Author's Note: I'll have you know, it is still technically Wednesday here in California. =P

Work has been busy, as has life (I got engaged!), hence the three-day delay. I will still try my best to get the next update out by May 16 (i.e. eleven days from now), but I may again need an additional few days. It will be absolutely no later than Sunday, May 23 (and if there are any late edits to this chapter, they'll go up then, too).

As always, please please pretty please with a cherry on top, if I can persuade you to set aside a few minutes to jot down some thoughts, please leave comments/reviews, or head over to r/rational to join the discussion there. I treasure every drop of feedback you're willing to give me. 3

Chapter 51

—Livingstone (Marco 2199023255552)—

I looked down at the tiny shard of Yeerkflesh in my hand, and thought about the implications.

I thought about them, because there wasn't any point in not thinking about them. Crayak had to be able to think a thousand—a billion—a quadrillion times faster than me, surely—had multiple versions of my complete brain state stored on its hard drive, would be able to think of anything I could and much, much more. I wouldn't be helping anything by trying-not-to-think-about-it.

In exactly three minutes, you start your morph, Edriss had whispered, guiding my hands across the console, setting timers. And in exactly—well, now it's four minutes and fifty-two seconds—your ship will launch into Z-space on autopilot, along the course I'm setting now.

And then she had crawled out of my head.

I didn't know where that course would take me, but Crayak would. Edriss had very deliberately kept my eyes on the screen as she set it, and as soon as I morphed, Crayak would have direct access to the memory—or at least, I assumed it would.

Which made this—

What, a feint?

A trick?

A trap?

I was caught like a fly in honey in the middle of the Z-space rift—had been traveling across it at a snail's pace for days. I was supposed to be the reserve, the rear-guard, the fail-safe. I was the guy who was supposed to take the fight to Visser Three, if the whole Earth system went to shit and we ended up in a place where there was nothing left to lose.

Changing direction now—changing direction with timing precise down to the millisecond—going into morph without Edriss—

She knows something. Something they don't want Crayak to get a peek at—something they think it doesn't already know, somehow. Something they think it won't be able to figure out.

Like where, exactly, I was headed, and what was supposed to happen when I got there.

I let out a heavy breath, dropped the shard of Yeerkflesh into the small cup of water on the console.

There were any number of reasons for the others to have kept me in the dark. Good reasons, for the most part. I just wished—

—uselessly—

—I knew which one it was. You know? Wished I could know which, without giving the whole game away. Wished I knew why.

Wished I knew what I was purchasing, with my death.

Because that's what this felt like. I mean, I wasn't sure, but come on—launching into Z-space on a timetable, nobody telling me where I was going—

Hope you're this calm about it when it's your turn.

I sucked in a breath, this time, trying not to notice how many I had left—how many inhalations and exhalations before the counter ran to zero.

It was what I had said to myself—what a booted-up copy of myself had said to me, once, as I shut him down and morphed him away. As I killed him, because I was done using him, and I needed to get on to the next thing.

Hope you're this calm about it when it's your turn.

He hadn't been angry, exactly. He'd almost sort of meant it—the hope. Had almost genuinely wanted that future version of us to be calm, to be settled—to be okay with it, rather than freaking out or falling apart. There'd been bitterness there, but not—not—

Whatever the word is, for, like, being not-on-the-other-guy's-team. Wanting them to fail, wanting them to hurt.

Enmity, I guess.

There hadn't been any enmity. That other Marco had known what was happening, and why, and had died believing we were on the same side, whatever that was worth. It hadn't made it better, but it had helped. A little bit, anyway. Around the edges.

My eyes drifted back toward the timer.

Forty-five seconds.

Forty-five seconds until I started my morph, and two more minutes after that until—

Until whatever.

Was I calm?

