Author's Note: Pushed pretty hard to get this one out on time, so there's a higher-than-usual chance of slight tweaks and edits to the last couple of sections. I don't expect to change anything substantial, though—just little improvements here and there.

Next update should be no later than March 28th, though, and there will possibly be smaller updates sooner than that.

As always, if this story delights you, or terrifies you, or has any impact on you at all, please consider leaving a comment, or swinging by r/rational to join in the discussion there. I treasure every single word of feedback you all leave for me. 3

Chapter 47: Tobias (Part II)

The woman's face shimmered into visibility.

"Hello, Tobias," she said, her voice soft and gentle.

"Hi," I answered, feeling awkward. "Um—"

—you can't just jump right in—

"—is everyone settling in all right?"

She nodded. "We have been learning how to—collaborate—with the ship's computer. She is slow to understand, but eager to help. Already our chamber feels more like a home."

Her lip twisted—still gentle, but with a kind of quiet, sad self-awareness. "For however long," she added.

I felt the gravitational pull of a whole other conversation—there will be a planet that works, somewhere—decided to sidestep it.

"I need a favor," I said, and then winced. It was always like this, talking to Terra's—what, mouthpiece? Ambassador?

‹Mystical horse girl.›

Shut up.

I just felt—clumsy. Blunt. Inelegant. Feelings I wasn't used to minding, my usual response to refinement being more like defiant contempt.

But Terra's—

‹Mystical horse girl.›

—high priestess—

In the back of my mind, Maninho cackled.

Okay, fine, that wasn't any better—

Terra's human go-between wasn't doing it on purpose. The elfish grace wasn't an act. That was just how she was.

"Anything," she said smoothly, her eyes brightening with gratitude. "With all you have done for us—you have only to say the word."

I winced again. "It's not—"

I faltered, started over.

"Nothing—nothing crazy," I stammered. "Just—Yeerk pools communicate by swapping shards, right?"

We were on the clock, and we all knew it.

Not just because of the ongoing holocaust down below—Jake had explained the Visser's little negotiating tactic, how he'd alerted the Howlers to our presence to try to force the conversation to a close. So far, the invaders hadn't taken the bait, but at some point, they were bound to launch a raiding party, and we would have maybe half an hour of warning before they came in range.

But still, there were things to do, and those things took time, and there wasn't any point in not taking the time, just because there was a chance we'd have to scrap everything and run.

There were the twelve shards of Terra, sealed in simple containers provided by the ship and tucked away into Jake's morph, to be delivered to each of the mutinous coalescions. They were too small to count as anything like manipulation or mind-control—not that I would have necessarily balked at that, at this point. Just enough, hopefully, to get the rebels to stop being stupid. To give them evidence that we weren't their enemies—at least, not exactly.

There were also preparations to be made for the actual council meeting, mostly in the form of hologram links that needed to be set up. Helium couldn't afford to leave the bridge of the flagship, and while Telor and Terra were perfectly happy to send ambassadors over to the fleet, I wasn't willing to leave the safety of the New Day's Dawn. Nor could we afford to put Chee on the bridge with Helium—not if there was any chance of a combat situation developing.

It took a while, but eventually, I managed to explain to the ship what I wanted, and it separated out and individually packaged a bunch of little self-powered holo-scanner transmitters. We would meet 'on board' my ship, with everyone able to see and hear everyone else, even Helium.

I maneuvered the ship through the wormhole—no point in trying to maintain physical distance when Visser Three knew exactly where I was anyway—and into formation with the rest of the Yeerk fleet, dropping the transmitters into space where the others could reel them in with tractor beams.

It was—hard, being on the far side of the Z-space bubble. It made more of a difference than I would have predicted, seeing the Earth shrink to nothing, seeing the sun reduced to just another spot of light in the darkness. It was suddenly uncomfortably easy to put the whole situation in perspective—to see the loss of everyone still left behind as insignificant, in the grand scheme of things—

You mean the remaining eighty-five or ninety percent of the human species? The six-billion-or-so of them?

But that was the thing. That was it, in a nutshell—my monkey brain couldn't handle numbers like six billion. Was surprisingly sensitive to whatever happened to be right in front of it, which right now was a way out.

The type of people who do the right thing, even if it's hard.

But was the right thing staying behind, and fighting to the last man?

Or was it taking the goddamn hint, and saving what could be saved?

I had the Chee on board—at least a hundred of them, which seemed like enough physical power to build a pyramid in less than a day. I had two different Yeerk coalescions, both friendly to humans. I had something on the order of two thousand human collaborators, plus a quite frankly shocking variety of animals that Terra had incorporated into itself, and all of the plants and seeds and other supplies those two thousand hosts been able to gather in the hour I'd given them. I had the ship itself, which was proving itself more and more powerful by the minute.

Go, whispered my instincts. Go, and let the others take responsibility for the Earth.

Would I feel differently about that, if I was still groundside? If I were down there, watching Tobias fly away?

Maybe you should ask Magellan. Cousteau's still down there in the Amazon, if the Howlers haven't glassed the whole place by now.

But Magellan wouldn't be able to give me a real answer. He could only give a Marco answer. Marco was a how guy, not a what guy.

I thought about the people I'd left behind at Oak Landing. Louis, Fletcher, Johnny and Roger. Meredith. The night caretaker, Aryano.

It wasn't that I missed them. I hadn't much liked them. Hadn't trusted any of them. But I wouldn't have left them to the Yeerks specifically. I just—hadn't specifically tried to save them. There'd been a bigger picture.

Was this any different?

There's a reason you found the ship. There's a reason the Howlers landed on the wrong side of the world from Terra. That's not vague spiritual bullshit. You know it for a fact.

But in that sense, there were reasons for everything. Once you knew it was all part of some grand design, you couldn't use 'there's a reason' as an argument anymore. It was like adding infinity to every single term of an equation.

The four of you are my primary concern, the blue avatar had said, talking to me and Jake and Rachel and Cassie down in the frozen hell of the Yeerk pool. You are the bishops, the knights, the rooks. For the time being, at least, the game revolves around you—your decisions, your fate.

It had said that right after I'd asked about Garrett. Had said that as a dismissal of Garrett—that Garrett didn't matter.

But Garrett mattered to me.

Garrett's morals, Garrett's values, Garrett's tradeoffs, to use the avatar's words. They were a part of my morals, my values, my tradeoffs. If my decisions mattered, then Garrett mattered through me.

How many random people would I sacrifice, to save Garrett?

‹Not six billion,› Maninho whispered.

No. Not six billion. Garrett—Garrett would not be okay with that.

But not zero people, either.

How many people would I have to save, to put Garrett in harm's way?

If the default situation was now Garrett is free, he gets to fly out of here with a Pemalite ship and a hundred Chee guards—

How many lives would have to be at stake for me to change that?

Up until now, it had always been—hypothetical. Academic, sort of. Like, sure, I knew that somehow saving Ax from under the ocean translated into lives being saved. Looping in the president. Bringing in Thàn Suoros. Booting up the auxiliaries. I'd done all those things because I'd thought they would help—because I thought they'd end the war sooner, leave more people alive.

But I hadn't ever directly had the power. Hadn't ever had thousands of people on a ship under my total control, and the choice to either take them out of harm's way or drag them back into the burning building with me.

‹Kind of depends on how hard the building's burning, doesn't it?›

It did.

It really, really did.

And from my perspective—

From my perspective, the Earth was actually a lost cause. Like, sure, maybe we could sneak in and scoop up a few thousand more refugees—at the risk of bringing a Howler fleet down on us—but was there really all that much difference between two thousand survivors and five thousand? Were three thousand extra survivors worth the risk of losing everything, when two thousand was already en—

I paused.

Enough?

Ah.

A thought occurred to me, then—a thought I would have flinched away from, before.

