cast half of Ante's face in flickering shadow.

"I know, right?" I agreed, trying inject some enthusiasm into my voice. "Real Fight Club."

Ante smiled, looking almost wolfish for a second, and then turned his attention back to the testing station, where two more kids were lighting up their bags. One of them burned a lot brighter and longer than the other, but from where I was in line, I couldn't tell if they'd had a better mixture or just a bigger batch.

Eventually, it was our turn.

"Ante Niska," said the teacher, making a check mark on a clipboard. "And…?"

"Rachel Koskinen," said Ante. "My cousin."

"Who will sign her receipt?" the teacher asked.

"My mother," said Ante. "Sofia Niska."

The teacher nodded, making another note. "Bags on the scale, please."

We dumped our dozen-or-so bags into the silvery bowl.

"Almost three kilograms," said the teacher. "Very good. Remove the bags you wish to test."

We each reached in and grabbed a bag.

"Two point three seven kilograms," the teacher said, tearing off a strip of paper and handing it to Ante. "Have your mother sign this and bring it back tomorrow."

"We're keeping this stuff?" I whispered, as we fed the other bags into our pockets and placed the two we'd removed atop two cinderblock stands.

Ante shrugged. "We can't use it in an emergency if we don't have it."

"You can't burn your house down with it, either," I shot back.

"We're not stupid, you know," Ante bit out, his tone suddenly sharp. "Maybe the kids in Tampere fuck around, but out here we know not to shoot ourselves in the foot. Besides, you can't light it without magnesium, and they're not giving us that."

It was true. The teachers were unspooling lengths of flattened magnesium ribbon from a single, central roll, and sticking them into the bags themselves before handing over the lighters.

"Besides, you're missing the point," he said, after we'd burned our bags and were walking back to clean up our supplies. "It's not about the termiittiä."

"What do you mean?"

He held up one of his bags. "Look at this stuff. Rust and metal. Completely harmless unless you get it up over seventeen hundred degrees. And even if you do, it doesn't explode, it just burns. You couldn't make a bomb out of it. It's not even a restricted substance. Mr. Lampi probably bought the ingredients at a hardware supply store. And every parent in the lähiö is going to collect it as soon as they get home tonight, and lock it up tight."

Ante raised an eyebrow at me, and I shook my head. "I don't get it."

"It's a game," he said. "A play. Charades. For the little ones. It's not real."

"Still don't get it."

"The little ones, they're looking around, they see Mommy and Daddy stressed, arguing—scared, even. Half the grownups aren't working their regular jobs. School is fucked. There are all kinds of weird new rules, new emergency drills. You hear about Ventura and Masaki on the news, hear people saying that the aliens are coming, that it's the end of the world. This thing with the termiittiä—"

He shrugged. "If you ask me, it's a stuffed animal. A security blanket. The grownups, they're thinking, what can we do to give these kids a sense of control, stop them from going out of their minds with anxiety. Keep them calm. And from their point of view, this stuff is only a little bit more dangerous than building campfires, which all the little ones already know how to do. It's—it's theater."

He fell silent, his face flushed a little, and I realized that this was the first time he'd—I don't know—let go? The first time he'd said more than a dozen words in a row in front of me, let me peek behind the curtain.

"Plus," he said, more softly this time, "they really do want supplies on hand everywhere in the lähiö, and you know how it is when they tell you not to touch something. This way, it's not—tempting. It's not forbidden or new. It's just like a hammer or a saw."

He had a point. Certainly if this had been a lesson in an American school, with some central, guarded cache of termiittiä and a bunch of teachers treating the students like rabid monkey thieves, I'd have ended up spending the next two days trying to talk Jake and Marco out of sneaking in to steal some just on general principle.

In fact, now that I thought about it—

"Ante," I said, reaching out to catch the older boy's sleeve. "Did you steal some magnesium?"

He grinned, looking for a split second exactly like Marco. "Who said anything about stealing? Konstit on monet."

The ways are many.

Okay, so Ante hadn't stolen any magnesium, but he definitely had some.

Whatever. Not my problem.

We spent the next few minutes cleaning, and then we just sort of lounged around until the teachers blew their whistles, signaling the end of the period. The crowd began to move, oozing around the building toward the fields and the playground. Break lasted about fifteen minutes, and then the whistles sounded again, sending everyone to third period.

"We have Classical Education first," said Ante. "Follow me."

Classical Education, as it turned out, was just regular school, the idea apparently being that little doses of math and science and language arts would keep the students from falling too far behind, in the event that the whole interstellar war thing sorted itself out. For half an hour, we churned through a series of short test questions, and then the last fifteen minutes were spent huddled together in small groups, swapping answers and occasionally asking the teacher a question.

Then it was break time again, with everyone flowing down the hall toward the stairs.

"I'll be there in a bit," I said to Ante, jerking my head in the direction of the bathroom.

"No niin," he replied. "If you can't find me, next period starts in room two-twenty-one. Ms. Olsson."

I pushed my way against the crowd, passing the bathroom, looking for a classroom with no one in it. Finding one, I slipped inside, nudging the door shut and waiting until the sound of passing students had faded to silence.

All right. Here goes.

I could feel my heartrate rising again, sweat beading on my forehead as I pulled a couple of stray bookbags together in a corner, making a barrier to hide me a little if someone just happened to stick their head in. Lying down behind it, I closed my eyes and concentrated—

"—it was only a few days later that the first Pemalites started to get sick," said Erek.

"Biological weapons," I said softly.

"Yes. It had been the Howlers' first move, as it turned out—they'd seeded the atmosphere with a plague that took weeks to incubate. The rest of it—the burning, the killing, the torture—that was just because they liked it."

I clenched my jaw, clamping down on the question I wanted to ask—

Why didn't you fight BACK?

From what Erek had told us, sitting on the grass next to Tobias's hospital bed, the Howlers hadn't been more technologically advanced than the Pemalites. They hadn't been smarter, or faster, or better equipped. They'd just been more brutal, more relentless, the Pemalites unwilling to do anything but fall back, defend, and fall back again as each layer of their defenses was breached. If the Pemalites had just unlocked their army of invincible robots—

But as I looked around at the park, at the hundreds of dogs barking and gamboling in the golden light, I could also sort of see it. The way in which turning the Chee into weapons wouldn't have been an answer, would have just been defeat in a different form. It wasn't something I would have been able to notice, before the morph-swap, except maybe in the vague sense of 'this is a Cassie thing, I guess.' But now—

The Pemalites had built the Chee because they'd wanted friends. Not to handle menial or repetitive tasks, not to make manufacturing more efficient, not to solve intractable problems or answer deep questions about the nature of the universe or any of the reasons why humans might someday invent robots. They'd done it just for the joy of it. To have someone to talk to, to share with—to bring more total happiness into the univer—

"RRGGGGHHHHHH!"

It was worse, this time—way, way worse. My teeth actually ached from how tightly my jaw had clenched, the muscles in my face twitching and throbbing. I had pulls in both calves, now, and an uneasy twinge between my shoulder blades. There was blood on my tongue, and for a moment I was worried I had gotten it all over my shirt—

Don't touch it. Don't touch it, don't move, don't do anything. Just breathe.

I lay there for two full minutes, counting hippopotamuses, waiting for my overworked muscles to relax.

They're real, my brain insisted. Those visions are real. There's too much detail, too much stuff I could never make up. That was the sanctuary in Washington, where you and Garrett went to pick up Tobias and David—

My thoughts stalled, sputtered to a halt.

David?

Who the hell was David?

I had no idea, and yet, as I dipped back into the memory, I could feel my own awareness of his existence. Knew that he was a kid. Knew that he was there, in the sanctuary, though I couldn't see him—knew that I had known, at the time, that he was somewhere nearby.

Okay, fine, whatever. Is that worth having an epileptic fit to find out?

A long, gathering silence—

It was like the inside of my mind was made up of a dozen different schoolchildren, and eleven of them were now staring in disbelief at the one that had just spoken. Were crowding around it, menacingly, shooting it withering looks.

Yes! Yes! Yes, it's worth it! Obviously! I just found out that the Chee have an underground sanctuary in Washington, D.C.! I didn't know that a minute ago! Koskinen doesn't know that! It's possible none of the rest of them know—I don't know how many of us were killed, or who knew what, or whose memories got preserved! What if the next vision is—

Fake? the twelfth voice interrupted.

My thoughts jerked to a halt again.

What if the next vision is fake? What if you're just going crazy? Or worse—what if this is some kind of trap? What if someone is doing this to you?

I took in a deep breath, sat up slowly, trying not to strain my overworked muscles.

It didn't make sense for it to be a trap. In order for it to be a trap, somebody—

Visser Three?

—would've had to expect that they could manipulate some future outcome by way of making me think that I was remembering important information through an incredibly painful and suspicious channel. That was beyond James Bond levels of ridiculous—anyone with that much power, anyone who could just insert thoughts directly into my brain—there would have to be easier ways for them to achieve their goal than that, wouldn't there?

Okay, fine. What about the insanity possibility, then?

That—

That, I couldn't rule out.

Not really.

Even given the deep, rich, consistent complexity of the memories—when you got right down to it, it was just an apparent deep rich consistent complexity, a perceived deep rich consistent complexity. If I was losing my mind, who's to say I wasn't just imagining that it all made sense, dream-logic style?

Well, there are easy ways to check that—

Yeah, there were, but they required someone I could talk to, someone I could trust. They needed Jake, or Marco, or Tobias, or Ax.

Sofia? Koskinen? Ante?

The other eleven parts of me laughed.

The internet, then.

The incident with the cinnamon buns. I could still check that out. If it had really happened—yeah, odds were pretty good there would've been news stories about it.

What about right now?

I rubbed my forehead. It was the same choice it had been, with basically the same information I'd had the other two times. Only now I knew for sure that it was getting worse—

But is it getting worse because it's getting worse, or just because of how little recovery time you're getting? Is it getting MORE worse than you'd expect just from having crazy intense muscle spasms every five minutes?

I wasn't sure.

But one more probably wouldn't kill me.

Are you sure?

No.

But one more probably wouldn't kill me.

‹Let me just make sure I heard you right,› Marco said, all the while continuing to outwardly ignore me as he whittled the stick he was holding down to a point. ‹You want me to cut your fucking ARM? OFF?›

‹My morphing armor arm, yeah,› I said, picking myself up off the ground. Wiping the sweat off my forehead, I started my next set of jumping jacks.

‹I just—bear with me, please, it just seems really important to be extremely clear, here, because, like, I could see there being some kind of tragic misunderstanding, if it turns out later that there was some joke I was missing—›

‹I'm not joking. I'm talking about my literal arm, and you literally cutting it off.›

‹See, there's that problem again, because people do this thing with the word 'literally'—›

‹Marco.›

‹So what happens if there ARE Chee hiding in the bushes?›

‹Do we need a plan for that? It's not like they're going to hurt us.› Finishing the set, I knelt and dug my knuckles into the dirt, counting seconds of rest.

‹I'd rather not lose the shredder, though. Maybe an Andalite morph?›

‹If we're gonna play it off like we spontaneously got mad at each other, it's a lot easier for you to pull out a gun than to spend a minute and a half morphing,› I pointed out, as I straightened my legs and began to do pushups.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four.

Five.

Six.

Seven.

‹Do you have a better solution?› I asked. ‹A better quick solution? I mean, if we're actually going to do this, we need to get the ball rolling.›

Sixteen.

Seventeen.

Eighteen.

Nineteen.

‹Marco? Are you still there?›

‹Sorry,› he said, as I finished my set and rolled over onto my back, chest heaving. ‹My brain has to run through all the dumb sentences like 'but that's going to hurt' and such, before I can get to the rest of it. Variations on the theme of 'what the fuck,' and so forth. 'Are you a genius, or just insane.' You know, filler.›

‹Porque no los dos?› I asked, as I threaded my fingers behind my head and extended my legs straight out, heels six inches off the ground.

For a long time, Marco didn't answer. Then—

‹Hey, Rachel.›

‹Mmm?›

‹Why'd you come to me with this, and not—›

"How far?" I asked, tugging on my hat as we pushed through the double doors and out into the sunshine. "How long until we get back?"

"Fifty minutes, out and back," Ante said. "Maybe an hour, but no longer. We've got to be back in time for the Territorial Forces at fifteen, anyway."

It was maybe 1:20, 1:30. I had ended up back in morph again, more as a result of sheer inertia than I really wanted to admit—

At least I actually got fifteen minutes of rest, this time.

