r Animorphs: The Reckoning Chapter 39: Jake, an animorphs fanfic

Author's Notes:

1. This is a replacement for Chapter 39 (which was 12,000 words), while also being Chapter 39, Part II (new total 24,000 words). Sorry for forcing you to reread, but I ended up going back and making a lot of changes (hopefully improvements) to the earlier parts, and then just smoothly carried on into the second half. You could technically just ctrl+f "I lay awake on the narrow cot," but you'll have false memories about what happened with Jake and the Visser if you do.

2. Speaking of which, specific kudos to readers u/CouteauBleu and u/hyphenomicon for feedback that was both highly critical AND highly constructive. This chapter is better because of them. (There are other readers who proposed a bunch of stuff that'll help with future chapters that I'll hopefully remember to shout-out later.)

3. I've opened up an admonymous account as a side project, with the goal of collecting questions that are too personal, too embarrassing, too confrontational, too dangerous, too weird, or otherwise too costly to be seen to ask. It's been fun so far; if you want to drop a question it's just admonymous dot co slash duncan. Note that answers go up on Facebook and pretty much nowhere else, so you'll need to either friend me, follow me, or search for me there to see them (my posts are always public).

4. Next update is planned for two weeks out; we're still On A Roll. May lose steam at some point and slow down, but at the moment I'm still hoping to not go on another long hiatus (and at most, one more long hiatus).

Chapter 39

~~~JAKE~~~

Know your enemy.

I know—it's a cliché. The sort of thing that makes people roll their eyes. The sort of thing you hear from the #wise character, two episodes before the big battle. As if digging through Tom Riddle's childhood memories will always, always, always turn up some crucial weakness just in time for you to exploit it—as if people have weaknesses, in the superhero sense. Weaknesses that are like buttons that you can just press—weaknesses you can rely on, make solid plans around.

I went back and looked up the original quote, once. From Sun Tzu, who first wrote it down maybe twenty-five hundred years ago. A quarter of the way back through human history.

Sun Tzu wrote if you know your enemy, and you know yourself, you may fight a hundred battles without danger. If you know yourself, but not the enemy, for every victory you will also suffer a defeat. And if you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will lose every time.

We'd had victories.

The Animorphs, I mean.

We'd had defeats.

And while most of our victories had come from knowing our enemy—from managing, once in a while, to be one step ahead—

Just knowing wasn't enough.

I think Sun Tzu knew that. I think when he imagined fighting a hundred battles without ever losing one, he was taking for granted that part of how you pull it off is not fighting the ones you're going to lose.

I mean, that's part of knowing your enemy, right? Knowing when they're stronger than you. Better positioned. Better prepared. Being able to see what they're planning, and to see that it's going to work. That there's nothing you can do to stop it.

I couldn't see through the fog, but I could hear them—like rice falling through a rainstick, the rattlesnake sound of a million tiny legs, a million clacking jaws. I could hear them even though Marco was screaming—could somehow hear them through his screaming, as if the two sounds were coming through completely different senses, neither interfering with the other. I could feel my self, my soul, tearing in half, every part of me wanting to run forward, every part of me knowing it was too late—

Tom and I used to take Tae Kwon Do classes, when we were little. After school, in a little do jang inside a strip mall, not far from the construction site. One time, this old grandmaster came over from Korea as a special guest, to judge a black belt test. Grandmaster Byong Yu, I think his name was. And he had a piece of advice of his own, one he said he'd picked up from his master, back when he was a child in Korea during World War II:

When trouble comes, do not be there.

You don't have to fear the results of a hundred battles, if you're in a position to pick and choose from among them. If you can afford to wait for your chance.

And if you can't—

If the enemy gets to choose where and when you're going to fight—

If they're a hundred times more powerful than you, and have full control of the battlefield, and have been preparing for months—

I don't know. It's still worth knowing, I guess. Just in case. For that one-in-a-million chance. Sometimes there really is an Achilles' heel.

But it doesn't feel like a guarantee, the way they make it sound in stories.

Which is maybe why, after months of trying to think my way into Visser Three's head—

Trying to figure out how he thought, what he wanted, what his blindspots might be—

Now that we could actually just look—

For some reason, my attention kept getting pulled somewhere else.

"Helium," I said, pitching my voice low as the rough feathers of Quatazhinnikon's body flowed together and melted back into human skin. "What's a vecol?"

I wasn't an expert in reading alien body language, but it wasn't hard to pick up on Helium's surprise, or the tension and discomfort that followed on its heels.

‹It seems that you already know, if you know enough to ask—›

"I want to hear it from you."

The young warrior twitched, shifting nervously, his stalk eyes refusing to meet my own. When he spoke, his words were slow and reluctant.

‹Denotatively, it refers to a small, scavenging amphibian native to the Andalite homeworld,› he said. ‹One that makes its burrows in the mud of bogs and swamps. It is named for the sound it makes to attract a mate.›

"It's a dung eater, right?" I asked.

Helium nodded.

"And connotatively?"

The alien seemed to brace himself, drawing upward, meeting my gaze head-on. ‹It's a label, among the Andalites, for the imperfect,› he said, his tone now flat and emotionless. ‹Those you would refer to as disabled, whether mentally or physically.›

I nodded.

Shit-rat.

The Andalites, apparently, had a lot in common with ancient Sparta, when it came to their attitude toward cripples and special needs kids.

‹We understand that this view differs from the views of many humans—›

Not that many. I'd almost thought the word retards, not because I had any active desire to be insulting, but just because that's the word that came to mind.

‹—but you must remember that Andalite psychology, Andalite culture, is very—›

"What do you know about Alloran?" I interrupted.

Helium blinked with all four eyes at once. ‹Esplin's host?›

"Yeah."

‹Um. Can you be more specific? Strategic and tactical genius, decorated veteran, father of modern Andalite military doctrine—›

"Any stories about his childhood? Or, like, myths? George Washington and the cherry tree?"

‹Ah—›

"Anything about vecols, in particular?"

There was a long silence.

‹No, Prince Jake. Not that we can recall.›

I nodded. "Thanks, He-Man."

I turned back toward the empty corner of the Bug fighter's storage bay, where I'd pulled together a couple of crates into a place to sit and think.

It wasn't all that surprising. Not really. From the things Ax had told me, Andalite groupthink was incredibly powerful—what the crowd believed just was the apparent truth, a lot of the time, as difficult to question as the color of the sky.

And if Alloran was a beloved hero, a tragic martyr, a perfect specimen of Andalite nobility and genius—

Well, then, of course he wouldn't have had anything to do with shit-rats. You didn't even need some weird half-hivemind to explain it. As far as alien stuff was concerned, that was almost human.

Sucking in a lungful of the stale, metallic air, I closed my eyes, focusing once more on my mental image of Quatazhinnikon. The Arn's anti-infestation tech meant that I could spend at most about fifteen minutes in morph before things started to break down. This would be my fifth time dipping into the feathered alien's memories—into one memory in particular.

Hypersight.

Rachel had described it to us, once, back in Ventura—had experienced it for a split second during the takeover of the high school. The Visser's ship had been carrying a strange alien creature that Ax later identified as a Leeran—had brought it close enough that the Visser, Rachel, and Erek the Chee had all been inside of its—what—aura? Umbra? Its area-of-effect?

She'd said it was like the way people joke about magic mushrooms, in the movies. That time and space had opened up, unfolded—that she'd been able to see everything, understand everything about the Visser, and Erek, and the Leeran itself—that the Visser had known exactly where she was, even though she'd been hidden inside Erek's hologram.

The Andalite head grew large, larger, and larger still. The four horselike legs merged into two and then expanded, each leg becoming as large around as a redwood tree, the webbed feet sinking into the mud of the construction site. The wiry Andalite arms—sprouted, somehow, splitting and shivering into a seething mass of tentacles. In the hideously bloated head, a mouth appeared, filled with teeth as long as my arm. And all the while, the Andalite war-prince just lay there, watching, unmoving, until the monster reached out and seized him by the neck—

Just for a moment, Rachel had said, and then the ship had passed out of range, and the memories had—had leaked, somehow, had been too huge and weird for her brain to hold on to, leaving her with just glimmers and fragments, a few sketchy recollections.

But Quatazhinnikon's memory was perfect.

More than that, the alien scientist had spent whole minutes sitting in the bubble of hypersight with the Visser—almost half an hour, in total, as they negotiated back and forth.

Which meant that we had a half-hour-long recording of the inside of Visser Three's mind. Of Esplin's mind, and also—of course—

Of Alloran's.

It was funny. In all this time—in every conversation, every argument, every council-of-war—

We'd never asked about Alloran. Never considered him. Never stopped to think of him as a separate individual, except maybe in passing—as Esplin's victim, Esplin's slave, a repository of intel and strategic and tactical wisdom.

But as the morph completed, and I unfolded the strange, frozen, fun-house-mirror-slash-wax-museum of Quatazhinnikon's memory—

There he was.

Marco—

I flinched, and gritted my teeth.

Marco—all five of him—had been poring over the memories himself, when he wasn't busy grilling Visser One or trying to work through everything with his—their—mother. Trying to learn as much as they could about Esplin's goals—his plans—the things he'd asked Quatazhinnikon to do—the techniques and technology that the Arn had employed as he'd tried to comply.

It was the sort of thing I should have helped with. Should have been interested in, especially since—even now—I had the edge over Marco when it came to making sense of an alien mind.

But I wasn't having the easiest time being in the same room with Marco at the moment, let alone Elena or Visser One.

And as for taking a look myself—

I couldn't explain it. Somehow, Esplin and Quatazhinnikon just…didn't hold my interest. It was like they were a paper I had to work on, one that wasn't due for another week, and in the meantime, my attention kept sliding back to Alloran. To the brief, fragmented moments when Quatazhinnikon had turned his attention to Visser Three's other half, the handful of memories that had passed between them in the wild swirl of hypersight. Each one was like—like its own little world, its own little dimension, an entire reality frozen in time that I could peer at, step into, walk through like one of those room-sized model train sets. Like sticking my face into a Pensieve, and finding a memory that could only be played frame by frame.

The taste of the pale lavender flowers that grew in the perpetual mist beneath the waterfall near his childhood home.

The ache and throb of muscles pushed beyond exhaustion when his military instructor ordered him to chop down a gigantic tree with nothing but his tail.

A quiet conversation on a cold, dark night.

A fall of sand from a clifftop.

The ugly, almost unbearable horror of that first awakening, after the Yeerks' betrayal, when he regained consciousness to find that his body no longer responded to his commands.

Memories large and small, with no particular rhyme or reason—the kind of things that just happen to stick with you, just happen to come to mind, side by side with some of the most important moments in the Andalite war-prince's life.

And most important of all—deeper and somehow central, as if it was the foundation on which all of the rest had been built—a memory that had caught even the strangely indifferent attention of Quatazhinnikon, been the focus of the Arn's curiosity for long, long seconds in the swirling, timeless madness—

They clustered together, the six of them—had shifted, perhaps unconsciously, reforming the circle away from the small, crumpled body. They looked desperately back and forth at one another—clung to one another like the survivors of a shipwreck, seeking safety and reassurance as waves of guilt and fear and panic crashed through the eib.

Alloran could see himself in the others' thoughts, as clearly as if he stood before a mirror—the splash of dull red across his torso, the shining wetness on his tail. He was motionless, pretending stone, his stillness even more pronounced as the others twitched and trembled, their tails quivering, their stalk eyes twisting and darting.

The others noticed.

They noticed, and as he watched himself through their eyes, he could see that they were taking it, on some level, as evidence of distance. Of judgment. Of other-ness. That his apparent calm meant that he was not-like-them, not-one-of-them.

Alloran felt a twinge of unease. It wasn't that he was calm. He was trying to think—

But it was too late. In their agitation, they turned from him, pulled away from him, the perception of difference becoming reality as their belief in it grew stronger.

‹It wasn't our fault.›

Not a message. Not clean, deliberate communication. Just a wild thought, leaked rather than expressed—slipping through the fraying boundary between one mind and the next.

‹It wasn't our fault. We didn't mean to.›

The thought passed around the circle, redoubling, reverberating, gathering weight and momentum like a snowball rolling down a hill.

‹We didn't mean to. We didn't.›

‹Of course not.›

More thoughts, as the snowball tumbled, as one by one the others joined the self-assembling narrative—

‹We didn't do anything.›

‹It was an accident.›

‹He was too close to the cliff—uncoordinated—clumsy—›

Alloran looked down at the body—at the cuts and gashes, the streaks of blood.

Alloran looked at the others—at five tail blades, wet and slickly gleaming.

Alloran looked at the landscape—the gentle, rolling hills, without a rock or cliff in sight.

‹We didn't even want to go, but he insisted. We were humoring him. It was his idea. And then, when it happened—we were too far away—›

‹No.›

The other children stopped. Turned to face him, moving in eerie synchrony, one mind with five bodies.

‹No,› Alloran repeated. ‹Look. They will look, they will see, they will know—›

It wasn't a bid for truth. It was, if anything, an attempt to help. Look, Alloran was saying. Look, the story is too weak, too evidently false—

For a moment, there was fear—

‹They won't look,› said Harelin, stepping forward and rising to tree-stretch. ‹Not for a vecol.›

The thought filled the eib, crowding out the seed of doubt.

‹They won't.›

‹Why would they?›

‹And if they did, they won't care.›

‹They probably wanted this.›

‹This is why they sent us out.›

‹It was their idea to send us to the cliffs in the first place.›

‹It was their idea.›

Again the snowball, and Alloran closed his eyes, feeling dizzy—closed all four eyes and dropped to river-run, seeking the solid stability of the ground. It was true, he remembered old Nerefir giving the order—

But the blood on our tails.

Why would there be blood on our tails, if Mertil had merely fallen?

And why would Nerefir have ordered them to visit the cliffs—that was a two-day journey, and they had no supplies, no navigation equipment, no communicators—

There was a sound, and Alloran opened his eyes to find that the other five children had closed around him, had made a circle that did not include him, a circle that contained him—

Alloran blinked. The tails of the other children were clean, and dry—

No. They were wet, streaked with green—had been hastily wiped on the ground while his eyes were closed—

No, they were clean—

The vision ended there, Quatazhinnikon having lost interest and turned his attention back to Esplin and the negotiation. But the rest of the story was obvious—was written in every aspect of Alloran's personality, splattered across every other memory. I poked and prodded, wandering through the frozen wax museum of the Arn's recollections, piecing it together.

Alloran had fought—resisting both the incredible mental pressure of his peers and their desperate physical intimidation.

Alloran had fought, and Alloran had won.

And then, bloodied and exhausted, Alloran had gone back to his superiors, dragging the other five children in his wake, and confessed. Had forced all of them to confess—to share the unbent truth that they had almost managed to make themselves forget, in their fear and shame and panic.

And then, nothing had happened.

No punishment. No reprimand. The adults hadn't even kept a record of what the children had done. They simply noted that Mertil-Iscar-Elmand was no longer on the registry, and redistributed the six remaining cadets among other squads who had lost members to illness or injury or graduation. Alloran had carried on with his own training with neither a black mark nor a commendation. It was as if it Mertil—

—poor Mertil, the vecol, whose stalk eyes had never sprouted, who could only see in one direction, with forward-facing eyes—

—which in fact was his downfall, was how Harelin had managed to sneak up on him from behind in the first place—

—it was as if Mertil had never even existed.

There was this one time, back in eighth grade, when I got super mad at one of my teachers for switching a project deadline from mid-January to the last day before Christmas break and then pretending it had always been due that week. I griped about it over the holiday, and my grandfather just laughed and gave me a copy of 1984 to read.

There's this one part, in the book, where the main character finds a photograph that proves that the government has been lying—something about some guys that weren't actually enemies of the state, or who'd been in one place when they were officially somewhere else, I can't remember exactly.

And anyway, the main character burns the photo, because it's dangerous contraband or whatever, and he doesn't want to get caught with it. But I remember that he hung on to the memory of it for years, after that—that it was like the one thing he clung to, no matter how crazy everything else got. A reminder that there was a reality outside of what everybody "knew" was true.

That was what Mertil was, for Alloran. What he became. A rock in the stream, solid ground underfoot. And, more importantly, a constant reminder that that was necessary—that the other people around him were not even fully aware of what they were doing, when they rewrote history.

Cut to twenty years later, and Alloran had become the most brilliant and capable military leader that the Andalite people had seen in generations—maybe their most capable military leader ever.

I guess it was technically possible that those two things had nothing to do with each other, but I wasn't betting on it.

And now, a decade or two after that—

Around me, the mental vision began to flicker and degrade, signaling the breakdown of the morphing tech. Pulling my attention away from the memories, I concentrated on my own body, feeling the flesh return to my limbs, feeling my eyes shrink as the hardened beak melted back into soft, human features.

What are you doing in there, War-Prince?

The creature we knew as Visser Three had not started the way Helium had, with willing cooperation. Esplin nine-four-double-six was, and had always been, totally and ruthlessly in control.

But still, Alloran was in there. Was a crucial ingredient of the Visser Three hive-mind, was not just a passive vehicle that Esplin used to get around. His thoughts, his memories, his perceptions—they were the lens through which Esplin viewed the world, the computer on which Esplin ran his calculations.

And given that—

Given what the avatar had told us, that what had happened to Ax and Perdão would happen to any Andalite Controller—

Given what I'd learned about Alloran's history and character—

Given that Alloran was absolutely Esplin's enemy—

I was as sure as I'd ever been that somewhere deep inside of Visser Three, the part of him that was Alloran was biding his time. Waiting his chance. Doing everything he could to throw a wrench in the works, to nudge things into place for an eventual fall from grace. I was as sure as I'd ever been that Alloran, of all people, would never, ever give up the fight.

I could picture Marco's face, hearing that—could see that little skeptical smirk, that raised eyebrow, that look that said sure, uh huh, whatever you say, buddy—

I pushed the image aside. It didn't really matter that I didn't have enough evidence to back it up. I knew that I didn't, and I believed it anyway. I could feel it, somehow—feel it leaking out of every last shard of Alloran's memory, every frozen thought. He was in there, and he was still in the fight. He didn't—he wouldn't make sense, otherwise. And people always made sense, once you looked closely enough.

But I didn't know what that meant, in practical terms, given that Esplin could eavesdrop on Alloran's every thought, would be aware of the war-prince's every intention. I didn't know what would happen—what had happened—as the walls between them crumbled, and the pair of them bled together into a single individual.

I didn't know what—if I was Alloran—I could possibly do, which meant that I didn't know how I—as Jake Berenson—could help.

But it seemed like I might be able to figure it out. Seemed like I should probably try to figure it out, as long as we were stuck out here in space, waiting for the Ellimist to snap his fingers and send us back to Earth.

Uh, Visser One? Elena? Esplin? Quatazhinnikon?

I shook my head, feeling the last of the feathers fray apart into hair. There were five Marcos now, not to mention Helium. I couldn't do everything, didn't have to take responsibility for everything—

I paused, letting myself breathe.

It was true that I would probably do a better job than Marco at understanding Visser One, or Esplin, or Quatazhinnikon himself. But there was only so much time left, and something told me that if there was some deep, subtle insight to be had—some important detail that I might catch, that Marco wouldn't—

I don't know. It was just a hunch. Maybe not even that. Maybe I was just rationalizing, looking for any excuse to stay hidden in my corner a little longer.

But my little black box said it was Alloran if it was any of them, so I closed my eyes and focused once again.