That's why I don't feel any time pressure.

Time pressure around the ongoing slaughter down on the surface, the according-to-Jake fifty million deaths taking place every hour. I wanted to stop it, yes, but—

But—

Okay, maybe I'm still flinching a little.

I steeled myself to look straight at it—to let myself acknowledge it, before prejudging whether I should or shouldn't have thought it, and therefore whether I had or not.

I wanted to stop the slaughter, but also there was a fundamental difference between no survivors and one survivor, and it was way bigger than the difference between one survivor and two, and that cut both ways.

The human species was already beyond repair, in the sense that there would never be a return to what-had-been-normal-a-year-ago. What mattered now was the chance that they—

‹They?›

I paused again. Took a breath. Tried on the alternative, to see how it felt.

They.

There was a chance that they would be able to find their feet again, rebuild something. There could still be an Earth, ten years from now, even though it wouldn't even remotely resemble the Earth of ten years ago.

But that chance was not particularly sensitive to fifty million more deaths here or there. By now, the Howlers had basically swept the whole globe, done their first complete pass and would soon be starting on a second. There weren't any more cities or airbases or laboratories or manufactories to destroy. There were just people, and if we focused too hard on the difference between stopping the slaughter at six billion or five billion, if we let the individual tragedies blind us, confuse us, rush us, so that we ended up doing something stupid when we could've just taken a little more time to think—

Maybe.

Maybe.

It wasn't exactly a Garrett-shaped thought. It smelled more like Marco—Marco at his worst, Marco when he was confusing if you can't look at this, you'll get it wrong with if you AREN'T looking at this, you ARE getting it wrong. And I wasn't sure I believed it, myself.

But I had been thinking it. Deep down, in my subconscious. There had been a part of me that had looked at the situation on Earth, and felt—

Unrushed.

Unrushed, because the situation had reached a particular level of fucked-up that was going to last for a while—because if it was going to transition to the next level of fucked-up, past the point of all possible recovery, it wasn't going to be in the next twenty-four hours.

Which—now that I looked straight at it—was both right and wrong. If you took 'the human race' as one single thing then yeah, the next fifty million deaths didn't really matter but also the human race wasn't one single thing, it was billions of individual things, and the question was which one was it more in this case, which lens should I be looking through—

No.

No, that's still not the question, because either way—

Either way, if there was a solution to the Howler threat, it was not going to come from me.

It was going to be the Visser's virus, or an outside force, or some crazy thing the human resistance cooked up.

My purpose lay elsewhere.

‹Then why are you—?›

Maninho didn't finish the sentence. Just projected a sort of helpless gesturing feeling.

If you're so sure, then why are you like this?

It was a good question.

It was a good question, so I thought about it. Asked myself, and waited for the answer.

And what came floating up was—

Because I don't know what Garrett's going to say.

Because it felt like I shouldn't make the call without asking him. Because I was putting a lot of weight on what I thought he would think, and the real Garrett deserved a chance to second-guess.

‹You could morph him and just ask.›

No. The real Garrett.

Not the out-of-date backup copy.

The boy who'd woken up in a hospital, without me there to have his back. The one who'd lived through Visser Three's bombing and the Howler invasion and whatever the hell else had been going on for the past week or two. The one who, Jake had said—

—briefly, as if it was somehow okay to just drop a bomb like that and then change the subject—

—had snapped and killed a room full of Hork-Bajir not two hours ago. Who had almost snapped and killed all of them.

That was the Garrett I owed something to.

That was the Garrett I wanted to talk to. To get his take and—

Don't start flinching now.

To get his take, and to fix his take if it was wrong, it wasn't that I thought I knew better than Garrett, it wasn't like I thought I was always right whenever we disagreed, but also I knew him, I knew how he thought, I knew how he led himself astray, and there was a very real chance that Garrett was—that he had been broken by the events of the past couple of weeks.

‹Kind of a tightrope, no?› Maninho whispered. ‹'I want to give him a chance to talk me out of it, unless he's crazy in which case I'll fix him until he agrees'?›

No. Not until he agrees. Just until he's fixed.

And then, a second later—

Also, I'm not going to decide whether he's crazy based on whether he agrees. It's—it's about the how and the why.

I knew how that sounded, from the outside. I could picture Marco's raised eyebrows perfectly, in my mind's eye.

But I didn't care.

I knew what I actually meant—knew what I would actually do. And regardless of how it sounded, it was true, and it was right.

I glanced down at the palm of my hand—at the faint scar cutting across it. It was there because Garrett had put it there. Even though the whole hand had been gone, when he'd acquired me. Somehow, he had managed to force the morphing tech to regrow the hand, but leave the scar.

Probably he hadn't even done it on purpose. Probably that was just—how my hand was, in his head. How it was supposed to be.

Listen. This is going to hurt, okay? It's going to hurt, and you're going to bleed, and I'm going to be hurting and bleeding, too, and that—that's part of it. That's the ritual. You bleed and you hurt, we both hurt, and that's like a symbol for it, so we know it's serious, so we don't forget. Forever, okay? There's gonna be a scar. We're both gonna have scars, because we're both making this promise and it doesn't have an expiration date, neither one of us leaves the other one behind in this shithole, okay? I don't leave you, and you don't leave me. We both get out, or neither of us—

A soft chime sounded—the signal for someone trying to contact me. I looked up, surprised—

‹They said it would take at least half an hour, didn't they?›

They had. Ten minutes for the trip over, ten minutes for the ship's decontamination procedure—just in case—and then at least ten minutes for one of the Terran collaborators to take Garrett into the Leeran bubble and then drain back into the pool—

"Who is it?" I called out.

"No who! Just message! For you! From the flagship!"

I felt my brow furrow. "Read it."

"Elfangor wants to talk to you!"

The hologram shimmered, sharpened, solidified.

"It's Cassie, right?" I asked.

It had to be Cassie. No one else still had an Elfangor morph.

Although Marco might have one now.

‹Yes,› came the response. ‹Cassie is indeed the—owner—of this body. But she has receded, for the moment, leaving me in control.›

"Say hi for me, I guess."

I studied the familiar figure, rendered in such perfect detail that I could see my own reflection in its eyes. The dark, rippling fur. The sideslung legs. The long, muscular tail. The front section—not quite a head—was reared up like a cobra, what Ax called tree-stretch, freeing the delicate, seven-fingered hands.

He looked so much like his brother. But thicker, heavier, stronger.

Sturdier.

Older.

"Why—"

I broke off, clearing my throat.

"What did you want to talk about?"

The Andalite stared at me for a long, long time—long enough that I almost began to wonder if he was nervous, somehow.

"Uh—"

‹Tobias,› he said abruptly, cutting me off. Abruptly, but also softly, a tone that would have made me lean forward slightly if he had been speaking out loud. ‹Are you…happy?›

No.

Yes.

Wait—what?

"Uh," I repeated. "In what sense?"

The hologram of Elfangor was studying me, I realized—studying me intently, its eyes searching.

‹In the sense that matters to you,› he said.

Why? I wanted to ask.

But also—

Am I?

I felt my attention flutter nervously toward the corner of my mind where Maninho lurked, as if I were flubbing a math problem up at the whiteboard, and looking for someone to mouth the answer.

But Maninho was silent, and still. So was the image of Elfangor, both of them radiating a kind of patient, curious composure.

"Uh," I said, for a third time.

Happy was—it was a thing I wasn't even used to tracking. A thing I wasn't used to paying any attention to at all.

And why is that? a tiny voice wondered.

Because they can't take it away from you if you don't care about it.

No, wait. That wasn't quite right.

Because they can't hurt you, by taking it away from you, if you don't care about it.

I shook my head, trying to refocus—realizing only then that I was unfocused, that Elfangor's question had caught me off guard.

"Ye—" I began, and then broke off. "N—"

I frowned.