Maybe. It was—honestly kind of hard to tell. It didn't really matter, when you got right down to it. There was a part of my brain that was, like, aggressively disinterested in the question. I had seen the visions Edriss had copied into my brain—the avatar, screaming as it was torn apart, and the impossibly huge structures popping into place around the Earth. And worse—the tiny, almost invisible filaments stretching down toward the surface, tendrils of corruption, tiny black stains spreading outward in a dozen different places—

I sort of—didn't care how I felt, in the face of all that. It seemed like it would be—would be rude or something—self-centered—almost pathetic, somehow—to act as if my feelings mattered. Even inside my own head. I didn't—didn't want to be like that, even at the end.

Especially at the end.

There's that quote—I don't remember all of it, but somewhere in the middle is something like do not go quietly into that dark night. And, like, I get it, but it always felt to me like it was—confused, or something. Like it was mixing up two things that are very, very separate.

Don't miss your opportunity to fight back, sure.

Don't treat something like it's good just because it's inevitable, sure.

But at the same time, at the end of the day—

I couldn't see the point in being—I dunno—performatively angry, or something? Standing on a mountaintop and screaming at a thunderstorm, as if that matters, as if that helps, as if it means anything.

Edriss hadn't told me much. Hadn't passed along more than a tiny fraction of what was going on back there. But I knew it wasn't good, and I knew we hadn't given up.

And that was—enough, somehow. I wanted more—would not have turned down a chance to see the plan for myself—would probably have been able to see things the rest of them wouldn't, even with Lewis and Magellan there.

But I didn't think they would have not-told-me for stupid reasons. Didn't think they would waste me for stupid reasons.

I remembered the sound of my own voice screaming, as my clone-brother was torn to pieces on the slopes of the Arn forest.

At this point—with everything coming to a head—with seconds left on the clock—

If Jake and Rachel and the rest of them needed me to fly my ship into a black hole—if somehow that would make a difference—

I could feel that I was trying to talk myself into it. Feel myself trying to make it feel okay.

But like—

It was working?

And I was doing it on purpose, so.

A light flashed on the console, and I let my eyes flutter shut.

A part of me had wanted to—I dunno—optimize the choice of morph, or whatever. Try to figure out exactly what would be best, given that I knew absolutely nothing about what was coming—something durable? Stealthy? Dangerous?

But that, too, had felt like pretending, so when the moment came, I went with the path of least resistance—my morph armor, the body I'd worn more often than any other. I debated whether to wake up my other self, but not for very long—no need to put two of us through—

Through—

Through whatever happens next.

I felt the tingle as the transformation swept through me, invisible. I reached for a metaphor—something about one Marco disappearing and another taking its place—gave up halfway when it didn't click.

Any second now. Any second now. Any second now. Any second now—

—Helium—

There was time remaining, in the least useful quantity—time enough to doubt, yet not enough to change course in response.

We were alone—together—in the Visser's makeshift cradle, hidden from all mundane detection by the repurposed remnants of murdered Chee, waiting for the crucial moment. All was dark, and quiet, and still—not so much the stillness of the calm before the storm, but rather that of a thought half-formed, a silence on the verge of ending.

We thought—together—of the plan.

We thought—together—of its chances.

We thought—together—of beginnings, and endings, and the branching path of possibility, and the Path drawn bright through them.

There is a game called ko, popular in the upper echelons of the Andalite military. It is played between a single attacker and a single defender, on a grid seven spaces on a side.

The attacker controls a single pawn, which starts in the center space of the lowest row. The defender controls the placement of walls, each of which separates two adjoining spaces, blocking movement between them.

The goal of the attacker is to guide the pawn to any of the seven spaces in the highest row. The goal of the defender is to keep the pawn at bay.

The game proceeds in rounds, the first of which is (almost) always the same:

The attacker commands the pawn to move forward-as-far-as-possible.

The defender places a single wall in any of the six possible positions between the starting point and the goal.

The choices of the two players are revealed simultaneously, and the orders carried out.

And the attacker loses.

(Always, one would expect, if one were naïve, and unfamiliar with the infinite imperfections of living minds.)

