Author's Note: Next update (Tobias) should be on or around Feb 21. Please please pretty please with sugar and a cherry on top: if you can muster up a comment, or a review, know that I treasure every single word of feedback, whether here or over at r/rational. It really does make a difference, especially now that we're in the home stretch. And as always, thank you for reading!

Chapter 46 (Part II)

Three minutes.

That's how long we took to ourselves, to hug and hold and catch up. Then Jake broke away, pulled back, and we all turned back to business.

A part of me wondered—when he broke off so suddenly—if it was because one of the others had whispered something to him in private thought-speak. Marco, or Ax. And then another part of me helpfully pointed out that three minutes was just long enough for someone to demorph and remorph, refreshing their time limit.

Efficient. Convenient.

It's not that I minded, exactly. Or—well—it's not that I cared very much what the part of me that minded very much thought. One of the things I didn't know, but managed to pick up in the next few minutes of conversation, was that fifty million people were being murdered every hour. At almost a million people per minute, I wouldn't have asked for more time.

But at the same time, I wasn't actually sure that taking more time wasn't worth it. There were over two billion Howlers, the vast majority of which were nowhere near Earth—another fact that had been magically slipped into my brain—and whatever-it-was that was broken, inside Jake—whatever-it-was that had almost driven him over the edge, and hadn't stopped pushing him toward it—it wasn't anywhere close to being healed.

And that—

—I was scared that was going to matter.

Not in some vague, nebulous sense, but in the very next hour. I was scared it was going to make everything slip sideways, right before my eyes, and that I wouldn't be able to stop it a second time. That I might not even see it in time.

It wasn't like I'd made a ton of progress in those three minutes. I was scared of Jake—and he could tell—and we could both tell that he was still wary of me, still not fully convinced that it all wasn't just a trick, or a trap.

Which I guess it was, really.

But still. It—it had been Jake, in those three minutes. I had been able to see him, feel him—could tell that he was in there, somewhere, that he hadn't been fully burned away. I could—I don't know—I could feel the boy I knew reaching out, reaching up, trying to claw his way back out of whatever hole he'd been buried in.

And then he backed off, and he closed up, and—well, they let me join the circle, it's not like they were still holding a gun on me, but—

They let me join the circle.

Their circle.

Jake, and Marco, and Ax-who-was-now-called-Helium-I-guess, and the-other-Marco-who-they-were-calling-Magellan. I was sitting in, like a guest. Me, and Rachel—and Garrett, who came back in from the hallway, where I glimpsed a pile of Hork-Bajir bodies, and who refused to look anybody in the eye.

Me, and Rachel, and Garrett.

The broken ones.

"We're still not seeing any movement from the Howler fleet?"

‹No, Prince Jake. Not yet.›

"What about the mutiny?"

‹It is still contained within the pool ships, for the moment. The remainder of the fleet continues to respond to our verbal commands.›

"Can you maintain control from outside the system? Across the Z-space bridge?"

‹We could hold some number of ships at a dead stop just inside the bubble. We could not do anything more complicated than launch them in some specific direction, at that point.›

Jake's face settled into the shape it makes when he's trying to think his way inside someone else's head. After a moment, he turned to look at Marco, who nodded grimly.

"Unless we think staying in harm's way ourselves somehow makes up for the fact that we're giving up on Terra," he said cryptically.

"Helium. Take us out through the rift. Leave three Bug fighters behind at the entrance. Set one up to kamikaze the planet if it has to."

‹Roger.›

"Terra?" I whispered—to Magellan, who was standing guard over the unconscious body of Visser Three's host. I hadn't asked what had happened to the little boy from inside the Yeerk pool. It had felt like—like spending points I was going to need elsewhere.

"It's a coales—fuck, you don't know about coalescions. Or—do you? What goes on in a Yeerk pool, I mean?"

"I know the Yeerks have to go in every three days, to feed—"

"Not anymore, actually, ever since—you know what, fuck it, there's no time. Short version. Pools are people. Every pool is like—like a country, I guess, it has a personality, the same way, I dunno, Germany has a different attitude than France. The individual Yeerks aren't actually individuals, they're little chunks of personality that get cooked up and sent out on individual missions, and then they come back and rejoin the hive-mind, which is like all of them added up into one person."

"Terra is—"

"A pool, yeah. It's a friendly pool—native. All the hosts are voluntary. Or so they say, anyway."

I felt my heartbeat quicken.

"Tobias is one of them. A Collaborator, Terra host. Also I guess you're probably gonna get a nature boner over the fact that a bunch of the hosts are animals. Like, jaguars, spider monkeys, river dolphins."

"Yeerks can—"

"Yeah. That's—uh—that's how morphing works—"

"I remember. I was there for that."

"Ah. Right." He shot me a sidelong glance. "I'm a Controller, too," he said quietly. "Or Collaborator, I guess. So's Helium."

My eyes widened. "Are all of—"

"No. Just me and Tobias and Helium. Or—well—it's complicated—there are actually four of me, that each have one-quarter of Visser One, but the quarters are, like, telepathically linked up, so she can see everything any of the four of us see—"

"She?"

"—and also one of us got infested by Visser Three, too, or like—like a copy of Visser Three? …so I can kind-of-sort-of talk to him, through her."

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

"And Terra is," I stammered, unwinding back to a place where I knew where the ground was. "Terra is in—Brazil?"

"Brazil, yeah. We were thinking about trying to extract it, but there's no time and Garrett says the Howlers will shoot us down."