Neither of those had felt quite right.

‹I see,› the alien murmured.

"Why are you—"

Why are you asking? And why are you asking ME? Why are you taking the time for this, in the middle of—

‹Weren't you the one who was just thinking it was a bad idea to rush?› Maninho whispered.

To rush, yes. But this wasn't not-rushing. This was—

Well. I could honestly say I had no idea what this was.

"Why do you want to know?" I finished.

The alien's shoulders drooped in a way that seemed sort of sighlike. ‹I suppose if I were to say because I am curious, you would simply repeat the question. Ditto if I were to say because it matters to me.›

He paused.

My frown deepened.

"You said 'ditto.'"

‹Yes.›

"That's a, a, a whatchamacallit, the thing where the way you say something is, like, local—"

‹An idiom. Vernacular.›

There was an intuition tickling the back of my neck, nudging me forward. I felt myself almost thinking a thing—felt myself pointedly refusing to think it, because it was silly, laughable, indefensible—

That was silly, too, though, so I went ahead and thought it.

"When we first met," I said slowly. "You were in a human body. A human morph."

I tried to remember what it had looked like. It had been a male—white—late thirties, maybe? Had it had dark hair, or light hair?

Why can't I remember what it looked like?

"You told us you'd been on Earth before," I continued. "Said—said you'd spent a few years here."

‹Yes.›

And Marco's mom said that there was something fishy going on, time travel or hallucinations or alternate universes—

"Do you—did you—"

I swallowed my self-consciousness, forced my way through the embarrassment. "Have you met me? Before, I mean? Or—or some other version of me?"

It was ridiculous, which was why my brain had tried to stop me from thinking it. But it was one reason why the greatest Andalite warrior, resurrected from the dead for a mere hour or two, might take time out of his busy schedule to come talk to some random orphan while the universe blew up around us both—

‹Not quite,› he said, and I thought I detected an ocean of sadness behind the two short words, like a glimpse of a hurricane through a ship's porthole. ‹But—I knew your mother. Or—a version of her. A woman named Loren.›

He waited.

My mother's name was Laura, I thought.

Thought, but didn't say. Some instinct kept me silent, kept my eyes locked on his.

‹We—›

The alien faltered.

‹There is a—a timeline, or an alternate universe—or perhaps just a madman's fantasy. I do not know. I cannot be sure. The Ellimist—›

He broke off again. ‹I fathered a child, once. A human child, with a human woman—a woman I loved, and yet love. A woman who saved my life. And that child's name was Tobias, and he lived in Ventura County, and—›

He fell silent a third time, and when he spoke again, his tone was suddenly tighter, stronger, more controlled. ‹I apologize,› he said. ‹It is not right to burden you with details—not right, and not relevant. Nor should you bear the weight of my—my expectations. You do not owe me anything—›

"Wait," I cut in. "That's not true."

The alien's eyes crinkled in an Andalite smile. ‹You may bear some debt of gratitude to the ghost of Elfangor,› he admitted. ‹And I may certainly qualify as such. But doubtless that ghost is also responsible for much you would have preferred to avoid. Pain, and fear, and loss.›

I wasn't sure what this conversation was. It was dizzying, directionless, the ground shifting and lurching under me. But I knew what to say in response to that.

"So?"

I might have imagined it. It was the sort of thing it's easy to trick yourself into seeing when it isn't really there. But it seemed like the alien straightened a little. Stood just the tiniest bit taller.

Like a human would, if that human was feeling proud.

‹As you say,› he murmured, and fell silent.

The seconds ticked by.

If it's true, whispered some part of me. If he really was your father, in some alternate timeline—

No. Screw that. Just based on what he'd done for me in this timeline—

"Give me a second," I said. "Please. I—I'd like to try to answer for real."

Elfangor nodded.

Are you happy?

There was the first answer, the knee-jerk answer—I haven't been happy in a long, long time.

Then a backup, waiting just behind the first—look around. What do you think?

But both of those were patterns, clichés—how I was supposed to feel, how I imagined anybody would feel, in my shoes. A cardboard cutout of an answer.

I felt my lips twitch upward in a crooked smile. I'd learned this lesson already, more than once. But it was surprising how easy it was to slip back into old habits, even after you'd figured out a better way.

I'd learned that lesson more than once, too.

"I think," I began, and then hesitated.

‹Go on,› Maninho urged. ‹I mean, that's the real answer, isn't it?›

"I think that happiness isn't the right question," I said, turning to face the alien more fully. "I think that happiness—it—it comes and goes, and—it doesn't really have much to do with—"

With the days I'd choose to relive over and over, if the Ellimist or whoever gave me the chance.

"I think there are a lot of things that matter to me more than whether or not I'm happy," I continued, my voice growing more firm. "Because happiness—I don't know. For one, it's pretty easy for them to take it away from you. For another, it's—it seems kind of hollow, if you're chasing straight after it. Like—if you're just trying to do whatever makes you happy, it seems kind of—backwards—like people who chase after respect instead of, I don't know, actually becoming respectable—"

I faltered. I was doing an incredibly bad job of finding the right words and putting them in order—

‹He doesn't care.›

It was true. Elfangor's eyes were fixed on mine, his stalks motionless, his body language practically screaming you have my full attention.

"I don't have—a lot of regrets," I said. "Mostly just little things. I'd change—I wouldn't change any of the big stuff. I—have you met Garrett?"

Elfangor nodded.

"I wouldn't trade him. Which means I wouldn't trade Oak Landing. And—I'd rather be—I wouldn't want you to have picked somebody else, unless—unless it would have worked out better for everybody, I guess—"

I broke off again. What was I actually trying to say?

"I think—if we make it out of here—if Garrett comes out okay, if we survive this, him and me and enough people to start over somewhere—I think there will be a lot of days when I'll be happy," I said. "I think—I don't think there've been very many days at all when I wished I wasn't alive. And I think—"

I swallowed. This part was harder. Not because it wasn't true—if anything, it was the part that rang the most true.

But because the way the alien was looking at me—

I wasn't used to being looked at like that.

Like it mattered.

Like what I was about to say was going to make a difference to him.

It was—

A lot of responsibility.

"I think I'm proud of what I've done," I said. "I think it—I think that I—that I helped, some. That it made a difference that I was there. That it was me. I think I've made things better, a little, and that—"

That's all you can ask for.

It wasn't. Not really. You could ask for plenty. You could ask for money. For parents. For not having to make the call between dying in a hopeless war or running off into the unknown with nothing but survivors and scraps.

But it was enough.

"Yeah," I said, to the ghost of Elfangor—to the alien warrior who'd found us, who'd saved us. I reached out, laced my fingers through—

—the hologram's—

—through his.

"I'm happy," I said. "Or at least, I will be once my little brother gets here."

Marco did a double take, same as Jake. Unlike Jake, though, Marco couldn't resist. Or chose not to, anyway.

"So Garrett's the top, then? I've wondered."

I sighed.

Jake's face didn't twitch. "Can these holograms punch?" he asked, his voice level.

I twiddled a control. "They can now."

Jake swung. Marco ducked.

Quietly, I reset the system back to non-solid.

They're in different rooms, then.

"Cassie's going to be a few minutes," Jake said. "She's getting set up to—I guess you'd say re-download—all of Elfangor's memories from the past hour, so he won't be starting up from scratch again. Rachel is—not coming."

I glanced down at the small figure curled up on the floor beside me, hidden from the others behind a holographic invisibility cloak. He was motionless except for the rise and fall of shallow breathing, one arm wrapped tight around my calf, the other holding the thick blanket closed over his head.

"Garrett's out, too," I said.

Jake nodded. "Helium will be at the meeting proper, but he doesn't have any spare cycles to help with planning or setup, not that we're doing much. Magellan will be there, too, representing Visser One and the Marclones, but right now he's sitting on Visser Three."