There are those who claim that there is meaningful subtlety in the first round of the game. Those who believe—or pretend to believe—that a wall placed directly in front of the pawn is different, somehow, from a wall placed just shy of the victory row, or one dropped somewhere in between. There are attackers who, wishing to deny their opponent the satisfaction of thwarting them, thwart themselves, sending their pawn left-as-far-as-possible or right-as-far-as-possible, foregoing even the pretense of a genuine effort.

And there are some defenders who, knowing this, are so arrogant—so cavalier—as to lay their lone wall to the left or right, leaving the path to victory wide open in hope of landing a (presumably devastating) psychological blow.

‹Stupid,› whispered the voice of Perdão within us.

‹Childish,› agreed the dain of Elfangor.

Yet the part of us that was Aximili could not quite bring himself to full disdain. Granted, it was foolhardy in the extreme, within the rules of the game—but there was a world outside the game, was there not? With points of a fundamentally different nature. Surely that counted for more than nothing?

(We weighed this, unsure.)

In the second round of the game, the attacker is allowed to give two commands, to be carried out in sequence, sending the pawn—for instance—left-one-space and then forward-as-far-as-possible, or right-as-far-as-possible and then forward-as-far-as-possible, or perhaps simply forward-as-far-as-possible and skip.

As with the first round, there are technically other options available, but the vast majority of attackers send their pawns forward in the center row, or in one of the rows immediately adjacent, or in one of the rows on the outer edges of the board. A straight shot, or a dodge to one side—of one space, or three—followed by a subsequent dash for the victory row.

The defenders are also granted two moves in the second round—two walls, to place at will. Two walls, to cover the five possible lines of approach.

Again, there is an obvious choice—one wall directly in front of the pawn, and another directly beside it, cutting off three of the five available paths.

(Since a wall to the left of a pawn will block both left-one-space and left-as-far-as-possible.)

Yet again, there are those curious few who are scornful of the established wisdom, choosing instead—for instance—to place walls blocking each outside row, or to double their walls along the central path.

‹Stupid,› hissed Perdão. Elfangor said nothing, but his opinion was understood by all just the same.

As the rounds progress, the game grows more complex, the outcome less certain, less easy to model. The pawn may start in any space in the lowest row, not only the center one. Additional commands become available, such as move-in-whichever-direction-is-open, preferring-left. Some walls fade with time, or move, or block the pawn only once before vanishing.

Walls are more powerful than pawn-movements, and so they are granted more slowly—by the sixth round, the attacker has eight moves to distribute, and the defender only four walls. But soon enough, the proliferation of possibility renders even quite large numbers of walls only marginally effective.

(There are limitations on how complete an enclosure the defender may make, of course, as well as how formidably they may fortify the victory row.)

For amateurs, the game is always played in sequence—the early rounds like a dance, each player learning the mind and mood of their opponent. A pair of masters might kneel and start straightaway at round seven, or fourteen, or even twenty-one, each preferring mutual obscurity to mutual vulnerability.

(Some masters make—)

((Made.))

(—made a habit of memorizing the catalogues of their likely opponents in advance, in the hopes of unbalancing the symmetry. This tended to result in both higher win-rates and, predictably, lower esteem and celebrity among that portion of the audience which Perdão labeled stupid.)

‹Better alive than admired,› whispered the dain of Elfangor, in the tone he used when quoting Alloran.

Speaking as one admired, but no longer alive, Aximili thought-but-did-not-quite-say.

‹Yes.›

The greatest of games—those that were recorded as historical events in their own right, those that were known—vaguely—even to hopeless cloudlings who had never come within a tail's length of a ko board—

The greatest of games lasted only a single round, might comprise as many as twice-seven-squared moves in sequence, have walls blocking fully a third of the seventy-eight crossable boundaries. Monstrous complexity, with each player laying their plans in darkness and ignorance, and then all revealed in an instant, the outcome unknown, yet predetermined—

This was the task we had set for ourselves. That the creature Toomin had set for us—a round of ko with astronomical stakes, with an opponent capable of mapping whole solar systems down to the smallest speck of interstellar dust.

There would be no time for regrouping, reevaluation, second attempts. We would move, and we would find ourselves blocked, or not.