I'd demorphed in another empty classroom, and then snuck into a bathroom stall in my own body before remorphing and joining the others in the cafeteria. I had until 3:05, give or take, which meant I'd have about half an hour after we returned to find a safe spot.

Close, but doable.

We'd finished eating and were now on our way to 'past the fence,' the entrance to which was apparently all the way at the other end of the street. It was warmer than it had been during second period, but still cold; I held my jacket closed against the breeze and found myself wishing I'd brought gloves. It was weird—the three Finnish boys were fine, and Aino had grown up in the cold, but somehow my native Californian sensitivity was leaking through even in morph.

"Aleksy said somebody from the YEM was coming with them," Elias chirped. "With the Territorial Forces, I mean. His cousin in Jyväskylä saw them yesterday, the same group that's coming here."

"Aleksy's full of shit," asserted Ante. "The YEM aren't going to send an agent out here to the suburbs, and if they did they wouldn't show themselves in front of a bunch of random kids."

"YEM?" I asked.

Ante shot me a withering look and then turned to Juhani, his hands spread in mock helplessness. "See what I mean?" he said.

Juhani looked back and forth between the two of us and shrugged.

Gonna be hard for you to see anything once I poke your stupid eyes out—

"Yrks en mano," said Elias, interrupting my fantasy. "The resistance group?"

"The alleged resistance group," Juhani cut in. "The so-called resistance group, that nobody's ever actually proved exists."

"That's because they're covert," Ante shot back. "Wouldn't be a good resistance group if they were mucking around on Instagram, would they?"

"Shitsberries," Juhani sniffed. "I guess that proves Joulupukki's real, too."

"Ante really wants them to be real," Elias offered helpfully.

"Suksi vittuun, Elias," Ante growled.

"I'm just saying," Juhani continued loftily. "You want to say Aleksy's full of shit, but then you turn around and talk YEM like some kind of Illuminati truther—"

"Enough!" Ante snapped.

There was a moment of silence, during which the red slowly drained out of Ante's face and Elias and Juhani did a C+ job of stifling their laughter.

"Well, this was fun," I said dryly. "What are we going to talk about for the other forty-nine minutes?"

Between movies, video games, and my own first-hand experience, I'd probably heard the sound at least a thousand times before. You'd think it would be familiar. Routine, almost. The sort of thing you could take in stride.

I mean, they talk about desensitization, right?

But coming out of the blue, with no warning—

Clack-CLACK.

I froze.

"Don't move, Rachel."

Yeah, thanks, I heard you the first time.

But the smartass part of my brain was all by itself, was barely even registering inside my own head, let alone coming anywhere near my mouth. The rest of me was immobile, trembling, like I'd grabbed onto a live wire.

"Keep your hands low. Keep them out."

There were two more quiet clicks, one from the outcropping above the shallow ravine, where Juhani had disappeared a minute ago, and one from in front as Ante reemerged from the undergrowth, a long hunting rifle pointed straight at my chest. He held it level, steady, his head tilted slightly to the side as he walked slowly forward.

He held it like he knew how to use it.

What is this? I wanted to ask. But despite everything I'd been through, despite the fact that I'd faced death a dozen times already—

For some reason, my mouth was completely dry.

These weren't Yeerks. This wasn't a battle. These were kids, and this was not supposed to be happening.

"We're going to ask you some questions," Ante said, his voice flat and serious. It sounded just like Jake, that voice—like Jake when he'd talked Illim right out of Tidwell's head. "Nod if you understand."

I nodded.

"We're a kilometer and a half away from the nearest house. People hunt in these woods all the time. A couple of gunshots on a Friday afternoon—nobody would question it. Nobody would even remember hearing it. Nod again."

I nodded.

"Where are you from?"

"T—Tampere," I said, my voice hoarse.

"Wrong," said Ante, and a chill ran down my spine.

"Tampere," I said again, sinking myself into Aino's memories, as deep as I could go. "I live at 17 Satamakatu, on the fifth floor, I go to school at—"

"Wrong," Ante repeated, cutting me off. He tightened his grip on the rifle, raised the barrel from my chest to point straight at my head.

Strange how much of a difference that makes.

"You are not from Finland," he said. "Obviously. You think Elias and Juhani would point guns at a little girl from Tampere?"

I opened my mouth—

"I wouldn't. Not unless you're planning to tell the truth."

I closed my mouth again.

What were you going to say, just then?

I had absolutely no idea.

"What do you want?" I managed to force out.

"Answers," said Ante. "True ones. I'm going to ask you another question, and if I think you're lying again, I'm going to shoot you in the foot."

What was it you were thinking this morning, about the stakes being so low?

Underneath the shock and confusion, my mind was racing. They were stronger than me, all three—bigger, faster, better positioned. I couldn't even see the other two—Juhani must have been lying behind the grass and shrubs up above, and the clack-CLACK of Elias's shotgun had come from somewhere behind me. I couldn't run. If they shot me and I had to demorph, I'd be helpless. If they kept me here long enough, I'd have to demorph—

"Are you a Controller?" Ante asked.

"No," I said, unable to stop myself from wincing as the word left my mouth, as Ante's finger twitched on the trigger.

It wasn't that I was afraid, exactly. I was, but more than that I was lost.

I'd read somewhere that chess grandmasters are more likely to lose to a total novice than to, like, a chess blue belt, because the novices violate rules and expectations that are so fundamental and basic that the grandmasters have no way to anticipate them, no experience coping with them.

With the Yeerks, I knew all of the possible outcomes—death, torture, infestation. But Ante—

I didn't have a clue what this kid wanted, didn't know how he'd made me, didn't know if he really had made me or if he was just fishing—

"Then you're a morpher," Ante declared. "Yes?"

I sucked in a breath. "What makes you think—"

"If there's some third way that a person who's definitely not from Finland can be walking around in a Finnish girl's body, speaking the Finnish language, then you'd better tell me about it right now."

Well, gee, now that you mention it, there is a third way, let me tell you about the ancient indestructible pacifist dog-loving alien robots that disguise themselves with holograms—

And weirdly, that did it.

I don't know if it was the quick dose of perspective, or the reminder that I'd made it out of worse situations before, or just the sheer ridiculousness of it, some part of my brain conjuring up an image of what Ante's face would look like in that one-in-a-million world where I actually said the words out loud.

But whatever it was, thinking of the Chee snapped me out of it. Loosened up the part of me that had been frozen, pushed the fear and panic back down to manageable levels.

And just like that—because it was obvious, now that I wasn't stuck in fight-or-flight mode—I knew what Ante was up to.

"Yes," I said calmly. "You figured it out. I'm a morpher."

To his credit, the boy took the words in stride—didn't scoff, didn't flinch, didn't lower the rifle.

"Prove it," he said. "Demorph. Now."

"That's going to be complicated."

My mind was racing ahead, now, trying to feel its way through all of the possible moves, weigh all of the possible consequences. Ante—

Ante really wants them to be real.

It was plain as day, now that I knew what I was looking for—was written all over his face—the need, the raw, burning desire, the hopeless, almost romantic longing—for it to be true, for this to be some kind of adventure, for there to be some scrap of traction, some way for him to get his hands on the problem, to actually do something about it instead of just waiting for it to sneak up on him—

The boy who'd set up this ambush was the same one who'd decorated that bedroom. The same one who'd looked on in rapture as his teachers taught him how to mix termiittiä, a boy who'd scoffed at the idea that a secret resistance group would ever come here, but who never doubted for a second that they were out there somewhere else—

Ante had nowhere near enough reason to be pointing a gun at me. It was crazy—wild, wishful thinking—the sort of loose recklessness that would be wrong ninety-nine times out of a hundred.

And yet, here we were.

"Complicated how?" he demanded.

It had only been a couple of seconds, all of that had flashed through my mind in an instant, faster than words, and along with it had come an overwhelming feeling of warmth, of kinship—

This boy was me.

Me, if Visser Three had landed in Finland first—if I'd been stuck out in California for months with nothing but rumors and Grandpa G's old war rifle.

All the way down to the badass posturing, because as far as you know, that's how you're supposed to do it.

"There's something wrong with my morphing," I said bluntly. "I'm having trouble whenever I demorph. I go unconscious, start twitching, flail around for about a minute."

"What? Why?"

"Don't know. It's new."

Ante's eyes shifted, looking at something over my shoulder, then up at the outcropping above us where Juhani was hiding.

"You can ask your uncle if you don't believe me," I added.

"What?"

"I have the pills he prescribed for it in my pocket. They've got his name on them."

Ante's eyes narrowed.

"Oh, and we gave him the morphing power, too."

"What—"

Raised voices—arguing—

"Enough!" came Marco's voice, cutting through the clamor, and then I heard the distant TSEWWWW of the handheld shredder, followed by silence.

I really, really hope that was set on stun.

"No time, not a democracy," Marco continued, his voice muffled by the walls and windows but still clear to the excellent hearing of the raptor morph. "You agreed to that, going in."

His voice was steady, deep, confident. I listened as he gave orders, divvied up tasks, cowed the room full of grownups into something resembling obedience. It was strange—a surreal glimpse into some alternate universe, where Jake hadn't made it out of the Yeerk pool and Marco had inherited the job of fearless leader.

I could see it. He didn't have that—that same warmth, that look that Jake had, like he was staring straight into your soul. That thing where you weren't afraid of his judgments, because his judgments were your judgments, just mirrored back at you.

Marco—

Marco had his own bar. But when it came to getting shit done—

The sliding glass door opened, and he emerged, backpack slung over his shoulder, black shirt tight around his chest, hair all matted and sweaty like Kyle Reese in Terminator.

‹That sounded fun,› I said, standing up from my hiding place behind the bush.

‹You were listening?› he asked, sounding surprised.

‹The whole time,› I answered. ‹This thing has really good hearing.›

I swiveled my head, training my ears on the house, where the others were just now crowding out through the front door, getting into cars. ‹You're not exactly a Jake when it comes to dealing with people, huh?›

He grinned. ‹I'm not exactly a Rachel, either.›

‹Touché. Look, given how that went, you want me to follow—›

I came awake with a strangled cry, muscles spasming, the twin knots on my head throbbing with pain. There were hands holding me down, pressing my arms into the dirt floor of the ravine.

"Onko hän hereillä?"

"Rachel, kuuletko minua?"

I looked back and forth between the two hovering faces, jerked my arms out of their grip and sat up.

"Oletko kunnossa?" asked Elias, his eyes wide with concern.

"Päästä sammakko suustasi," Juhani snapped, sounding irritated. "Hän ei puhu suomea, muistatko?"

"I don't speak Finnish," I croaked, wiping the blood off of my upper lip.

"Are you okay?" Ante asked, stepping around from behind me and crouching down. His accent was thick and heavy, the words sounding as if they were coming out of his nose and the back of his throat rather than his mouth. I almost didn't recognize it as his voice, now that I was hearing it through my own ears rather than Aino's.

"Better than last time, actually," I said, reaching down to massage my legs. "The extra time out of morph made a little bit of a difference."

"Can you walk?"

"In a minute, yeah."

Then my brain caught up to me.

"Wait—you speak English?"

Ante nodded. "Most people do, at least a little," he said. "The younger kids aren't so good with it, but—"

He shrugged. "Best TV is in English. Best movies, too. And Reddit."

I rolled over to one side, preparing to stand up, and he stepped back, offering me a hand.

"Thanks," I said.

Six agonizing seconds later, and I was on my feet, sustainably if not exactly stably. Ante stayed close on one side, and Juhani stepped in on the other.

"This doesn't mean we believe you," Ante said abruptly, after we'd shuffled a few hundred feet toward the lähiö. "You morphing doesn't prove you're not a Controller, or some kind of double agent. Doesn't prove any of the other things you said, either."

"I'm guessing that's why Elias is still behind us with the shotgun?"

There was a short, embarrassed silence.

"Elias, hanki kirottu ase," Ante muttered.

"Haista paska, Ante, et myöskään ajatellut sitä."

Footsteps receding behind us.

"That doesn't prove it either," Ante said.

I would have smirked, but the muscles in my face were too tired. "Just ask your uncle. He can back me up."

"What if you got to him, too? What if he's a part of it?"

"It?"

Ante stopped. "Don't do that," he hissed. "Don't—don't act like—like it's cute."

I stopped too, frowning. There was a strange note of—something—in his voice, something I couldn't quite put my finger on. Resentment, maybe. Pleading, maybe.

