Author's Note: The world got a little more hectic than I anticipated (as usual), and so I'm shifting the update schedule just a bit. I didn't want to leave you all hanging this weekend, so here's the first HALF of Chapter 53. The second half will go up on or before Sunday, June 27, and the final chapter will hopefully go up on or before Wednesday, June 30th, so that the fic still finishes in the month of June.

Even moreso than with other chapters that have gone up in two parts, it's possible that you really actually do not want to read this yet. You may just actually factually want to wait until next week, and read both parts together. It's not a chapter that was MEANT to break in half, and I suspect that people reading it later will not even be able to guess where the chapter break was. Like, there's no proper arc or cliffhanger, it just sort of pauses in the middle.

But! I leave that to your judgment. And if you DO decide to go ahead and read this part by itself, please please pretty please with a cherry on top consider setting aside a few minutes to leave a comment or review, or to go join the discussion happening on r/rational. I've read every single word of feedback you all have left me, and cherished every one. Your comments keep me going; we would not have made it this far without them.

Hearts, stars, and horseshoes,

—Duncan

Chapter 53: Rachel (Part I)

I didn't know what to say to Garrett.

I felt a little weird about it, because for one thing, we'd just spent the better part of an hour sitting inside each other's brains, and for another, in about twelve more minutes we were going to be—

Well. I didn't even really have words for how high the stakes were. How little everything else mattered, compared to what was about to happen. What was already happening, really, while we waited for the calculations to finish.

So it felt like maybe Garrett shouldn't be quite so front-and-center in my mind. Like if Marco was here, he'd have something scathing to say about priorities.

But on the other hand—

I don't know. Garrett was—he'd just said goodbye to Tobias, for what was probably the last time—had said goodbye for my sake, was here to protect me, in case we ended up in a situation where a thoughtscream might make a difference.

And yeah, it had been his own idea—he was the one who'd insisted on it, in fact—but it's not exactly like it was his choice. Stuff like 'choice' gets kind of complicated when you're walking around with the fate of the entire universe on your shoulders and your catch phrase is basically with great power comes great responsibility.

And he hadn't said a word. Not one word, since the hatch had whispered shut behind him and he'd slid into the too-large chair beside me. Was just sitting there, now, curled up into a tiny ball, his fists clenched in the fabric of his pants, his eyes locked onto the clock.

And I know he wasn't much for chit-chat even on a good day, but I still felt like—

Like—

"Feels like I'm supposed to say something," I finally ground out.

Garrett's head turned, his gaze settling somewhere in the vicinity of my chin.

"Dunno what," I continued. "Just—feels like I'm supposed to."

Garrett said nothing. Just waited, his face drawn. Tired. Empty. Limp. He looked—

Old.

"You, uh. You okay?" I asked—

—and then winced, because something about how the words came out made it sound less like I was talking to my buddy in the foxhole and more like I was checking up on him—

—which, sure, yeah, that was part of what was going on inside my head, but that didn't mean I intended to say it out loud. I owed him more respect than that—he might be little, and looking pretty vulnerable, and I had some big-sister reflexes that utterly failed to take into account just how much hell he'd been through and how capable he was of handling it, but that didn't mean that I didn't know—

His eyes twitched a little higher, focusing on my forehead.

"Because I'm little," he said flatly. "And prone to meltdowns. And it's your job to take care of me."

I flushed.

I see we're not mincing words.

"That's not what—"

"Shouldn't it be the other way around, though?" he asked.

I blinked. "What?"

"You know. Since you're the girl."

His delivery was flawless, his voice perfectly deadpan, and I felt my jaw drop, felt my eyebrows climb all the way up into my hair before my brain caught up with me—

"You little twerp," I growled, unable to stop the grin from spreading across my face. "You need to stop hanging out with Marco—it's corrupting you."

"Pot," the boy intoned. "Kettle."

I felt an urge to slug him on the shoulder, and suppressed it, roughhousing not really being one of Garrett's love languages. "Remind me never to bet against you in poker," I said.

Garrett's lip twisted. "You mean, after all this is over?"

The words were like a splash of cold water, snapping me back into the present. My eyes slid toward the display, where the live feed from the Bug fighters we'd left in-system filled a corner of the screen, showing the Earth half-wrapped in dull, gray shadow. Beside it, the glowing numbers of the countdown ticked past ten minutes.