‹Find?› murmured the ghost of Tom Berenson.

‹An interesting inversion,› observed Aximili.

Because, of course, we would not find ourselves blocked. Would not know or recognize defeat, since—presumably—it would come in the form of instantaneous death.

There were constraints. Rachel had—unfortunately—had less-than-perfect access to the arbiter, had not been suddenly granted omniscience or omnipotence or any particular power. She had said—

Well. Not said, precisely, any more than Perdão or Elfangor or Aximili or Tom spoke to one another within our own shared mind.

But she had known, and we had seen—

It's like a door handle. Or—or a button, or—

Confused metaphors, a jumble of impressions and images, alongside her own direct perceptions. An object whose shape implied its purpose, a felt sense of what-could-be-accomplished.

There were potencies that she could access, now. But we did not know what they were, nor what they would cost. And we had to presume that the moment she extended herself, Crayak would know—that any flexing of muscle in that domain would come with a corresponding enabling of our enemy.

Then how do we win? our war-prince had wondered, and we had seen—all of us—and carefully ignored—and been seen ignoring—the fraying panic underneath, the quiet desperation contained within the iron resolve, a layer of pretense and control made suddenly and uncomfortably transparent in the confusion of hypersight.

And the answer had been—crushingly—that Rachel did not know. That there were victory conditions—explicit ones, objective ones—and that the ghost of Toomin had left her some rough predictions of their basic shape—but that rough knowledge alone would not suffice. Yeerks, humans, and Andalites living together on Earth in stable harmony was a phrase easy enough to think, but horrendously difficult to make precise—not to mention that neither Crayak nor the Ellimist had particularly prioritized parsimony, each hoping to lose the other in unmanageable complexity.

Yeah, well, 'everything's dead' seems straightforward enough, Marco had thought/felt/said/shared. Why hasn't Crayak just glassed the planet? Like, even if the Ellimist was stopping it, before—

At a guess—

—because guesses were all we had, a terrifyingly fragile spiderweb of intuition—

—because the arbiter would not let it?

Bullshit. It can't be that hard. Crayak doesn't have enough influence left to move a rock?

Perhaps it was expensive, within the rules of the game.

Or maybe, Cassie had whispered—

—and then, as the eye of the-thing-that-was-all-of-us-together fell on her, she had flinched, shrunk, collapsed inward—just for a moment, and then a threshold was passed, and some other thing asserted itself, displaced the fear and self-consciousness and sent her expanding outward once more, all steely defiance aimed at nothing in particular—

—maybe it's got something to do with the structures.

The vast complex of machinery, thousands of times the mass of the Earth itself, which the Ellimist had summoned for its killing blow against the Chee—

It hasn't gone anywhere.

Valuable hardware, perhaps. Worth preserving—perhaps. Difficult to put back, into the nooks and crannies from which the Ellimist had dragged it, in haphazard haste—

Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps.

The problem was not a lack of theories—it was that we had too many of them.

Perhaps Crayak was paralyzed.

Perhaps the Earth's destruction was so assured that Crayak felt no sense of urgency—there were the patches of unknown black corruption slowly spreading across the surface, after all.

Perhaps the machinery surrounding it was too valuable to risk in something as swift—and messy—as a relativistic strike.

There's also—uh—

It was very hard to not-think-something on purpose in Leeran hypersight.

—life, on Mars, these days.

Yet Crayak had essayed no moves in that direction, either—or at least, none we had detected.

In the end, we did not know. Could not be sure. And so, lacking confidence in our ability to even understand the game proper, let alone win it outright—

A plan emerged. A constellation of plans, the synthesis of the incoherent wanderings of our double handful of minds, filtered according to our collective sense of what-things-might-even-be-possible.

It was—as Toomin had said of its own frantic machinations—not a sound strategy.

But it could work. Was not, like so many other things we thought of, and discarded, guaranteed to fail.