Hope?

Whatever it was, I didn't feel like being flippant in response.

"That's fair," I said, and after a moment, he turned and started walking again. "But what are you going to do about it?"

"I don't know," he said simply. "I haven't figured it out yet."

He lapsed into silence, and I followed suit. We walked for maybe twenty minutes, Ante and Juhani on either side of me, Elias behind. The going got easier as we went along, my overworked muscles sagging into a kind of low-energy floppiness. We were almost all the way back to the street when—

"Mitä hän aikoo tehdä?" came Elias's voice. "Aikooko hän muuttaa uudelleen?"

Ante shot me a look. "Are you going to morph again?" he asked.

I shrugged. "Dunno," I said. "Depends. What's the plan?"

"If we go to see the Territorial Forces…you don't speak Finnish. You won't understand anything."

"Do I need to?"

Ante was quiet for a moment, considering. "I can't miss them," he said. "People will notice. I'm—"

"The local fanboy, yeah. I got that."

"Ime paska," he shot back, but there was a hint of a smile around his eyes. I threw him a wink.

"She really does look almost exactly the same," Juhani pointed out. "I don't think—she's only been at school for one day. One morning, really. I don't think anybody would notice if she didn't morph. Not if we're there to vouch."

"A bit harder to explain how she suddenly forgot the language, if anyone tries to talk to her," said Ante.

"Will they?" I asked. "It seems like you guys leave each other alone most of the time."

Ante frowned, his expression heavy with thought.

"Hän voi mennä takaisin asuntosi," Elias said.

"What?"

"He said, you could go back to my apartment."

That was an idea. I could rest, and think—maybe spend an hour or three in that sauna Sofia had mentioned. I was exhausted—physically, mentally, emotionally. The day felt like it had lasted for a week already, and it wasn't even three o'clock.

"Yeah," I said. "I could do that."

"Not alone, you couldn't," Ante countered.

"Oh, come on," I protested. "I was alone there for like five hours straight yesterday."

"Yeah, but that was before your cover was blown. Maybe now you move up your timetable, reach out to your fellow traitors—disappear some witnesses."

I managed to stop myself from rolling my eyes.

He did ask you not to act like it was cute.

"Okay, that's fair," I said. "Until you know that you can trust me, I get that you can't have me running around. What about…"

I trailed off, trying to think.

Just like old times, huh?

The funny thing was, it was. Juggling constraints, bouncing ideas back and forth, shooting down the bad ones—if it hadn't been obvious why it felt familiar, I would've called it déjà vu.

"I have an idea," said two voices at once.

Ante and Juhani turned to look at each other.

"You first," offered Juhani.

"No, you," said Ante.

"Okay, well—what if Elias and I go with her?"

"Back to my apartment?"

"Sure, why not? With two of us there, she won't try anything. And you'll be back before your mom gets off work, right?"

Ante's expression turned thoughtful as he looked back and forth between the two other boys, a weighing look in his eyes.

I knew that look. It was the same way Jake and Marco had looked at me, back at the beginning—the look of someone wondering just how likely you were to screw things up.

"I can wear restraints," I volunteered. "Zipties, or whatever."

"You'll just morph out of them."

"So have him bring the shotgun," I said, unable to suppress a note of annoyance. "Besides, as you may recall, I've only got two morphs."

"You say you've only got two morphs."

But I could hear in his tone that he was convinced—not that I only had two morphs, but that his friends could handle it.

"Straight there," he said. "And you keep her out in the main room, okay? I'll be back by seventeen."

I reached into my pocket, dug out the spare key Sofia had given me, held it out to Juhani.

"Odota. Mikä oli ideasi?"

Ante turned to look at Elias. "Ei mitään," he said. "Unohda."

"What was that?" I asked.

"He wanted to know what Ante's idea was," said Juhani.

"Doesn't matter," Ante said. "This is the plan now."

"But—"

"I said, it doesn't matter," Ante repeated. "Take her with you, stay there. I'll see you soon."

"Hey. Juhani. Would you maybe look something up for me?"

"Eh?"

"Look something up for me. On Google. Uh—American Google."

Juhani frowned. "Is this a trick?"

"Nope. I just need to know if—uh—I want to see if there are any news articles about a grocery store and some cinnamon buns and a gorilla. Back around the time that Ventura blew up."

"A grocery store, some cinnamon buns, and a—"

"Gorilla, yeah."

I mimed knuckle-walking, pretended to pound myself in the chest with my fists.

Juhani fixed me with a long, steady look. "I don't see how you can say to me, with a straight face, that this is not a trick. You have some coded message from another agent that you want me to check for you? 'A trip to China sounds nice, if you tread lightly'?"

"It's not that."

"What is it, then?"

"—never mind."

"All right, here we go. Any last thoughts before we begin?"

I tried to shake my head, but the restraints held my skull firmly in place.

"No," I said, through clenched teeth. "All set."

The technician patted me on the shoulder, pressed a button on the side of the machine, and left the room. Slowly, the table I was lying on slid inward, pulled by some mechanism I couldn't see.

It was Tuesday—the fourth day after my brief encounter with the Finnish Common Endeavor, and the fifth after my resurrection.

Well. It was actually two months, or something, since my resurrection. But it had been five days since I'd woken up.

I was back at the hospital in Tampere, under the watchful eyes of Sofia, Dr. Koskinen, and his neuroscientist colleague, who had introduced himself as "lääkäri Hernesniemi, no relation."

It had been a long weekend. Ante had refused to leave me unsupervised, first staging a sleepover on Friday night with Elias and Juhani and then locking me into Petri's room on Saturday—after secretly sealing up the window and stuffing towels in the cracks under the doors. Sofia had finally figured out that something was up on Sunday morning, which had led to a shouting match with lots of how could you keep this from me and well, look how you behaved once you knew and so forth.

In the aftermath, it had come out that I was having seizures whenever I demorphed, and Sofia had immediately gotten on the phone to her brother to schedule an examination. She'd spent the rest of Sunday mothering me, and then Ante had stayed home from school on Monday, "in case I needed anything."

It actually ended up being a pretty good day—by that point, Ante had started to let his guard down a little due to sheer exposure, despite his ongoing diligent suspicion. We spent most of the morning talking about the war, with him filling me in on the post-Ventura timeline and me doing a one-on-one ask-me-anything about the Animorphs.

It turned out that the Common Endeavor was not, as I'd first thought, some all-consuming retool of the entire Finnish economy into a gigantic war machine. It was more like a new mission statement, a kind of wartime version of the general sisu attitude—after the bombing at the peace conference in Japan, the new prime minister had given a speech urging everybody to set aside their differences and pull together, and each local polity had figured out what that meant for itself. Some were basically just business as usual, while others were cranking up food production or manufacturing output. Most of them weren't ditching the entire school curriculum in favor of teaching eight-year-olds how to make bombs—

"Not bombs," Ante reminded me. "It doesn't explode."

"I know, you must be real broken up about that, right?"

—but some, especially the more isolated ones in the far north, were going full guerilla warfare.

"Do they really think that'll help?" I'd asked.

Ante shrugged. "Probably not, but the alternative is to just sit around and wait, so."

That afternoon, we'd met up with Elias and Juhani and gone shooting out in the open country. Ante even brought down a goose and let me acquire it, though the three of them absolutely refused to let me morph it on the spot.

I could tell that he wanted me to be a good guy, in the end—if for no reason other than so that he could brag about having intimate insider knowledge of what Marco Levy was really like. But I had increasingly-not-even-begrudging respect for the way he was steeling himself against future betrayal. He kept me out of his room entirely, spoke only in Finnish and—I was pretty sure—Swedish when making plans with Elias and Juhani, and—as I found out only thanks to some careless comments from Sofia—had even misled me about which section of the surrounding woods was "past the fence." Apparently it was a local term that referred specifically to the wilderness on the northeast side of the lähiö, while Ante's ambush had been in the ravine to the west.

He'd even managed to not-react in the moment when Sofia gave it away; I only found out later that they'd fought about it afterward, and only because Sofia straight-up told me. She thought his attempts at spycraft were adorable, and responded to them with a mixture of light-hearted mockery and patronizing tolerance; as I watched him glower and sink lower and lower in his seat, I couldn't help but feel sympathetic. It had been a long time since I'd had to put up with condescension, and it almost—

—almost—

—made me want to pull some kind of evil shenanigan, just so the kid would have a chance to say I told you so.

But instead, I limited myself to dropping casual hints, telling offhand stories about how this-or-that careless mistake led to various forms of disaster, including—here, I was taking a little bit of license—the one that had led to my own death. It made a difference, after a while, though I was sure Sofia was holding back more than really changing her mind. The war was very far away, after all.

Other than chatting with Ante—and finally confirming that yes, there had in fact been an incident with a gorilla in a supermarket outside of Scottsdale, Arizona—I'd spent most of my time quietly daring myself to acknowledge what had happened in Ventura—to work up the nerve to face it head-on, with shields down and armor off. I still hadn't really managed it—I'd spent a few hours crying, here and there, but always in a generically sort of way that steered well clear of thoughts like Mom is dead or my whole childhood neighborhood is gone or I'll never see Cassie again. Those thoughts were allowed only in the cold, emotionless moments, when I flooded my mind with things like Perspective and Resolve, and all of the fragile parts of me buried themselves so deep that they might as well have ceased to exist.

I'd morphed again exactly two more times—once on Saturday, and once on Monday, both in the small hours of the morning, in moments when the grief had threatened to break through the levies and I'd decided that—all in all—a seizure was the less risky option. The first time, I had recovered a memory of a quiet conversation with Jake, about the fact that Ax had started calling him 'prince' after becoming a voluntary Controller—

—which was a headline in and of itself; Koskinen hadn't mentioned anything about that—

The second time, I'd been up somewhere high—the Rockies, maybe, or maybe the Ozarks; it had been during a cross-country flight and I hadn't been paying much attention to which state I was over. There had been a remote mountain meadow with a beautiful blue lake, and five small, round, white boulders nestled in the grass—four of them clustered together, and one a little ways off to the side.

I had remembered wishing that I have a knife or a chisel, so that I could carve names into the rocks; remembered briefly wondering whether a Hork-Bajir's blades could make a dent in the stone. But then I'd had the thought that it didn't matter—that the point of a memorial was to remind people, and that there was no chance I would ever forget.

And then I had smiled. Smiled for a good ten memory-seconds, looking out over the quiet lake, before waking up back in the real world, my body covered in sweat and my bedsheets twisted around me.

It was jarring, that glimpse into the future—jarring to be, for a moment, someone whose grief had already gone quiet, was no longer a tsunami and was now just the constant gentle crash of waves on the shore. It was jarring to return from that moment—to drop back into the present and feel the calm evaporate, all the scars tearing open again.

I'd left it alone, since then—stuck to my own timeline, resisting the urge to sample from that other Rachel's memories. But here, now, inside some giant machine in Koskinen's hospital, it was time to try again.

"First scan almost complete," said the voice of the technician, through the headphones he had placed over my ears. "Two more minutes, and we'll be ready for phase two."

I was still in my real body, held in place by tight, form-fitting restraints that were meant to keep me still during the anticipated seizure. The idea was for Koskinen and Hernesniemi to get a baseline look at my brain, then record both the morph and the demorph, and then take a second, comparative scan once it was all over. They had no idea what they were looking for, or whether they would find anything of interest, but it was the obvious place to start.

I'd never been in one of these machines before—wasn't even sure what it was, an MRI or a CT or a PET or whatever—and the claustrophobia wasn't exactly helped by the straps and panels holding my arms and legs in place. It was cold, too, and loud—the headphones were the wrap-around, noise-cancelling kind, and they'd given me earplugs too, just to be safe.

They'd said that the whole test would take maybe an hour—twenty minutes for the initial scan and twenty for the final, plus a shorter scan while I was in morph to see if the morphing tech left any kind of signature they would be able to pick up. Apparently they'd already tried looking for it with one kind of detector, with Koskinen himself in the machine, and now they wanted to try something else.

Under other circumstances, it could have been fun—could have been fascinating, like finally learning how an engine works after being in cars your whole life. Koskinen had been full of words like synaptic potential and hippocampus and predictive processing; he'd shown me some of the printouts of his own brain mid-morph and said a bunch of stuff I hadn't understood at all about how the control tissue interfaced with various neurotransmitters. It was the sort of stuff that Jake and Marco and the rest of us had never had the chance to stop and think about, what with the constant pressure of the invasion.