~~~VISSER~~~

The creature opened its eyes.

There was nothing prior to the opening—no consciousness, no awareness, no dreams or delirium. Not even blackness, or emptiness, or a sense-of-nothing-there. Just an utter lack of existence, a timeless time, followed suddenly by its opposite.

Four things the creature knew, in that first moment—knew without thought, without processing, the kind of wordless knowledge that lives in the deepest crevices of the mind.

The first was that it was restrained—its limbs pulled in all directions, wrapped tight in a thick, dark, woven material whose look and feel advertised indestructibility in an offhand, indifferent fashion, with nothing to fear and nothing to prove.

The second was that there were guns all around—guns in front, guns behind, guns pointing down from above and up from below, a hollow shell of death with the creature held fast at the focal point. It would count the guns, later—out of habit only, since by then it would have remembered how many it had placed there—but in that first, fleeting moment, it knew only that there were enough, and more.

The third thing the creature knew was that it did not want to die.

And the fourth thing—this being the spark that would light the fire of conscious thought, opening the floodgates to emotion and memory and purpose—the fourth thing the creature knew was that the screen directly in front of it was empty, save for a single message reading Scenario Four.

The creature understood the message, and the understanding was a trigger, and in the wake of that trigger the creature knew many more things—distressing things, for the most part, and far more than four of them.

But foremost among them, the creature remembered its name, and it remembered what came next.

The first of the tests was passed when the Visser reached out with a tendril of thought, wiping away the message and initiating the authentication protocol. There was no other outward acknowledgement—no loosening of his bonds, no relaxation of the attendant arsenal. That was not the Visser's way.

Instead, the system merely proceeded, the screen producing a set of four queries in each of four quadrants. Taking in the information at a glance, the Visser projected four answers simultaneously, and the screen flickered again.

There were questions—about his former life as Alloran, his former life as Esplin—even a smattering of inquiries for the part of him that had been Cirran, various trivia dragged up out of a vault of years.

There were problems—in strategy, in tactics, in physics and math—challenges that required him to hold and manipulate upwards of thirteen variables at once, measuring the speed and quality of his thought.

There were lesser tasks—demonstrations of his body's ability to project thought, to divide his attention, to control at a distance. There were diagnostics, checking the health of the body itself—his mastery over muscle, nerve, and sinew. Samples were drawn, and scans taken, to be processed elsewhere, out of sight.

At one point, a Leeran emerged, held tight within its own bonds, a thick cable dug deep into its brain. The creature looked at the Visser, comparing what it saw with what it remembered, as the Visser watched, and watched itself watching, and watched itself watching itself watching.

The Leeran withdrew. Nothing else changed. The tests continued.

Finally, the gauntlet was complete. The guns disappeared, quietly and without fanfare, each cylinder vanishing behind its own small port-cover. The fabric flexed, relaxed, and unraveled, the individual threads snaking their way downward through a thousand tiny holes in the deck. On the screen, there was nothing—for the Visser needed no other reminder that the system was awaiting his orders, and thus had not programmed one in. Everything within the facility was his to command, utterly and without hesitation.

The Visser stretched, sinking his awareness into his new body, feeling the mix of the strange and the familiar. Quatazhinnikon had fulfilled his every requirement—the new body was larger than Alloran's old form, large enough to overpower even the strongest of natural Andalites, yet still it felt light, limber, responsive, the snap of his tail so swift the air cracked. Where before there had been fur, there now lay row after row of tiny, overlapping scales, each hardened to an iridescent sheen, a reflective surface to scatter Dracon fire with blood vessels just below the surface to leach away what heat could not be blocked. He shrugged, and the vulnerable dome of his cranium retreated beneath a hooded carapace, a sleeve of thick bone with two sharp blades forward-swept and tiny slits to peer through.

He crouched, twisted, leapt into the air, testing the flex of his new muscles and the responsiveness of the new third arm that rose from the center of his back. He looked toward the screen, and light filled his vision, shading into colors he had never perceived before, infrared and ultraviolet and a faint, slow sparkle of Z-space fluctuation. Soft cilia on his face tasted the air, and nerves in his hooves quivered as they passed through the electromagnetic fields that flowed everywhere invisibly through the air.

In that moment, there was joy, and the Visser did not suppress it. He exulted in his victory, reveled in the fact of his own survival, bathed in the exhilaration of pure sensation. It was good to be alive, and for a moment he let himself feel it fully, laughing with uninhibited abandon in that chamber where no other could see.

Not for long, for there was work to be done. But for long enough, and the act itself was strangely powerful—was a closing, of sorts, to the ritual of necessity that had come with his awakening. It was a reaffirmation—a reminder of all that he fought for, and why the fight was necessary, an emblem of the opposite of the end of all things.

And then, awake and aware and ready, above all else, he stood once more in the center of the chamber, and turned his thoughts to the future.

Scenario Four.

It was the worst of the best cases, or perhaps the best of the worst. There had been no direct signal to trigger his revival, nor an absence of the standard delay signal—

—had his enemies duplicated the standard delay signal? How?

—he had instead been revived by the absence of the auxiliary backup signal. That meant that as many as seven cycles might have passed, and other processes set in motion—contingencies, fallbacks, deadman switches—

With a flicker of mental energy akin to the twitch of a finger, the Visser called up the relevant information.

Six other Vissers had been awakened alongside himself, and would now be emerging from their own gauntlets—on Leera, Gara, and the homeworlds of the Andalites and the Arn, as well as one of the thirteen deep space sleepers and the one aboard the Z-space skimmer.

Reset all other timers; return all other clones from standby to deep stasis.

The other in-system sleeper—the primary sleeper, for Scenarios Two and Three—had not been awakened and was likely lost, along with the rest of the materiel at the Martian facility, which was currently unresponsive. The Visser tried to pull up local surveillance data, and found that his remote observation craft were offline, either compromised or destroyed; it would be some time before he was able to move one of his surviving assets into place.

If the Martian facility had been taken—

That would mean the end of the breeding program; he would instead have to rely on cloning for the first generation of augments, which would mean a significant delay. He tried opening a channel to Quatazhinnikon—

The ansible link to the Arn had been cut.

Suppressing a rising—and useless—note of alarm, the Visser initiated a complete diagnostic inventory of his communication channels.

Active surveillance devices surrounding Earth: disabled/non-responsive.

Active surveillance devices surrounding Earth's moon: disabled/non-responsive.

Active surveillance devices surrounding Mars: disabled/non-responsive.

Active surveillance devices above and below the plane of the ecliptic: still functioning (the Visser instructed these to move to new positions and begin transmitting data).

Passive surveillance devices surrounding Earth: disabled/non-responsive.

Passive surveillance devices surrounding Earth's moon: disabled/non-responsive.

Passive surveillance devices surrounding Mars: still functioning (the Visser began an automated scan of their recordings, starting with the most recent, instructing the computer to flag anything unexpected).

Direct line to his personal ship: disabled/non-responsive.

Direct line to the Telor mothership: disabled/non-responsive.

Direct lines to in-system Bug fighers and transports: nominally functional, but unresponsive.

Direct line to the autonomous assets on Europa: disabled/non-responsive.

Direct line to the incoming reinforcements: disabled/non-responsive. (Jammed?)

Direct line to the Indian battalion: nominally functional, but unresponsive.

Ansible link to the Arn: disabled/non-responsive.

Ansible link to the Andalites: disabled/non-responsive.

Ansible link to Visser Two on Leera: still functioning.

Ansible links to the other sleepers: still functioning.

Deep-space relay to the Silat contingent just outside the rift: still functioning (the Visser ordered the contingent to yellow alert and instructed them to prepare for re-entry into the system).

Deep-space relay to the blackmines surrounding the Z-space bridge: still functioning (the Visser ordered a secondary diagnostic scan, to be followed by a randomized repositioning of all mines after the Silat contingent had passed through.)

Deep-space relay to the American president: still functioning (the Visser noted that there were four messages, and placed them in the queue).

Deep-space relay to his agents on the Yeerk homeworld: disabled/non-responsive.

Deep-space relay to the Chee: nominally functional, but unresponsive.

One-way mirror-link to the kill-switches on the human power grid: still functioning.

One-way mirror-link to the kill-switches on the human internet: still functioning.

One-way mirror-link to the kill-switches on the human satellite network: still functioning.

One-way mirror-link to the takeover switches on the human satellite network: still functioning.

One-way mirror-link to the remaining nuclear capacity on board the human submarines: disabled/non-functioning.

The Visser continued on down the list, his confusion deepening. There was no obvious pattern to what had been disabled and what had not. He thought, for a moment, that the humans might have somehow continued tracking his movements after the destruction of their Z-space resonator, but no—while they had carefully disabled his first set of countermeasures, they had not disturbed the neutron explosives he had planted afterwards, as a failsafe—

Perhaps they were trying to be clever? Deliberately refraining from acting upon all of their intelligence, so as to avoid tipping their hand? But if that were the case, then surely they would have removed Donna Marina from office—subterfuge or no, there were few wise plans which called for leaving a blade at one's throat—

A thought occurred to the Visser, then, and he turned back to the list—

Remote hyperdrive triggers: disabled/non-responsive.

He cursed.

But if that were so—Telor's auto destruct was mated to those—

With a mental command, he brought up the live feed from the extraplanar observation stations. It was lagged, delayed by the time it took for light to reach them and then be relayed, but—

Debris cloud.