"So Marco's the bottom, then?" I murmured.

Marco stuck his tongue out.

Jake's eyes traced around the wide, brightly lit meadow. "So that makes the three of us, Cassie, Helium, Magellan, V3—"

"Telor and Terra each agreed to send a representative," I said. "And there'll be a Chee hologram, too."

"Can we cut that one in and out?"

"Yeah. They're already expecting it. They can cut themselves out, too, and back in, unless I've overridden. I gave them a link with the ship's computer that'll let them sort of half-listen, so they can tell when it's safe to pop back in."

"Wait," said Marco. "How does that work?"

"The link? They're basically plugged in to the shipwide wifi—"

"No, no, I mean—how can they tell whether there's stuff going on that they shouldn't listen to, without listening to it? Like, isn't the whole problem that if they become aware of violence, or—or intent to cause violence, they have to do something about it?"

I glanced back at the clock on the console, debated briefly whether this was the right moment to go into detail.

Short version.

"The Chee anti-violence stuff—it's not really like a clean system," I explained. "Actually, the Chee themselves aren't really a clean system. They're pretty hacked-together. Not finished. They were still in development when the Howlers—"

I paused, shook my head, started over. "Basically, there's like three different systems working together to enforce the pacifism thing. Three, or four, depending how you count. And one of them is a kind of—fuzzy causality module? Like—like they're all wearing blurred glasses, or something. It stops them from thinking too clearly about X leading to Y leading to Z, sort of limits them to what's right in front of them. Stops them from noticing stuff that they'd have to do something about, off in the distance. That's how they hunker down during wars and genocides and stuff."

"A don't-think-about-it app," Marco quipped.

"Yeah. So they can check in on the conversation every few seconds and just sort of, I dunno, read the vibe? And they can tell from that whether it's too hot to really pay attention to."

"How do you know all this?" Jake asked.

"This ship—it came out of the same lab that the Chee came out of. Like, the same company, or whatever the Pemalites had instead of companies. The computer has all sorts of notes and logs and records and plans and stuff. Prototypes. Some history and news, too. There's a lot of it—I spent a whole day reading up on just the Chee and barely scratched the surface."

I'd been trying to figure out what they wanted—why they'd given me the key to the ship in the first place, what they expected me to do with it. And then—later, when everything started to go to shit—whether or not it was a good idea to bring any of them along.

Satisfied, Jake nodded. "Would like to poke around in there later, if we get the chance," he said softly. "Meanwhile, thanks to the shards you sent over, the other coalescions in the fleet have calmed down a bit. They nominated one of the pools to be their speaker, and are sending a Hork-Bajir."

I counted. "So that's eleven, if we don't count Visser One."

"We should. In fact, we should count Cassie and Elfangor separately, too, so there's thirteen. Every little bit helps."

‹Hey, what about me?› Maninho play-pouted.

You're Terra and you know it, I shot back.

Out loud, I asked, "That's what the Yeerks call their government, right? The Council of Thirteen?"

Jake nodded again.

"So, what's the plan?"

"No plan," he said, sounding tired. "No plan, no goal. I just figured it might be worth it to put our heads together for like ten minutes before everyone else shows up. See if we can think of anything to stop this being a total cl—"

He broke off, turning to look over his shoulder at nothing.

Something back on his ship.

"Well, that was a free square on the bingo card," he muttered darkly. "Visser Three just reported Howlers on the way. From deep space, not coming up from Earth. I guess they're clever enough to know we'd spot them lifting off the surface."

"How many?" I asked, just as Marco said "How long?"

"Ninety-seven minutes," Jake answered. "He says—another hundred ships, give or take. Maybe a seventh as many as made it through the mines in the first place."

"So like a one percent reinforcement overall."

"Oh, and they're aimed at us, not the planet."

"Tracking us?" I asked sharply.

Jake shrugged. "V3 says no. And his host in Howler morph is nowhere near here, and he's confident there's no information leaking in the other direction. We're just in the obvious spot."

He sent his gaze drifting around the chamber again. "You up for shifting positions with us?" he asked. "If we need to move the fleet out of danger?"

I glanced down again at Garrett. Ever since the moment he'd come on board, I'd had the Chee ship ready for immediate Z-space jump, direction and duration random. I'd felt stupid for not setting it up earlier, though to be fair things would be worse right now if I'd hyperspaced away from Jake when he showed up with the Leeran.

"Sure," I said easily. "But—won't we lose contact with the Bug fighters inside the bubble? The lookouts?"

"Not if we stay on a straightline vector. Or leave another fighter just outside, as a relay."

"Makes it a lot easier to find us," Marco warned. "And they'll blow up the fighters once they get here, right?"

"Yeah," Jake said. "So we have a time limit. A hard one, if we want to keep the pilots of those fighters alive."

‹Interesting 'if,'› Maninho murmured.

I gave an inward shrug. "If this conversation goes on longer than an hour, we're in trouble anyway," I said.

I didn't explain, and neither of them asked.

Probably because there are like four different reasons, each of which is more than enough all by itself.

"So what are we doing, then?" I pressed. "I mean, if there's no plan—"

"I don't know," Jake admitted. "I get that you're gone, no one's trying to stop you—"

"None of us, anyway," Marco added.

"—right, none of us, and probably none of the Yeerks, though it seems like you could give the whole fleet a run for their money if you had to. And obviously no one can make Visser Three do anything, either, but he really does seem to be along for the ride. So it's mostly just—figuring out where everyone's going, I guess."

"The options being stay or go?"

Jake shook his head. "Not quite. So far, we have go-with-Tobias or go-with-the-Yeerk-fleet, I think. We, uh—"

His eyes flickered toward Marco, and he looked as if he was very deliberately not wincing. "We decided that the Yeerks should get control of their ships back—"

Marco held up his fingers and made air quotes.

"—most of them, anyway. It's not like a few ships makes a big difference to them, and it's not like an entire fleet would make a difference to us. We're going to hold on to one pool ship and a full complement of fighters; Helium can handle that much alone if he has to."

"And everybody else is leaving?"

"I don't know, but they staged a revolt to stop us from even maybe going down into the hot zone, so it seems like a safe bet. There's the question of whether you're headed in the same direction—did you get the maps?"

I nodded.

"And there's a question whether we're headed in the same direction as either of you. We're still split on whether or not to swing by the Mars base and pick up the—people—there."

"And the Howlers?"

"No answers there."

Marco's face twisted. "Well, there's one answer, but it's been outla—"

"Can it, Marco. You can bring it up once everybody gets here. Which is when, again?"

I touched the console with a finger. "About five minutes from now. Or at least, that's what we told them originally. We can push it back if we need to."

Jake shook his head sadly. "I don't think an extra ten minutes is worth the extra ten million lives," he said softly. "Are you controlling the—"

He broke off as the air began to shimmer, the image of Cassie solidifying in between him and Marco.

"Oh," she said softly. "What happened?"

I sighed. "It looks worse than it really is," I grumbled, my fingers brushing self-consciously across the swollen lump over my cheekbone. I could still taste blood where my lip had split, and there were a handful of scratches that Cassie and the others couldn't see.

"Was that—did Garrett—"

"Yes," I said flatly.

I wasn't quite sure why I was annoyed. I could have just had the ship fix it. Could have had the ship hide it, at least—mask it so none of them would see. If I didn't want them to comment on it, that is.

But—

I don't know. There was approximately zero chance that anyone would get the message I was trying to send. But I didn't want to hide it. I didn't want to fix it. I didn't want to pretend like it was shameful, or embarrassing—like it somehow wasn't okay, or worse, like it somehow hadn't happened.