But I wasn't here for the joy of discovery. I was here because something was wrong, something that might be slowly killing me, and lying there, locked inside the machine, it was hard not to dwell on the fact that the nearest qualified technician was about ten thousand light-years away.

"All right, Rachel," said the technician. "We are ready for the morph. Go ahead whenever you can."

And then, ninety seconds later—

"Thank you, Rachel. Please hold still for phase three."

It's going to be fine, I tried to tell myself, even as another part of my brain was muttering about seizures and cancers and strokes, those people who'd had massive brain injuries and woken up with no memories, or with completely different personalities—

I mean, there's an obvious cure, right? If it is killing you? You just—don't morph anymore.

Yeah. Except—

It was strange to realize just how much the morphing tech had become a part of me, a part of my life—so much so that imagining life without it was like imagining life without my legs. I'd always been confused by those people who had a heart attack or whatever, and were told that they would die if they didn't stop eating hamburgers, and kept eating hamburgers anyway—it hadn't been the sort of thing I could imagine myself doing.

But really—to never again take to the skies? Never again feel the power of the elephant or the gorilla or the tiger? Never again feel what it was like to put on someone else's face, dip into someone else's memory?

You're more than just the morphing power, I reminded myself sternly. The human race needs you, whether you can turn into a cat or not. The war needs you.

But if it wasn't for the war—

With my family gone, with my life in ruins—

It wasn't like I was suicidal, or anything. I just—

I could see it. That's all I'm saying. It wasn't completely impossible to imagine.

I made the connection, then—was surprised that I hadn't made it before—that the morphing power had given me something like the freedom of a Yeerk. A Yeerk that managed to get out of the pool, anyway—a Yeerk with a host. And just as I was reluctant to give it up—

"All right, Rachel. Thank you for your patience. We are ready for phase four. You may demorph whenever you are ready."

I took a deep breath in through my nose, the cold, metallic air searing my nostrils. They'd given me a muscle relaxant before strapping me down, but even taking that into account, I wasn't looking forward to how I was going to feel on the other side.

No point in putting it off, though.

Letting the air out with a sigh, I focused.

Me, I thought, along with the vague hodgepodge of images that usually fueled my demorph—how my hair looked in the mirror, how I felt after a workout, how my hands and feet and breasts looked from above—

"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—

"—okay on our end, Rachel. We're going to pull you out for a safety check. I remind you to please only get up if you must—if you are fine we're going to tuck you right back in for the final scan—"

I didn't move. My muscles ached, but no worse than they had any of the other times. My nose was bloody, but that, too, was starting to feel normal.

Something had changed, though—in the moment of transition, the split-second between seeing the world through the eyes of Rachel A and seeing the world through the eyes of Rachel B—

A hand tugged the headphones off one of my ears.

"Blink twice, please, if you are good to continue for the final phase?"

I blinked twice, distracted, hardly caring what came next. The technician resettled the headphones, gave me a thumbs-up, and pushed the button that sent me sliding slowly back into the machine.

Okay, I thought. Nice and slow.

It had happened in the changeover, the handoff from one Rachel to the other.

WHAT had happened? I asked myself—gently, as if I were talking to a kindergartener.

Well, nothing, really. It's just that that's when I noticed it.

One of the things that had been bothering me about—about the other Rachel—was how very different from me she seemed. Or like, not "very" different, but different in subtle ways that felt—

Crucial. Central. Important. I was picking up on it more and more each time I demorphed, each time I thought back to all the earlier vision-memories.

There was the way she was so much more settled about Mom and Sara and Jordan and Cassie, of course—that was what had first caught my attention.

But there was also the way that she seemed to have caught feelings for Marco, and the way that she seemed to be pulling away from Jake, and—and—and something about her attitude toward the worst of it, the death and the pain and the hard decisions, I couldn't quite put my finger on it but there was something there that didn't feel like me.

Except that it was me, more and more. Bit by bit. I mean, that Rachel—the memory-Rachel—she had started out just like me. Had become the way she was through her experiences, and each little memory was a micro-experience of its own, complete with ready-made reactions. Already it felt less strange than it had, to watch myself acting out her responses, even though the visions seemed to be pushing further and further into the divergent future.

And I had worried about that, a little. Worried about letting it happen automatically, at least—about just falling into becoming exactly the same kind of person as that other Rachel. More and more, I'd been looking back on the vision-memories with a critical eye, wondering which lessons to take to heart, which conclusions to cast aside. Which moves I thought would probably turn out to have been mistakes, assuming I ever got to follow up on them.

That was how I'd been thinking about it, until—

It had come to me right in the instant of transition, like one of those old Magic Eye pictures suddenly switching from nonsense into a full, 3D picture. You don't win wars by being good, the other Rachel had thought to herself, and I had started to object, to form some long and complicated response like but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try, when suddenly the ground had shifted out from under me.

Why do I think that MY memories are "mine" and hers are "someone else's"?

It wasn't quite the "fake Jake" problem that Jake had told me about. I didn't feel like a fake Rachel—like I wasn't me, or anything like that.

It was more like, suddenly I wasn't sure what the whole "me" thing even meant.

Like, whether it was a random malfunction of the morphing tech, or something wrong with my brain, or some kind of sick puppetmaster screwing with me, somehow I was being funneled these memories, and they were kind of changing who I was, as a person, in a way that I didn't have full control over, and some other part of me had been watching that happen and had opinions about it, and I had kind of been rolling with the assumption that that person was me, only I'd just sort of—

Seen her from the outside, or something? Like if you woke up one day and your body was out in front of you, video game style. I'd noticed the noticer, which meant that the noticer wasn't really me, which ordinarily would just be, like, yeah, sure, you want to get all existential up in here with some weird philosophy stuff that doesn't actually matter because we all know what the color red is—

Only now, with this morph-vision-memory situation, it kind of seemed like maybe it did matter.

Not the color red, I mean. But the question of—

I don't know. I had feelings about how I'd been changing, felt like some of the changes were good and some of the changes were bad, like I was a sculptor comparing each new chisel-mark against the grand vision.

But who was the sculptor, and why was it her vision we were following?

Why did I trust my own opinion on who-I-should-be-trying-to-be?

Where had that vision come from?

And one step further—

Is Rachel Berenson even a real person?

I hadn't met anybody who knew me, since waking up. All I knew is that Koskinen told me that Jake and Marco and Tobias and Ax had been there, that they'd showed up with me and Garrett in tow. And Garrett was in a coma. Everyone else was meeting me for the first time—strangers, all of them—and the hometown I remembered was gone, vaporized, my backstory impossible to check—conveniently—

Slow down, girl.

Not Marco's voice this time, but Cassie's—soothing, caring, understanding.

There were movies, I'd seen movies, Jason Bourne or whatever, the main character wakes up in a hospital and can't remember who they are, but those movies had skipped over the real question, the more dangerous question—if you woke up in a hospital why would you assume you were who you thought you were? When people's whole personalities could change just because they got a nail shoved through their brain?

Slow down. Slow down and breathe.

I tried. Tried, because the person that I was trusted that Cassie—

—that my memories of Cassie, the cardboard cutout imaginary Cassie that I'd built inside my head off of those memories—

—that Cassie was smart, sometimes smarter than me, and that me imagining her voice was my brain's way of putting on the brakes, keeping me from blowing a gasket—

Ahem. You were going to try something?

Right.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

In.

Okay.

I felt a little better.

There was this bucket that I had—this mental bucket, in my head—labeled "yeah, but there's nothing I can do about that either way, so." It was where I dropped stuff like maybe we're all in the Matrix and maybe there's a God and maybe free will doesn't really exist and you just think it does.

And it had occurred to me—while I was taking my own advice, filtered through my inner Cassie—that a good chunk of this belonged in that bucket. Like, if I was being tricked somehow—if some mad scientist had made me up and put a bunch of fake memories in my head—it wasn't like recognizing the possibility gave me any new threads to pull on. Keep it in mind, keep my eyes open for anything suspicious, and otherwise—

Chuck it in the bucket.

But the sculptor thing—

The sculptor thing did not belong in the bucket. There was a real question there, one that mattered, that would make a difference in my future decisions. I didn't know the answer to it yet, but—

I'd spent most of my life focused on the sculpture. On the person that I was, the person right in front of me when I looked in the mirror. I'd been trying to be the best Rachel Berenson I could be, without ever exactly thinking of it in those terms—had been, unconsciously, trying to live up to some hidden set of blueprints, hit some preconceived target.

Rachel Berenson is good at gymnastics.

Rachel Berenson isn't afraid.

Rachel Berenson is as good as any boy.

Rachel Berenson is someone you'd want on your apocalypse team.

I'd been using those same blueprints to judge the memory-Rachel—had been grading her against them, sorting her actions into good and bad and ? based upon them.

But memory-Rachel had her own set of blueprints, and they were different from mine. Had changed, since the moment when we'd been the same person—had mutated, evolved. And they'd done so without her noticing—when I was inside her head, she still thought of herself as Rachel. The same Rachel she'd always been, not some off-brand Rachel spinoff.

But her sculptor wanted something different than mine. Cringed at a slightly different set of things than mine did, was shaping her to be someone slightly different than the person I was trying to become. Was more willing to forgive, and shaping herself to be more forgiving. Was more willing to kill, and shaping herself to be more comfortable with that, too. Had different thoughts about the other Animorphs, was growing closer to some and further from others in ways that didn't quite make sense to me.

And that—

I don't know. I didn't have a conclusion. I didn't even really have a question.

But it seemed like something I really ought to think about.

"So you're saying you don't really know."

"That's a little oversimplified. We were able to track the seizure activity, and confirm that it seems to originate in the hippocampus and the amygdala, with the sympathetic activity in the other parts of the brain being something like aftershocks. This is pretty unusual in itself, and deserves—"

"Is it going to kill me?"

"There's no scarring or abnormally suppressed brain activity—yet. And comparison between the before and after images didn't show anything at first glance. But we're going to need more time to process the results, and I'd really like to do some more tests, as long as you're here—"

"—starting some war-games next week, capture the flag and stuff. Mostly in the woods behind the school. So we spent third period scouting out the territory, making plans and so forth."

"How's that going to work, with eight hundred of you?"

"They're going to group us by age. Ten-elevens, twelve-thirteens, fourteens-and-up. Each group is going to be broken up into four units that'll fight each other, six games in all. I'm not sure what they're doing for the little ones."

We were sitting around the dinner table in the Niskas' apartment, me and Ante and Sofia. There was pea soup, and dark rye bread with butter, and black coffee, and some kind of pancake thing covered in jam.

"Okay, what about fourth period?" Sofia asked.

"They combined fourth and fifth, actually," Ante said. "There was this guest speaker from America—she was meeting with some bigwig in Estonia and came up for the day as a personal favor to Mr. Sotala. She had these mental techniques, little step-by-step algorithms to help you think through your plans, figure out what you really want and how best to get it, avoid pitfalls, stuff like that. It was funny—she kept calling the pitfalls 'failure modes.' We had to translate for the little ones."

"That took up both hours?"

Ante shook his head. "No, that was just the first half hour or so. We spent the rest of the time getting into and out of fights."

"Fights?"

"Disagreements. Arguments. She had these sort of—I guess you would call them alerts? Triggers? For noticing when a conversation isn't going anywhere, or recognizing that you're starting to get mad at each other instead of talking about a thing. It was practice for having fights that don't end up with one person storming out of the room."

"So, school was good, then?" asked Sofia, glancing over at me. "No—incidents?"

I shook my head. "It was fine," I said. "Same as yesterday. The muscle relaxants work, so I can demorph in the bathroom."

"You're still having the seizures, though?"

I nodded. Sofia shook her head, muttering darkly in Finnish under her breath. Ante snorted, droplets of pea soup splattering on the table, and Sofia shook her napkin at him like it was a flyswatter.

"I don't like all of this risk that you're taking," she said, out loud. "And the nosebleeds. Are you sure you can't just go in your own body?"

"She doesn't speak the language, mom."

"You could translate for her."

Ante rolled his eyes, and I cleared my throat. "Uh," I said. "Actually—Ms. Niska—"

"Sofia, please."

"—I was thinking about not going anymore."

Sofia fixed me with an extremely grownup sort of look. I was surprised at how effective it was at making me squirm.

"It's been seven days since I woke up," I pointed out. "My friends have got to come back soon, and even if they don't, Garrett could wake up at any moment, and even if he doesn't—especially if he doesn't—I can't just—"

I glanced over at Ante's face and immediately abandoned the second half of my sentence.