A quick estimate of the mass, a quick summary of the spectral analysis—

The Visser's tail rose grimly, unconsciously, hovering over his shoulder as if in anticipation of violence. That was indeed the remnants of the pool ship, and the traces of helium hydride confirmed unambiguously that his own ship had been caught in the explosion as well.

Enemy action?

He sent another command, and information from the human internet flooded the screen.

Betrayal.

There was no anger or frustration. There was, if anything, a begrudging respect, tinging the boundaries of a larger surprise. For all that self-sacrifice was a nonsensical move, it at least required uncommon courage, and he would not have thought Telor capable—had made no plans for that contingency, except in the general sense of having attempted to ready himself for disasters of any magnitude.

An expensive lesson.

Time passed. Quickly, efficiently, the Visser settled into his work, activating what resources remained accessible, probing the limits of his new—and greatly reduced—capabilities. Telor—and perhaps the humans?—had done its job well; many of the strings he had relied upon had been cut, and of those that remained, few could be tugged without giving away his position or escalating the conflict.

But the Visser had done his job well, too. He had survived, after all, and while it looked as though most of his supply caches had been compromised—most painfully the primary facility on Mars—this fallback base carried a full fleet of 169 drones, a joint Arn/Naharan fabricator, and three each of human, Hork-Bajir, and Betalite bodies in statis, along with thirteen proxy shards and a full database of Quatazhinnikon's work. Most valuable of all, it contained a hyperdrive in perfect condition, shielded against all detection by one of the salvaged Chee hologram generators. If he wished to shatter the Earth and escape the system, he would need to steal or manufacture another, but if he wished to do only one—

The Visser paused, then, as he considered, for the first time since his awakening, the full termination of the Earth invasion.

Scenario Four.

It was in the gray area, along with Scenarios Three and Five—a situation not obviously salvageable, but also not a clear and overt threat to his greater interests. Telor's betrayal was a setback, and the loss of the Martian base an even heavier blow, but it was conceivable that the best path forward still lay through the as-yet unconquered humans in their billions.

A reflex fired, at that—whether from the ghost of Esplin, who had long since learned the shape of Alloran's mockery, or from the ghost of Alloran himself, the singular creature who was the Visser did not care.

A reflex fired, and it produced a thought, which in words might have been something like:

I notice that I am seeking a conclusion.

Seeking, as opposed to merely looking and reasoning. Seeking, despite resistance from reality.

The Visser paused for a moment to let the recognition seep through every layer of his conscious awareness, releasing the desire for that answer and replacing it with the desire for the answer—for the unbent truth, as near as he could come to uncovering it.

Given my goals: should the invasion of Earth be terminated, and the resident humans along with it?

Yes.

Upon second thought, the answer was clearly yes. It was the longer path, and the slower by far, but the Visser had already cleared the system of greater than ninety percent of its tactical nuclear capability. He had exported hundreds of the humans' air, land, and sea vehicles, each of them bristling with weaponry, along with the necessary expertise to operate, maintain, and build many more. That alone was an enormous win—would almost certainly prove decisive in the conventional wars over Leera, Gara, and the outermost Andalite colony worlds.

What he stood to lose from terminating the invasion was some seven billion potential hosts, and an industrial capacity equivalent to that of a third of the other known worlds combined.

But what he stood to lose from continuing it—

There was no force in either the Yeerk or Andalite power structures sufficient to wrest control of the Earth from him—of that, he was confident, even now.

But the Earth might yet wrest itself—might well become a power in its own right. The Visser had added weight to that possibility himself, with the various technologies he had given the humans—had greatly accelerated their progression toward true sophistication. They were more dangerous now than they had ever been—were already producing starships—were innovating on both defensive and offensive technology—had even opened independent lines of communication to the Andalite homeworld and the Council of Thirteen.

As yet, they still seemed shy of the tipping point. But it was in the nature of such things to be difficult to estimate, and always in the wrong direction. Certainly the Andalites had thought the poor, backwards Yeerks no threat, and had paid the price for their miscalculation…

Somewhere in the depths of the Visser's mind, a connection was made, or a calculation completed—what, precisely, he could not have said, but it impelled him—

—via a sudden, rising urgency, checked only briefly before being trusted by default—

—to flip a certain switch, initiating a series of preset commands which triggered the destruction of every major undersea internet cable, along with every backup, and half of the communications satellites in orbit.

(Those being the ones which had not been vulnerable to straightforward splicing and reprogramming, which now went dark and dormant, awaiting his further instructions.)

Some fraction of him relaxed, then, while the rest continued to think.

It was not only an apprehension that too late would come too soon. That had been a part of it, and the crippling of the human communication network a commonsense precaution that complacency had left untaken far too long.

(A wholly automatic reflex flagged the thought, and stored it away for future consideration.)

But there was more to the Visser's unease, as evidenced by the continuing steadiness of its manifestation—the absence of a conclusive yes, that's it in response to his previous action. He probed, and prodded, but the feeling did not change, did not respond—continued to sit like a stone in his abdomen, tightening the muscles of his limbs. There existed some key, some password, which would cause the feeling to unfold into comprehensibility; by the fact that it had not yet unfolded, he knew that had not yet found its true name.

Is it the human children? he wondered. The ones that survived the attack?

No.

Something else, then.

The humans themselves? Something that would be lost, if they were killed?

No, but there was movement in the part of him disquieted—a flicker of recognition, partial and fleeting—a sense that he was near the path, if not quite on it.

Ah.

He would have chided himself, then, were his reawakening not so recent—had he had more than scant moments to think, and thus the expectation that he would have already considered all things obvious.

The gods.

The gods whose existence was no longer in question, the gods in whose machine he was a ghost—the plotters, the puppetmasters, twitching strings to purpose unknown.

The Visser extended his will, and new information flooded the screen—

Nothing had changed in Z-space. Seerow's backdoor interface still functioned, as did the additional structures the Visser had built inside of it. The hypercomputer was still vast, and ineffable, the few and narrow paths he had explored within it like the burrowings of an insect on a mountainside, but none of the open doors had closed, and—most critical of all—the digital avatar he had distilled from the morphing database was still untouched in its dusty corner, on standby and smoothly updating.

(Not for the first time, the Visser wished that he could reach through the god-computer, rather than merely into it—felt a pang of loss and regret which his mind smoothly reshaped into irritation, that Seerow had not bothered to think ahead, had sought only the bare minimum of control, enough to solve his problem, leaving untold potential untapped and unexplored. There was information there, behind barriers which Esplin and Alloran were not, themselves, competent to breach—and more, there were eyes, eyes and ears that pierced space itself at every point, the answer to every question the Visser might ask and then some.)

(But it was a thought that led nowhere, so he set it aside.)

The gods.

They were not, precisely, the source of his unease. They were watching, certainly; interfering, without question—but they had yet to impede him directly in any detectable fashion, and while he would not claim that he had tried everything, still he had spent long weeks endeavoring to divine their intentions, to provoke unambiguous response, and thus far all for nothing. If they intended to reveal themselves, it would clearly be at a time of their choosing; what plans could be made in ignorance, what defenses set against their sight and their reach, he had already done.

No, it was more that recalling their existence had reminded him of other unknowns, other blindnesses—of all the variables yet beyond his direct control.

Again the rising pressure, again the impulse to act—and again, as before, he yielded to it, trusted it, erring on the side of least regret. The viral replicators would have been too final of an intervention even had they not been neutralized—

—thanks to the absolutely ridiculous coincidence of the Z-space rift and the humans' accidental resonator—

(Another flag, and in the back of his mind, some fraction of his attention set to work.)

—a situation which he would have dealt with directly, had he not been preoccupied with the captured Chee, and the search for the Iscafil device, and his first forays into the hypercomputer after the human children revealed the link between the morphing tech and the gods' intervention—

(Flagged.)

—not to mention all the lesser distractions like his ongoing manipulation of the exodus project or his campaign to undermine Visser One—

—but the substitute failsafe was more surgical, and perhaps more appropriate anyway, as it targeted intellectual and military capital rather than population centers or industrial capacity—

The screen displayed its confirmation, and the Visser relaxed another fraction. Time—it would take time to be certain that nothing had gone wrong. But whatever the risk of human ascension, that should have halved it, buying him breathing room—seven revolutions, most likely, though of course he would only count on two.

A strange tension arose in his mind, then—not the old split, between Esplin and Alloran, but two different Esplins, two different Allorans. A latitudinal division rather than longitudinal, with both of his inner ghosts present on both sides.

That won't be enough, argued his warier half. Not enough to be sure.

No, the other half agreed, one-quarter reluctant and one-quarter annoyed. But caution, in excess, is an error of its own, no less lethal in the end.

If the humans escape this system—

If they escape, they will find me waiting for them. I am already awake beyond the rift—by the time they breach the boundary—

If we don't need them, then why take the risk?

If they are such a risk, then they must be correspondingly valuable.

The safe and certain path—

The safe and certain path would have us still languishing in a dirt pool on the homeworld!

A gamble does not become correct simply by virtue of turning out well. Even unwise gambles pay out some of the time.

This is not an unwise gamble. I am no Seerow, running ahead with eyes closed. I have prepared for every contingency, up to and including literal divine intervention—

We were killed!

And yet here we are, awake and aware and with tools at our disposal.

And what if the humans broker peace between Yeerk and Andalite? What if we end up facing both of them, united?

Then better to have seven billion hosts at our command.

It was a strange sensation, feeling himself divided, his thoughts turned so squarely against themselves. Strange, and unpleasant. He was unaccustomed to it—or rather, had become unaccustomed to it. He remembered well the endless battles between Esplin and Alloran—remembered them from both sides, before the boundary between them had worn away. Not since Ventura had he felt such—

Discordance.

And with that, the sense of unease blossomed, opening like a flower to reveal the core insight within:

He was not one person.

He was not one person, and never had been. Alloran had always been the enemy of Esplin, and Esplin the enemy of Alloran, and the hostility between them had not ended, had merely gone quiet, and somehow he had not noticed, because—

Because he felt like one person.

Not in words, the thought. More a feeling, a formless confusion, and along with it a sudden ratcheting of his awareness, a stepping-back of perspective.

His goal—the goal, the true goal, the only goal that made actual sense—

He had thought—he supposed—that Alloran had converted, seen the wisdom of the quest and dropped his petty, personal resistance. He must have thought that, at the time, only he couldn't actually remember—

(Flagged.)

And now came the true dread, the rising horror, for the creature that was the Visser turned his stalks inward, searching, searching, and finding—

Nothing.

There was no clear division within himself, no two agents arguing—just himself, a tangled mass of fear and confusion, ambition and fury. He was Esplin, and he was Alloran, and he remembered both, remembered being both, but the two had fused, and both were in control—he was in control, no part of him any less than any other—

When? When had it happened? And why had he not noticed?

I mocked him—

He mocked me—

Alloran had mocked Esplin as the news came in from Ventura, the first reports of explosions in the pool facility—he remembered that, the memory doubled over, remembered his—

—Esplin's—

—anger, his bloated outrage, and the twisting knife, that anger was cousin to stupidity—a cheap retreat from the painful recognition that one's expectations had failed to match the true state of things—

That had happened, yes, and he—

—Alloran—

—had been thrust beneath the surface, and then—

—and then—

The Visser paused, his whole body sliding into stillness as every ounce of attention was swept up in the remembering—they weren't his memories, not truly, yet still he remembered them—

He had remarked on it—remembered remarking on it—the day that he discovered the bridge. He had discovered the bridge, and had waited—

—Esplin had waited—

—for Alloran's voice. Had waited, and been surprised to hear nothing, and then—

The gap in the human child's memory, the moment of fleeting disorientation—

Had this been interference of a similar kind? It surprised him, to think that he had been so incurious, but it didn't seem conclusive—

The bridge. Alloran was not there, at the bridge—could not be roused. And then—

Telor. That was the day he had faced Telor—had secured the coalescion's uneasy cooperation, begun his misinformation campaign.

And since then, nothing. Neither Alloran's presence, nor Esplin's curiosity. Nothing, until the discontinuity of death and resurrection had shaken him loose from the bias of sustained perspective.

(Flagged.)

And now—

Now—

He searched within himself, knowing even as he did that what he sought might somehow be behind his eyes, might somehow have made its way across the barrier—

Never before has any Yeerk lived so long within a single host.

And Yeerk no longer, now that Quatazhinnikon had built a single brain to house them both.

Could the Arn have made a mistake?

But the Leeran—

The memories—

No. If there had been a mistake, it was not recent.

The Visser twitched. Trembled. Felt the coursing of energy through his body, with no outlet—

Try as he might, he could sense no self-destructive impulse within himself, no desire to see himself fail. Only sincerity, deep and total—but within that sincerity—perhaps, even, fueled by it—

Disagreement. Irreconcilable disagreement, a fundamental clash of worldviews, deontological in nature, and neither clearly suspect.

Boldness.

Caution.

Risk.

Restraint.

One of them was Alloran, surely—surely one of them was a feint, a false flag, crafted carefully and specifically to cripple him at just the right moment—

But which?

He could not tell—could not see even in his own memories where the knife was hidden. Reason said that the caution derived mostly from the war-prince, and the drive from the Yeerk, but—

Was the caution the poison, meant to slow him down?

Was it a goad, meant to trigger contrarian recklessness?

Was it all to create this very confusion—to cause the Visser to mistrust himself and his intuitions, paralyzing him at a critical moment?

A critical moment—

The flagged thoughts rose to the surface.

They were all critical moments. Every one of them. The whole system was one giant, subtle web, a tug on any given thread causing the rest to warp and wobble.

And yet even that insight provided nothing, told him nothing. Just that something was manipulating him, or predicting him, or—or—

He did not know. He did not know, and he could feel himself trying not to think about it, feel the urge to slide back down to the object level, the safe and comforting territory where everything was comprehensible and every problem had an answer. The uncertainty was raw and painful—like hypersight, only without the sure knowledge that the experience would end, hypersight made permanent, eternal disorientation.

And yet—

Even knowing that the object level question was a distraction—

—a shield, a shelter, a place to hide—

Even knowing it, he still felt a pressure to answer it.

For he had to answer it somehow, didn't he? Either the Earth was to be destroyed at once, or it was not—and if he did nothing, continued to wrestle with the existential issue—

That was choosing not.

Seven billion hosts.

Well—six and a half billion, now, given what he had just done. Six and a half billion, and perhaps as few as six, once the dust settled.