It had happened, and it was okay. Or at least, the not-okayness had nothing to do with a couple of bruises on my face. This was the natural outcome—the inevitable outcome of everything we'd put him through, and it was far, far, far better for him to—to have someplace to put it, than for him to just try to swallow it all himself.

I wanted them to see the aftermath. To see it, and know what it meant. And I wished—even though I knew it was unreasonable—on some level I wished that the whole thing would be obvious to them. Self-explanatory. That I wouldn't have to answer questions, translate the message into mouthwords. I wanted them to just get it.

‹Asking a lot,› Maninho whispered.

Yeah. It was.

But also I didn't want to stop asking a lot. Didn't want to unlearn the reflex that had me reaching for it automatically, even when I knew on some level that it was hopeless, that Jake and Marco and Cassie didn't really speak my language.

‹Unstated expectations are premeditated resentments.›

Where the hell did you pull that from?

‹Dunno. Might've been a fortune cookie.›

Anyway, Cassie—well, I don't know if she took the hint, but she took a hint, and dropped it, sparing one last, sympathetic look in my direction before turning to Jake.

"Should I morph now?" she asked.

Jake's eyes fluttered closed for a moment. "Yeah," he said softly. "Go ahead."

"Also hi, by the way," I said belatedly. "Welcome—welcome back."

She gave a little half-smile. "Hi, Tobias. Good to see you again."

Then her mouth melted away.

"Aaaaanyway," Marco said. "Everybody's just showing up all at once in four minutes, or—"

"I can stagger the arrivals," I said. "If we want."

The three of us looked at each other. It was suddenly extremely obvious that none of us had ever hosted an interplanetary diplomatic summit before.

Jake heaved a sigh. "No," he said. "Just blink everybody in at the same time. But—can you mute them?"

"Yeah," I replied, reaching out to the console. "Easy."

"All right. Let me talk first."

"What are you going to say?" Marco asked.

"I honestly have no idea."

He fell silent—we all did, the only sound the grinding and squelching of Cassie's body rearranging itself, rendered faithfully in high fidelity by the hologram tech. The seconds ticked by.

‹Prince Jake.›

Jake's head whipped around. "Heli—"

He broke off, his jaw snapping shut with a click.

"I'm not a prince, Elfangor," he said quietly. "Were you?"

There was an interesting quality to his tone—a conspicuous lack of deference, almost exactly the way he sounded when talking to Marco.

The alien's stalk eyes swayed and dipped. ‹'On her advice he therefore signified to the Senate that the title Augustus would be agreeable to him.'›

"What?"

Elfangor gave a small shake of his head. ‹Nothing,› he said. ‹I meant no offense. I was wondering—do you know where you yourself are headed? You, and—›

He paused.

You and the others?

Four names written in fire—Jake Berenson, Marco Levy, Tobias Yastek, Cassie Withers.

‹Or rather,› he began again, ‹do you have hopes, pending the outcome of the discussion?›

"Seems a little early for that."

The alien blinked, all four eyes together. ‹For hopes?›

Jake said nothing.

A small light appeared on the console. "One minute."

‹Jake Berenson,› Elfangor said, the last name pronounced like a title. ‹Might I speak first, in your council? Not—not first, but—once you have concluded the opening ceremonies.›

Jake's eyes didn't narrow. They just—looked, dull and tired and empty.

"Why?" he asked, sounding as if he was only doing it because he thought he was supposed to. "What do you want to say?"

‹My piece,› the alien said simply.

Jake looked at Marco.

Marco shrugged.

Jake looked at me.

"Is he here for some other reason?" I asked.

Come on, Jake, snap out of it.

"Fine," he said heavily. "Not like there's any kind of status quo for you to mess with."

We waited as the last few seconds ticked by. Then, at almost the last possible moment, a sudden impulse seized me.

"Know victory," I said.

Jake's eyes locked with mine—

And then the others arrived.

Seven other bodies, all spread out, completing a wide, comfortable circle. Eleven in total, counting my own, representing anywhere between thirteen and two dozen individual minds, depending on how you wanted to draw the boundaries.

"Hi," Jake said immediately, as heads turned and eyes spread across thousands of miles of space took in the holographic scenery. "Thank you for coming."

He raised a hand. "Jake Berenson," he said evenly. "Leader of the Animorphs."

He pointed.

"Marco Levy, also of the Animorphs."

His arm shifted. "Magellan Levy, of the Animorphs, current host to Edriss five-six-two of the Sulp Niar pool, representative of the Yeerk military and government, rank Visser One."

Shift.

"Cassie Withers, of the Animorphs, serving as—conduit—for warrior Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul, of the Andalites."

Shift.

"Tobias Yastek, of the Animorphs."

Shift.

"Hyruk," Jake said, pointing now at the hulking shape of the Hork-Bajir controller. "Also representing the Yeerk species, specifically the coalescions of this fleet."

Shift.

"Conceição, representing the collaborative coalescion of Terra."

‹So that's her name,› Maninho whispered. I ignored him.

"Peter Levy, representing the coalescion of Telor Reborn."

Wait. Peter Levy?

I shot a glance at Marco, whose face was a mask, giving nothing away.

"Helium, formerly Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill and Perdão of Terra, collectively representing the third path."

I suppressed the urge to whistle. If Jake was actually making all of this up on the fly, he was doing a damn good job—

"Logan, representing the Chee—"

The android spoke, its lips moving soundlessly.

"Hang on," I cut in. I moved a finger—

"Try now."

"And the dogs," the android repeated.

Jake nodded acknowledgement, then shifted his arm to point at the final figure, an unassuming man who looked to be in his early forties. "And Han Pritcher," he said. "Current unwilling host to a shard of Visser Three, formerly war-prince Alloran-Semitur-Corass and Esplin nine-four-double-six of the Cirran coalescion."

A faint rustle of apprehension swept the circle, all those who hadn't known which host carried the Visser—an eclectic mix of emotions, fear and fascination and apprehension and hate. But no one spoke. Jake still had the floor—still held the floor, commanding silence by the set of his shoulders and the line of his jaw, every hint of exhaustion and despair now buried.

"This council is being recorded," he intoned, and I scrambled quietly to confirm—I was pretty sure the ship recorded everything, but he didn't know that, plus I had no idea how the recordings were stored or how I could call them back up—

‹No worries!› the ship shouted into my mind.

"—for the sake of all who come after. It is our first opportunity to cooperate, in the face of—"

Brief, so brief the flicker, his eyes darting toward the man he'd labeled Han Pritcher, so quickly that I genuinely wasn't sure whether I'd imagined it.

"—a greater enemy."

He sucked in a deep breath. "We are here to determine our next moves, against the threat of the Howlers, and in light of the situation on Earth. Everyone in this council will have a chance to speak, if they want it. None in this council—"

Again the flicker—this time for sure.

"—may command any other. Agreements will be reached by consensus, and mutual—agreement—"

My eyes shot toward Marco's face just in time to catch the twitch.

"—or not at all. Any one of us may leave this council at any time. The first speaker will be Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul."

And with that, he promptly sat down, leaving the rest of us blinking in the sudden, abrupt silence.

Elfangor—Cassie—took a half-step forward, drawing the eyes of the circle.

‹I am known to all of you,› he began simply.

Quietly, Maninho placed the knowledge into my memory.

The Beast. The Vanarx. The blade that falls without warning.

That was how the Yeerks in the circle knew Elfangor—Terra, and Telor, and Hyruk. As a shadow in the dark, a legendary nightmare. Their siblings went out, and all that came back was silence.

‹I am not, properly speaking, a member of this council,› he continued. ‹I am a memory, a remnant, a revenant—dead for some time now, at the hands of the Visser.›

All the eyes turned in the obvious direction. The Visser's stolen face remained blank.

‹I am here at the request of Cassie Withers, to whom I will soon cede control of this body. I have but one point to make, and I beg you each to listen.›

Glances around the circle. The Andalite warrior reared higher, then higher still, his silhouette becoming almost centaur-like.