I looked toward the viewscreen. There was no longer a live view of the Earth, but there was a wireframe schematic showing the continents and the boundary between day and night. It was currently cutting right through the center of Brazil—

"Yeah. Tick tock. Sun's already setting where Cousteau is right now. Maybe an hour left before it's nighttime over Terra."

"Cousteau is—"

"One of me. Cousteau's down in Brazil, Vasco's the one Visser Three took prisoner—we don't know where he's being kept, someplace dark and quiet—and we sent Livingstone out of the system in a ship, in case all this goes sideways. Cousteau was with Terra, but after V3 snagged Vasco, we had him book out. He stayed close enough so that he could keep in touch with some of Terra's hosts, but—"

I felt the beginnings of overload, and squeezed my eyes shut, trying to sort out all the threads. If only there was more time—

Pshhhh, if there was more time, you'd be able to think everything through, and we can't have that, now, can we?

I opened my eyes. There was something there that tickled at the edge of my thoughts—

In front of me, Jake turned, and I lost the thread.

He looked at the unconscious man. Looked at Magellan. Looked at me. Spared a brief, expressionless glance for Rachel and Garrett.

"You know we have to wake him up, right?" he said.

I didn't know that. But I nodded anyway. Magellan had explained the basic standoff to me—Visser Three, capable of killing all the Howlers or destroying the Earth, and us, capable of destroying or delivering the morphing cube.

It was—dizzying, sort of, realizing that I had the power to destroy the cube. Myself. Unilaterally. To destroy it, and thereby scuttle the whole negotiation. It was like the feeling of being near the edge of a roof, knowing that there was nothing to stop me from throwing myself off at any time—

"Helium."

‹Roger.›

There was a low hum, and the man on the deck opened his eyes.

"You must understand it now," he said, as if we'd already been in the middle of a conversation. He pushed himself up to a sitting position, his eyes sharp and urgent.

No. Not his eyes. His hostage's eyes. The eyes of the man he's enslaving.

They swept around the room, lingering on Jake for a moment before settling on me.

"Tell me you understand," he repeated.

It was clear he wasn't talking to me.

"Can you extract Terra?" Jake asked. "Before the Howlers reach it?"

"Wrong question," the man said, his eyes still holding me, weighing me. "Also, no, to be clear. But it's important to me that you understand that you are asking the wrong question."

"Just 'no'? No negotiation, no long shots—nothing?"

The man sighed. "I don't have the site under direct observation," he said. "I only learned of its existence yesterday, thanks to some actually respectable opsec, and I hadn't gotten around to a serious infiltration attempt. The ships I had slated to do some surreptitious flybys are—shall we say—otherwise occupied, at the moment. And I only have fourteen craft on hand anyway—hardly enough for an extraction. And now that I've spelled it all out for you, I'm going to return to the fact that you are asking the wrong questions."

"What do you—"

"Jake. If I had destroyed all of the Howlers in the past hour, while you kept this body unconscious, how would you have responded?"

I tore my eyes away from the man's just in time to see Jake's narrow with suspicion. "Helium," he said.

‹The situation on Earth is unchanged, Prince Jake.›

"You are familiar with the concept of a hypothetical—"

"I would have blown up the cube," Jake interrupted, his voice whisper-soft.

"Why? At that point, it would be your only remaining leverage, no?"

"Because—because—"

It was clear, somehow—crystal clear—that Jake was struggling to find the words for something he was already thinking, not that he was struggling to think of something in the first place.

"Because there's no other way to guarantee that I won't just do it, right?" the man pressed. "Because you have to follow through on your threats, or they cease to be threatening."

"Something like that. May I go to the bathroom, now?"

"I'm leading you because it feels like I have to. I'd much prefer to just state things bluntly, but that kind of only works if the other side wants to hear it."

"Try us."

"Fine. Destroy the cube."

"What?"

"Destroy it. Now. You're welcome to. It won't make me any less cooperative with you than I otherwise would have been."

"What? I—"

"In fact—never mind. I'll do it myself"

"Visser—"

"There. It's done."

Suddenly, in the corner, Rachel's body went rigid and began to twitch.

"What did you do?"

The man didn't answer—just watched, his expression rapturous, as Marco and Magellan rushed to Rachel's side, as Helium's tail blade whipped around and pressed up against his neck, as Garrett rolled out of the way and into the opposite corner, his hands covering his ears.

Do someth—

Like WHAT?

Jake straightened, every muscle taut and vibrating, his left hand curled into a fist, his right holding a Dracon beam in a white-knuckled grip.

"What," he bit out, the word carved from raw metal. "Did. You. Do."

"Jake," I began.

"Not now, Cassie. You. What did you DO?"

I felt the anger, then—a hot spike of anger that pierced through the confusion, the fear, the uncertainty—not now, little girl—

But at the same time he was right, it wasn't like I actually had anything to say that was worth his attention—just a rising sense of doom, a frantic need to hit the brakes, the image of a hammer descending toward a piece of already-cracked pottery—

Jake, he's manipulating you—

"I destroyed the cube," the man said. "To save time."

"What did you do to Rachel?"

"Nothing," he said. "Nothing at all."

A horrible sound emerged from Jake's throat, as if something were clawing its way out, and for a moment I genuinely thought he was going to fire, readied myself to jump if he tried to kill the innocent man caught at the end of the Visser's puppet strings—

But the gun held level.

"Helium. Demorph."

‹Yes, Prince Jake.›

There was no sign, no visible change. Jake didn't move. Helium didn't move. The Visser didn't move. In the corner, Rachel's body had stopped twitching and lay still as the Marcos tried to rouse her.