But six billion hosts, with infrastructure largely intact.

He could feel the lean, the bias—the desire to hold on to the Earth and its value, not solely for their own sake, but also because they were his. Because he had staked his claim, poured out his sweat and blood—because they had challenged him, and the part of him that burned with fire and fury wanted to see them fall—

Ridiculous. Exactly the kind of anti-reason he disdained with all of the parts of himself—an outright parody of what both Esplin and Alloran stood in opposition to.

And thus—obviously—a clumsy attempt at reverse psychology—

And thus—obviously—a clumsy attempt at reverse-reverse psychology—

And thus—

It was a new problem, one he had never before encountered, neither as Yeerk nor as Andalite nor the uneasy marriage of the two. He did not know, had no policy, had no preset answer to the question of what one should do, when one could not put trust in one's own mind—

Or worse, when one wasn't sure whether that was the case.

What do you fear, on the object level?

(Setting aside the gods, who were their own problem—whose only interventions thus far had been to keep the game going, first by rescuing the human children and then later by creating conditions which resulted in the failure of their attack on him, and his subsequent progress with the Chee and the hypercomputer.)

The humans running amok—becoming a greater power in their own right, destabilizing the larger war, of which he almost had control.

What do you want, that makes you hesitate?

Time, of course. It all came back to time. Six billion humans would be seven again in a generation, even without technological advancement—and seven billion humans could be assimilated into the project in a revolution or two. If he had to start over with just Silat—without even the breeding population he had sequestered on Mars—it would be almost the same as if the humans had never existed, as if he had started from scratch with the Arn, as the Arn had with the Hork-Bajir—

No. That was the wrong way to go about settling the question—the wrong question to ask, in the first place. He was not sure which half of himself produced the objection, but he listened to it.

The question is not whether the humans, as a pre-existing resource waiting to be harvested, are too risky to harvest.

It was about whether the humans were, in fact, a resource or not. To presuppose a future in which they existed under his control, and then imagine the alternative as a loss, with accompanying disappointment—

That was putting the emphasis in the wrong place, creating a bias that clouded his thinking. If one approached the situation from a position of true neutrality, cognizant of what Alloran called empty stories and the humans called sunk costs—

If the humans were not his, and had never been—if he made no irrational claim to their future, had only just arrived in-system, with the resources currently at his disposal—

(And with the knowledge he already possessed about the interference of higher powers, powers with purposes unknown to him and likely at odds with his own.)

—what would he do then?

It was not obvious that the right answer to that question was total annihilation. There were resources still under human control that were disproportionately valuable, even now, and worth absorbing some risk to procure, particularly if the largest risks could be contained, ameliorated—

(Flagged.)

A single hyperdrive, sufficient to leave the system or depopulate it, but not both.

A thousand revolutions. That was what it would take, to grow the equivalent of a new human race from scratch, with only the resources available outside the system. Which might just as well have been a million revolutions—in the current equilibrium, a thousand was far too long for any practical use.

With the resources obtainable within the system—the resources realistically obtainable, only what he could extract within, say, the next sixty cycles—

A seventh of that, which was still far too long. Humans or no, the overall conflict would almost certainly be decided before two hundred revolutions had passed.

No middle path, then.

Either he conquered the system, as originally planned, or he would end up destroying it; the resources he could extract from it in the short term, given what had already been taken, were only negligibly greater than the opportunity cost of his own time and effort spent elsewhere, and accompanied by substantial risk.

There was frustration, then, and anger—a feeling like chasing quarry around the trunk of a guide tree. All this thought, only to arrive back at the same dilemma, the same choice, and with no further insight into the trustworthiness—or lack thereof—of his own reasoning. A wild, reckless nihilism played at the edges of his mind, daring him to simply flip a chit and be done with it; he resisted, all the while uncomfortably aware that that very resistance might well be the intended effect.

What would Alloran say, and Esplin in response—

An alert echoed through his mind, interrupting the loop, and data began to flow across the screen—visual confirmation of the detonation of the neutron explosives. A subroutine analyzed the data, producing an estimate of the casualties—

Five hundred and fifty-four million, give or take fifty million, mostly concentrated in North America, Europe, and the eastern coast of the Asian land mass. That, along with the permanent crippling of the humans' communication networks—

They will not escape.

They will not ascend.

And with his own duplicates already operating outside of the system—with the spare hyperdrive already at hand—with the American president still unsuspected at the heart of the exodus project—

(And with the quantum virus, which he now commanded the fabricator to bring to within two steps of maturity, just in case.)

The Visser paused, his thoughts changing orientation once again, another layer of unease unfolding—a deeper one, that he had not previously realized was there.

Know victory.

It was his central creed, his modus operandi—a place where Esplin and Alloran had shared agreement even back at the very beginning. And victory, in this case, meant the swift capture of the human species—or most of it—as his most efficient path to the harnessing of the broader galactic population.

But the destruction of the human internet, the leveling of certain human cities—

These were surgical measures, carefully prepared, designed to do maximum damage to human effectiveness and morale while inflicting the fewest casualties and being easy to repair, later. The neutron explosives would have left buildings and machinery intact, and it would take only a few revolutions to replace the undersea cables once there was no external force working to keep them broken.

And yet, his motive in executing those measures had not been to move toward victory, but rather to prevent defeat. They had been defensive maneuvers—conceived in wariness, executed in fear.

The realization rooted him to the spot.

Did he face defeat here, by leaving the Earth intact?

The heaviness in his abdomen shifted without lessening, as if to confirm that he had identified its source without assuaging its concern.

It seemed to him—

Upon reflection, it truly seemed to him that the answer was no. That there was, in fact, no realistic or predictable path by which continued efforts to assimilate humanity would lead to his eventual downfall. That there was nothing about the present situation which made him vulnerable in ways he could ameliorate. Especially not since his failsafes had worked—since he himself had revived, and his doppelgangers as well.

(He had previously been reluctant to commit to the use of autonomous duplicates, even having achieved apparent full fidelity; the risk of an error had still seemed high, and there had been little to gain while his own physical person remained safe. But the enemy had rolled those cubes for him, and the way now was forward.)

The threat of human ascension was contained, the moreso now that he had just dealt them two enormous blows—

(And with impunity, he noted, the gods having offered no interference.)

—and the threat of peace similarly manageable. He could end humanity at any moment, destroy the planet—or even the star!—at a whim, even from beyond the grave. Even if he failed, the other duplicates had everything they needed to launch a quantum viral attack. He had no specific cause to feel disquiet; just a vague and sourceless apprehension, a persistent intimation of vulnerability. It yielded preemptively to his interrogation, admitted freely its lack of basis—but it also refused to dissolve in the face of evidence and argument, leaving the Visser lost and foundering.

He was on edge, and he did not know why.

Without the Earth, completing the conquest of the rest of the galaxy will take five times as long, and be twice as likely—or more—to fail.

He was suspicious of the thought—for being too reassuring, too convenient, for making him feel better when he still did not understand the cause of his disquiet. But even in his suspicion, he could not stop himself from believing it.It simply seemed true.

And thus, he had no choice, choice being reserved for those situations where the answer, given one's goals, was not obvious.

He knew he had not yet answered the deeper question. Knew it, but could not wait upon an answer—and could not, somehow, bring himself to question the assumption that he could not wait. His mind slid off of it, and even in full self-awareness he felt no urge to make it do otherwise.

The Visser continued down his chosen path, for his confusion and uncertainty were yet insufficient to provoke a full reversal, and standing still was worse than moving in either direction.