‹If you meet a sudden stranger in the wilderness,› Elfangor said, ‹you may be startled, and act from fear, with violence. A tail-blade to the throat, a stone to crush the skull.›

The hologram representing the Chee, Logan, winked out.

Elfangor didn't pause. ‹Thus, you think, you may become safe again. Yet the stranger's companions, finding the body, track you back to your camp, and fall upon you in the night. Thus, they think, they become safe again.›

The alien's stalks swiveled, his eyes tracing around the circle, holding each person for a brief moment before moving on. ‹Yet true security is costly. There is an event horizon to safety, a half-life to invested self-interest. The strong overpower the weak. The weak band together to bring down the strong. In fear, both build walls, weapons. They hone their martial skills, spend ever-greater portions of their spare attention and energy on war, and the prevention of war. And in the end, no relative improvement. Just as the faster predator forces the evolution of faster prey, which forces the evolution of faster predators in turn. Untold resources spent—untold calories dedicated to the growth of absurd musculature, only to remain in the same tired stalemate.›

He turned, fixed all four of his eyes briefly on the Visser. ‹Waste,› he said, with heavy emphasis. ‹Waste.›

The Visser's face was still blank, but his own eyes had sharpened. Around the circle, everyone else was silent, and attentive.

‹Violence begets violence,› Elfangor continued. ‹The threat of violence encourages preemptive violence. Each, feeling unsafe, takes actions that necessarily lead others to feel unsafe, and so the cycle feeds itself. There are only two ways out.›

He turned again, this time toward Marco. ‹The first—total victory. If all else is dust and ash, then truly nothing can threaten you, and you may walk the final wasteland alone and safe. But that path requires total victory—in a universe with quantum viruses, with Z-space bombardment, with who knows what horrors yet to be devised, even a single survivor may be the seed of one's destruction. Any individual willing to wreak unlimited violence is infinitely vulnerable to unlimited violence wrought in return—his stalks may never rest, who does not know how to make peace.›

He turned once more, this time toward Terra's host, the ethereal Amazonian woman. ‹But there is another option,› he said gravely. ‹Relinquishment. One may make a sacrifice of one's own freedom to destroy—may choose not to lift a weapon ready-made. So long as you and the stranger each reserve the right to defend yourselves with violence, each must ultimately guard against that same violence in turn. But if you set that option aside—if you bind yourself to lesser strategies, lesser vengeances—›

The alien paused, seeming to search for words.

‹The cynic will mistake my meaning. I do not propose a vulnerable naïveté—civilization is not a unilateral act. The language of violence is not well-answered by the language of peace. I simply gesture toward what may be reclaimed if both sides switch to the language of peace together. If the hemorrhage is staunched, the cycle of wasteful expenditure sidestepped. If the resources that each side would have burned, one for one for one for one, may be spent elsewhere. If the branching tree of cooperative endeavor is not ripped from the soil before it has the chance to flower—two together may accomplish things infinitely beyond the reach of one and one, apart and wary.›

He spread his hands, as if to encompass the entire circle, one stalk focused on the Visser, the other now turning to gaze at Jake. ‹But none of it is possible unless the sacrifice is credible,› he insisted. ‹The relinquishment must be genuine, the abstention unimpeachable. Else, the futile race goes underground, and begins again, more covertly. It must be clear that there are things you will not do, and there is only one way to prove that—the hard way. By not doing them, even when you could. Even when, perhaps, a sane and sober calculation tells you that you should.›

He lowered his hands again. ‹I do not presume to tell you that you should not raise your tails against the Howlers,› he said softly. ‹It would be—a little much, coming from one who has dealt so much death as I. Yet if I am not allowed to learn the lessons of my own mistakes, and pass them along—›

He broke off, gave an eerily human shrug. ‹I simply wish to help make Cassie's point, that it is not an act without consequences. To defend oneself so vigorously—to employ a weapon of unlimited power and scope—to kill every Howler everywhere with only the barest attempt at parlay—it is not just you and the Howlers, in this wilderness. There are others watching—judging—waiting to see whether they should treat you as those who would, or those who would not. And the distinction matters, to them. There are different rules for each. The protections of a peace treaty only hold for those who abide by its terms.›

"We're not even planning to use the damn virus," Marco broke in, his voice brittle.

‹Yet,› the alien replied. ‹You are not planning to use it yet. I wager it would have come up—that it might still, even now. You were willing to use it once already, and were stopped only by a literal miracle. Yet you retain the freedom to use it—are restrained only by your unwillingness.›

Elfangor turned back to the Visser—

—to the human slave the Visser is using as a puppet—

—held the man's gaze with his main eyes as his stalks continued their slow sweep around the circle.

‹It is that unwillingness which I am seeking to strengthen,› he said. ‹Think what tragedies might have been avoided, if Cirran had not been willing to tear you apart. If you had not been driven to desperation by her willingness to unmake you—not been forced to meet threat with threat—if you could instead have trusted her to choose the path of self-restraint. It is no idle analogy, Visser.›

I shivered.

The whole point is for you to be placed into situations where your decisions are philosophically relevant. Situations where you are free to choose—where the constraints on your choices are primarily your constraints—your morals, your values, your tradeoffs.

That's what the little blue avatar had said—the little blue avatar that was almost certainly responsible for Cassie's resurrection, for Cassie and Elfangor even being here to make this plea in the first place. I would have called it cheating, except—

Well. Except that it was still just words. There were still choices to be made, and me and Jake and Marco—

—and the Visser, I realized with another chill, there was nothing saying that it was just our choices—

—we were all still free to decide. As free as anyone ever was, anyway.

"Counterpoint," Marco growled. "Fifty million humans an hour. This is not a hard question."

‹An oversimplification,› Elfangor countered. ‹Whether to respond at all is not a hard question. I do not deny your right to self-defense. But there are varying degrees of response. The vast, vast majority of all Howlers are not here.›

"Yeah, because they're off genociding a bunch of other species."

‹It is not your place to avenge every wrong done within the universe. A fact which your present company indicates you well understand.›

He swiveled a stalk eye pointedly back and forth between Marco and the Visser. Marco's face darkened. The Visser's remained catlike.

‹In any event,› he said, his voice softening again, ‹the point is made. I leave you now to consider it, along with everything else.›

Gracefully, the alien stepped back into his place in the circle, his blue fur already beginning to melt and run together, darkening toward chestnut. I felt a strange impulse to shout something—to catch his attention before he vanished forever—

‹Forever?›

—realized only then that I had been fully convinced, on some wordless level, that I was going to leave this council and head in another direction, and never run into Cassie or Jake or Marco or the others ever again.

Around the circle, the other faces were clouded, closed-off, thoughtful. No one seemed to want to be the first to break the silence.

‹So,› Maninho whispered. ‹What do you think?›

I blinked.

Somehow, I had been holding myself apart from the issue—looking at it from the perspective of a non-participant, a member of the audience. Maninho's casual question sparked a sudden, confusing tangle of reactions—

I don't think.

Wait, seriously?

That's the whole point of getting the fuck out of here, is not having to deal with this—

Wait, SERIOUSLY?

—all in a flash, skepticism and recalcitrance and recrimination and sheepishness overlapping and mixing and bouncing off one another. I—contained it, sort of—was both caught up in it and also on some level still aloof, still watching, a kind of huh, that's interesting as the rest of my brain tried to go in six directions at once.

‹I'm pretty sure—› Maninho began, and then broke off, radiating a sort of timid tiptoe delicacy.

Oh, come on.

‹I'm pretty sure Garrett would say you don't get to not-have-an-opinion, here,› Maninho said reluctantly.

I glanced down at the blanketed shape still clutching my leg.

I was getting there just fine myself, thank you very much.