It relied on a few simple principles—assumptions which, should they prove false, would mean we were doomed anyway, and thus could be relied upon:

One, that Crayak truly did not know we were coming, yet. Was impaired, or distracted, or otherwise blinded; might perhaps have contingencies ready but was not focused on thwarting us-in-particular.

Two, that it would see us, once we began moving in earnest—once one of us morphed, say, or once we left the immediate confines of whatever illusion Toomin had wrapped around us.

Three, that it would not be unlimited in its capacity to respond—that it could not be everywhere at once.

Four, that once Rachel in fact opened the door she sensed, she would be able to do something to aid us. To aid some of us, at least, if not all.

And five—

—the most uncertain—

—the assumption that produced the deepest hesitation, the gravest misgivings—

—yet also the one which caused the scattered fragments of intention to cohere, to fuse together into a single, workable whole—

Okay, fine, but I want it on record that the universe DOES NOT WORK LIKE THAT.

It was the Marco version of Cassie and Prince Jake's self-conscious contraction—an embarrassed backpedal, since it had been Marco's own musings that led to the tentative hypothesis—

Why did they bother treating us like people at all?

The gods—Crayak, and the Ellimist.

Why did they not just—just—

He had not been able to finish the sentence—but then, he had not needed to.

At the level of sophistication employed by Crayak and the Ellimist, there was no meaningful difference between a human being—or a Yeerk, or an Andalite—and a billiard ball rolling across a table. Whatever magic underlay the experience of self-awareness, it was still made up, at its base, of the simple interaction of matter and energy. It was only the intricate delicacy of the systems involved that created the illusion of opacity—forced us, from our limited perspectives, to abandon straightforward mechanical explanations and imagine intrinsic, ephemeral properties like agency or free will.

But Crayak and the Ellimist were not so constrained. By rights, both of them should have been free to simply—reconfigure us. Should in theory have been capable—as Toomin clearly had been—of subjecting us to precisely crafted stimuli that would simply cause us to believe whatever they wanted us to believe, and act as they wanted us to act.

Or just editing our brains directly, while we were in morph.

Maybe they did, Tobias had countered. Would we know?

A horrified pause, a moment of unhinged pre-panic, and then our war-prince's quiet pragmatism brought us back to ground.

We had no choice but to ignore possibilities like that—not because they couldn't be true, but because it would not matter if they were.

A complicated mental picture accompanied the thought, couched in the language of an unfamiliar game, one which took a moment to fully absorb and appreciate—

If you're playing Magic or—or blackjack or something, I don't know—if there's no way to win unless you draw a specific card in the next three turns or whatever—

The parts of us that were Aximili and Elfangor had nodded in recognition of a core military principle. It made no difference whether the odds of drawing that specific card were one in three, or one in three thousand—if it were genuinely the case that all of one's hopes of victory hinged upon it, then one should behave as if one were guaranteed to draw it, and take only those actions which were optimal in that swath of possibility.

Always, there was a temptation to divide one's efforts—but softening a crash that would be fatal regardless, at the expense of one's remaining margin in the branches where one might survive—

There was nothing to be gained by playing around the possibility of mental manipulation, since mental manipulation meant we had already lost. Even if it was overwhelmingly likely, we had to proceed as if it were not.

Cassie's persuasion did not seem supernatural, Perdão had mused. And the intervention on Marco—snipping out his impression of David—that was comprehensible, not miraculous. You understood it after the fact.

And so, the hypothesis: that the gods were somehow limited in their ability to interfere with their pawns. That for whatever reason—whether because of the lingering influence of Toomin, or perhaps to forestall an arms race of manipulation and counter-manipulation that would be no different from war in the first place—the rules of the game had forbidden direct edits to our mental states.

Well, not forbidden—

But surely they must have been rare, and costly—not, for instance, the sort of thing that was casually done every time any one of us morphed. We had observed only the one instance—the one the avatar had acknowledged, the one the Visser had detected. All the rest had been mundane persuasion, and the skillful arrangement of incentives and circumstance.

Which meant—

No, it does NOT 'mean' that, that's not what 'mean' means—

Our war-prince had conceded the point, and begun anew.