He continued down his chosen path, but uneasily.

~~~JAKE~~~

I jerked to a halt as the door slid open.

"Uh," I stammered. "Sorry—"

"No, it's fine," said Marco's mother, brushing hastily at her tears as she looked up from my cot.

She didn't get up.

"Uh," I repeated. "You—you can stay here, if—"

"No, no," she interrupted. "I'm not—thank you, but no. I was actually, um. Hoping to talk to you."

She looked at me, then—straight at me, eyes red, lips forming into something that seemed like it was supposed to be a smile. "If that's okay," she added softly.

It wasn't. Not really.

But neither was telling her no.

I stepped forward, letting the door slide shut behind me. "I was in the cargo hold with Helium—"

"I know." She gestured around her at the walls of the narrow space. "To tell the truth, a couple hours of quiet time didn't hurt, either."

I blinked. "You've been in here for two hours?"

She nodded. "You've been busy."

"You could have—"

She waved her hands. "You've been busy," she repeated.

I stood just inside the doorway, feeling my heart rate slowly crawling upward, not sure what to say, how to respond. A part of me was—tight, almost—tense, like I was bracing myself. My brain, which up until about thirty seconds ago had been completely focused on Alloran, was now offering up all sorts of useful parallels, reminders about what Mrs. Levy had been through, what she was probably still going through, it was everything Tom had been through and more, and now Marco—

I cut off the thought.

I didn't want to deal with it.

I didn't want to help.

I knew I was supposed to, knew it was the right thing to do, but—

"You've grown," she said softly, derailing my train of thought.

"Uh," I replied, acutely aware that it was the third time in a row.

"You can sit down," she added, sliding a little further away from the door, patting the thin mattress. "I won't bite."

I didn't move.

"Trying to figure out what you're supposed to do?" she asked.

I blinked.

"Marco says you're tired of being the grownup."

For some reason, my heart kicked up another notch. I still didn't know what to say, but I felt like I had to say something, and I couldn't say uh again so I went with "What?"

Mrs. Levy cracked another one of those almost-smiles. "Actually, what he said was 'don't bother Jake, he's mad at me for being a jerk.' I had to read between the lines a little."

I had absolutely no idea what to do with that. There was a feeling of rising pressure in the room—or maybe just in my head—a growing sense of I-don't-want-to-be-here, which I was resisting for some reason, and the energy that was taking out of me was not energy that I had to spare. I was tired, and resentful, and—and empty, it was almost midnight by the ship's clock and I had been expecting to shut the door behind me and collapse—

"Sit down?" Marco's mom repeated. "Please?"

You know that bit in Harry Potter, where he's being mind-controlled to jump up onto a desk, and halfway through he kind of thinks to himself no, I don't think I will, thanks, and ends up smashing his knees?

I pressed my back against the door and slid down until my butt touched the cold metal floor.

"Sorry," I whispered.

Marco's mother's face twisted, looking for just a moment the same way her son's had, on a mist-cloaked hillside a million miles away.

Listen, you can't be more broken up about it than I am.

"Me, too," she said.

There was a long, long silence. Long enough for me to try out nine or ten different sentences in my head without saying any of them. Long enough to play out four or five different guesses as to why she was here, and what she wanted to talk about—long enough to start feeling guilty, and then defensive, and then angry, before finally remembering that I should probably wait to hear what she had to say before deciding how I was going to react to it.

Which was a good thing, because when she finally did speak up, it wasn't any of the things I'd imagined her saying.

"I gave them new names."

"What?" I said reflexively, even though I'd heard her, and understood immediately.

"New names," she repeated. "I gave them—him—new names. They weren't—they weren't exactly into it. But that's one of the perks you get, as a mother. You can do stuff like that, and they can't say no."

I tried to picture Marco's reaction and got nothing.

"What names?" I asked, because it seemed like she wanted me to.

"Vasco. Magellan. Livingstone, Cousteau."

She paused, and I could feel the weight of her expectation—a kind of quiet, desperate hope.

I wanted to punch something.

"Explorers," I said flatly, filling in the blank.

She nodded. "And Lewis," she said. "Like Lewis and Clark."

A series of memories tried to rise to the surface—Halloween, back in Ventura—Marco's mom dressed like Dora the Explorer—hiking backpacks full of Reese's and Snickers—

I shot them down.

"Only you're not Clark, are you?" she continued, and this time her voice was lower, as if she were talking to herself. "More like Shackleton. All those weeks, out on the ice."

My resentment flared, brightening suddenly into anger, and I grabbed it just before it could take control—grabbed it and held it, waiting for it to cool enough for me to see what it was made of. A theory occurred to me—that Mrs. Levy had planned all of this out, sitting here by herself for two hours—that she'd practiced the words, plotting out the twists and turns of the conversation—that it was a kind of ritual for her, a way to lay hands on some measure of control.

The anger receded.

"There are more than just five of them, you know," I said, keeping my voice steady. "He said he made about thirty."

I could play along, I decided. If I was right, and this was all just a script—I could give her that much.

"Thirty-eight," she murmured, her eyes focusing on nothing in particular. "Or—I guess just thirty-five, now. But there are plenty of explorers' names to borrow. Amundsen. Battuta. Erikson. Zheng He." Her voice hitched, and came back even quieter. "My little adventurer, always running ahead."

I waited.

Eventually, she turned to me, offered me my next cue.

"Is he still in there, Jake?"

Soft, the words—not a whisper, exactly, but somehow clearly fragile. I felt myself go still, like you would if a butterfly landed on your toe.

"What?"

"Marco. My little adventurer. You—"

She faltered. "You've been on this—journey—with him," she said, and now her voice turned pleading, took on a new note of something like need. "You know what—what's happened to him, what he's been through—what you've both been through. He—he told me—just a little—"

The pressure in the room was back, had doubled and was doubling again.

"—so much pain, and fear, and—"

Brittle. I felt suddenly brittle, like my arms and legs had turned to ice.

"—and hardness, he seemed so—so cold—"

The desire to run was back, but I couldn't move—had my back to the door, was blocking my own escape.

"—the way he just killed Hildy—the—Visser One's companion, he just—without even a thought—and that Arn, too—"

I didn't want to hear this question. Didn't want to hear it, didn't want to answer it—didn't want to force my own brain to go there, to think the thoughts required to find an answer and put it into words for her. That was why I'd been hiding in the first place—from her, from Marco, from all of it—digging through Alloran's memories of thirty years ago—

And she knew that.

"I just—I need to know, one way or the other. If he—if my beautiful little boy is still in there or—if this is—if this is all that's left—"

The anger came back, then—because she knew, she knew I didn't want to do this, she'd waited in here for two hours because she knew—

Anger, but I held it back, because even in my exhaustion I couldn't forget that this was Marco's mother. That she'd been taken, raped, enslaved—that she'd had Visser One inside her head for four years, and that her son had bought her freedom by taking in her captor—

It was too much for me to deal with. But it was too much for her to deal with too.

The silence stretched out, taut and wild and vulnerable.

Say something.

But I didn't have the words. I didn't know the answer to her question. I just knew that the wall—the wall between me and all of it—it was thinner now than it had ever been, a sheet of paper holding back an ocean, and I wanted to help her, and I wanted to leave, to turn around and run away, but I couldn't leave her, couldn't just abandon her there with it—

I opened my mouth to find that it was bone dry, closed it again to try to work up some moisture.

I'd rehearsed some conversations of my own—the dutiful ones, the on-mission ones, things I knew I'd eventually have to ask—about Visser One, Visser Three, any intel she might have on the Yeerks and their intentions.

But this, I had not prepared for, even though of course it was coming, I should've seen it coming, but that would have meant thinking of it in the first place, thinking about it, I couldn't have prepared for this without coming into contact with this and I wasn't ready for it—

"Mrs. Levy," I began.

"Elena, please," she said—an ancient reflex, from a lifetime ago, and as the words left her lips I could see in her eyes that she hadn't been ready for it, either.

"Mrs. Levy," I repeated, following the script—

And then I stopped.

Stopped, because my own eyes were suddenly—

—inexplicably—

—filling up with tears.

"S," I said. "S-s-so—"

"Shhhhh," she said, and then she was there on the deck beside me, her arms wrapped tight around me—warm arms, familiar arms, arms that had hugged me more often than any others besides my parents'—

Oh god.

I broke down completely, then—had absolutely no hope of holding it together, and didn't bother pretending otherwise. For a long time, I wasn't really there—no thoughts, no words, not even any feelings. Just an overwhelming, torrential flow, as the ocean of all of it poured through me.

"He died," I said—was already in the process of saying, when I finally became conscious again, finally came back to myself. "He j-just died and I c- I c- there was nothing I c-could do and then it all h-h-happened again—and again—"

"Shhhhh," Mrs. Levy was saying, and I knew, I didn't even have to think about it, I just knew that she didn't mean be quiet or stop but rather it's okay and I'm here and take all the time you need and my soul responded to that by cracking right in half all over again.

I cried.

I cried for what felt like hours.

I cried for Marco, and for my parents, and for Rachel's parents, her sisters—I cried for Tom, for what he'd been through in those weeks after the attack, out there all alone—I cried for Cassie—oh, god, for Cassie alone I felt like I could weep for days, and then there were Cassie's parents, and everyone else in Ventura, and behind that every terror and trauma we'd been through since the beginning, from the woods to the Yeerk pool and all the way back to that very first night, when we'd watched Elfangor die—

I clung to Marco' mother like a life preserver, forgetting for a moment that she had suffered, too, that she probably needed somebody to cradle her—for a while, all of the shoulds and supposed-tos just vanished, dissolved, and I just let every single bit of it come tumbling out of me until there was nothing left.

Eventually, the flow of tears stopped, and I found that my head was in Mrs. Levy's lap, my face streaked with salt and snot, my whole body slumped and twisted and trembling. Mrs. Levy had one hand clamped awkwardly around my shoulder, the other stroking my hair as she whispered "Mijo, mi querido hijo" over and over again in my ear.

It was like a switch had been flipped. Suddenly, I—reinflated, guilt and shame and embarrassment rushing in to fill the space where everything else had been. I sat up, feeling almost naked, pulling my shirt up to wipe off my face—

Mrs. Levy let me go, made no move to hold on to me. But she didn't move, herself, and so we stayed pressed together, crammed into the tiny space, my knees digging into her thigh, her face just inches away from mine.

"Sorry," I said, and my voice was almost perfectly level, perfectly normal, as if nothing had happened, as if we'd just been talking about the weather. I didn't—couldn't—look her in the eye, just stared down at my hands where they gripped my torn, soiled jeans.

Sorry? whispered Marco's voice in my head. For what? Being human?

But that wasn't quite it. I was sorry for being human now—for being human in this moment, for falling apart right at the exact moment when Mrs. Levy needed to, herself—

And underneath the sorry, I was angry—indignant, defiant—because I hadn't asked for this, it wasn't my job to take care of her, on top of everything else I had to be Marco's mother's mother when there were five of him—

It was like everything inside my brain had come loose, the lids on a thousand little compartments all blowing off at once. All the thoughts I had been putting off, postponing—all the stuff that had been waiting its turn—somehow Marco's mother had cracked open the door, overloaded my self-control, and I felt scared and I felt lonely and I felt stupid and I felt furious and I felt—I felt everything, was feeling more feelings than I'd ever felt before, all at once, and it wasn't fair—

"Thank you," whispered Mrs. Levy.

I took in a huge, deep breath, and steeled myself to look up at her face, and saw—

—that she looked better, somehow. Happier. Healthier—as if something had been healed, some wound knit closed with scar tissue—

—and for a moment my brain tried to reject it, to insist that it couldn't be, that I was just being selfish and trying to justify it, but a smarter, wiser part of my brain pointed out that how about shut the fuck up for a minute—

"For what?" I said, because I couldn't think of anything else.

"I don't know," she answered.

We sat there in silence for another long moment.

"For my son," she said, eventually. "For saving him, for all the times you saved him. For letting him save you. For holding his hand as he—as he died. And—"

She hesitated, and I saw her gathering her resolve, bracing herself. "And for saving him again," she said, fixing me with a look. "In the future. For being there for him still, especially—"

She broke off, gnawing at her lip, and I thought I understood.

"Especially now that he has—now that he's—"

"Yes," she said. "That thing in his head. In his heads."

I didn't ask what, exactly, she was afraid of. What she thought might happen, what she thought I might prevent. It seemed obvious, given what she'd already said.

My beautiful little boy.

Hey, Jake—why did the blind man fall down the well?

"I'll be there," I said. "I won't let it—I won't leave him."

They hurt, a little—those words. Hurt because I had been leaving him, right up until that very moment—had been turning away, pulling my soul out of the equation. Hurt, because I might have kept going in that direction, if she hadn't caught me, intervened. Because even though it felt right, now—felt obvious and true and—and easy, even—even though I couldn't picture going back, I could tell that I'd come very, very close to going the other way. Had not even noticed the fork in the road, or the fact that I'd already taken a dozen steps down the wrong path.

Slow down, Jake.

I took in another ragged, unsteady breath.

It wasn't bad to protect myself. Marco had—

Steady.

Marco had hurt me.

He had.

But pulling away—building up a wall—that wasn't the only way to deal with it.

"It's too much to ask," Mrs. Levy said, her voice sober. "But the world doesn't wait for us to be ready."

I felt the power in her words like a magic spell—like an echo of Elfangor, so long ago—tell me, human children, what deeds would you do, what burdens would you shoulder, how far would you go, if the fate of your species hung in the balance? I looked into her eyes, dark and haunted, and saw, for a moment, the pain contained within them, the proof of her own suffering.

Four years.

Somehow.

"Are you okay?" I asked suddenly, the words slipping out without thought.

"No," she said grimly. "Not yet. Maybe not ever. But—"

She broke off, fixed me with a look. "I'm not a part of your little flock, mi guerrero pequeño. That's the most I can give you—that you don't have to worry about me."

It was a relief. I was surprised at how much—at how much weight came off my shoulders, in that instant—surprised, and a little embarrassed. I hadn't realized how much I had been expecting it to be my problem, until it wasn't.

I think she could see it on my face, because she laughed, then—a real laugh, light and bright and without a hint of bitterness.

"What?" I asked, still feeling self-conscious.

"Everything else you're dealing with," she said, "and that one little bit makes a difference?"

I didn't answer. If there was a joke, I didn't think it was funny.

But she didn't press the point. Just leaned over and planted a kiss on my forehead, took my shoulders in her hands and looked me up and down. "You've grown," she said again. "So tall. So strong. Bigger than Tom was, the last time I saw him."

The dome vanished, and in its place stood my brother. He was on his feet, his body tense, facing in slightly the wrong direction. He whirled as the hologram disappeared, taking in a full view of the clearing, eyes wide and head turning frantically from side to side. When he saw that it was just me and Erek, he stopped and straightened, but his shoulders remained tight, his fists clenched. I could see grime on his cheeks, and his eyes were red and puffy—his voice cracked, and his eyes flickered almost imperceptibly back and forth. "You're not going to make me—you're not going to—to put it back?"

"It's been a long time," I offered vaguely, thrusting the intrusive memory aside.

"But still so young," she mused. "You and my baby both. The youngest of men, only thirteen."

Again, I didn't know how to respond, so again, I said nothing.

"The Yeerks," she said, and suddenly her tone shifted, became businesslike, as if to signal the end of the tender moment. "The Yeerks have a superstition about the number thirteen—"

~~~VISSER~~~

He was glad, in retrospect, that he had not been rash—had not leapt immediately to a final and irrevocable solution.

Telor had been in contact with the broader Yeerk command structure—Telor, or the human resistance.

(He couldn't be certain, just as he wasn't certain whether the communication was direct or indirect; he had yet to identify the channel and had not decided whether, once he found it, he would close it or attempt to corrupt it.)

But either way, his siblings had awakened to find that their enemies had taken advantage of their brief reprieve—had leapt into action almost immediately upon their predecessor's death, raiding his known supply depots, launching sudden and savage counteroffenses on multiple fronts.

The Andalites' response had been slower, and less coordinated, but no less enthusiastic—they had scorched nearly a seventh of the surface of Desbadeen, and once more tipped the balance on Gara, putting the remaining Yeerk forces there in jeopardy.

They were not acting in concert, thankfully—as yet, the animosity between Yeerk and Andalite remained in effect, and had even led to pitched battle in the skies over Bakura. But the momentum had shifted, and decisively. Telor's timing had been devastating, and the Visser's delay in reawakening even moreso; the larger war had become an uphill battle, and his sense of the Earth's relative importance had risen yet again. It was even possible (though not quite probable) that the explicit aim of the outsystem duplicates should be attrition rather than conservation—that their efforts would be better spent engaging in mutual, one-for-one destruction of resources, delaying the inevitable entry of enemy forces into the Earth system and buying the Visser more time to consolidate control.

As for the nature of that control—

The situation on Earth was also better than it had seemed, at first glance. The Indian battalion, which he had feared lost, had in fact simply gone to ground, closing down their communications in an improvised protocol to avoid detection. He had reestablished contact, and they were now on the move, taking advantage of the disruption in human satellite surveillance to cover ground at double speed.

Donna Marina was also in play—in fact, the Visser's destruction of the internet cables had had the unintentional effect of netting him information; the German and Israeli militaries had been busy constructing redundant fallback communication infrastructure in a secret collaboration, and had brought it online in the wake of the attack. They were operating with commendable operational security, and had thus far successfully contained all relevant technical information about the network itself, but the American president was taking part in conversations on that network, and had been provided with credentials and technology enabling roughly one petabite of data transfer per human hour, and was funneling him summaries every eight hours.

Most fortuitous of all, he had discovered that the forces sent to lock down the Martian base had yet to penetrate the interior compartment defenses (which had successfully activated in response to the breach of the outer wall), and were for some unimaginably naïve reason unwilling to simply destroy the facility in response, meaning that the larger drone fleet and its nanotech payload were still recoverable via the lower access tunnels (through which they were now traveling).

There were negatives, along with the positives—the word from Arn was that Visser One, escaped from Council custody, had successfully conducted an ambitious raid, bypassing all of his orbital and aerial security, and that Quatazhinnikon was dead. It had to be assumed that she had duplicated the avian's archives, and would soon be at least theoretically capable of fabricating countermeasures (though she would not have the benefit of a revolution's-worth of iteration in purpose-built Naharan machinery, whose specifications had been carefully secured elsewhere). That meant that, while the Visser could continue to count on absolute biotechnical superiority within the Earth system, it would be prudent to anticipate the closing of that gap in the near future in the broader war.

But all in all, the net result of Telor's betrayal—at least, within the bubble created by the Z-space rift—seemed, if anything, to be positive. It had forced various gambles which the Visser's predecessor had been hesitant to take (and which the current Visser still believed had been correctly identified as negative-in-expectation, given what had been known at the time), but the bulk of those had proven beneficial, and in the meantime, the humans had moved out into the open.

His earlier hesitation persisted—the mere fact of the continued apparent viability of the original plan did not conclusively rule out some critical flaw in his thinking—but even there, he felt reassured by the establishment of reliable channels to his counterparts, and the laying-down of further layers of fallbacks, failsafes, and countermeasures in-system (including several which in no way relied on the rift's persistence). It now seemed to him that only direct divine intervention, among all known forces, could cause the humans to successfully break out of the system en-masse—or even survive the dead-man switches that would be triggered by his own death or defeat—and even there, he was not entirely without recourse.

One further promise he made himself, in unison across all of his various bodies—that, should the estimated odds of critical failure for plans not involving the Earth drop below one in seven, he would immediately trigger the destruction of the planet and establish a permanent blockade over the Z-space bridge. His own personal sense of urgency aside, it was only the likelihood of defeat-without-Earth which justified continued engagement; an eventual victory seven-to-the-seven revolutions in the future was still immeasurably better than permanent defeat (the moreso now that his resurrection technology had proven sound), and there were enough uncontrolled variables surrounding the situation on Earth that he could not argue himself into assigning less than a one-in-seven chance of disaster, failsafes or no failsafes.

That done, the Visser turned his attention back to the information currently trickling in from Kadamba. If the human governments had noticed, they had not made any mention of it in their communications with each other, which meant that the next phase could be launched at any time—

He knew, on some level, that there were things he was not thinking about. Obvious things, for the most part—

—such as the fact that the apparent plausibility of the Earth invasion, the estimated value of the human species as an instrumental target, had stayed each time just ahead of marginal indifference, the initial allure always falling but never quite far enough or fast enough to reach a point at which it was unambiguously correct to cut his losses (and that even after the metacost of that very dynamic had been taken into the calculation)—

—or the possibility that the gods themselves were directly interfering with his perception and processing, as they had with the human child Marco, leaving him unable to arrive at correct answers no matter how detailed his observations or justified his reasoning—

—things which were beyond his ability to directly detect or influence, and which were therefore assumed to be not-worth-considering outside of the occasional brainstorming session or deep strategic review.

Yet there were other things which were not included in any such sensible policy—thoughts which eluded him not just on one level, but on every level—things he not only failed to consider, but also to consider considering, and also to consider considering considering. Phenomena which escaped his notice entirely, no part of them extending outside of the boundaries of his blindspots.

There was nothing particularly unusual about this. If anything, the Visser was measurably less susceptible to such oversight than his foes, his allies, his antecedents—was noteworthy, in fact, for having brought an unusually large number of considerations into his field of view, subtracting them from the infinite list of things-unthought.