"Right," I said softly, since there wasn't anything else to say.

Garrett shifted in his chair, and I turned back to see his eyes still mostly pointed at me, his head now cocked at a curious angle.

"Why aren't you scared?" he asked quietly.

I blinked again. "What?"

He sighed. "Is that the 'say it again' kind of what, or the 'I heard you but I'm stalling for time' kind?"

"Are you scared?"

"Yes," he said—promptly, shamelessly, matter-of-fact. "Duh. Why aren't you?"

I opened my mouth—

Huh.

I had tried to say of course I am, to which my shoulder Marco had first responded lol, followed by lmao, followed by absolutely no further help.

"Um," I said.

Backing up, and taking the question seriously, because apparently despite the fact that it was based on an utterly ridiculous premise that premise did seem to be true—

Garrett Steinberg, ladies and gentlemen. He's gonna be here all night.

Listen, if you're not going to do anything useful, can you at least not be actively distracting?

That's what she said!

Gritting my teeth, I shoved the Marco-voice a little further toward the back of my mind and tried to focus.

"I don't know," I admitted, after a long silence. "I don't know, but—I could maybe guess, a little? Do you actually want me to?"

Both of us glanced at the timer as it crawled downward from 08:15 to 08:10.

"I don't know," Garrett said.

And then—

"Sure. Yeah."

"Well, for starters—"

I swallowed, my mouth suddenly dry.

"For starters, I don't really have—it kind of feels like there's nothing left to lose," I said. "I mean, sure, there's us, but—"

I trailed off.

"But that's not really the same," Garrett murmured.

"Yeah. You guys—Jake and Marco and Cassie—you're not—it's like I can't let you—matter, or something? Not in the same way. Because you might have to—it'd be like, I dunno, building a house on quicksand, or something."

I could feel myself fumbling, sticking words and concepts together half at random.

"And everyone who did matter like that—Mom, and my sisters, and Dad, and all my other friends—"

"Melissa Chapman," Garrett murmured.

My brain kicked up a sort of what-gives-you-the-right impulse, and I squashed it ruthlessly.

"I don't know," I repeated, shaking my head. "It—now that I say it out loud, I'm not so sure. Maybe not. But that—that could be part of it. Nothing to lose, nothing to fear."

"But you could die."

I almost laughed—choked it off at the last possible second. "Yeah," I said. "But that's—"

I faltered.

That's gonna sound pretty cheesy.

But who cared? There were like seven and a half minutes left.

Besides, this was Garrett.

"That's kind of true either way, isn't it?" I said. "Not fighting—not standing up to fight, when it means this much—there's more than one way to be dead."

Garrett's face softened into thoughtfulness, and I hastened to clarify. "I mean, I'm not talking about, like, Helium and Tobias—"

"You feel alive right now," Garrett said, cutting me off.

It was just barely not-a-question.

"Yeah," I answered. "I do."

"You like this."

I sighed. "Yeah," I admitted. "I mean, not the part where everybody's dying. And I don't—I mean, I know it's, like, not okay, or something. I know we're supposed to—to be reluctant, or angsty, or whatever, but—"

I shrugged.

"I don't know why," I said, as the clock ticked down past the seven minute mark. "Scared versus not scared. It's not like—I mean, I see the same stuff you see, you know? The same threats, the same risks. Why one person gets scared and another one doesn't, when they both have the exact same information—"

Melissa Chapman had been a better gymnast than me in almost every way—smaller, stronger, her landings cleaner, her form tighter. And yet, when we'd first started trying to learn double backs—

"I don't know," I said again. "Anything I try to say here is going to be made-up. For all I know, Toomin did something to my brain to stop me from freaking out."

Garrett squinted. "You don't believe that."

"I don't. I don't, because—"

I chewed at my lip.

"Look at me," I said. "Pretty, tall, blonde. Girl. Middle class America, Ventura county suburbs. I always wanted—"

I broke off, embarrassed.

"More," Garrett offered.

"Yeah. I guess. Something worth—worth fighting for, something more important than, I dunno—"

My mom had fought and fought and fought to make it to the top of her law firm. Had been hard, and disciplined, and cutthroat, had poured years of long weeks and late nights into her career, sacrificing everything else—sacrificing her marriage to Dad, even—and at the end she hadn't even been happy—

"Something that mattered," I said, my voice growing firmer. "I think, the way things were going before Elfangor—I think I would have always felt like something was missing. And I guess—it's not like I would have asked for this, but—as long as we're here, I think—I think I'm not going to feel guilty about it anymore."