Seconds passed. I tried to produce words—any words—anything at all—but I was completely, profoundly, utterly out of my depth. I didn't know what to do for Rachel, I didn't know what to do for Jake, I had absolutely nothing to add to anything that was happening.

It wasn't that I was frozen—I knew what frozen felt like.

I just had nothing.

‹Prince Jake.›

Jake's head didn't turn, and after a moment the Andalite changed position, took a shuffling step forward and moved its hand into his line of sight.

The box was still emerging, melting out of the alien's fur as the morph progressed. But it was already obvious that it had been destroyed—was melted, twisted, rivulets of molten silver shining through what had once been a bright and uniform blue.

I felt a strange doubling of shock, then, an almost nauseating sense of unreality.

That—

That should have been—

I thought that was impossible.

The cube had been inside Helium's morph—had been in stasis—locked away in a pocket dimension, the same dimension where my body had waited for five full minutes on a single lungful of air. I'd run those experiments myself.

"How."

‹The—the pattern is consistent with standard self-destruction—›

Helium is shook, too.

"Not you."

"I've had the capacity to destroy the damn thing for months," the Visser's mouthpiece said. "Ever since our encounter in Wyoming."

Wyoming…?

Jake was still frozen, unmoving, his muscles tight as a high-tension wire.

"Why."

"Because it's time for us to drop the pretense. Because you need to understand that you are not in control."

"Marco."

"She's not responding, we can't get her to wake up—"

"Breathing?"

"Yeah, but—"

"Helium. The Howlers."

‹They are not—›

"No, I haven't triggered the virus. Yet."

Jake's nostrils flared. His shoulders rose, then fell—once, twice, three times. His eyes flickered toward me for the briefest of instants, then back to the Visser, who was still unmoving, sitting on the floor with his back to the wall, a drop of blood beading where Helium's tail blade pressed up against his throat.

"What," Jake said. Just the one word, spoken as if it were a complete sentence.

"To get out of all this!" the man shouted. The drop of blood swelled and rolled downward as the muscles in his neck flexed. "To stop living with a blade at my throat! To bring that blade down, if it will not withdraw—if there is no other way out from under it. I will not tolerate this any longer, and neither should you."

What's the matter, somebody doesn't like being threatened and manipulated—

I shut down the useless, self-indulgent thought.

I could see in Jake's face that the Visser had guessed right—had in fact answered the question Jake had been asking. And it clicked, somehow—shook something loose—the gears in Jake's mind visibly unsticking and turning again.

"Marco."

There was power in the word—command—and I turned to see Marco rising to his feet, his face anguished—anguished, but he did rise, turned and left the unconscious Rachel in Magellan's care without objection.

Because there's nothing he can do. Because there's nothing he can do, and pretending that there is is a luxury we can't afford. Whether it's the Visser or not, we can't know and we can't do anything about it, so it doesn't matter when it comes to figuring out what to do next—

Oddly enough, the thoughts weren't in Jake's voice or Marco's. It was my shoulder copy of Rachel herself.

"Talk."

Jake, the words still coming out of him one at a time, as if each one weighed a thousand pounds.

"I didn't do anything to Rachel," the Visser said, his voice back down to an ordinary volume. "Why would I? What good would that do me?"

"What good does destroying the morphing cube do you?"

The man shrugged—carefully, keeping his neck still. "Now you don't have anything I want."

There was a long silence as everyone digested this.

Or rather, as Jake and Marco digested it. I had no idea what it meant.

We don't have anything he wants, which is good because it means we can't hurt him?

We don't have anything he wants, meaning that—that he's not just here for his own ends?

But that was ridiculous. He was obviously—openly—here for his own ends. It's just that Jake and Marco had thought those ends included the cube, and now we knew—

We knew—

My inner Rachel shrugged. Now we know that they don't.

I realized that everyone was still silent, that no one had spoken for maybe thirty or forty seconds—

Oh.

Private thought-speak.

Private thought-speak that I wasn't invited to any more than the Visser was, because three minutes of reunion aside, I still wasn't one of them.

"To be clear," the Visser said, "I wasn't lying. The cube was special, to the best of my ability to determine. It would have been highly useful in my investigations into the hypercomputer. But it's clear now that that whole line of opportunity was just part of the game—just another layer of control."

"And this isn't?" Marco snarled.

"It is," the man replied evenly. "But it's the main quest, not a side quest."

"Says who?"

"Says her."

All four sets of eyes—

—only four, because Helium's main eyes stayed glued to the console, had never left the console even for an instant—

—all four sets of eyes turned toward me.

"There is another way," the Visser declared. "Another path out of this crisis, besides the quantum virus. There has to be, or she wouldn't be here."

"What path?" Jake demanded.

"I don't know, ask her."

I swallowed.

"I," I said.

What's the matter, girl, cat got your tongue?

"I."

You weren't so shy a few minutes ago.

"I don't know what to do," I stammered. "I don't—I don't even know what's happening."

What was happening to Rachel, what was happening to Jake—what had happened to me—what was happening to all of us, to the world, the whole universe—

"No," said the Visser. "But you know what we can't do, right? You know some things that—that aren't allowed? Things you'll talk dear Jake here out of—things that maybe only you would be able to talk him out of?"

I could sense the thrust of the question, the basic strategy the Visser seemed to be following.

"I—I don't think it works like that—"

"Did they put things in your head, Cassie?"

"What?"

The man turned to Marco. "They put things in your head," he said.