Yet even very large numbers subtracted from infinity leave infinity untouched. And among those things-unthought were some whose power to influence the Visser waxed, rather than waned, as his own power grew.

Each new layer of policy was a tightening of the system, a step along the path that ran from chaos to agency, from susceptibility to control. The more aligned he became with his actual values—and the more consistent and coherent those values became—the closer he came to resemble a straightforward, deterministic machine, with inputs leading reliably and unambiguously to outputs. Like a weapon which, upon activation, invariably destroyed whatever object was fixed within its sights, instead of sometimes jamming, sometimes missing, sometimes breaking down or blowing up.

This was not, strictly speaking, a mistake. There was no subset of the Visser's goals which would be better served by being less efficient, no value expected from being less capable (or becoming more capable less rapidly). Rather, it was a tradeoff—an increase in the ability to achieve those goals, paid for by an increase in the likelihood of their being achieved.

There were parts of the Visser which, hearing that, would have known to be wary—as the Andalite war-father, as the prodigal child of Cirran, he was far from ignorant of the reality of unintended consequences. Those parts would have responded with greater thought, greater caution, more nuanced policy—an increase in the ratio of signal to noise.

But they did not—

—in a very real sense could not—

—respond by causing the greater system that was his self and his purpose to become any less of what it already was. The one thing the sculptor could not do was cease to sculpt, and so the Visser—who was, after all, quite young, whose elder parts even had mere millennia of experience, and that limited to the banks of a single, muddy pond—carried inexorably onward down a path that grew narrower with every step, toward a destination ever less ambiguous.