Maninho said nothing, in a very what do you want from me? sort of way.

I sighed.

But thanks for the reminder.

There was movement in the corner of my eye, and I looked up to see Jake stepping forward, his face grim.

"Who would like to speak next?" he asked.

Magellan raised his hand, and Jake nodded.

"I don't have much to add," the Marco clone said, a slight tremor in his voice. "I just wanted to say that—well, while we've been sitting here talking—Cousteau just died. My—my brother. Down in Brazil. The Howlers—just now—"

I felt the blood draining from my face.

"It wasn't pretty," Magellan finished.

There was a heavy silence.

"Visser," said Conse—

Conse—Consay—

‹Conceição.›

"—can you be persuaded to intervene on the situation on Earth? With the broader resources at your disposal?"

Her tone was soft, her words precisely chosen. Can you be persuaded…

"I am afraid not," the man said dryly. "One must not eat one's seed corn, after all. And while I admire the…tidiness…of a solution in which the Howlers and I destroy one another, I'm afraid I find them more interesting as a potential future resource."

Anger flashed around the circle—flashed, and was tightly controlled.

"Why are you here?" Marco's dad bit out. "What—what purpose—"

"Why are you here, Telor?" the Visser asked mildly. "I would have assumed that, having escaped death once already, you would not be inclined to risk it again."

"Telor didn't escape," Marco's dad growled. "She sacrificed herself. And it worked."

The Visser sighed theatrically. "Why are you here, descendent-of-Telor-who-is-genetically-identical-and-also-possessed-of-all-the-same-memories-and-personality-traits-but-is-definitely-a-different-person?"

"We are here to save what can be saved," Conceição cut in. "All else can wait."

I raised my hand. "Is the idea that—I don't know, that the Howlers can be—re-educated, or something? Turned back to the light side of the Force?"

"We don't know that they can't," Cassie said sharply. "If we haven't even tried—"

"I've tried," the Visser remarked. "Am still trying, at this very moment."

"No offense," Marco said, "but you're not exactly the first person I'd choose as an ethics teacher."

"The Pemalites tried," I countered. "They—sorry, does everybody here know about the Pemalites?"

The Hork-Bajir controller shook its head.

"I—okay, well—"

‹Skip it,› Maninho advised.

"They were some extremely kind and patient and empathetic and non-violent aliens," I said. "So non-violent that they let themselves be exterminated without ever taking a single Howler life. They tried for almost a whole year to get through to the Howlers, while the Howlers—got through to them. It didn't work."

"Yeah, well, I'm not sure we should exactly be using them as our template, here," Marco said, a sneer creeping in at the edges of his voice. "Maybe if they'd given the Howlers reason to listen, they would have had a better chance of being heard."

"The point is, if we're not trying to negotiate with them—"

"There are other pathways, besides negotiation," the Visser interrupted. "Memetic corruption, via their shared memory. Or infestation. The morphing tech has demonstrated that their bodies are susceptible to control."

There was a brief silence.

"The morphing tech," Marco said flatly.

The Visser smirked.

"Visser," Jake began, his tone cautious. "How many Howler bodies do you control at this exact moment?"

"Only twelve," the Visser replied easily. "The shared memory makes it an…interesting challenge. I've infested one hundred eighty-seven so far, but the Howlers enjoy battling their controlled siblings every bit as much as they enjoy murdering humans, and they have little trouble finding them, you see."

"Is this conversation worth hundreds of thousands of lives?" Magellan cut in. "What are we going to do?"

"Do you plan on going down to the surface yourself?" the Visser asked.

"What? No."

"Do any of you?"

There was another silence, longer and heavier this time. I felt motion down by my foot, glanced down to see that Garrett had sat up and uncovered his head, was watching the circle with wary eyes.

"This is the crux of the matter," the Visser continued. "It is easy to sit back and insist that something should be done. It is harder by far to actually do it."

"The preservation of our way of life—" Conceição began, but then the Visser cut her off.

"You don't have to convince me," he said. "I'm simply wondering—if you've all already decided to abandon system, why the hand-wringing? Is it simply to make yourselves feel better? Would this time perhaps be better spent choosing a destination? Plotting a course?"

Jake frowned. "At the very least, we're going to rescue the people on your Mars base."

"Uh," I said. "About that."

All eyes turned toward me.

"I was just wondering—I mean, if I'm understanding the timeline right, originally you were going to go get them because you didn't have any humans, right? To start a colony somewhere else? But that was before I showed up."

Garrett's head swiveled to look up at me, his face flat and unreadable.

The right thing, buddy. Even if it's hard.

"I've got like two thousand people on board, here. There's—what—another thousand, on Mars? Is that—worth the risk? If the Howlers see us, and come for us?"

I steeled myself to look over at Cassie—braced myself for a withering glare—but she didn't look mad or disgusted or shocked or disappointed. She didn't even look sad, exactly. Just—thoughtful. Weighing.

And tired. Like we all were.

‹She's not naïve, you know,› Maninho whispered. I could feel him leafing through my memories, looking back at our last conversation, in the frozen hellscape of the Yeerk pool.

Yeah, I know.

Her whole deal was trying to help sick and injured animals. Dying ones, half the time. She'd been facing up to harsh realities for years.

‹We can accomplish the extraction in just under an hour, assuming the Visser's cooperation,› Helium said, speaking up for the first time. ‹The Howlers would have to notice and respond within the first fifteen minutes, to reach us before that time. None of their previous movements have indicated that level of alertness. And a partial extraction would still be better than nothing.›

"Okay, let me be clearer, then," I said. "I'm not risking my ship, for that."

I looked around the circle, meeting their eyes one by one. "I'm sorry if that sounds—if that's cold," I said. "But I've got a lot of refugees, here. I'm not planning on going double-or-nothing when I'm already ahead."

"We'll go get them," Jake declared quietly. "Our ship. We'll take the risk."

He locked eyes with Marco, the two of them seeming to wrestle wordlessly for a long moment.

Or they're just thought-speaking at each other.

"Fine," Marco said. "So Tobias takes off with Terra and Telor, we head off to Mars, the fleet goes—where?"

"Fleet leave," the Hork-Bajir controller grunted. "Not safe."

"And—what—we just say fuck it to what's going on down on Earth? See you later, not our problem? Last I checked, our mission statement was to save as many humans as we could."

"As many as we can, Marco," I said softly. "There's no rule saying that has to be a big number."

"There's got to be something—"

"There doesn't have to be anything," the Visser cut in.

The conversation was unraveling, the slow dignity leftover from Elfangor's speech burning away, leaving behind tired bickering, pointless point-scoring—

"Then what the hell are we all doing here?"

"What we can," Conceição murmured.

"Fuck outta here with that stoic hippie bullshit, they are burning people alive down there—"

I felt a growing sense of unreality—realized it had been building for a while, like I was only just waking up to the fact that it was all a dream—

What the hell are we all doing here?

They continued to argue, Jake and Marco and Cassie and the Visser, wheels spinning in mud.

Why haven't we—

I frowned.

What was it the avatar had said?

The obstacle presented by Visser Three's ambition is the game. For us to undo it ourselves would be to abandon the contest entirely.

The obstacle presented by Visser Three's ambition—

We had solved that one, hadn't we? He was here with us now, playing along—

I stiffened.

Playing along.

That was how Jake had described it.

And that's how it felt to me, too—not the Visser, but me—like I was marking time, waiting for the cut scene to end—

Something else is supposed to happen. If we had—if we were already finished—

We would know, wouldn't we?

I looked over at the Visser's host body, caught his eye for a moment. He didn't wink, or twitch a smile, or anything. Just stared back, expressionless, giving nothing away.