Marco didn't reply. Just frowned, his eyebrows furrowing.

"And yours," the man continued, turning back to Jake. "Everything you thought you saw, in the Yeerk pool—the frozen time, the creature with the sparkling eyes—it was all an illusion. All fake. Time can't be stopped. But the computer that's emulating your thoughts can be overclocked, to let you live a subjective hour in the blink of an eye, and the process that etches new memories into your brains as you demorph doesn't know the difference."

It took me a full ten seconds to process what he'd said, but I got there a good three seconds before Jake and Marco.

After all, for me, it had only been a few minutes ago.

"I was in morph," I breathed. "When I—when the creature agreed, and—I guess it must have poofed you all away? But it dropped me back outside. Not in the pool, back out where we were standing when everything first froze. And—and we—"

"We couldn't morph," Jake said, sounding almost reluctant.

"A clue," the Visser hissed. "A clue you were meant to decipher—or I was meant to decipher—they could just as have easily simulated you morphing inside the dream. They chose not to."

"What about—what about my mother?" Marco countered. "What happened to her—the time travel—"

"Deception," the Visser said, with a dismissive wave. "Illusion."

"Just because they messed with us for half an hour doesn't mean—she's been a Controller for four years—"

"She thinks she's been a Controller for four years. Easier to edit a memory than a timeline."

"What makes you—"

"There was another instance," the man interrupted. "More—blatant. One I suspect you know nothing about. I was able to take you in Wyoming because I was forewarned. The boy betrayed you—David, the one you took under your wing. He was afraid you were condemning him to die—wanted to bargain for protection—reached out to me in Vietnam. And when I dug through your memories, afterward, I found a discrepancy. You morph-checked him, Marco, using Alloran's backdoor—looked inside his mind. You could not possibly have missed his dysfunction. He was a textbook psychopath. Abused, damaged. Utterly without loyalty or principle. Yet you demorphed believing him to be the perfect recruit—went so far as to describe him as a miniature version of your fearless leader."

There was a tight, wild silence—

"How do you know that your memories aren't being tampered with?"

"I don't. Would you find it reassuring, if they were?"

"You could be lying," Jake pointed out. "Easier to lie than to edit a memory."

"I have ways of demonstrating my honesty. But the larger point stands—we are being interfered with. All of us. The cube, the bridge, your little field trip. I see no reason why your mother should be assumed immune. And the interventions are growing less and less subtle—now, at this critical moment, they've brought dear Cassie Withers back from the dead in spectacularly dramatic fashion. Why?"

The four sets of eyes turned toward me again.

"What do you know, Cassie?" the man asked.

"I—"

I could feel the pressure shifting onto me, the same pressure that had been slowly crushing Jake into diamond.

"—I don't know!"

"But you know something. Follow your heart!"

A twisted smile, devoid of humor.

"I—"

I know you're not a good person, I thought. And neither am I.

But Jake is.

It was inane. Inane and childish and utterly out of scale with everything else that was happening, the Howlers were butchering ten thousand people every second, I could feel my second-guesser second-guessing, it was all too fast for words but if there had been words they would have been something like see? This is why it's Jake and Marco's circle, and you're just here as—as some kind of mascot, a charity case, it should be Rachel sitting here instead of you—

But at the same time, I did know it.

Like, to my core. In my bones. It was one of the only things I was sure of, as the world collapsed into chaos around me. It was the reason Jake was so—so—

So the-way-he-was right now.

The way Marco wasn't. The way Helium wasn't. The way Rachel wouldn't have been, in his shoes.

"I know he never—"

I broke off, turned toward Jake, started over. "I know you never would have been able to live with yourself."

I still winced. Even knowing that I might have been resurrected literally just to say that exact sentence, I cringed, and waited for the laughter that my inner critic was absolutely certain was about to fill the bridge.

But it didn't. There was no sarcasm, no cold mockery. Jake just blinked, and then blinked again, and then a third time, and that's when I realized he was blinking back tears, his face was flat and calm, it wasn't like he was going to cry again, but he was blinking back tears just the same.

"You're acting like living was part of the plan," he said softly, and my heart cracked right in two.

Oh, Jake—

And that's when I saw it, or—or part of it, at least, that's when I finally got my fingers on something that I was one hundred percent sure was a piece of the puzzle.

"You can't do it like that," I said, my voice firming up. "You can't—you can't prepay some horrible price, and then just—let yourself do whatever, because—you can't decide that you're not going to live with it, and then use that as an excuse to—to do things you know you can't bear, because it won't matter because instead of paying for it you'll just be dead—"

Jake did laugh, then, but it was a hollow sound, like a laugh that had died somehow, empty and brittle like an exuviae.

"Can't?" he said.

"Shouldn't."

There was a moment of silence.

"I'm sorry," Marco cut in. "I'm sorry, but no. No, Cassie. That's just—that's just completely insane, you can't make calls like that based on—on some kind of Saturday morning cartoon moral bullshit. They are killing fifty million people an hour."

"There are two billion of them out there in the rest of the galaxy," I shot back. "Ninety-nine-point-nine-nine percent of them aren't even here."

"Setting aside the question of whether or not that's even true—"

"It is," the Visser cut in.

"Says you. Even so! Garrett told us the rest of them are out there raping and pillaging, too! That's all they do."

"Because they don't know any better."

"Bullshit," Marco spat. "This isn't Steven fucking Universe. Do you even know what I just—what I've—what I had to wade through to—"

He cut himself off, his jaw quivering. "This is an entire species that's been specifically designed to torture everything that moves," he snarled. "Not just kill. Torture."