In many ways, that was the whole point.

~~~JAKE~~~

Four years.

I lay awake on the narrow cot, eyes open, the soft glow of the walls turned all the way down until it was no brighter than a nightlight.

She was a Controller for four years.

It was four in the morning by the ship's clock, and I couldn't fall asleep. Marco's mom had stayed to talk for hours—the all-business talk I'd been putting off, that I'd been half-hoping we wouldn't get to before the Ellimist sent us home. It wasn't like we needed to drag the real Mrs. Levy through it all over again, make her relive all of it—not when we had her morph pattern.

But she'd insisted, and pretty soon it was clear that she was getting something out of it—something more than just the knowledge that she'd passed along the information. Some kind of catharsis, or maybe some savage satisfaction—

I wasn't sure. I was exhausted, drained—had been awake for almost twenty-four hours, and my thoughts were frayed, wired, twitching.

Four years.

She had shrugged, when I asked about it—hadn't understood it any better than we did, didn't think Visser One—who she called Edriss—understood, either. Time travel, alternate realities, the gods messing with their memories—

Edriss had left the Yeerk homeworld four years ago, during the first wave of the diaspora, after Visser Three—just Esplin, back then—had taken over Alloran's ship and punched a hole through the unsuspecting Andalite blockade in orbit. She'd been given control of a Gedd body and an Andalite cradle, and a portable Kandrona—

"What?" I'd asked.

"A portable Kandrona. Basically an overpowered UV spotlight. It gives off a combination of three specific wavelengths of radiation that feed a certain kind of photosynthetic microorganism in the Yeerk tissue, and then that microorganism's excreta feeds the larger Yeerk."

"That's not what kandrona—"

"I know."

—and been sent off to look for viable infestation targets, along with a hundred other Yeerks sent off in a hundred other directions. She'd found Earth—taken a series of hosts, ending with Marco's mother—and then—

"Elfangor? Like—the Elfangor?"

"He wasn't the Elfangor back then. Just a lost first-year ensign—the sole survivor of a deep-space Andalite patrol ship ambushed by one of Visser Three's convoys. The hyperdrive on his cradle malfunctioned during his escape, and he spent nearly a month making a few thousand uncontrolled jumps a day until he ended up around the orbit of Saturn and limped his way in-system."

They had met—fought—left the system—Elfangor in Edriss's stolen cradle, and Edriss aboard a ship piloted by something called a Skrit Na. There had been a chase—an alliance of convenience against a mutual enemy called the Helmacrons—and then—

"They called it the Time Lattice."

A machine of some kind, impossibly advanced, with unknown capabilities. The Helmacrons hadn't built it, they were just looking for it.

"A time machine?"

"So they thought."

"Ax—Helium, I mean—he says time travel is impossible. Ruled out by physics."

"It is. In this universe, anyway."

They had betrayed each other—Edriss and Elfangor both—and in the end, Elfangor had been the first to reach the chamber where the mysterious device was hidden. He'd run ahead, entered alone, and by the time Edriss and Elena had arrived—

"He was gone. Vanished into thin air. We had no choice—the Helmacrons were right behind us—"

They had touched the strange, featureless sphere, and suddenly found themselves aboard an Andalite vessel in the skies over the Yeerk homeworld, just as it was overrun by Gedd controllers wielding clubs and stone knives and the occasional stolen Andalite shredder.

"We didn't know what happened. We didn't know how it happened. We thought—at first—time travel—"

But it hadn't been time travel. At least, it hadn't been just time travel. They'd been thrust back into the moment of Visser Three's betrayal, the beginning of the war—but they hadn't moved back in time. Later, when Edriss was once more given an Andalite cradle—this time in Mrs. Levy's body, which she pretended had come from a creature the Andalites had been holding prisoner—when they traveled back to Earth, to gather evidence to convince the Yeerk council—

It was the same year. The same day, according to human calendars. Edriss had landed in New York, and quietly checked the internet for news from Ventura, and had discovered that Elena Levy had been missing for nine days—exactly as long as it had been, in their own personal timeline, since they had abandoned her sailboat on the far side of Santa Rosa island, and boarded the passing Skrit Na freighter.

"We never figured it out," Mrs. Levy had said. "Whether we'd skipped universes, or created another universe, or created a time loop, or hallucinated the whole thing—it seemed like Elfangor might have known something, he was unbelievably quick on the uptake after the war got into full swing, became an officer after he pre-empted the surprise attack on Melpomenia. But we never managed to contact him to ask."

"But the Yeerks," I'd objected. "Once Edriss went into the pool, to feed—"

"They have incredibly fine control over memory, and memory storage, and memory transfer," Mrs. Levy explained. "That's how they mix and match to create the perfect Yeerk for each host. Edriss—she left the parts of herself that knew something was wrong inside my head. It wasn't a perfect solution—she couldn't do it for very long, and she nearly starved. She threatened to kill me, to hunt down Marco and Peter, if I said anything while I was in the cages. But she lasted long enough that no one suspected a thing until she made it back to her home pool. That's when she was promoted to Visser One."

"The other Yeerks—Essak, and Temrash, and Ter —Perdão—"

"They don't know. Visser Three doesn't know. The Sulp Niar coalescion kept it a secret—even then, there was suspicion about Esplin, his refusal to join the sharing, and his spies were everywhere. There wasn't much they could do with the knowledge, anyway. Edriss had already given them all the information she knew about what was coming next. And when they sent an expeditionary force out to the cavern where the Time Lattice had been hidden, it was empty."

"Does Marco know? That you—that you're not—"

"He morphed me, remember?"

"Ah. Right."

"But anyway, as far as we can tell, I am. All of the memories line up. Everything Marco remembers, everything that happened to me, it all checks out. We—Edriss and I—we even tracked down the Skrit Na freighter last year. They remember picking me up, remember following Elfangor out of the system."

"But the war—"

Marco's mother had shrugged again, helplessly. "It diverged almost immediately."

And Edriss—and even, to some extent, Mrs. Levy—they had both just—

Gotten on with their lives.

Shrugged it off, basically, especially once the rest of the universe caught up, and their special advantage stopped mattering.

I could understand that. It seemed crazy, on the surface, but—

I mean, there were days when I forgot that I'd even had a life, before that night in the construction site. Days when it seemed perfectly normal that I could turn into animals, days when I didn't even really think about the fact that I had died twice.

I guess people just adapt.

But there was some part of me that was resisting, a little. That didn't want to sweep it all under the rug just yet—that wanted to spend at least one night thinking about it, before throwing up my hands and saying oh, well, I guess the Ellimist and Crayak were just messing around.

It seemed like a clue. A puzzle piece. Some hint as to what was really going on, how this was all supposed to play out. We'd started out trying to save humanity from the Yeerks. Then we'd switched to trying to save humanity from Visser Three. Then we'd decided we had to save the galaxy from Visser Three. Now—

Now what?

What were we supposed to do? Which of the hundred interlocking games of interdimensional chess were we even capable of influencing?

I didn't know, and I wanted so very badly to not care. To give up. To rest. To sleep. There was a part of me that didn't even care anymore whether I made it through this war alive—a part of me that didn't want to make it through alive.

‹Helium,› I whispered, because of course I was in morph—always in morph, always on guard, I'd probably spent less than an hour in my own real body since we'd boarded the Bug fighter, had demorphed and remorphed in the middle of crying while Marco's mom had still been in the room—

‹Yes, Prince Jake.›

‹How are we doing?›

‹No change, Prince Jake. We are currently midway between the planet of the Arn and the Hawjabran Expanse.›

‹Still no sign of any other ships?›

‹No, Prince Jake. As we explained before, the odds of encountering another ship this far from any known planets or commerce lanes—›

‹Sorry. Just—let me know if anything weird pops up.›

‹As always, Prince Jake.›

Silence.

I had bargained with the Ellimist about our return to Earth, had gotten it to promise—whatever that was worth—that it would bring us back smart. That it wouldn't dump us in front of a moving car, or leave us out in space where the Earth used to be, when we left—that it would put us back under circumstances that we ourselves would approve of, if we understood everything that was going on and all of the ramifications of being in a certain place at a certain time, with no genie tricks.

I'd thought, once we had picked up Marco's mother, that that was it.

Then I'd thought it would be over once we'd ransacked Quatazhinnikon's lab, taking what we could and destroying the rest.

But there'd been no word, no visits from the strange blue avatar, no sudden teleportation. We'd boarded Visser One's Bug fighter, escaping the system just ahead of a small fleet that dropped out of Z-space as we left orbit—we didn't know whether they were Visser Three's allies, or Council police sent to capture Edriss—and had been hiding out ever since, crawling through the vast, unpopulated spaces between star systems, slowly making our way toward the Andalite homeworld for lack of any better ideas.

A part of me had tensed as Mrs. Levy left the room, thinking that maybe the Ellimist had just been waiting for that conversation to happen. But she'd been gone for half an hour, and still we drifted.

It's probably got something to do with the situation on Earth. Waiting for the right moment for us to reappear, as opposed to waiting for us to be done out here—

Or not.

Who knows.

Nothing I could do about it.

You're tired and not thinking straight.

Maybe.

Nothing I could do about it.

I waited passively—restlessly—resentfully—for my brain to produce its next thought, since it was clear it wasn't going to let me fall asleep any time soon.

Eventually—

‹Marco.›

Not just Marco. The Marco—my Marco, the one who'd been with me in Finland, the one who'd remained outside of the weird hive-mind mind-meld with the fragments of Visser One.

‹Whaddup, Fearless Leader.›

I winced. Marco's voice in my head was bright, cheerful, almost peppy. Like he was making absolutely sure not to let any stress leak through from him to me—

Or he's just actually in a good mood and it's not about you.

Tired.

‹What's new?› I asked.

‹Uh. Well, most recently, we had this idea that maybe we should just straight resurrect Quatazhinnikon, since doing everything fifteen minutes at a time was a bit of a pain and it means one of us is stuck in custody if we want to turn his expertise over to the military or whatever.›

I sent a mental question mark.

‹Well, the thought was that—since the anti-infestation tech means he wouldn't go through a coma afterward, and since his whole deal is being afraid of meteor impacts—›

Oh. Right.

Visser Three had hit Ventura with a meteor. Just, like, as a move.

Quatazhinnikon would probably Not Be Okay With That.

‹So—›

‹Didn't pan out. We tried waking him up and explaining the situation, and it turns out finding out that V3 throws meteors around just made him more unwilling to piss the guy off. Like, he immediately switched from willing partner to cringing minion.›

I sighed aloud, letting the disappointment trickle out of me. There wasn't much, since I'd only been excited for about three seconds, but—

‹What else?›

‹Well, we've pulled everything we think we're going to get about the stuff Q was working on for Visser Three. A lot of it we can probably do something about, if we can talk to the right people, but a lot depends on whether the Ellimist sends us back with the equipment we stole or not. A bunch of the machines weren't built by Q, so he doesn't know how to recreate them, and I don't know much about going from a genetic code to an actual living virus, or whatever.›

‹What about Visser One?›

‹You mean Visser One-Quarter?›

There was a silence.

‹You can't see it, but I'm doing finger guns right now.›

Marco, I'm really tired—

‹Sure,› I said.

‹See, because there's four of them, right—›

‹Are you doing this bit for you, or for me?›

Another silence, one I couldn't help but interpret as hurt.

‹Sorry,› I began. ‹I'm just—›

‹It's fine, buddy,› Marco said, his voice light and relaxed.

‹Yeah, but I—›

‹Seriously, don't worry about it.›

‹Can you just—›

‹Jake—›

‹Marco.›

I sucked in a breath.

‹Sorry,› I repeated. ‹But can you, like, stop trying to—›

I paused, searching for the right words.

‹—to make my life easier, or something?›

Marco didn't answer.

‹Like, stop tying yourself in knots, so that I won't tie myself in knots, or whatever. I don't know. I'm—it's fine if I get mad, you know? Or sad or upset or whatever. I'm not—I'm not made of glass, I'm not gonna break. It feels like you're bending over backwards to make sure you don't tick me off—›

I paused, to see if he would say anything, but he didn't. The silence stretched out.

‹I don't want it to—to not be okay to shout, or something,› I continued. ‹Like you're trying to hard not to piss me off that it—that I feel like I'm hurting you if I do.›

Seconds passed. Then—

‹Can I point out that I was in the middle of telling you it was fine to be mad?›

Just the tiniest bit of an edge to his voice. Just the tiniest bit of the real Marco showing through the cracks.

Why aren't you more broken up about it? I'd asked, as my best friend had bled to death on the hillside.

Duh. I've got to keep you from going over the top.

‹Yes,› I said. ‹Point it out. Clap back, for god's sake—stop—stop being the grownup.›

Another pause.

‹What exactly is it that you want here, man?›

I clenched my fists, alone on the cot in the tiny room. Just tell me what you want, so I can give it to you, no matter what it costs me…

‹Good question,› I said. ‹Give me a second.›

I'll be there, I'd told his mother. I won't leave him.

Somewhere in the back of my mind there was an alarm going off, telling me that I was too tired, too triggered—that this wasn't the right moment, that I was going to end up saying a bunch of things I'd later regret.

But I'd been listening to that alarm for weeks. That's how I'd ended up here.

I sucked in another deep breath.

‹I want you to apologize,› I said. ‹For doing this clone bullshit without telling us—without telling me. For me having to watch you die three times in one night. I want to talk about how you just straight-up murdered a POW—two POWs—in cold blood. I want to know what the f—the h—I want to know what on Earth you were thinking when you—you—you just threw away—after all your lectures about stakes, and perspective, and you just dropped everything to rescue your mom—and don't you dare try to pull some crap like it was all about Visser One, because I swear to god—›

I broke off, my face burning, my chest heaving. Around me, the tiny room was very, very quiet.

‹I want to know why you're so willing to just kill yourself, like it doesn't even matter as long as you've got copies left somewhere, were you even going to check in before you decided to just sacrifice yourself to make a Quat clone—›

I kept waiting for a Jake, buddy, but Marco kept saying nothing.

‹—I want to know what's wrong with you, if I can even trust you anymore, there are four of you walking around with Visser fucking One in their heads and you're cracking jokes like it's just some regular Tuesday and you won't—you haven't—you keep trying to—to protect me or something, like—›

I broke off again, my cheeks flushing red for an entirely different reason, the sense that I had just veered dangerously close to something like like you think you're better than me. Marco was better than me, at some things, and I'd pretty much rather die than twist our friendship into something where that wasn't allowed, or was treated like it was somehow a threat to me—part of why I liked him was the ways he was better than me—

‹We used to just talk,› I said finally, feeling something loosen in my shoulders, like I'd turned a key. Feeling some of the heat leak out of my voice, leaving behind just a solid, heavy, metal kind of quality. ‹You know? No—no planning it out, no weighing it up, like you're trying to figure out how to get your m—teachers to say yes to something. Not—not deciding whether or not we're going to talk based on whether the other person can handle it—›

‹Yeah.›

I broke off mid-thought. There had been a lot in that single word—in the way that Marco had said it, the feel of the silence that followed.

‹Yeah?› I asked.

‹Yeah,› he repeated. ‹Okay. You're right.›

I waited another pair of heartbeats, and then—

‹That's it?›

I couldn't have said, in that moment, whether I was making a joke, or twisting the knife, or genuinely looking for more, or what. Maybe all of them, a little bit. Maybe that was the point.

‹What do you want, you're right and here's a five-paragraph essay? Suck my dick, you win, I'll cut it out. And I'm sorry.›

I mentally opened my mouth—

‹Jake.›

The word was quiet, soft, warm. I wanted to say vulnerable—a tone I hadn't heard from him since the months after they found the boat.

‹I really am sorry.›

I waited.

‹I mean, I get it. What it—what I—did to you. Am doing. And I—›

I waited, what was left of the tension in my shoulders taut and vibrating.

‹You're right. I could've just—I should have just told you, after you woke up.›

You didn't tell me because it was easier for you that way. You knew what I'd say—you didn't tell me because you knew what you were doing, and you thought you were going to get away with it—

The words formed in my mind, but there was no pressure to actually say them out loud. My inner Marco got it—meant it—believed it—admitted it.

‹Okay,› I said.

And then—

‹We're still going to talk about the other stuff, though,› I warned.

There was the sound of a mental sigh, resigned but not reluctant. ‹Yeah, for sure,› Marco said. ‹Now?›

I squeezed my eyes shut in the darkened room, rubbing at my temples, where a dull throb had started up—unrelated, I was pretty sure, to the topic at hand.

‹It can wait,› I said. ‹For now—where were we? Before—›

‹Visser One.›

‹You mean Visser One-Quarter?›

I felt an appreciative chuckle ripple through my mind, and some last, lingering tension in my shoulders let go, and finally everything was back to normal.

At least, between me and this Marco.

‹So, for starters, it seems like she's being pretty up-front. Part of that is because she knows we're cross-checking everything with my mom, but she's been pointing out stuff she could have pretty easily stayed quiet about. There's no doubt she's trying to establish herself as trustworthy and helpful, but that doesn't mean she isn't trustworthy and helpful. We are her only hope, at least in the short term, and she knows it.›

‹Anything useful?›

‹Not much, to be honest. Most of what she knows is only relevant to the bigger war. We've passed some stuff along to Helium, stuff that might be useful to the Andalites, and she's had a couple of ideas about countermeasures to some of the V3 Quat stuff. But there's just not a whole lot of direct intel.›

‹The codes? To control the other ships?›

‹She still hasn't given those up. Still claims she absolutely will, when the moment comes. Mom confirms she's seen them work, and according to Helium, the specific way she claims to have hardwired them in is plausible. Like, it's not just made-up bullshit, and according to him, it's pretty unlikely V3 would have found it and very unlikely he would have been able to do anything about it even if he did.›

Something about that tickled at the back of my mind, but I couldn't draw out the thought, so I set it aside. I had another question anyway, one I wasn't sure how to phrase—

Just ask, man.

‹All right,› I said. ‹Three pitchers of beer. How are they doing? The other Marcos, I mean. With—with all of it.›

I should have known the answer already—should have been checking, myself. But—

Well. I hadn't, and that was just how it was.

‹Short version, they're holding up,› Marco said. ‹I'm doing morph-checks twice a day, and they don't seem to be Stockholming or anything like that. They're not exactly having fun, but literal hive-minding is pretty cool. I'm sure that, in a pinch, Visser One could fuck them up pretty good, but my mom and Helium both agree that there's pretty much zero risk of takeover, at this point. She'd have to, idk, make them trip and fall and hit their heads and then slither out and converge on just one of them, some shit like that.›

‹More subtle stuff? Emotional manipulation?›

‹They're vulnerable, and they know it, but cross-checking with each other is a big help, and if she stops letting them cross-check with each other, that'll be a red flag. 'Course, we can't really know in advance how good she might be at faking the cross-check, once they're not literally in the same room, but they know that, too.›

‹What—›

I faltered.

Seriously, just spit it out. Wasn't that the whole point of all that shouting two minutes ago?

‹How should I deal with them?› I asked bluntly, forcing the words out. ‹Like—how should I treat them. What—how should I—ugh. Tell me you get it.›

‹I get it.› Grimly. ‹Give me a second.›

I waited, the dull throb in my head growing slowly more intense. In the silence, my thoughts began scattering, wobbling. I was acutely aware that it was now four-thirty in the morning, that I'd eaten almost nothing for two days, that—

‹I think,› Marco said tentatively, snapping me out of it. ‹I think they understand. That you can't treat them like they're Marco.›

I felt myself frown. ‹You think?›

‹They get it. Or they will, once I point it out.›

‹Will they follow orders?›

A long silence.

‹Yeah.›

That didn't sound very confident.

‹That didn't sound very confident.›

‹Jake—›

‹Look, I'm not asking them to follow orders,› I said, cutting him off. ‹I just need to know what I'm dealing with, one way or the other. Are they on the team, or are they their own thing. Do we have, like, a Tobias-plus situation going on.›

There was another long silence, and when Marco finally answered, the words were heavy and reluctant. ‹They'll follow orders, but look—›

‹What?›

‹You said no bullshit, so fine. No bullshit. You've got to let them decide it's okay to die.›

I felt my breath hitch.

You can't be more broken up about it than I am.

‹They respect you, Jake. I respect you. More than I did six months ago. If we'd tried doing it my way this whole time—›

He stopped, and started over again. ‹You're the best guy we have for the job. But you're not perfect, and one of the ways you're not perfect is you—you're not—ugh. Look—sometimes, it seems like you're trying to—to make sure we all make it out of this thing alive, or something.›