We probably have a fair shot.

To—

That's the question.

We could not actually escape, in any meaningful sense—if nothing else, Crayak presumably possessed the capacity to release quantum viruses for each of our respective species, leaving us with maximum life expectancies of not-very-many seconds. It likely could not exercise that option yet, being still at least partially constrained by the arbiter, but that gave us hours or days, not years or decades.

It was possible, though, that if we presented sufficiently widely spaced targets, we could tax Crayak's ability to respond effectively.

And while he's 'taxed'—

Rachel.

Clearly, it would depend on Rachel. How, we did not know. But the answers, if there were any—the card we so desperately needed to draw—if it existed at all, it lay beyond the door that only she could see.

Which made things much simpler, for the rest of us. Our job was to draw Crayak out, make moves that would be maximally expensive for it to counter. To distract, to confuse, to hamper and harass.

We had several good ideas.

Not as many as we might have had, if we had given ourselves longer to think, but enough to draw begrudging approval from Marco and even a grim chuckle from the dain of Elfangor.

And—

(It was a small thing, but it still felt meaningful, somehow.)

—there was room enough, in the overall strategy, for each of us to play a part appropriate to our own individual strengths. To choose, from among the menu of options, one which felt right, on a personal level.

Better still, there was reason to act in character, as it were—it made each gambit more credible, made them harder to dismiss as bluffs or feints.

(It also made us marginally easier to predict, perhaps, but it was not as if we could succeed at making ourselves hard to predict, at this point. We were wholly reliant on Crayak not bothering to try until things were already in motion.)

And so we found ourselves—Aximili, Elfangor, Tom Berenson, and Perdão—alone on the fourth of four arks, with a makeshift hyperdrive on a countdown timer, aimed directly at the Andalite homeworld.

We could not guess what shape it would be in, after weeks of open war with the Visser, followed by his sudden death by quantum virus. We expected things to be chaotic, and dangerous. We were not expecting welcome, and were armed, and planning to be cautious.

But we were also optimistic. Carried aboard our tiny vessel a tiny, frozen coalescion, just barely large enough produce its own kandrona. Given time, and a not-unreasonable amount of luck, it—and we—could be the seed of a new beginning, the primogenitor of an altogether new way of life.

(We did not fool ourselves. We knew that most of our possible futures ended abruptly just after the jump to Z-space, and that even those precious few in which we made good our escape were more likely to end in darkness than in light. But if these were to be our last breaths, we would spend them with all four eyes turned toward that light. On that, every part of our collective self agreed.)

It was strange, to have withdrawn from the immediate fight. Stranger still to be in the vanguard of hope, the ship most likely to evade detection.

(Or least unlikely, anyway.)

But there had been no other sensible option, and we had not bothered to mount a pretense of objection. Terra would not leave the New Day's Dawn without its hosts, and even Telor would not have fit within the confines of the miniature cradle. As for the other coalescions, they were not yet—

(Ready, Perdão offered diplomatically.)

—to extend a credible offer of peace and cooperation to the traumatized Andalite population.

And besides—

Strangest of all, to think it, with everything so close to disaster. But—

The Earth—

The war—

Even, in truth, the Yeerk and Andalite empires—

They all seemed so small,now.

Too small.

If there was to be a future, after this moment, we would not be content our former place, nor indeed with any of the places that our respective peoples had carved out in advance. Our ambitions had grown—could no longer be satisfied in an isolated corner of a single galaxy.

We were hungry for more. Hungry, and eager. There was so much that we could accomplish, so much that we could build.

And so we had agreed, and so it was done.

Or—well—not quite done.

But soon.

Soon.

—Cassie—

It wasn't like they were judging me.

I mean, it wasn't like they weren't judging me, either. Not exactly.

It was more like—

I don't know. There was a—a fantasy, a fairy tale, one of those conversations you run in your head in the shower, where I had the thought, proposed the idea, and then Marco gave me one of his Marco looks and said something snide and infuriatingly obtuse, like what, suddenly NOW you're all gung-ho to pull the trigger?