There was something like panic rising inside me—panic, or maybe dread, a weird indefensible certainty that something was coming—

My finger hovered over the jump button, the preprogrammed command that would take the Pemalite ship out of here at faster-than-light speed, in a random, unpredictable direction—

A light flashed on the console, and my heart skipped a beat.

You can't outrun a god.

Reaching out, I made contact with the computer.

‹Chee requesting permission for multiple holograms!›

‹What?› I blurted. ‹How ma—why?›

‹Didn't say!›

I twiddled a control. ‹Logan, are you there?›

‹Thirty-six holograms, please.›

Another wave of adrenaline washed over me, like the one I'd felt when the Leeran arrived and the ship's computer went haywire. The Chee's mental voice was—taut, almost, stretched thin and tight like it was about to snap.

‹What for?› I asked.

‹Nothing bad. Promise. Please.›

I looked out at the circle—the various figures, sniping back and forth at one another—

I twitched my finger.

The conversation broke off with a yelp as thirty-six new holograms appeared, a larger circle fully enclosing our own smaller one. Garrett's arm tightened on my leg, and my foot started to tingle.

"Jesus—"

"What the—"

"Tobias, what—"

"It's fine," I called out, as another part of me broke loose and started laughing, because obviously the one thing it wasn't was fine—

The Chee were motionless—statues—standing there with blank eyes and open mouths.

"They're just holograms—they asked me to pipe them in—"

"And you let them?"

I opened my mouth, curious to find out what I would say in response, then cut myself off abruptly.

Click.

Click.

Click, click.

Click, click, click, click—

The Chee were making sounds—one at a time—short, strangled, fragments of sounds, each one like the first—what, frame?—the first hundredth of a second of a song, cut off almost before it began—

Click, click, click-click-click-click clicklicklicklicklick—

The sounds were accelerating, moving around the circle in a wave—had almost made it all the way back to the starting point—

"Tobias, what the fuck—"

"I don't know!"

Clicliclicliclickckckckckckckckckkkkkkkkkkk—

"Turn it off!"

"I don't—I don't think I should—"

The weird sense certainty had doubled, tripled—whatever this was, it wasn't that I thought it was safe, wasn't that I knew what was going to happen—just that it felt like it was necessary—there was only one way out of this situation and that was through it—

"Tobias!"

The clicks were coming faster and faster, smeared together and became a low hum—a hum that was rising steadily in pitch—

Oh my god.

The censor.

They're routing around the violence censor.

Or—or maybe they were fighting through it, I wasn't sure—there were thirty-six of them, maybe that was how many they needed to make one continuous sound as they shut down and rebooted in a constant wave, one after the other—

The hum steadied—stabilized—and then, without warning—

WHAT OF THE DOGS?

It couldn't properly be called a voice. It came from every direction at once, seeming like it ought to be thunderous—but it was also porous, insubstantial, the gaps between the scraps of sound somehow still palpable, like the constant flicker of a fluorescent light.

We looked back and forth at one another, paralyzed—

"We can't save them," Jake said. "Not without—not without more death. Maybe not at all."

WE CAN SAVE THEM.

"What?"

WE CAN SAVE THEM, IF YOU LET US.

"How?"

TOBIAS.

"What?"

TOBIAS HOLDS THE KEY.

All the eyes turned toward me as the hum continued to spin around us, like the whine of a hurricane, waiting to be reshaped into words.

"Tobias, what are they—"

"The key," I said. "I think—I think I can unlock the Chee, maybe."

"And you're just mentioning this now?" Marco said, his voice just barely shy of a scream.

"I didn't—I can't—the Chee aren't finished," I said. "I don't know if it's safe, don't know what might happen!"

WE WISH TO SAVE THE DOGS. THE HOWLERS THREATEN THE DOGS.

"Could they do it?" Jake breathed. "Could they actually—"

WE CAN KILL THE HOWLERS. WE WOULD VERY MUCH LIKE TO KILL THE HOWLERS. PLEASE.

"Yes," said Magellan flatly. "If they weren't pacifist-locked, they absolutely could."

"It's a solution," Marco said. "A compromise. Kill these Howlers—"

"More will come," warned the Visser.

"But it buys us time, doesn't it? Time to regroup, time to evacuate?"

"I don't know if—"

Suddenly, the entire ship lurched, as if struck—the lights dimming, the holograms winking in and out—beside me, Garrett began to shriek—

"What was that?"

"I don't know!" I cried. "Ship!"

"We have been struck!" chirped the ship.

"Are we okay?"

"Damage is minimal! Maneuvering to avoid further impact!"

"What—"

‹It is the Howlers,› Helium said. ‹They have found us.›

"You said we had ninety-seven minutes—"

"There aren't any Howlers here!"

‹Ranged attack,› Helium said.

Suddenly, the hologram representing Hyruk winked out.

"What—"

‹The ship carrying Hyruk has been destroyed,› Helium said tightly. ‹Along with eight other support craft. The pool ships remain intact.›

"We've got to move—"

"No!" said the Visser, his voice cutting through the chaos. "Think!"

The Howlers were clever. They knew we could spy on them—

And they learned from their mistakes, and they liked to play with their victims, and they had just had one of their own fleets devastated by Visser Three's minefield—

SET US FREE.

"Tobias!"

I felt my thoughts racing, trying to get out in front—

‹We have lost one pool ship.›

SET US FREE.

"Visser!" I screamed. "Good idea or bad?"

"You're asking him!?"

"What are the control systems?" the Visser shouted back.

I struggled to coax the shattered fragments of my memory back together, felt a wash of soothing calm as Maninho joined in—

"There's a censor that wipes any Chee that thinks a—a wrong thought," I said, as the ship lurched again. "A refresh cycle that wipes them every half-second anyway. A nonviolence autopilot that takes over if they get stuck somewhere. And a—some kind of, I don't know! A strategy block! A long-term consequences inhibitor! Makes it so they can't think more than six steps ahead!"

SET US FREE—

Ten thousand light-years away, an Andalite screamed as his mind was torn open, his most precious memories laid bare—

"Greetings, Visser," said the small blue biped. "My apologies for having waited so long to make contact—it took quite some time to devise a sufficiently discreet method of communication.

"Shortly after you finish assimilating this memory, you will be called upon to weigh in on a question of strategy. You will, of course, immediately perceive the obvious danger of the proposed course of action, but I would ask that you endorse it anyway, saying nothing of your concern, and deflecting concern if another raises any. Consider it a personal favor to me.

"The threat is genuine, to be clear, but it poses no real risk to either of us. I have taken steps to ensure that it cannot spread beyond the system, and suspect it will not even reach as far as your Martian base before being decisively neutralized.

"Nevertheless, one good turn deserves another, and I suspect the mere absence of risk is insufficient reward. Accordingly, in anticipation of your cooperation, and in appreciation for it, I have gone ahead and left you a gift in the next place you will look. It may take you some time to fully appreciate, but it is exactly what it appears to be—you may verify the authenticity of its contents in any way you choose. Hopefully they will be of use to you in your future endeavors.

"Yours in mutual benefit, Player Two."

"The choice is yours," the Visser shouted. "But personally, I'd take them up on their offer."

Once more the ship shook, and this time the shaking didn't end—just tapered off into an unnerving shudder.

"Jake?" I called out. "Cassie? Marco?"

"Do it," Jake shouted back.

"God help us," Marco added.

I locked eyes with Cassie. She looked scared—scared, and horrified, but resolute.

She nodded.

I reached for the console—I had disassembled the physical key as soon as I could, tying its functions back into the ship itself so it couldn't be taken away from me—

Disable censor.

Disable refresh cycle.

Disable nonviolence autopilot.

Disable strategy limiter.

The ship quivered, awaiting the final command to execute. I glanced down at Garrett—

Disable all onboard Chee until further notice.

I slid the last item to the top of the list, and sent my confirmation to the computer.

‹No problem!› the ship chirped.