Can't just sit here doing nothing.

"—impose on your hospitality forever," I said, recovering. "At some point, I have to work out my next move."

I flinched, a little, at the words have to. But it was true—I was going crazy, sitting around in the Niska's apartment, going to school like a regular kid. I needed action, forward motion, like a shark—had been morphing and demorphing more than I had to, just to get a contact high off of the other Rachel's memories.

It wasn't narcissism—at least, not totally. Part of it was a way of coping, of keeping myself from going in circles over and over about my sisters, my mother, my best friend, the people in the cages. Like a dog chewing on shoes—it was easier to get my brain to do something else than to just get it to stop.

And part of it was the knowledge—

—the absolute certainty—

—that there were things out there that needed to be done, opportunities that were dribbling away. That the war was moving forward with or without me, and that I couldn't just keep sitting around expecting someone else to take care of it.

I mean, I 'could.'

But I couldn't.

"You are only fourteen," Sofia said softly, interrupting my thoughts.

I didn't respond.

I knew that nothing I could say to her would help. The Finns were remarkably, shockingly willing to put faith in their kids—letting them wander the lähiö alone, letting them carry guns and knives, teaching them how to make thermite. At fifteen, Ante had more agency and autonomy than most eighteen-year-olds back in Ventura.

But they still thought of kids as kids. Still didn't quite see us as people, still assumed they knew better, still expected us to obey. Sofia wouldn't knowingly let a fourteen-year-old live on her own—would be reluctant to let a fourteen-year-old leave on her own, might have tried to lay down the law already if it hadn't been for the combination of the morphing power and her brother's influence.

All in all, it was better to drop it than to pick a fight. She had been nice to me—extraordinarily nice. The least I could do in return was not rub her face in it.

I looked up from my soup to see her wiping her own bowl with a piece of bread, soaking up the last few drops. "What would you do instead?" she asked. "Tomorrow, I mean."

"Don't know," I answered, because use the goose morph your son helped me get to break into the Ähtäri Zoo and acquire a bunch of wild animals didn't seem like the right thing to say, either.

Sofia's lip curled disapprovingly, but she said nothing. Across the table, Ante speared one of the pancakes with his fork, dragged it over onto his plate.

"And you, Ante?" she asked, after a long pause. "What's on the schedule for tomorrow?"

"Food day," he mumbled, his mouth half-full. "Foraging in the morning, first and second period. Cultivating third. Preserving fourth—I think we're smoking jerky. And we're having lunch early so we can go out in hunting parties in the afternoon. We're taking the eight-year-olds for the first time, this week."

"Home for dinner?"

"Maybe. I thought that I'd—"

He broke off, his eyes flickering toward me for the briefest of instants.

"—go down to the city sauna with Elias and Juhani and Liam."

Sofia snorted. "You mean, stay out in the woods working on your secret project."

"Mom!"

"Ante's building a spaceship," Sofia said, turning back to me, her sing-song voice just a shade too sharp to qualify as totally good-natured. "Him and those other two. They've been working on it since summer—must have spent five hundred Euros on broken computer parts by now—"

"Mom!"

Sofia laughed airily as Ante's face turned red, his hands trembling. I looked back and forth between the two of them, unsure what to do, whether to say anything—

Vvvvvvvvvm. Vvvvvvvvvm. Vvvvvvvvvm.

Ante and his mother locked eyes, and she tilted her head. "No phones at the table," she warned.

If anything, the boy's face got even darker as he stood, deliberately knocking his stool over behind him and taking two large, theatrical steps over to the carpet. "En ole pöydässä, rakas äiti," he hissed, before lifting the phone up to his ear. "Moro?"

I looked back at Sofia, paralyzed by the sudden tension. If it had been my mother—

Flinch.

—if it had been my mother, the next move would have been to lay low, keep quiet, not do anything to paint a target on my own head—

There was a crash, and my head snapped around.

Ante had lunged for the TV, tripping over the corner of the sofa and falling to the floor, his phone flying off into a corner of the room—

"Ante!" Sofia shouted.

But Ante was fine, was already back on his feet, had turned on the television and was hammering away at the remote.

"Ante, what—"

He snapped something in Finnish, and I turned back just in time to see Sofia's eyes widen, her mouth dropping open. Beside her, a spoon tumbled to the floor with a clatter; she ignored it completely.

"What—" I began, but Ante cut me off.

"Morph," he ordered. "No time to translate."

The screen now showed what looked like a local news program, with a pair of talking heads sitting in front of a zoomed-in photo of a sliver-crescent moon.

Eyes open, I concentrated on Aino, feeling the familiar tingle as Sofia stepped past me and sank down onto the couch, as Ante continued to watch from the floor, kneeling on the rug just inches away from the screen.

The moon-picture was filling the frame, now, the news anchors relegated to voice-over. There were circles appearing on the image, and arrows, singling out tiny spots of light, what looked to be the dimmest of stars. The picture shifted, then shifted back, the moon staying constant while the specks changed position. Then the scene switched to a shot of an observatory, one of those giant domed buildings with a telescope poking out—

Sofia and Ante were talking, talking over the voices still coming from the television, talking over each other, a rapid back and forth that was tight and tense and yet somehow flat, with none of the anger or levity of the conversation that had come before. Over in the corner, Ante's phone buzzed again, unheeded.

"—beyond a shadow of a doubt. The visual data, combined with the seismic data provided by the Americans, corroborate the message that we received twelve minutes ago—"

The words snapped into comprehensibility as my own brain finished transforming into Aino's.

"—can't say as of yet what this will mean for the future of human-Yeerk relations, or for the Europa mission that was set to launch just two days from now. Thus far, no government has reported receiving any communications or attempted communications from space, although receivers around the world continue to listen—"

"What happened?" I whispered in Finnish, but Ante didn't look, just raised a hand and made a chopping motion, his eyes glued to the screen in front of him.

"—for those of you just tuning in, we repeat that, twelve minutes ago, a variety of corporations, governments, and major news organizations began reporting that they had received email correspondence claiming that the Yeerk mothership, long rumored to be hiding in cloak behind the moon, has been entirely destroyed in an act of mutinous sabotage, leaving no survivors. As of this moment, we have no available information regarding the source of the emails, which seem to have originated in more than one place and are signed simply YEM—"

Ante's fist flew into the air in a gesture of triumph.

"—as for the claims made in the email, again—observers in both hemispheres have confirmed that there is an expanding cloud of debris originating behind the moon, and that seismic devices placed on the lunar surface by the Americans in 2023 confirm multiple of small-to-medium impacts beginning approximately eleven minutes ago—"

The mothership.

Destroyed.

I wasn't thinking, wasn't responding, wasn't even there in the ordinary sense. For the moment, I was just a recording device—passive, entranced, hypnotized, every speck of attention focused on absorbing the words and images coming out of the television.

"—Japan joins the governments of America, Spain, and Brazil in making available an officially verified copy of the messages they received. Thus far, there appears to be no difference between the messages sent to governments and those sent to private organizations, and all of the different translations appear to convey roughly the same information, although translators and forensic linguists are already poring over the differences in the hopes of gleaning information about the author or authors—"

I couldn't believe it.

"—announced a joint Sino-American mission using YF-Alpha, the alien-built vessel that famously circumnavigated the globe last May, to make observations of the far side of the moon, possibly as soon as three hours from now, thanks to efforts from American President Donna Marina to fast-track negotiations with her counterparts in Beijing. Meanwhile, the long-anticipated Europa mission has been reassigned to YF-Gamma, the first human-built starship, completed in Germany three weeks ago—"

It was like—

"—riotous celebrations already beginning in Los Angeles and São Paulo, among others—"

It was like—

"—several as-yet unsubstantiated reports of smaller unidentified spacecraft making landings at or near the Edwards Air Force Base in the American state of California—"

It was like if we'd woken up that morning, back in Ventura, to see that the Yeerk pool had exploded, all on its own, without any help from us.

A secret human military mission?

Visser Three covering his tracks again?

It couldn't actually be mutiny—could it? Would the whole ship have just—just—

"—just in, yle's editors have approved an on-air reading of the email document, tentatively being referred to as the Conclamatum ad arma. For those of you just joining us, we repeat: the following is a copy of a document which surfaced around the world in ten languages approximately eighteen minutes ago; we are currently working on producing a Finnish translation but in the meantime, here it is in English—"

I felt my body lean forward all on its own, saw Ante's shoulders tense.

"'Act now,'" read the news anchor, holding up a single printed sheet. "'Act now. The coalescion of Telor, in command of the only Yeerk capital ship in this system, acting in memoriam of the people of Ventura and the coalescion of Aftran, and in conjunction with the people of Earth, has this very minute destroyed itself and all war materiel under its direct control. Repeat: as of 16:37 GMT on this day of October 7th, the mothership hidden behind Earth's moon has been completely destroyed by its own crew, acting in defiance of their commanding officer, the war criminal Visser Three, in the hopes of delaying his plans for the conquest and exploitation of Earth, and in vengeance for the murder of their brethren in the Ventura disaster of May 15th, and in atonement for the deaths of some 607,892 humans in that same event."

There was a dread silence in the room—a silence even in the newsroom, conveyed somehow along with the anchor's words—a sense of tectonic plates shifting, the building blocks of reality changing their alignment. I could feel a sort of thrumming tension in my bones, in my skin, a mounting vibration that would eventually be too great to contain.

"'Act now,'" the anchor repeated. "'Act now. If all has gone according to plan, Telor's sacrifice has bought humanity temporary military supremacy within this system. In addition to the destruction of the mothership and three of its remaining Bug fighters, we estimate an eighty-five percent chance that Visser Three himself has been rendered temporarily ineffective, and a fifteen percent chance that he has been eliminated outright. Regardless, mainline Yeerk reinforcements are inbound, and will arrive in-system between five and eight days from now. Reconfigure your assets, take control of your borders, launch sustainable arks, set up mobile response units. If possible, dispatch overwhelming military force to the planet Mars, where you will find a significant stockpile of confiscated Earth military technology awaiting export in the Kasei Valles, north of Sacra Mensa.'"

A sense of unreality began creeping in around the edges, as if I was in the middle of a dream and just now starting to realize it. The letter was telling us to evacuate the planet. To invade Mars.

"'Act now,'" the anchor said again, sweat beading visibly on his forehead. "'Act now, for there is no one left to act for you. Act now, for now is all that is guaranteed. Act now, and whatever happens, do not forget that Telor, too, was Yeerk.'"

The anchor lowered the paper, looking ashen. "It's signed 'YEM,'" he said.

"YEM, of course, being the abbreviation of the so-called 'Yeerk-in-hand' organization," said the other anchor, picking up the thread. "Rumored to be made up of voluntary Controllers acting in resistance to the larger Yeerk body politic. As of yet, there is still no official confirmation that any such group exists, although certainly the timing of this message in conjunction with events taking place in orbit around the moon indicates a degree of logistical sophistication that—"

Outside, it was like I was outside looking in, like everything was happening inside of a zoo exhibit, through thick glass, untouchable. Like the way my grandparents talked about JFK, or the way my dad talked about 9/11—like there was nothing to be done, that was just the way the world was, reality was something that happened to you, not something you interacted with—

I had to get out of there. I had to do something, couldn't just sit back and passively observe—had to figure out how I could plug into things, since at the moment I had no idea. I felt my body straighten—

"Ante."

I twitched at the unexpected sound, coming from an unexpected direction—hadn't even noticed that Sofia had stood, and stepped away—had put herself in front of the apartment door.

Ante stood, too—slowly, his face wild and somehow empty at the same time.

"Ante, please—"

He took a step toward her.

"Ante, please, stay here, don't—don't go running out into the dark—"

Another step.

"Ante, you're fifteen, there's nothing you can do—"

Another step. I felt detached, floating—like I was watching the pair of them through another screen, infinitely far away, unable to do anything—

"I'm not alone, mom," Ante said, his voice as hard as diamond. "And Visser Three doesn't care that I'm fifteen. They took an entire high school in Ventura, before the meteor hit."

I blinked. That story wasn't in common knowledge, not even among conspiracy theorists. I had told him about that—

"Ante—"

Another step, and then he was there, right there in front of her, toe to toe. He reached out with both arms—

Embraced.

He hugged her, and for the first time I noticed how much taller he was—she wasn't a short woman but he was taller, couldn't quite rest his chin atop her head but had turned his head to the side and was resting his cheek.