And in that imaginary conversation, I had to defend myself, explain myself, even though it wasn't fair—cut past all the raised eyebrows and point out that things had changed a lot in the past half hour, thank you very much and that no, I wasn't stupid, and no, I wasn't some—some kind of zealot, I was capable of changing my mind in response to new developments, you know.

And then in some branch off that branch, some even more specific imagining, Marco raised an eyebrow and said something like touched a nerve, huh? Or worse, Jake would say something soothing and reasonable, something to—to calm me down, and it would be entirely well-intentioned and friendly and warm but at its core it would still be motivated by—by—by like flinching away from intensity, or something, like there wasn't room for me to have any kind of big feelings, if I had any big feelings it would ruffle everybody's feathers and then something would have to be done about that, so it was up to me, I could either be a bother or I could choke myself off and not say anything in the first place—

And of course all of that was really just an excuse, my brain trying to find something it could lash out at, a way to dodge the fact that I was feeling—feeling torn, and ashamed, I was pretty sure it was the right move but I couldn't tell whether I thought that just because I was scared.

No, not scared. Terrified.

I was terrified, because I'd mustered every scrap of courage I had to run back into the frozen hell of the Yeerk pool, and then I had—I'd thought that I had died, I'd been shot and trapped and I'd braced myself for the end, and then I'd woken up in the middle of an argument with the survival of two whole species in the balance, and I'd managed to avert a literal genocide basically just because Jake was willing to humor me, even though I was pretty sure the rest of them thought I was crazy and a hippie tree-hugger and they didn't get it, it wasn't about that at all, I don't think even Jake understood, really—

And then it had turned out that all that was just—just the fuse, or something, the spark that had set off the real fireworks, and then the closest thing there was to an actual god had been torn apart right in front of me, torn apart just like Elfangor had been, and then the Visser, too, like—like Thanos had snapped his fingers or something, and now the entire planet was surrounded and it looked like it was being transformed, somehow, like the whole surface was slowly being Borgified—

So yes, I was terrified, and I thought I was doing a pretty good job of dealing with it, actually, but at the same time I couldn't help noticing that I had suddenly flip-flopped on what seemed like a pretty important question, and I really couldn't rule out that I was just pretending I had reasons, to cover for the fact that deep down I secretly just wanted it all to go away.

And all of this while all of them could see me, they were all there inside my head with me, looking past the mask—looking at the mask, suddenly I was naked in front of them, in front of Rachel, in front of Jake, suddenly they knew, it was all on display, at least the first time, with the Visser, it had only been a couple of minutes but this time it just kept going—

They hadn't said anything.

But they'd seen, and I'd seen them seeing, could see their reaction to—to—

Uh, said Jake. Or thought. Or whatever. …Cassie?

And something—broke, then. Broke, or maybe just separated, I'm not really sure how to describe it, but suddenly there was a shift, and it no longer felt like the voice—

—the voice that was always lurking, just behind my shoulder, the one that was always whispering about what a good person would or wouldn't do, the one that was currently telling me that they were all going to think I was crazy—

—it no longer felt like that voice was me. Suddenly I was hearing it, from the outside, the way the rest of them were hearing it—like it was its own separate person. Suddenly I was noticing what it was doing, rather than what-it-was-doing just sort of being—

—the default?

And I didn't even know what that meant, was still trying to process it, but also I was in the way, this little panic attack or freak-out or whatever it was, it was taking up space, holding everybody up—

Actually, no. That was the voice again, wasn't it?

But anyway, there were infinitely more important things to do, and so I just—

Pushed.

It.

All.

Down, and tried to start over.

The word ooooookay oozed off Marco, as the rest of them tried not to move. So what I'm getting is, Cassie now thinks that maybe we should take out the Howlers, and definitely this has nothing to do with, um, anything. We are not drawing any conclusions about Cassie at all from this fact.

And I would have screamed, except that I could tell—since I was inside his head, too—that it was all completely genuine, he meant it without even a trace of sarcasm, Marco really actually was trying his best to—to cooperate, or something, trying to work with me, and that made me want to scream.