Marco fell silent, and for a moment, I lay absolutely still, the words tumbling through my mind like a bunch of magnets, picking up all sorts of other things as they went.

‹It's like—›

‹Shhhhh. Give me a minute.›

Elfangor. Elfangor had said something about this. Had sacrificed himself, so that Visser Three wouldn't know we were there. Something about purchasing a small victory with his death.

And Alloran—the frozen Alloran I'd seen in Quatazhinnikon's memory was absolutely a suicide bomber, by this point in the game.

There was something here, something more subtle than what Marco was saying—

Ah.

I laughed.

It wasn't a happy laugh. But it wasn't, like, a sad insane asylum laugh, either.

‹Jake?›

I wasn't even sure I could explain, in words. It was more like, something I'd already known in words had actually clicked, had finally made sense down in my bones. And just saying the words again wouldn't express the click—wouldn't let Marco see the difference between me-thirty-seconds-ago and me-now.

‹Never mind,› I said. ‹Let's just leave it at you win, I'll cut it out.›

‹Okaaay,› Marco replied, and I could hear in his tone a reflection of the same uncertainty I'd had when he'd said the same thing to me.

It wasn't that I'd been trying to make sure we all made it out of the war alive. I mean, I had been trying to do that, but that wasn't exactly it.

‹You there, buddy?›

‹I'm here. Hang on, still thinking.›

It was that there were more than two buckets. There wasn't just "alive" and "dead." And there wasn't just "trying to keep everyone alive" and "not trying."

Save Erek. I'm going after the kid.

I'd tried to stop Cassie, in that moment. Would have tried to stop her yesterday, if the Ellimist had snapped his fingers and given me another chance.

I hadn't tried to stop the Marcos, as we were making our way down the hillside. But I'd still resented them for it—still blamed them, somehow, for their sacrifices.

And not because I didn't get it. Not because I thought there weren't things worth dying for. At the very least, if I could give up my own life to end the war, to save everyone, I'd do it.

I'd been mad because I disagreed with them, about what they'd chosen to give up their lives for. Because I'd thought their lives were more valuable than what they were getting in return.

But just because I disagreed didn't mean I was right.

It was obvious, when you put it like that—if you'd put it on a multiple choice test, I would've known it was the right answer to bubble in.

But I still would've gotten it wrong, in practice, right up until a minute ago.

‹Hey, uh, no pressure, but I can't see your face, so if you could at least let me know you're still there—›

‹Still here.›

I didn't own any of them. They weren't mine, even though we used words like my friend, my crush, my cousin.

And even if they were—

You can't take it with you. That's what my dad had always said—about money and possessions and stuff.

And maybe it was just the delirium talking—the fact that it was almost five in the morning and I hadn't slept and was waiting for a god to throw us back into the meat grinder at any second. But suddenly the phrase what do you want to spend your life doing seemed profound and deep and meaningful in a way I'd never quite understood before.

Spend it, like literally spend it. Purchase something with it.

I'd been thinking—

I don't know.

I guess, on some level, I'd been thinking that the war needed my eyes on it, or something. Needed my ongoing oversight—mine, and Marco's, and Helium's—would go off the rails, be somehow unwinnable, without us.

But we'd made it this far without Cassie. We'd made it this far without Elfangor. The Andalites had lost Alloran, their most brilliant strategist, and yes, they were losing, but they hadn't lost. They'd hung on.

And the human race was in it. There were thousands of morphers, now, and factories all over the planet churning out Bug fighters and Dracon beams and repulsorlifts and force fields and hyperdrives and faster-than-light communicators.

It was like a weight was lifting off of my shoulders, and I wanted to laugh again, because the weight was having to stay alive. Feeling like I had to hang on, like it was my job to stick around. Thinking, on some level, that I—and Marco and Helium, too—was too important to sacrifice.

But, like, of course there were things we could buy that would be worth one of us dying. There were probably things we could buy that would be worth all of us dying—realistic things, I mean, not just crazy hypotheticals like "everyone lives happily ever after." The death of Visser Three, a real treaty with the Andalites and the Yeerks. Even just half a million humans safely off-planet—that alone was worth every Animorph put together and then some.

What deeds would you do—what burdens would you shoulder—how far would you go, if the fate of your species hung in the balance?

I'd been operating under the assumption that the answer was as far as it takes.

But really it was just as far as I can.

And that was—

I couldn't even really express how different. Not in words. I just felt it.

‹Okay, fine,› I said, surprised at how steady my mental voice was. ‹I get it. I won't try to stop them—to stop you—from—›

Dying.

‹—from making the tough calls. But they—you—you guys gotta take into account that we're depending on each other. We can't just—can't have columns just disappearing willy-nilly, you know? Holes in the formation.›

‹Okay,› Marco agreed. ‹Okay, yeah, that's fair. But—›

I got an impression of something like a nervous gulp.

‹As far as that goes,› Marco said, ‹I think maybe the answer to your question is something like "don't count on them," then. Like, not only do we not know whether Visser One-Quarter might be waiting to pull the rug out, but also they're in a pretty unique position to do some shit that nobody else can do. Spying, for instance. Coordinated strikes. We—we should really probably let them make those calls, without forcing them to check in. Like, obviously they should check in if they can, but—›

‹Yeah,› I said. ‹Yeah, okay. Go ahead and—I don't know—pass that along, or whatever.›

‹One sec.›

I fidgeted in the darkness, feeling sort of wobbly and unbalanced. The steady, cautious, responsible parts of me were on yellow alert—suspicious of this newfound "clarity," wary of the revelation, insisting that I sleep on it before carving it in stone. But like it or not, something had already shifted, something I didn't see shifting back—

‹Okay. Everyone's on the same—›

Blink.

‹—page. Fuck!›

There had been no warning, no sensation. We were simply back.

"Älä liiku!" shouted a tall, dark-haired boy, as he raised a rifle to his shoulder.

"Ante—no, stop, friends! Friends!" shouted Garrett.

I was on my feet in a cold, dark, high-ceilinged room with metal framing—some kind of garage or empty warehouse. Beside me were Marco and Helium; in front of me was Garrett, the tall boy, and—

"Rachel?" said Marco.

"Marco?" said the dark-haired boy.

There was a moment of mutual confusion, cut short by higher priorities.

"What's wrong with her?" demanded Marco, sinking to his knees beside my cousin.

She was sitting, slumped, in one of those cheap folding camp chairs, her head resting on one shoulder, her eyes moving but unfocused. The tall boy didn't respond—he was busy staring at Helium, his rifle only half-lowered.

"Where are we?" Marco said. "Why isn't she—why aren't we in the hospital? And who the fuck is he?"

"Ante," said Garrett, as if that was an answer. "She—we think she had a stroke—"

Garrett explained, his summary swift and straightforward.

"Wait—the mothership blew up?"

"Three days ago, yeah."

"She's been like this for—"

"Just two days. We—we couldn't go back to the hospital, because—"

I dropped back a few steps, keeping my face carefully still. ‹Helium,› I whispered, in private thought-speak.

‹Yes, Prince Jake.›

‹Is the cradle still out there?›

‹The line is still functioning. We have not yet made contact.›

‹Can you see where the ship is? Read its sensors and stuff?›

‹We can open a read-only link, but we can't guarantee that it will go undetected.›

‹Do it.›

I turned back to see that Garrett's eyes were on me, his brow furrowed.

Two days. He'd only woken up two days ago…

‹Garrett. Jake here. Can you morph?›

Garrett's head twitched, the shadow of a nod.

‹Can you morph yourself? Morph armor?›

A slight shake. No.

‹Okay. Tap your foot if you trust this Ante guy.›

Tap.

‹Tap your foot if you've morphed him and checked.›

Tap.

‹Tap your foot if I need to worry about Rachel right this minute.›

Nothing.

‹Tap your foot if there's anything urgent you need to tell me that you can't say out loud.›

Nothing.

"Okay," I cut in, interrupting a back-and-forth between Marco and Ante. "Everybody pause."

"Jake—"

"She's been like this for two days, she's not going to get worse in the next two minutes. I need you here."

Marco's face twisted, but he closed his mouth. Inside my head, the dull throb was swelling, climbing toward a viselike pressure.

Of course he'd bring us back now.

And then, on the heels of that thought—

No, but really. He picked a moment when you're exhausted, burnt-out, not thinking straight—

"First thing's first," I said, feeling my jaw twitch. "Where's Tobias?"

"Underwater somewhere," Garrett answered. "That's—that's all we know."

The Chee device.

"Marco. Did any of the Arn tech come back with you?"

Marco's eyes widened and his hands went for his pockets.

"No."

Dammit.

"Do you still have your phone?"

"Won't work," Garrett cut in.

"What? Why not?"

"Everything went down two hours ago," said Ante. "Phones, TV, internet. Power's still up, walkie-talkies still work. Elias and Juhani went out to see if they could get access to a car, find out if there's any news coming over the radio."

"How far away are cars?"

The boy grimaced. "Ten, twenty minutes."

So they should've been back by now.

"No connection at all?"

"None."

"Anything else? Any other—news?"

"No," said Ante.

"Yes," said Garrett.

They glared at each other for a moment.

"There were earthquakes about an hour and a half ago," Garrett said flatly. "Tremors. A bunch of them."

"I didn't feel anything," the taller boy protested.

"Good for you. I did."

I turned to Marco. "Impacts?"

"Nukes, maybe? Either way, sounds like our boy V3 is back."

"Or they could be deadman switches."

"Three days after the fact?"

Throb.

"Helium, what do you have for me?"

‹The cradle is currently grounded at a facility in Greenland. It is occupied, and transmissions are being sent and received every few seconds. We cannot access them without triggering alerts. Thus far, the occupants have not given any sign of noticing the passive link.›

"Is the cradle charged-up? Fueled? Whatever?"

‹Yes.›

"Could you talk to the people inside it?"

‹Yes. Do you want us to?›

"Not yet. Marco—what will the others do? Your—Magellan, and the rest of them."

Marco frowned. "They'll be trying to contact us. Once that doesn't work—"

He broke off. "Wait. You. Auntie Anne. Where are we?"

The tall boy said a jumble of incomprehensible syllables, and Marco sighed.

"How far are we from the hospital?"

"Thirty kilometers."

Marco locked eyes with me. "So it put us back, pretty much, with smart adjustment."

I nodded.

"Are we talking in front of this guy?"

"Rachel gave him the morphing power," Garrett said. "Before I woke up. She trusts him."

"Ah, great, as long as Rachel trusts him—"

"Marco."

"Sorry. If we all got put back smart, then they're in Cape Town, Moscow, Berlin, and—I don't know what would have happened to the one on the plane, but he's either in Rio de Janeiro or—I don't know what."

"Will they stay put? Or will they try to find us?"

"They know we've got the cradle, but—okay, let me think—once they find out the mothership was destroyed, they won't assume the cradle is necessarily still in play—and if we can't use the message drops—"

His frown deepened, and I bit off the urge to push, held back and let him think.

"They'll be in touch with each other," he murmured. "They'll be trying to get on top of the situation—"

He broke off. "Ante," he said.

"Mitä?"

"Okay, I'm gonna assume that means yeah?—what did the broadcast say? Like, you said there was some message, on the night the mothership blew up—what exactly did it say? Like, what has everybody been up to the last couple of days?"

"Uh. I didn't write it down. It said—Telor has killed itself, and tried to kill Visser Three at the same time. Yeerk reinforcements would be arriving in…I think it's now two-to-eight days? It said to act now—attack Mars, launch arks, set up response teams—"

"What were people doing, up until two hours ago?"

"Uh. Most major cities were evacuating, and I think they did send some ships to Mars, but a lot of the military stuff is secret, of course—"

"What's up with the arks thing?"

"There've been rumors ever since Ventura that the Y.E.M. was building ships to get a bunch of colony groups off-planet—"

"Who the fuck is—never mind. Are they real? Are there actual arks?"

"I don't know. I couldn't ever find out. I'm just—"

"Just a kid, yeah. I guess height isn't everything."

"Is he always this much of a dick?" Ante muttered.

"Yes," Garrett said.

Marco turned back to me. "I think—I think they'll try to get in touch with Tyagi, they know we're trying to get in touch with Tyagi, if we can't communicate with each other that's the obvious next rendezvous. I think they'll stay put for maybe twenty-four hours. I would stay put for twenty-four hours, and then I'd move. It takes, what, a couple of hours to get from place to place, in a Bug fighter or a cradle?"

"Helium?"

‹Yes.›

We really should've thought of this. We really, really should have. Had one of the Edriss shards crawl into my Marco, or something—

Too late. Play the hand you've been dealt.

"Okay," I said. "Okay. This is—we're gonna need a minute."

"A minute?" Ante said.

"Clock's ticking," Marco said. "The—guy—that just teleported us here, he doesn't do much by accident. If we're here two hours after the internet went down, and an hour and a half after a bunch of little earthquakes—that's for a reason."

Unless it had something to do with having just told the Controller-Marcos that they should trust their own judgment—

I made eye contact with my own Marco—

‹Yeah, I thought of that, too. They will, too, don't worry.›

Too much. There were too many threads, too many variables.

"Okay," I repeated. "Major players. World governments. Visser Three. Surviving Yeerks. Yeerk reinforcements."

"Y.E.M.," Ante said. "They're a group of human-Yeerk collaborators, the ones who—well, they didn't actually blow up the mothership, that was Telor, but they're the ones who sent the messages afterward."

"And us," Garrett said.

"Yeah."

I tried to prod my black box into motion.

You're Tyagi, and the mothership has just been blown up.

You're Visser Three, and the mothership has just been blown up.

You're Tyagi, and the internet has just gone down, and—and there are earthquakes.

You're Visser Three, and you've just killed the internet—

I closed my eyes, the sharp, screaming pain of my headache rising until it started to manifest as flashes of color in my field of vision—

I need more information.

You don't have it. Decide anyway.

Visser Three—he hadn't given up on taking the planet, or he would've just glassed the place. But—

Earthquakes.

In Finland.

If Garrett could feel earthquakes in Finland—

That meant that whatever was happening, it was big, because it almost certainly wasn't close. The closest world-level-important city was what, Moscow? And that had to be five hundred miles away—

You're Visser Three. They just tried to kill you. It—almost worked?

Three days. It had been three days.

It almost worked. Now you're back, and—

Yeerk reinforcements.

Human ships, launching from the surface.

My mind tried to scroll through the list of things Quatazhinnikon had made, but it was too long, too complex. The Visser could do almost anything, with all of that—

"We need more information," I said. "We need to get plugged in to—to somebody. Helium."

‹Yes, Prince Jake.›

"Open a channel with the—wait, no. Can you power up the cradle? Bring it here?"

‹Yes. But the occupants—we can order the cradle to cloak itself, but we can't jam communications from within. If the occupants have independent communications devices, there's nothing stopping them from leading others right to us.›

I looked over at Marco, who shrugged. "Plan A is out the window," he said. "We're making this up as we go along."

We needed info. More than that, we needed tech—Helium had said that the cradle could transmit the takeover codes to a ship or two at a time, but there was an entire fleet coming. Assuming the codes were real, assuming we were going to need them—

We needed to get in touch with the military.

And we needed the other Marcos—at least one of them.

We really, really, really should have planned for this—

"Marco," I said. "They'll wait for twenty-four hours?"

"Unless something's actively blowing up. They know we need to get in contact, and they know what happens if everybody runs in circles trying to find everybody else. The one in Moscow is most likely to try the hardest to stay put, since he knows he's closest to us."

"Okay, powwow time." I glanced over at Rachel. "Uh," I said. "Rachel—sorry for talking about you in the third person, Rachel. Garrett, Ante. Is she—is she with us right now? Has she been, like, responsive at all?"

"She's been in and out, but yes. She made some sounds a few times, and she's done the blink-twice thing."

"Okay. Rachel, you're in this, too. Garrett, keep an eye on her, stop me if she's trying to chime in."

I looked around at the rest of them. "Item one, get mobile. Item two, get oriented on what's happening. Item three, get in contact—with Tyagi if we can, Terra if we can't, resistance groups if that's all we can find. Yes, no?"

"Tyagi might not be happy to hear from us," Marco pointed out. "Last she heard, we were going after Visser Three, and then we vanished and—didn't Tom say they blew up Edwards? Or something?"

"Noted," I said. "Garrett, can you still thoughtscream?"

"I haven't tried since I woke up," he said. "But I don't see why not."

A part of my brain offered up a lovely picture of everything-going-wrong, and all because something went wrong with Garrett's brain chemistry during his resurrection. I stopped myself from looking over at Rachel—

"Morph. Now. Test it."

"All I have is Rachel, Ante, and a bird."

"Here," Marco said, holding out an arm. "You probably ought to get filled in on the last few months, anyway."

I glanced at Ante, saw him gnawing at his lip, visibly restraining himself.

"Rachel," I said, stepping over to her chair and crouching down. "Can you hear me?"

"Mmmmmm," she said.

"You been following all this?"

"Mmmmmm."

"What's one plus one?"

"Mmm-mmm."

"Should I let this kid have a Marco morph?"

"I wasn't—"

"Shhh, relax, I know you weren't. That's part of why I'm bothering to consider it. Rachel? One beep for yes, two beeps for no."

"Mmmmmm."

"Just double-checking, not trying to put pressure on you. Should I forbid Ante from having a Marco morph? One beep for yes, two beeps for no."

"Mmm-mmm."

"Welcome to the team, Mr. Whoever-the-fuck-you-are," Marco said, holding out his arm. "I'm going to want to acquire you, too."

"Helium," I said. "If we ask you to bring the cradle straight here—"

"Not straight here," Marco said. "Straight toward Helsinki, and then it goes cloak and swerves at the last minute."

"Good catch. How long?"

‹At full burn, through the atmosphere, one hour.›

"How long to go from cold to takeoff?"

‹Less than one minute.›

"Okay, here's the plan. Helium powers up the ship, brings it toward us. We try to talk our way up to somebody important while it's en route, and Helium does what he can with the sensors while it's flying, see if we can't figure out what's going on. When it gets here, we either knock out the passengers or we cooperate with them, depending. If other ships show up, Garrett takes them out. Straight and dirty."

There was a silence.

"This is a really shitty plan," Marco said.

"Is that a 'no'?"

"It's a 'let's think about it for five minutes first.'"

We went back and forth for more like ten minutes, in the end, but we couldn't come up with anything better. Just trying to communicate might mean that they'd lock the ship down somehow; splitting up might mean we would never find each other again; pulling the ship without saying anything at all would probably make them think it was Visser Three somehow, and who knew how panicked military types would respond to that—

"Tell them we have the cube," Ante suggested.

"What? Why?"

Ante explained about his uncle, and what he'd said about the value of it.

"You've given a bunch of people the morphing power, right? So the military already knows about it?"

"Yeah."

"If they know it's here, they might not come in guns blazing. They probably want it."

"Point," Marco said. "Should we give it to them? Bargaining chip?"

I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

"I want to say 'yes,'" I said finally. "But I don't know why."

"Area 51," Marco said. "You keep saving all your grenades for later, you die with like thirty of them in your inventory—"

Jesus.

That had been the last game we'd played. That night—the night of the construction site. We'd been leaving the arcade when we ran into Cassie and Rachel coming out of the food court—

Focus.

"If Visser Three's cutting the internet and chucking nukes around—"

"If," I said.

"Yeah, but—tell me you aren't getting the sense we're getting close to the endgame, here."

I looked over at Rachel, slumped in the chair—at the empty space where Tobias would be—at the space that didn't even feel empty anymore, where Cassie would have been.

We'd had options, in the original plan—had assumed we'd have options, and had made plans accordingly. Now, we were down to one single, obvious, viable asset—the cradle—and the clock was ticking.

What if the cradle had been destroyed along with the mothership?

My shoulder Marco laughed bitterly, and said something about dominoes.

"Yeah, all right," I said. "Bargaining chips: cube, codes, cradle. Risks: they're pissed about Edwards, they think we're with Visser Three, they're with Visser Three."

I turned to look at Ante. "You. I don't know you, but Rachel vouches for you. You in, or out?"

The blood drained from the tall boy's face as he opened his mouth and no words came out.

"Rephrase. You've got—let's say forty minutes, to make up your mind. Once that ship is twenty minutes out, you're either with us, or you're gone."

"Elias—Juhani—"

"Your friends?"

He nodded.

I shrugged. "They aren't here."

A part of me wondered where my brother Tom might be, right at that very moment—

No.

"Last chance," I said. "Ideas and objections."

No one spoke.

"Anybody think we should be taking more time on this?"

There was a silence, followed by the whisper of thought-speak.

‹Like the wind in thought and deed.›

"Weird flex, but okay," said Marco. "I vote go."

"Go," said Garrett.

"Mmmmmm," said Rachel.

I looked at Ante.

He swallowed. "Go."

It was the least okay I'd ever felt about a plan. But in the end, it still seemed better than doing nothing.

"Helium," I said. "Open a channel."