"Ante," she whispered, and I could hear that she was fighting back tears. "My boy, my little boy, it doesn't have to be you, why does it have to be you?"

"I love you, mom," he answered, squeezing harder.

I felt—

Naked.

Even though I was just sitting there—even though they were the ones who were exposed, the ones having this deep, intimate moment while a stranger stared at them—

Still. I wanted to hide. To cover up. To run, if there had been any place to run to.

But I didn't move.

"Trouble will come soon enough," Sofia said. "Why do you have to—to go out and look for it—"

"You heard the message," Ante said, drawing back from the hug, but keeping his arms on her shoulders. "We can beat them, as long as we actually try. As long as we don't just shrug and go back to everyday jobs, everyday life, act like this isn't happening."

"A thousand kilometers away," Sofia sniffed.

Ante laughed, then—a real laugh, open and full of warmth. "Just say you love me, mom. You don't have to pretend to be stupid."

"I love you."

"I love you, too. And I have to go."

He moved her gently to the side—she let him, helped him, took a step herself so he didn't have to push. He bent down and picked up his phone—walked to the door—knelt—began putting on his shoes.

"You understand, don't you?" Sofia asked quietly.

"Yes."

And then, with a note of vulnerability that suddenly made him seem much younger, like maybe Garrett's age—

"You understand too, right?"

She nodded. "It's just—"

He stood, shrugging on his coat—stood there not quite looking her in the eye.

"I know you'll be back tonight," she said, her voice unmistakably steady-on-purpose. "I know that. But the way you're going—I don't know which night will be the night when I don't know—I don't know how many nights we have left. With your sister at least I knew when she was leaving—"

Ante said nothing, didn't move a muscle, and suddenly I knew what he was thinking, knew exactly what he was holding back from saying aloud—

If it's the not-knowing that hurts, maybe I should just go now.

"Don't," I said, my voice much louder than I intended.

They both looked at me like they'd forgotten I was there, Ante's eyebrows furrowing—

"Don't," I repeated, more softly.

We stared at each other for a long moment, and then he shrugged. "No niin," he said. Then he turned to Sofia—

"I'll see you tonight, mom," he said. "I love you."

"He's cracking," I said quietly.

"You think I don't know that?" Marco snapped. "I'm not blind."

I shot him a sidelong look.

He sighed. "Sorry," he muttered.

We were both silent for a moment, our eyes tracing around the darkened room—the neat rows of desks, the papers covering the walls, the rows of cubbies by the door. We'd left the lights off, for obvious reasons, but there was enough light to see by streaming in through the windows from the streetlamps outside.

I hadn't really thought about school, since that last disastrous day in Ventura. Hadn't thought about the impact of everything going public—of Visser Three showing up in Washington, of Marco's broadcast.

But looking around the room, everything seemed—normal. Familiar. Cursive letters in a banner over the dry erase board, a little reading nook over in the corner, gold stars next to kids' names on a poster on the wall. Even a shiny-looking apple on the teacher's desk.

It was like nothing had changed. Like all the teachers and parents of Mojave had gotten together and agreed to pretend like nothing was going on, to maintain business as usual.

I wasn't sure whether that was better or worse than the alternative.

"Thing is," Marco said abruptly. "Thing is, there isn't anything we can do about it."

I turned to look at him, the side of his face silhouetted against the window as he continued to stare out into the night.

"Are you cracking?" I asked.

He snorted. "Yes. Obviously. Aren't you?"

I was quiet for a minute, considering.

"What am I saying, of course you aren't. You like this."

I frowned. "What's that supposed to mean?"

He turned to look at me in the dim light, eyes shining out of the dark shadow under his brow. "Tell me that if this was all over tomorrow, you wouldn't be even a little bit disappointed," he said.

"That's not fair."

"Tough shit. Life's not fair. Which you know damn well by now, if you didn't already."

There was another silence.

"It's not what you think," I said finally.

"What?"

"Me—liking it," I said, forcing the words out one by one. "It's not about—"

"Stop," he cut in. "I know. I've been inside your head, remember?"

"Then why'd you say it like that?" I asked. "Throw-it-in-her-face style?"

He shrugged. "Because I'm cracking," he said. "We all are, except for you."

"Kuka siellä on?" called a high, nervous voice. Elias, I was pretty sure.

"It's me," I called back, in English. "Rachel."

There was a moment's pause.

"Doesn't sound like Rachel."

Juhani.

"That's because I'm in Ante's body," I said.

A much longer pause, this time, with lots of low muttering and several strident hisses.

"Why are you here?"

I opened my mouth—

"You," Sofia said in English, after she finished drying her tears. "You know where he is going."

"I don't. Sorry."

"But you can find him, yes?" she pressed. "Little warrior, little shapeshifter, little child fugitive. You can find my son?"

I hesitated, but not for long.

"Yes."

"Then you go, and you help him. For my keeping of your secrets, for the roof over your head. You find my son, and you do whatever you can do."

"I'm here to help," I said.

More muffled argument. I shifted my feet, stamping in the cold. It was well past eight o'clock, the sky full dark, the temperature dropping quickly toward freezing. I was wearing Ante's second-best set of warm clothes, but I'd forgotten to bring a hat.

"Come out," said Ante's voice.

I groped my way forward through the bushes, stumbling over a root as I stepped out into the clearing. It was barely any brighter in the open than it had been in the forest, the silver moon screened over by flat, colorless clouds.

"That's my body," Ante said, switching over to Finnish. He was carrying the rifle, but it was slung over his shoulder, not pointed at me.

Yet.

"Yeah," I replied.

"You stole it," he accused. "When?"

"Sunday night. When you dozed off while we were watching TV."

"And then you spied on me," he spat.

I nodded.

"Demorph," he ordered. "Now."

I shook my head. "Doesn't work like that," I said.

"You don't have permission to use my body. I don't consent."

"I know."

We stared at each other in the darkness.

"I could shoot you," he said, his voice quieter.

"Big difference between could and would."

He said nothing.

"The other day, when you guys were trying to decide whether or not to trust me, and you said you had an idea—"

"Yeah. So?"

It was my turn to say nothing. I looked over at the other two—no, wait, four—boys, sitting on rough-cut logs around the device in the center of the clearing, watching the two of us with inscrutable expressions.

"So, why didn't you ask me?" I demanded.

"Because if you'd meant to, you would have already."

I blinked. Ante's voice had turned dull, leaden, hopeless—almost exactly the opposite of how he had sounded on his way out the door an hour and a half earlier.

"I don't have the cube," I said slowly. "Coma, remember?"

"Not just that," he said. "When I asked you about your plans, what the next target is, what the other Animorphs are up to—"

"I don't know any of that stuff—"

"So if you did, you'd have told me?" he snapped.

I started to reply, then caught myself.

"Look," I began. "It's not that simple, okay? It's not that I don't trust you—"

Ante laughed, and it was like the skeleton of the laugh he'd given his mother an hour earlier. I'd been going to say something like I just don't have any way to use you, but something about the sound of it pulled me up short.

Danger, Rachel Berenson.

I decided to try a different tack. Turning away from Ante, I took a step toward the device.

All five boys stiffened.

"Sorry," I said. "Um. May I?"

Ante looked at each of the other boys in turn, then stared at me for a long moment before shrugging.

I stepped closer.

It was a hodgepodge of parts, about the size of a large backpack. Even in the darkness I could see the exposed wiring, the mismatched paneling, the recycled household items. That wasn't bad—it was supposed to look like that. It had been designed to be buildable on the cheap, as Ante's memories had told me.

"Have you turned it on yet?" I asked.

Ante shook his head.

"But it's still powered up, right?"

"Yeah."

I nodded. Makes sense.

The device was—allegedly—a portable, wearable, one-way shield-and-hologram combo, cobbled together by some mad engineer ripping through the leaked Bug fighter schematics. According to the designs Ante had downloaded, it would create a one-meter-wide, two-meter-tall field directly in front of you—a field that would stop bullets and laserfire, move with you when you walked, and camouflage you perfectly from anything straight ahead.

There were no controls. No settings. Just a single on-off switch. The design had been stripped down to absolute bare bones, made as simple as humanly possible.

After all, the point was to publish something even teenagers could put together.

"I can test it," I offered.

It was Juhani's turn to laugh, this time—different from Ante's laughter, high and mocking and hurtful, the sort of laugh I'd heard Marco make from time to time. I couldn't tell for sure in the dark, but it looked like Ante's hands had balled up into fists.

"What is this?" I asked.

Ante turned away as Juhani kept laughing.

"We're scared it's going to blow up," Elias explained.

I knew that already, from Ante's memories—they had held off for almost a week already, since confirming that the makeshift power pack had indeed reached full charge. They'd been afraid the device would melt, or explode, or generate the field in the wrong place and cut off someone's arm or head.

But now, with everything that had happened—the mothership, the Conclamatum, the YEM—

"I can test it," I repeated. "While everyone else is off at a safe distance. Even if it blows up, I can just demorph."

"This you trying to get us far enough away that you can steal it? Or sabotage it?"

The words were empty, lifeless—like even Ante didn't believe them, but was saying them because he had to, checking off a box.

"No," I said, letting some of my impatience bleed through. "Turns out I did not, in fact, come all the way to Finland, creating a conspiracy to support me that includes both your uncle and your mom,not to mention spending two days in Scandinavian survival school, just so that I could trick a bunch of backyard Phineases and Ferbs out of their science project. I just figured I could push the button for you, so if something goes wrong nobody gets hurt."

I don't know what sort of response I expected, or if I'd even had time to form any expectations at all. But I was surprised by what I got, which was Ante just kind of slumping down in slow motion until he was lying completely flat on the ground, staring up at the charcoal sky.

I looked around at the other four boys. None of them met my eyes. Elias was staring at Ante. Juhani was staring off into space, still chuckling quietly to himself. It was too dark for me to say for sure who the other two were, but they were both staring at nothing, heads down, fingers picking idly at the weeds.

"What is this?" I repeated.

No one answered for a long time. I was just about to ask again—to start shouting—something—when—

"We did some goal factoring," said Elias, his voice tinged with bitter sarcasm. "Before you showed up."

Goal factoring—

"That thing the guest speaker was talking about?" I asked. "In fourth period?"

"Yeah."

I waited.

"I don't get it," I said, after another ten or twenty seconds had passed.

"Mom was right," Ante said, from the ground. "There's nothing we can do. Not from way out here, not when we're fifteen, not when the real players are going around dropping meteors and blowing up spaceships."

I frowned. I couldn't think of anything smart to say—

Then say something stupid.

"You, um. You're kind of in a different mood than you were before. When you left the apartment, I mean."

Ante gave another dead laugh. "Well, kind of a lot's happened since then."

"Like what?"

Ante didn't answer. Eventually, Elias spoke up.

"We were too scared to turn it on."

Okay, yeah, I already knew that, but—

Oh.

"We sat here for ten whole minutes, trying to psych up to it," Ante said, still lying flat. "Or, well, some of us were trying."

I looked around again. The other boys were still avoiding my eyes, and this time I thought I could read something like shame in their body language.

"And then I thought, fuck it, that's not so bad, it's good to be cautious, right? Not to take risks? So I started talking about getting some supplies together to go to Helsinki, instead. Try to synch up with Rollo's cousin. But none of them wanted to leave the lähiö."

My mind was racing ahead, putting the pieces together—how that would have landed, what would have happened next. Maybe I was cheating, sitting on top of a copy of Ante's brain, but—

"So then you realized you didn't want to go, either," I said softly. "Not alone."

Another dead laugh.

"I guess it's all just a game," Ante said, his voice still hollow. "It's been a game this whole time, I just didn't know. I was the only sucker who thought it was real."

He propped himself up on his elbows, looked straight at me. "You're leaving, aren't you?" he asked.

"Uh."

"And you're not taking any of us with you."

I didn't say anything.

What could I say?

"You're leaving, and you don't even know where you're going, you don't even know what's next, but you know there's nothing we can do to help."

With a sudden, swift motion, he rolled to his feet, stepped toward the device, reached out a hand—

I grabbed him by the wrist as the other boys leapt up, began backing slowly away.

"What is this?" I asked, for a third time. "You suicidal or something? All of a sudden?"

Ante shook his head. "No. It just doesn't matter."

"What doesn't matter?"

"Me. Us. Any of this."

He gestured—at the device, at the other boys, at the woods around us.