Jake, wavering, unsure whether to reach out and take my hand—

Can we please just not all of this please?

It was Perdão who rescued me—us—Perdão, who as a Yeerk had plenty of experience dealing with crazy humans being crazy inside their own crazy heads—

The quantum virus is prepped and ready, Perdão said, deliberately injecting the words into the mind meld, giving each one its own crisp, clean edge.

We don't think maybe the Visser—

—left a deadman switch, was the second half of Garrett's thought, but he didn't need to finish it, since at that exact moment we were all remembering our previous glimpse inside the Visser's mind, along with the fact that he'd already died once before and the Mars base didn't blow up then, so.

I mean, the whole point is to catch Crayak's attention, right? I argued, trying to ignore my own reflexive wince as the voice whispered that I was still coming on too strong, I sounded defensive, they were going to jump all over that—

Not merely the premade virus, said the part of Helium that was somehow a leftover ghost of Elfangor. The laboratory also contains the necessary components to design and manufacture more.

Which made it a credible threat. Something Crayak would need to answer.

An actual real contribution to the overall plan.

Is that what this is all about?

Yes. Of course.

I was tired of being—being the brakes, was not at all comfortable with the fact that I had been used as the brakes—been brought back on the assumption that if you just—added me to a situation, I would bring it all to a screeching halt—

Cassie. That is not—

Yeah, I knew that wasn't reasonable, I knew that wasn't how it worked, I knew that wasn't a fair description of what had happened, I got it, thanks—

You being—Jesus, you're NOT the brakes but to the extent that you ARE the brakes that's a GOOD thing—

Can you please give me ONE. GODDAMN. MINUTE.

Shocked silence.

Good.

I couldn't—couldn't breathe, could not think like this, there was a reason that things worked the way they did inside my head, I needed time to produce thoughts, actions, answers that I was okay with, I couldn't—couldn't start with only perfectly logical and reasonable thoughts, this was suffocating—

I, I thought, slowly and carefully, need room to be wrong. In my head. I need to be allowed to think wrong thoughts, and roll them around, and see that they're wrong for myself, and then fix them, myself.

It was bad enough, when I just had my own mental second-guesser cutting me down. With all of them watching—listening—judging—

They got it.

They got it, and—somehow—backed off. Or maybe it changed on my end, I don't know—maybe the sudden sensation of space was entirely in my own head, and maybe the suffocating-feeling had been my fault, too—

It doesn't matter.

I didn't have to know the answer.

What mattered was finding a way to help. Finding a way to pitch in, to be a part—to not be the brakes this time, because this time there was no slippery slope to worry about. No dangerous precedents. This time, we either won—fully, finally, decisively—or it was all over.

I can do this. I can get to Mars, and pull the trigger, if Crayak doesn't stop me.

And then—at that point—

I would already be on Mars.

Once more, understanding flowed outward, spreading throughout the circle, followed by acceptance, acknowledgement, agreement.

All right. So that's Tobias, Garrett, Helium, and Cassie accounted for.

And then we were on to the next thing, and I sank back out of the spotlight, became just another voice in the chorus.

Somewhere, in the back of my head, a voice tried to tell me all the ways I was bad—all the rules I was breaking, all the mistakes I was making, a laundry list of possible hypocrisies.

Let's not forget what happened the last time you did something just because you were tired of doing nothing—

But the voice didn't have me anymore.

I had it.

The boy is alive, I whispered back. He's alive today, right now, in the other room. He's alive, and he wouldn't be, if I hadn't gone back for him.

That wasn't enough. But it wasn't nothing, either. And if the best I could do wasn't good, if it wasn't sufficient—

That didn't make it any less my best.

Jake's hand didn't surprise me, when it slipped into mine. It couldn't have—I was Jake, just as much as I was myself—felt the reaching-out as if I was the one doing it.

But it was warm, and it was good, and as far as we knew, it was the very last time.

I didn't second-guess it.