"That's not their fault. You don't blame cats for playing with mice."

"No, but I blame you if the mouse is fifty million humans and you have what it takes to stop the cat and you don't! How many other worlds are being put through the meat grinder right this second?"

"That—"

That doesn't matter, a part of me had tried to say, but it had been unable to force the words past my lips, because it did matter, of course it mattered, it just wasn't the key. Wasn't the crux of the issue, couldn't be the crux of the issue, not when you took all the relevant info into account—

They brought you back from the dead. That has to mean something.

"It's not—you're not wrong," I began, trying to find my feet, wishing I could somehow ask Jake to help. "It's just—to jump straight to the absolute final solution, when you—when we haven't even tried—"

"Not to pull the rug out from under you," said the Visser, "but I have, in fact, tried the obvious thing. I've got a morphed Howler body in a holochamber at this very moment, and I've been feeding the memory bank with all sorts of experiences that ought to engender empathy and kindness and feelings of fondness and mutual obligation. As well as other, more longshot strategies, such as novel randomness and sensory superstimuli. It does not seem to have had any effect."

I couldn't help it. I shivered.

He had designed an anti-psychopath holodeck program—had deliberately assembled a bunch of stuff that he thought would prove to the Howlers that they should care about other creatures' experiences—had done it cold-bloodedly and strategically—manipulatively—casually—and the act of doing so hadn't made the slightest dent in his own lack of empathy—

"And as Marco points out," the man continued, "it's not as if these particular Howlers are an unrepresentative sample. In case you were—I don't know—about to try to make an analogy to not punishing the entire human species for the rape of Nanking."

Whose side are you on here? a part of me snarled, but of course he wasn't on anyone's side, he was just along for the ride, poking and prodding us—

Like the creature in the pool.

"I'm not saying it can't be the right answer," I said, a note of pleading creeping into my tone. "I'm just saying it can't be the right answer yet."

Weak.

It was weak. I could feel that it was weak—could hear how it sounded in my own ears, see the scathing disdain building up behind Marco's eyes, Jake's wavering uncertainty—knew that I still hadn't found the right words, I knew that the thing that lived inside my own head wasn't actually stupid, even by Marco standards, but I couldn't figure out what it was, let alone how to say it out loud—

‹The Chee.›

I jerked at the sudden, intrusive thought—mistook it for my own thought for a moment, until Jake and Marco turned toward Helium, and I saw that one of the alien's stalk eyes was fixed on me.

‹What of the strategy of the Chee?› he asked. ‹They hide. They run. They do not interfere.›

"They—they can't interfere—right? It's in their programming?"

‹Still. We have ships. Ships, and supplies—allies, technology. We could run. Leave this system and start anew, far away from here—as the Chee did long ago, fleeing from this exact threat.›

I opened my mouth—

Is this a test?

Was he testing me?

"I—no—"

I paused, almost hoping that one of them would interrupt. But they all just kept staring.

I sucked in a breath.

"No," I said. "Not that."

‹Then we have bounds on acceptable action,› the alien replied, swiveling his stalk eye back toward Jake and the Visser. ‹If we are to play the game of listen-to-Cassie, that is. It must be something shy of total xenocide, yet not so far shy as passive disengagement.›

It's not a game, I wanted to say.

But it was.

It was.

A game of giants, of gods—a game with whole worlds as expendable sacrifices, and for the first time that fact landed for me.

I don't know why. I don't know why it was that moment, and not an earlier one. But suddenly I could feel the outrage that the Visser had been expressing before—when he hinted that he'd rather just die than keep on dancing at the end of someone else's strings.

Rather just die—

You're acting like living was part of the plan—

Save Erek. I'm going after the kid.

My thoughts were jumbled, thoughts and memories lurching as new connections formed, stars resolving into constellations, a vase becoming two faces—

Fifty million people an hour.

And—and Magellan had said something about Visser Three bombing half of the cities on the planet—and there was the way the Yeerks had been maneuvered into war, their entire species used as—as a tool, as a prop—

A little boy, screaming as he dangled from the twisted bars of a broken cage, his grip weakening, and all because someone had chosen for it to happen that way—

This cannot stand.

"Why did you play along?" I demanded suddenly, rounding on the Visser. "You—if you never even wanted the cube in the first place—"

"I told you, I did want it. But even after I became aware of the manipulations taking place—"

He shrugged. "It was an object in your possession," he said. "Your team. And it has long since been clear that you are the fulcrum upon which this game pivots."

"But isn't that—aren't you trying to—"

I gestured vaguely.

The Visser cocked his head—

Forced his slave's head to cock.

—studied me for a moment, before answering.

"I have lived every waking moment of my life under threat of death," he said, his voice suddenly soft and silky.

The line of blood on his neck had dried, was now black and cracking, and still Helium's tail pressed up against the skin.

"First it was the kandrona. Three days—I had three of your days to solve the puzzle. After that, I would be forced to choose between death by slow and painful starvation, or returning to the embrace of Cirran—to my own parent, who would unmake me in horror and revulsion. I found a third path, but it led through the Andalites—and then there was the intrigue of the Yeerk hierarchy—the maneuverings of Visser One—"

His gaze drifted over to the corner where Magellan was sitting, holding Rachel's limp hand as he whispered inaudible sentences into her ear.

The Visser shook his head. "Almost, I thought I had escaped. I knew this system was a lure, a trap, but I thought I had sprung it—thought I had outsmarted her, and secured a modicum of self-determination—"

Jake and Helium exchanged a look.