"Months, we've been working on this," he continued. "This, and all the other shit. Archery. Dead reckoning. How to grow potatoes, how to build a fire. As if any of it matters. As if any of that's going to be relevant, for this war. It's just—it's just theater, television, no different from teaching the little ones how to make termiittiä, they're feeding us shit to keep us happy and out of the way. Even this—"

He tried to kick the device, and I tugged on his shirt, pulling him away, off-balance.

"Even this, it's just more play-acting," he said, yanking his arm free of my grip. "Even if it works—great, we'll have one cobbled-together shield that works in one direction and lasts a whole eighty-one minutes before it needs three days to recharge. That'll win the war."

He twitched, lunging forward unexpectedly, faster than I could react, and flipped the switch.

Nothing happened.

"So there you go," he said bitterly. "Two months and four hundred sixty-one Euros. How much you want to bet the plans aren't even real?"

Once again, I didn't know what to do. I groped around inside my head, looking for something to say, something that was both true and useful—

"It's not about being the guy that fights the big battle," I said, hoping as I started the sentence that it would have a point by the time I got to the end. "It's about—it's about how, if everybody pitches in, then we're strong no matter where they try to hit us. We need you just as much as we need everybody else—"

"Shitsberries," Ante spat. "This war is going to be over before it ever gets here, and you know it. That's why you don't want to stay. That's why you're here in the first place—your people needed someplace out of the way to lay low. Someplace your enemies would never bother to check. We're the fucking Shire."

I opened my mouth to give the automatic response, some obvious inspirational-poster garbage about Frodo and Sam—

Hey, uh. Maybe before you jump right to trying to reassure this kid, you take a minute to check whether he's actually wrong? 'Cause it would be pretty damn cruel to pull the wool back over his eyes, if what's happening here is him seeing clearly for the first time.

"Do you really want to live outside the Shire?" I asked carefully, trying to pitch my voice so that it didn't sound judgmental or pushy or anything like that. "Serious question. Because, like, um. I don't know if you noticed. But. Pretty much everyone in my family is dead."

I braced myself against the inevitable surge of emotion, kept my eyes fixed on Ante even as they filled with water. Ante seemed to be struggling to find words, chewing at his lip, his face twisting.

"I want to if it matters," he said finally. "I want to know. Either there's nothing I can do, so don't bother, or here's how you can actually help."

I opened my mouth—

"And yeah, I know that basically nobody gets that kind of certainty, you can skip the lecture. It's still true. I can't just—just keep going to work, like my mom, I don't know how she can stand it, when she knows it doesn't matter anymore—"

I closed my mouth.

Is this Marco's fault?

It was Marco who'd told the whole world to get ready—who'd told the whole world that they needed to get ready, that every little bit would count, in the end.

Uh, in my defense, we're not AT the end yet, so you can't really say I was wrong. Also, why are we giving such a substantial shit about the mental health of some random teenager in suburban Finland?

I looked at Ante, who had sunk back down to the ground, his head in his hands.

It was true, from a certain perspective—that this wasn't worth worrying about, that even if you multiplied Ante's emotional distress out across millions of teenagers all over the world, it was still probably the right price to pay, all things considered. Better to let down a handful of romantics than to let the whole world get caught with its pants down. And by any sane, objective measure, I had much, much more important things to spend my energy and attention on.

But at the same time—

If this didn't matter—

Wouldn't that mean that none of it mattered at all, really? I mean, why bother keeping the Yeerks out of people's heads at all, in that world?

It was one thing to have perspective. To triage, to prioritize—to look at Ante and say I'm sorry, I'd help if I could, but I can't, because this other thing comes first.

It was another thing entirely to say this doesn't matter, period.

I thought about Cassie, who—according to some other Rachel's memories, according to Jake and Marco in those memories—had given up her ticket out of the Yeerk pool to try to save a little boy. Who'd died in the attempt, saving nobody.

My inner Marco had opinions about that.

My inner Cassie didn't care. Those opinions were missing the point.

I sat down next to Ante.

The problem, I thought.

The problem was that the word matter wasn't one word, was really two very different words pretending to be the same thing.

There was whether or not something mattered in terms of its ranking, how likely you were to actually get around to it, what you would sacrifice to protect it.

And then there was whether or not something mattered at all.

I'd killed two or three hundred people, a week ago. Not in calendar time, but in my own subjective experience—it had been fewer than seven days since I'd led the mission to destroy the Yeerk pool.

I'd done it knowingly. Willingly. I had sacrificed those people, deliberately, to try to save the other seven billion. And though I'd taken advantage of the opportunity to pick a time when my family wasn't there—

Steady.

—if it hadn't been possible, if I'd had no other choice, I still would have done it. Because my family—the people in the YMCA that day—all of the people of Ventura—

Each one of them was infinitely valuable, and each one of them meant less, overall, than the fate of the entire human race. Those weren't contradictory truths—they were two different ways of looking at the same reality, each one useful in its own way. Each one necessary, to balance out the other.

And Ante—

I'd been thinking a lot, since the hospital, about what kind of person I was becoming. About my sculptor, and how I felt about each new development—whether I resisted or embraced each new strike of the chisel. About how I decided what to cut away, and what to grow—what principles I was using to decide which parts of the statue were really me.

I still didn't have an answer. Not a complete one. But—

Rachel Berenson is the kind of person who looks at Ante, sitting there with his head in his hands, and feels—

Contempt, or compassion. Disdain, or admiration. I could feel the choice inside of me, the two potential paths, two blueprints of two very different Rachels, one impatient and cynical, the other empathetic and forgiving. I could be the sort of person who looked at Ante and saw only his naïveté, his insufficiency, his overall meaninglessness in the grand scheme of things—

Or I could see the other thing.

Porque no los dos?

No. I wasn't strong enough. Wasn't mature enough. Couldn't trust myself to hold both perspectives fully, switch back and forth between them smoothly. Maybe Jake could. Maybe some future Rachel would be able to.

But for now, what I had was a chance to choose which mistake to make. Which one to overdo, which side to err on, which person to be by default. Whether I wanted to turn myself into the kind of person who would remind you that every snowflake was unique, or the kind of person who'd shoot back that nobody cares, though.

Sounds like you've already made up your mind, there, Warrior Princess.

And I had. I could feel it—feel the rightness of it, the full, coherent sense of purpose. The part of me that had always imagined myself holding a sword had—had zoomed out, somehow, was now looking at the scene around me, seeing for the first time why—what I was standing in front of, what I was trying to protect. I imagined a field, a stadium, a continent full of Antes, all sheltering behind me—a billion different varieties of young, unimportant, useless, fragile—

Like flowers.

It was a weird mix of martial and maternal—the same fierce protectiveness I'd felt toward my younger sisters, only now I could feel it turning, expanding, stretching to cover everyone—humans and animals and aliens alike—not 'everyone' as a collective but a garden full of flowers, each needing time and space to grow—

Yeah.

Yeah, that was who I wanted to be. I wasn't her yet, but that was the blueprint—not Marco or Cassie or something in between, but Rachel. That was what I wanted Rachel to be for, what I wanted to think of as my purpose. Guardian. Protector. Not just of lives, of bodies, but of souls—where Marco would do what it took to keep someone like Ante alive, I wanted to do what it took to give someone like Ante a life.

I wouldn't be able to do that everywhere, for everyone. I knew—better than any of the other Animorphs, I knew what the cost of war was. What it meant to sacrifice one thing for another. I knew the mistake that Cassie had made, even as I understood why she'd done it on a level that Marco never would. There were seven billion people out there that I'd never even meet—I couldn't let myself get tunnel vision on the ones right in front of me.

But Ante—Ante wasn't trading off against anything. I wasn't going anywhere, had no plans, no targets, no ideas. And I could see his spirit breaking—see the fading, flickering light.

I didn't know what would happen, if that light went out. If he gave up—truly gave up—on being the kind of person who dreamed, the kind of person who expected things from himself. I wanted that to matter to me, no matter how insignificant it might be in the grand scheme of things.

That's awfully poetic. You sure it's not just that you have a crush on a pretty Scandinavian boy?

I didn't thrust the voice aside. I didn't have to. It was wrong, and I knew it was wrong, and that was enough.

I looked down. Ante was lying flat on his back again, one arm covering his eyes. Around us, the other boys had returned to the logs, were sitting there inert, exhaustion written in the slump of their shoulders.

The world is ending, and they don't know what to do.

I could relate to that.

"Ante," I said, reaching down to poke him gently in the shoulder. "Get up."

"Fuck off," he groaned.

"All right, then, at least sit up. Look at me."

He didn't sit up, but he lowered his arm, opening his eyes.

"Let's say you never get to find out. Whether you matter, I mean. You just have to pick."

"Pick what."

Dull the words, like falling mud.

"I'm just saying. If Gandalf did come along and give you the choice. Black or white. You either leave the Shire, or you don't."

"To go where."

"Come on, man, meet me halfway, here. You know what I'm trying to ask you."

"You want to know if I'm giving up."

"Yeah, sure, we can call it that. Are you?"

A silence.

"What if I want to give up a little?" he asked. "What if I want to just lay here for a while, and figure it out later?"

"You promised your mom you'd come home tonight."

Ante sighed, sat up, looked around at the other boys and then turned back to me.

"Easy for you," he said. "You're an OG Animorph."

"'If you're nothing without the suit, then you shouldn't have it.'"

Ante said nothing.

"Come on, you guys don't get Marvel movies out here?"

More silence. And then—

"I don't want to give up forever," Ante said. "But I don't want to promise never to give up, either."

"That's fair," I said. "What about a test run? You come with me on one mission—tomorrow, after we check in with your mom tonight."

His eyes narrowed. "Some kind of pity thing before you fly off to win the war for us?"

"Yep," I said. "Exactly that. You in?"

A part of me was stirring, a part that had been growing louder and louder lately—the part that held the memory of Jordan and Sara, that carried Cassie and Mom and Dad and Uncle Steve and Aunt Jean and Melissa Chapman—that part had risen up in objection, full of anger and indignation—

You can't just—just let it go like that, let it END like that, you can't let them get AWAY with it, they have to PAY—

I squeezed my eyes shut, visualizing their faces, one after another—Sara's gap-toothed smile, the mole on Jordan's cheek that she was so self-conscious about, the way Cassie's eyes would light up whenever Jake walked into a room. I played the list in my head, rehearsing the memories, the memorial that was all I had left of them—of any of them.

Mom's sigh, and the way a few strands of hair would always manage to slip themselves out of her pony tail, the way she would brush them back behind her ear whenever she turned the page of one of her briefs.

My trip to Disney Land with Dad last year, when he'd put me up on his shoulders to see the fireworks—I was twelve, way too big, he'd ended up twinging his back and he'd needed an icepack on the flight home, but he'd still called me his little monkey, had made me feel like I didn't weigh anything as he swung me up in his arms.

Melissa's dress, on the night of our first school dance—

Uncle Steve, teaching me how to play chess at the family reunion at Lake Tahoe—

Aunt Jean's black belt test—

Too many, there were too many of them, too many faces and too many memories, friends and coaches and teachers and neighbors. I felt my anger cooling as I rehearsed them, recited them, but it didn't go away—just transformed, the magma spreading out, thickening into a bleak, black sadness.

Not fair.

It wasn't fair, that they were dead—that they'd been tortured, some of them, that the last days of their lives had been filled with horror and then been cut short. It wasn't fair that I was alive, when they weren't—that I had been given the power to fight, to protect myself, when they hadn't.

Never, ever forget—

And I wouldn't.

But at the same time—

At the same time, it wasn't right to think that things would never be okay again. For a part of me to insist that they would never be okay again, to treat any possibility of peace or progress or forgiveness as betrayal. That piece of me—it was standing up for something right and good and true, it was protecting something important—something I desperately wanted not to lose—but it was wrong about how to protect that thing. That piece of me that wanted to rage and destroy, to make them pay, it was wrong about how the world worked, about what it would mean for there to be such a thing as justice, it didn't understand about prices, about consequences, any more than my sweet tooth understood about diabetes.

At some point, somebody has to be willing to not get everything they deserve, or it'll all just keep going around and around forever—

"Ei, se ei ole pysyvä tili," said Ante. "Se on salasanalla varustettu laatikko, joka on rekisteröity nimellä Garrett Steinberg. Kaksi r ja kaksi t Garrettissa."

He gestured toward me, and I smiled vaguely up at the man behind the desk, whose lips thinned in response. He began typing on his terminal.