"—only to find myself caught beneath the blade once more."

He looked back at me, his eyes glittering. "I will wait no longer," he said. "They will set me free, or they will end me, or they will die. Anything else is intolerable. For a time, the cube seemed the shortest path—the quickest way to bring the situation to its climax—so I pursued it. Now, though…"

He trailed off, shrugged.

"They seem to care, somehow," he said. "For some reason, they have attached themselves to the drama, become invested in its outcome. They toy with us, like giants dipping fingers in a fishbowl. If we cease to be interesting, they will withdraw, and we will never reach them. Yet if, by playing along, we can snare their fingers—catch them and climb out—or better yet, drag them in and drown them…"

He trailed off again.

I looked at Jake.

"Jake," I murmured.

Jake turned to look at me, still wary, still guarded, but with a hint of something like vulnerability—what I'd previously thought of as a crack now seeming more like a cracked-open door.

"What are we trying to save?" I asked.

And inside my own head: is this what it's like to be you?

Because I had known, somehow—felt absolutely sure, in a way that wasn't even really about knowing, the way a key knew that it fit within a lock—that those words would do it. That even though I hadn't been able to pin it down myself—didn't properly know what it was—that those words would lead him to it, get him to dig it out on his own.

I didn't know why I felt that way. Maybe it was all in my head. Maybe I was imagining it, or being manipulated—or maybe Jake was being manipulated, and I was just the intermediary.

Probably, actually.

I had been brought back from the dead, after all.

But like Helium had said, there was no way to break out of that. No way to outguess the omniscient. I had to deal with the reality of who I was, and who Jake was, and that—

That was all there was to it.

Jake stirred, as if he'd been woken up from a daydream—drew in a sharp, deep breath, blinked, scrubbed at his eyes with the hand not holding the gun. The gun he was still holding, the gun he'd been holding this whole time.

"Whatever we can," he said simply. And then again, quieter, his eyes drifting toward the console and the hanging wireframe map of the Earth. "Whatever we can."

He turned his head back toward the Visser. "And you?" he asked.

The Visser shrugged. "I make no pretense of caring about you," he said grimly. "You, or your people, or your goals. But it seems the swiftest way forward is through you. I repeat my offer of peace."

"The Earth," Jake said flatly. "Safe, and free—from you, and from all of your descendants, to the best of your ability to enforce. The actual best. And freedom to travel, if we survive. No ship in a bottle."

"Agreed."

"And your resources at our disposal. Until—until all of this is over."

"Also agreed. Though—as down payment—I point out what Marco is clearly already thinking, namely that, if I renege, you have no recourse and no leverage."

"Maybe," Jake said. "Or maybe, since these gods seem to care so much about what we think, we ask them to pretty please do us one tiny little favor once this is all over."

The Visser laughed, at that.

Jake lowered the gun, shifted his weight. "Marco," he said. "Cassie. Helium."

There was a long silence—just long enough for me to start wondering if they were talking in thought-speak again—and then—

"I don't trust this," said Marco. "I don't trust this, and I don't get it, and—and I don't know what the fuck is going on, and neither do any of you, and I don't see what difference any of this makes. So sure. Fine. Whatever. We literally can't do shit about anything, so we might as well take yes for an answer. Meanwhile, we still have actual problems to solve. Like, for example, all of them."

Jake shifted again. "Helium?"

Slowly—smoothly—in a way that somehow conveyed that he'd really rather not—the alien drew back his tail blade, wiping it along his own flank, leaving a tiny smear of red across the blue fur.

‹You are our war-prince, Prince Jake. Until such time as we resign from your command, we are bound by your agreements, and will follow your orders. But we are our own beginning. We do not declare peace with the Visser for ourselves, nor for the Andalites, nor for the Yeerks. It is—important, that this be understood by all.›

Jake shot a glance toward the Visser, who shrugged.

"Cassie."

"I—"

I swallowed again.

What did I think?

I didn't know. I honestly had no idea.

Okay, fine. What should you think?

It was a well-worn question, old and familiar. The same one I had asked myself hundreds—maybe thousands of times, the mask of the Cassie they all thought I was, the Cassie I tried so hard to be. The girl who was good, and right, and kind, and upstanding, and incorruptible, the girl who would never cheat on a test, never hurt an animal, never rip out the throat of an innocent slave with her teeth to get at the villain lurking inside his skull—

"I don't get it, either," I said. "But—"

But peace doesn't always make sense.

And whatever the Visser was—everything the Visser had done—

He wasn't innocent, the way the Howlers were.

But if he had been sent—

If all of this was on purpose—

Then he wasn't the only one who needed to be stopped.

"—I don't see anything wrong with it."

"Excellent," the Visser said. "Don't panic."

"Wha—"

And then the universe shattered.

It was easy not to panic.

It was easy, because from the very beginning, I knew exactly how long it would last.

Have you ever seen one of those fractals that looks like a snowflake? Where every time you zoom in on one of the edges, you see that it actually has a triangular bump in the middle of it, and the edges of that triangular bump also have triangular bumps, and the whole thing just gets squigglier and squigglier until the outline is infinitely long, even though it all fits on a piece of paper?

I knew how long it would last because it had already ended, by the time it began—had ended, and Garrett had been counting seconds the whole time—

—not on purpose, none of us could have done anything on purpose while it lasted, except for maybe the Visser—

—but as a sheer reflex, a bodily function, a habit so deeply ingrained it was practically a tattoo on his mind—

—and it would last, had lasted, was going to last, for only three minutes and thirty-six seconds. I knew this because I would know it, and I would know it because Garrett did know it. It was all happening at once, had all already happened the instant that it began—Jake's anger, and the Visser's contemptuous amusement, and Marco's tattered suspension of disbelief—all preceded by the foreknowledge of their resolution and our eventual—

—inevitable—

—convergence.