We were standing inside the Nordea bank, two kilometers north of the hospital in Tampere, where Tobias's note had directed Garrett to go in the event that he didn't come back. It was still two days shy of October 10th, but under the circumstances, I figured neither Tobias nor Garrett would mind.

Behind the desk, the man's expression flickered, darkening for just a moment before it returned to its flat, businesslike composure.

"Mikä oli tilin salasana?" he asked.

"The password?" Ante translated.

"Roger Carson," I said. "R-O-G-E-R, C-A-R-S-O-N."

The man typed in the letters, his expression flickering again.

"Olen pahoillani, mutta herra Garrett Steinberg sulki tilin useita päiviä sitten tyhjennettyään laatikon. Voinko nähdä henkilöllisyytesi?"

Ante stiffened, his hand falling on my shoulder. "Ei, kiitos, älä unohda, pidä mukavaa päivää!" he said, steering me out of line and pushing me toward the door.

"Go," he muttered. "Don't run, but don't stop."

I felt a flood of adrenaline and picked up the pace, the hairs on the back of my neck tingling. Behind us, the man behind the desk was calling after us, his voice loud but not yet carrying a stop, thief kind of urgency.

"Kiitos vielä kerran!" Ante called over his shoulder as we reached the exit. Two seconds later, and we were out on the street.

"Okay, now we run," Ante said.

"Where?" I asked, but the other boy had already taken off.

Three blocks away, we slowed and changed direction.

"Okay," I said, chest heaving as we headed south, toward the water. "What the hell was that?"

"The guy said that the account was already closed," Ante panted. "And that you were the one who closed it."

Everything was swimming, everything was heavy and distant and foggy and clogged, it was all I could do to hang on to consciousness, to keep my eyes open against the million tons of force trying to drag them closed—

I felt hands around my face—gentle slaps—resolved the image of my cousin Tom out of the fog. I tried to speak, but nothing came out. Tom was shouting, but it was like I was underwater, like I was underwater and he was over the surface, I could hear that he was saying something, but whatever it was I couldn't make it out.

And then—

Tobias?

That can't be right, whispered some detached, empty part of me. Tobias is—he's—

I didn't finish the thought—couldn't. Once more, the black fog choked my vision off to a point, snuffed it out. I couldn't feel anything, see anything, could barely think anything—

Marco.

I remembered Marco.

Remembered a face, a voice, a smell, a smile—

Hang in there, Wonder Woman, the voice whispered. It's going to be o—

"You have something that belongs to me."

For a moment, it seemed that Koskinen was going to deny it, but then he sighed, his shoulders sagging.

"So you did see the note," he said.

I didn't nod, didn't answer, just crossed my arms.

You did see the note meant I hoped you hadn't seen the note, which meant I deliberately hid the note once I found it. Tobias must have left it that very evening, just a few hours before I woke up—before Koskinen could take it away.

"You morphed Garrett to get the password," I said accusingly, echoing Ante's tone from the night before. "Without his permission. You morphed this comatose child in order to steal his property, after first invading his mental privacy."

"Circumstances required—"

"Paskanmarjat," I snapped. I hadn't picked up many Finnish words over the past week, but I knew how to call bullshit, thanks to Ante. "Circumstances required you to violate your patient? Circumstances that said, don't inform your conscious patient, even though she's just a phone call away?"

Koskinen's eyes flickered toward his nephew, who was sitting in the chair beside me.

"It is not that simple," he said. "You are a minor, Garrett Steinberg is a minor, the other children who brought you here are all minors—"

"I'm sorry—do minors in Finland not have property rights? You can work and open a bank account at fifteen, can't you?"

"You're fourteen, not fifteen."

"Which you know, again, because you violated the mental privacy of a child under your care."

Koskinen's face had begun to redden, and his voice took on an edge. "I decline to sit here and be lectured by a child," he said. "A child to whom I have provided significant value, at substantial risk both personal and professional—"

"Value that was paid for by giving you and three of your friends literal superpowers," Ante hissed.

Koskinen blinked. They were the first words the boy had spoken since entering the room with me.

"Do you have any idea what I would do, to have the morphing power, uncle Rand?" Ante continued. "Do you know what I would do with it? I wouldn't sit around in a hospital in Tampere running tests, that's for sure—"

"Those tests are crucial to understanding this technology," Koskinen shot back. "To being able to duplicate it one day—"

"Why bother duplicating it when you've already got the box?" I spat.

"A childish perspective," Koskinen sniffed. "Why bother making a second lightbulb when you've already got one? Humanity needs to understand this technology—the sheer potential for medicine alone, not to mention telepathy, nanotechnology, dimensional physics—this could be the key to ending death itself—"

"Not if we don't make it through the next week."

"What are you going to do with it this week?" Koskinen countered. "It was sitting in that deposit box for days. For how many months have you children been carrying it around? Since March at least, no? And how many people have you—activated?"

"Over a thousand—"

"A thousand!" he shouted, cutting me off. "Pennies! Bird droppings! The cube can transfer the morphing power to five individuals every thirteen seconds! Twenty people a minute, a thousand people an hour, a hundred and fifty thousand per week! You could have given every soldier in Finland this power, in the months you've kept it to yourself!"

"We've kept it safe from the Yeerks," I snarled. "Who we're still at war with, even if a few of them have defected. Who already have better tech, not to mention the high ground, not to mention that they're close enough to every government to have emailed half the heads-of-state in the world on their personal emails! If you put this thing in the system, you're all but handing it over to Visser Three, who will use it to end us!"

"We know how to be careful—"

"Do you? Because I'm the one Elfangor gave final responsibility to. I'm the one he charged with blowing it up, rather than letting it fall into the wrong hands. I'm the one whose family—"

I broke off, my whole body trembling. "I don't give a shit that you're a grownup, Koskinen. I don't give a shit that you're a doctor. If you weren't Ante's uncle, you'd be having this conversation with a grizzly bear right now, regardless of what you've done for me and Garrett. I already wouldn't have been able to just—just take your word on it, that you're doing enough to keep the cube safe, and by stealing it you've made it so I can't trust you at all."

I was full—absolutely full of anger, was shaking with the effort it took to keep it all inside. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a clinical part of me noted that maybe I was so angry because Koskinen had a point—that we should have been doing more with the cube, all along—

But that was just fuel for the fire, was a mere tributary to the river of rage flowing through me—at the violation this man had so casually committed, the risk he had so blithely shrugged aside—

"Where is it?" I demanded.

"Someplace safe," he said.

"Where is it?" I repeated.

"I won't tell you."

"Then I'll destroy it," I said. "You've been in Garrett's head, no doubt you've been in mine, too. You know I can blow it up remotely."

Koskinen crossed his arms in front of his chest. "You can," he said, his voice artificially cool. "I wonder if you will?"

Big difference between could and would, I'd said to Ante. I turned to look at him, saw that he had made the connection, too.

Would I?

I had come to get the cube, to give the morphing power to Ante and Elias and Juhani. Although everything I'd said about keeping it safe from the Yeerks was true, I hadn't really been weighing the situation along that axis—that had just been my brain producing sentences it thought might win the fight.

Yeah, okay, but if he flat-out refuses to give you any information about where it's being kept and what it's being used for, then you have to assume it is in danger of being compromised, right? That it's out of control, and needs to be shut down?

A part of me noted that I needed to remember to kill Tobias, the next time I saw him, and then another more careful part overwrote that with you need to find out what his constraints were and then maybe kill him.

"Listen," I growled. "If you don't give me at least some reason to—"

It happened faster than I would have believed possible—too quickly for me to even process, at first, let alone respond to, let alone interfere with.

Ante sprang up from his seat—

Snatched up a massive, leatherbound tome that was lying on the desk—

Swung it, binding-first, straight into Koskinen's temple—

Koskinen's head snapped sideways and he went instantly limp, almost falling out of his chair in the process.

"Ante, what—"

"Common Endeavor," he said. "The Territorial Forces taught us how to knock people out after school. Sharp blow to the temple or jaw, anything that snaps the head around."

"But you—"

"He's my uncle. I know him. He'd already made up his mind."

"But—"

"Acquire him. You can access all of his memories if you acquire him, right? Like how you found us last night? You can get the cube back, if you know where it is?"

My jaw snapped closed with a click.

"He'll wake up," I said, as I reached over to grab his limp wrist.

"I'll keep him here," Ante said darkly.

"But you—"

"Were you telling the truth about the cube just now?" he said, cutting me off. "How important it is to keep it away from the Yeerks?"

I nodded.

"Then I can handle the fallout. I'll take care of Garrett, too—uncle Rand can be a shithead, but he is a good doctor, he won't hurt Garrett, I'll stick around to make sure—"

I stood up and began morphing, forcing my clothes into the pocket dimension along with my body. I would take Koskinen's clothes off of him, which would have the side effect of making it easier for Ante to keep him in the room.

"Ante," I said, my voice beginning to rasp. "I don't know—whether this works or not, I don't know if I'll be able to come back—"

"I get it," he said. "It doesn't matter. Just get it done."

There was a fire in the boy's eyes, a tightly-controlled thrill in his voice.

Looks like mission accomplished, eh?

"Sisu, Ante," I said, and he nodded grimly.

"Sisu, Rachel," he replied.

The walls seemed to shimmer, to flex—changing colors, changing shape, one moment flat unpolished metal, the next smooth beige plastic. There were lights, shifting and flickering—beeps and clicks, radio voices—a viewscreen like the one on the starship Enterprise, showing—

Showing—

? ? ?

"—no time," said Jake, or maybe Marco, the bodies switching places, disappearing and reappearing. "At this rate—they've already—hundred Venturas—"

"—can't beat them head on," said Tobias, from the screen—no, from right beside me. "—wasn't for those mines, we'd already—"

It was different this time, I thought. And then I realized that I was thinking—that I was thinking, the now-Rachel, the Rachel who was demorphing, who was right now in the middle of a seizure-vision, I'd never come awake during one before—

Marco spoke again, and it was like the voice of some nightmarish monster, ten different sentences all emerging at once, blended and overlapping and incomprehensible. Jake answered back, and then Ax—except no, wait, Ax wasn't here, Ax was down on Earth, and besides, he wasn't called Ax anymore—

Flashes of light, blindingly bright—

The whole ship shook, throwing us to the floor—

No, wait, nothing had happened—okay, now it was happening—

‹Yes, or no,› thundered the voice of the Visser, from where he stood, surrounded by Marines all pointing their guns at him—no, he was on the viewscreen—both?

It isn't usually like this, I thought. Why—what—why is it all—

"Yes," said Jake.

"Yes," said Marco.

"Yes," said Tobias, and then vanished.

"No, wait, stop, you can't!"

The voice was Cassie's—

Cassie's?

She was there, where she hadn't been, her eyes wide, her face stricken. "You can't," she repeated, as Jake shouted her name, as another explosion rocked the ship, as beside me Marco raised his gun and fired—

My head throbbing the cube to the flat, tumble wince sound of blue.

Above face face eye brow brown frown Ante, face along Garrett "Rachel?"

Feel no spike pain because under nose red, red, red red red red red—

"Rachel, don't m̷̝̄ov̵͒ͅe̶̫͐ ̶̿͜c̵͎̒ơ̶̻n̶̚͜e̶̖͌ ̶̏͜f̵̙͠ǘ̷̠ŕ̷͜ỳ̡,̶̺͛ ̷͕̈́s̷̲̽ỉ̝n̵̟̈k̷̥̀ ̶͔͐ okay s̴̳͛ẗ̷̲́r̵̺͠o̵̦͒k̴̝͒è̶͚ ̵́ͅh̵̪̆on̶̙̄or̵͈͝ ̶̞́h̵̘̉e̷͖͝ĺ̶̝ps̶̩͝a̵͙͊f̴̹͗ȅ̴̖ ̷̗͗h̴̹͒u̵̘͗r̵̟̃rý̷̮."

I can't. I can't, don't.

Try but numb hand up bump cube at least, more face word Ante, Garrett, head spin floor burning blur blur blur gaussian?

calm

CALM? CALM?

Mouth. Face. Hand. Eyes. Verb? Hurts—

Ante "okay, g̴̠̈r̶̲̊â̵͜b̵͜͠ ̴̺̚h̵̰͠é̷ͅr̦̀—"

Garrett touch wait cube cube cube

"Got it r̴͇̽a̵̖̤͛̄̚c̷̘͍̥͒̾̓h̷̼͈͝e̷̡͙̅l̶̨̺̼̋͒̌"

Spinning black