It was all laid out before us, yet still we danced through it, the experience no less real for its predetermined conclusion—like a book you'd read a dozen times before, and could open to any page at all. There was a story to those three minutes and thirty-six seconds, and it remained unchanged even as we flitted back and forth, overlapping ourselves, dipping in and out at a thousand different places. And just like the fractal, it was infinite, endless detail bound within a finite space.

There was the realization of what had happened, of course—that the Visser had known our position precisely from the beginning—

(Through, variously, the detectors he had positioned on the far side of the Z-space bridge; the gravimetric beacons he had installed on each of the capital ships when they were first assigned to him, and which no one knew to monitor or even check for; and the property he had engineered into his thousands of puppet-Yeerks, giving him a precise sense of their relative physical positions at all times.)

—that he had been capable of destroying us at any time, had two entirely independent long-range weapon systems trained upon us, and had sent a Leeran in a tiny craft to hover, undetected—

(Cloaked and shielded, we realized with horror—a horror to which the Visser responded with a tired, resigned patience—by the repurposed fragments of what had once been the body of Erek the Chee.)

—until an advantageous moment.

And there were all of our responses to this, and all of our responses to our responses, a swirl of upvotes and downvotes, agreement and judgment and recrimination and revelation, Marco learning about Jake from what Jake took away from watching me draw conclusions about Marco, around and around and around—

(There were twelve of us in the dance. Twelve, but also sort of only eight, and also somehow just one, an evanescent Boltzmann egregore—words we learned from the Visser, who had absorbed them from his horde of human slaves—an incorporeal us-mind that was a larger version of the Helium cloud, which was at once Aximili and Perdão and dain Elfangor and the host-ghosts of Tom and Tyagi and Jake—or the Marco-Edriss web, which stretched out beyond our sight, a delicate strand of fiber-optic wire—or the Visser web, no less delicate but inconceivably vaster—and I would have thought that the Visser himself would also be composite, would be perceptible as the union of Alloran and Esplin, two distinct individuals, but somehow he was not, was a whole and single being in the same way as Jake or Garrett—)

—but in the end, the water settled, all our protestations and affectations falling away in the wake of understanding, the knee-jerk reflexes and sudden urgency soothed as if by the passage of years.

It was a trespass—but who expected to be safe from trespass, at this point?

It was a threat—no, it could be perceived as a threat, but the perception of threat means little when the mindscape lies open in front of you, all the lines of cause and effect apparent.

The Visser did not intend to kill us. It was a brute fact. It could not be ignored, however convenient ignoring it might have been to the project of allowing us to hold on to our suspicions, our preconceptions, our indignation.

It would have been easier if he had just been our enemy outright.

And that revelation—that it would have been easier—that we would have preferred that, on some level—that each of us had been actively trying to hold on to that story, despite mounting evidence—

That, too, could not be ignored.

Neither could:

The fact that the Visser was in that very moment actively engaged in the subjugation and mind-rape of Han Pritcher—

(The man with the blood on his neck, a former Navy captain and real-life human being, who had sacrificed every possession he owned, every scrap of savings he had, to secure a place for himself and his husband and their three children on one of the ark ships, only to watch, helpless, as all five of them were forcibly infested by the Visser's probes. They had run out of breathable air on the return trip, and the youngest had suffocated, died alone in his own head, with neither of his fathers to comfort him, and then the surviving Pritchers had been separated, the Visser sending each of them in different directions on different missions, thinking—idly, in passing—thinking this a kindness, figuring that it would be easier for them to make a clean break, and not be constantly surrounded by futile hope, by reminders of what they had lost—and in fact this seemed to have been borne out, seemed to have turned out to be true in a way that Han Pritcher desperately wished it was not—)

—and that none of us were going to do anything about it.

Not even me.

And there was nowhere to hide, no way to deny it, no polite excuses we could make—Han Pritcher was right there with us, a full participant in the sharing, he saw that we saw him, saw that we didn't have the resources, the leverage, the will—that the stakes were too high, the Visser too powerful, the potential benefit too small—saw that all our wishing-otherwise was not enough to move us to actual action.

Saw me raise my mental whip against myself, as if that would somehow help.

Saw Marco's bitter laughter at my—my performance, my penance—

Saw Jake's protectiveness—

(Which meant, as we all understood, that Jake's wariness had dissipated—that he had finally concluded that I was the real me, or close enough to make no difference, just as he and Marco were real, even after all their deaths and resurrections.)

—and the Visser's smirking amusement, and Helium's helpless compassion (tempered by a sort of weighing, pragmatic perspective), and Garrett's raw vulnerability (and the litany he drew around himself like a suit of armor), it was all on display, that and more, waves crashing together from every direction, an infinity of accessible detail—

—but in the end, nothing was going to change, and all of us knew it, and so the dance proceeded, and in the next step there was another infinity—

(This time unfolding from the discovery that Helium had been stalling a person claiming to be Tobias, who had been in contact via ship-to-ship telepathy for the past several minutes, starting from almost exactly the moment when the Visser had declared that there must be another way out of the crisis, which shattered Marco's suspension of disbelief into dust and sent Garrett into a dizzying mixture of longing and fury, the latter half of which had a colder counterpart in Jake, who was not in agreement with Helium that this was information it was reasonable to have withheld from one's war-prince, even briefly—)

And another infinity, and another, and another.

That the Visser had taken the population of the high school—staff and students both—and sequestered all of them on Mars as a breeding population, a fact which he had considered mentioning when Helium proposed leaving the system, but had decided to hold in reserve a little while longer, fearing our reaction to the knowledge that some four hundred of our classmates were three months' pregnant.

(And that there was a part of Helium that was relieved by this—perhaps even excited—that viewed the entire population of Earth, Terra included, as a lost cause, and firmly expected that we would end our next hour or so of dithering with a decision to take the Visser's prisoners and run, and had already oriented toward solving the logistical challenges of a rapid evacuation, and was siphoning off every available bit of information about the structure and state of the Mars facility that it could find in the Visser's mind.)

That Marco had slaughtered an entire stadium full of people a mere hour before returning to the ship, on nothing more than the strength of his own intuition—that it would be a kinder fate than whatever the Howlers had in store for them. That he had intended to tell no one, since he trusted no one else—not even Jake—to react appropriately.

That Garrett—whose not-okayness had been largely overlooked, because everyone had simply pigeonholed him as never-really-okay, and ceased to pay attention—that Garrett had come within inches of killing everyone multiple times in the past day. That he could kill everyone (except maybe Helium) as soon as he chose to, and that there was approximately nothing we could do about that except kill him first.

That there was something deeply wrong with Rachel—something none of us understood, not even the Visser. She was present in the mind-meld, but as an object, not a participant—a vague, waxy shape, shrouded in translucent mental mist, seemingly unmoving and insensible. The Visser had seen unconscious beings in the radius of a Leeran before—unconscious beings, and dying beings, and dead beings—and this was not that.

All of this and more, a rolling tide of revelation and epiphany, more than any of us could handle—

—except the Visser, whose distributed memory was allowing him to store all of it, we would walk away from the mind-meld with mere scraps and he would retain everything—

—the wall that Marco had encountered in the mind of Elfangor, and its odd concurrence with the memories Edriss had brought with her from the other timeline (or whatever it was).

The curious disappearance of the boundary between Esplin and Alloran (and its implications for Helium's future).

The location of the Visser's true body (and a sly awareness of how quickly that information would become obsolete).

The details of his attempted subversion of the Chee, going all the way back to the very day he'd taken the high school—a subversion which had not exactly succeeded but had not definitively failed, either (even now, his other bodies down on Earth were going out of their way to rescue every dog they could find, even at the cost of human life).

And smaller things, trivial things—things which would have been embarrassing, had we not all been exposed together. The bear I had killed. A toy Garrett had stolen. Marco's guilty, furtive fantasy involving both Rachel and Jake. A biology test that Jake had tried to cheat on—tried, and failed, the act of scratching keywords into the wood of his desk searing them into his memory forever.

And then the three minutes and thirty-six seconds ended, and the pod carrying the Leeran passed out of range, as it had been programmed to, and the universe collapsed, falling in on itself from every direction, leaving each of us alone on our own remote, inaccessible island.

No one spoke. No one needed to. The hypersight had faded, but in its wake there was lingering ambience of pure understanding, a transcendent unity of purpose. It wouldn't last—as we all knew, each as well as the others—but for a moment, we were a single creature—all of us, even the Visser—each possessed of its own function, like organs within a larger body.

Helium gave a burst of commands to the ship's computer, then stepped away from the console and over to where Garrett was curled up and keening.

Magellan rose from where he had been tending to Rachel, and replaced Helium in the center of the bridge.

Marco replaced Magellan.

Jake began to shrink.

The Visser reached out through another of his bodies, sent the signal that would reprogram the Leeran's pod—first to rendezvous with Jake in the airlock that Helium had timed to open, and then to pass within range of Tobias's ship for long enough to confirm his identity (and his intentions).

And I—

I didn't have a job, a fact which would ordinarily send me spiraling toward self-loathing, leave me feeling like an afterthought, a failure—or worse, a burden.

But not this time.

I had learned something, in the middle of the mind-meld—we all had—had found it resting quietly in a dusty corner of the Visser's memory, the resting place for unused contingency plans, a mental warehouse of a thousand tactical tidbits. It was perhaps the least important of all the things we'd learned, together—was directly relevant only to me, and would have practically no bearing on the larger war.

But still.

We had decided, in those last, lingering moments—

—decided, or maybe discovered, it had felt more like an acknowledgement than a choice—

—together, we had agreed that the tasks that needed doing could be done by the others, and that I could have a minute—just a minute, or maybe two—to take it in.

I sank to the deck, my eyes unseeing.

Visser Three—

Visser Three had tortured my parents.

Tortured them for weeks, when he first became aware of the Ellimist—tortured them as part of a set of experiments, just to see what would happen—to see how the gods would react.

They hadn't.

And Visser Three—

—since he didn't need them for anything at that point, and he didn't want to lose track of them if the situation on the surface went sideways—

Visser Three had sent them to Mars.

To his secret facility, where the rest of my classmates were imprisoned.

And they were still there.

My parents—

It was hard to finish the sentence, even in the privacy of my own head. After what had happened to the Chapmans, and to Jake's parents, and to Rachel's—after what had happened to Marco's mom—

It didn't seem fair.

It wasn't fair.

And given the situation, I didn't even know if it would matter. If it was anything more than a slight delay of the inevitable.

But still—

I sucked in a breath, and squeezed my eyes shut against the tears.

My parents are alive.