There was a long silence.

"Well, I don't like this," Garrett said bluntly, as the clock ticked past 06:00. "At all."

"Yeah, I know. I'm sorry."

Another silence.

"But I'm glad you were here," I said. "Are here. And—"

I remembered the mission to the Yeerk pool, Garrett's body weighed down with so many explosives that he literally couldn't even stand. Remembered him morphing, putting his life literally in the palm of my hand.

He'd taken down a Hork-Bajir that night. A Hork-Bajir I hadn't even seen, a Hork-Bajir that would have cut me down without me ever even knowing what had happened.

And now here he was again—just in case.

And even though he was right, even though I wasn't scared, there was still something that was—better, because he was here. Because he had my back.

"I guess none of us ever really said thank you. To each other. But—thanks."

"Thanks," he whispered.

We were quiet then, as the fifth minute faded away and the fourth began to shrink. I fiddled uselessly with the computer, checking and rechecking everything, replaying Toomin's words in my mind in case there was something in there we'd somehow all missed—

"Rachel," Garrett said, breaking the silence.

"Mmm?"

"You remember the version of the plan where Cassie was going to try to grab Visser Three's computer? The one he was using to hack into the hypercomputer?"

"Yeah."

The idea had actually been for Cassie to morph into me—to grab like two thousand pounds of random material and take it with her into morph, dropping her time limit down to nothing. The thinking had been that we could pull a kind of seven Potters diversion—send multiple Rachels in multiple directions, forcing Crayak to split his attention.

It would have meant Cassie's death, but by that point, we'd all pretty much accepted the fact that we probably weren't getting out alive. That wasn't what sunk it—what sunk it was when Marco pointed out that, in order to pull it off, Cassie would've had to morph early, and that would've given the whole game away.

"Well. Uh. I had this thought."

"Yeah?"

"You wanted to get into the hypercomputer in case that made it easier to—to whatever, right?"

There were a handful of things that I was hoping to do, with the admin access that Toomin had left me. I had sort of—felt around the edges, mentally, trying to get a feel for what might be possible without actually pushing any buttons, and I was pretty sure I could do a lot of it remotely, just by thinking—like controlling a Bug fighter via thought-link.

But it had seemed better—just on general principle, setting aside the fact that I had no idea how the hypercomputer actually worked—it had just seemed better to be physically there, to have some kind of direct access rather than trying to do everything via remote command.

"Yeah," I said.

"Well. Since you're already going to be in morph—"

Oh.

Holy crap.

This is what happens when you throw together a plan in like half an hour, my shoulder Marco whispered. You don't have time to think things through, see all the implications.

We had gone back and forth over whether to morph at all, given that we knew it was possible for Crayak to mess with our minds while they were running on the hypercomputer. But that had only happened once, as far as we could tell, and it seemed likely to have cost a lot, according to the rules of the game, and there were too many places where the plan just—wouldn't work, if we were limited to our own bodies.

And so, in what was rapidly becoming Animorphs tradition, we'd gone with if we can't get away with it we're screwed anyway, so we might as well. The plan was for everyone to morph right at time zero—Livingstone, so that Crayak would get the message about the solar bomb; Cassie, so she could handle the Martian atmosphere and later insulate her parents; Garrett, so he would be able to thought-scream—

And me, so that Crayak couldn't just end the whole thing with a single well-placed rock. Not to mention giving all of us access to thought-speak, which might well come in handy.

But I hadn't realized—none of us had—that this meant I would already be inside the hypercomputer—would be running on its hardware, a ghost in the machine.

Toomin took over Father from the inside—

"Yeah," I breathed. "I get it."

"I mean, who knows if it gets you anything, but—"

"No, yeah, I understand."

From inside the hypercomputer, I could—

I could—

Well, okay, I didn't know what I could do. Maybe nothing at all. But Toomin had left me a whole new set of tools—given me a new sixth sense that was already working, even in my own regular body. It was at least possible that I would be able to do—

Something.

I turned back to look at Garrett, still curled up tight in the giant metal chair. Turned to look, and for some reason flashed back to the moment in the mind-meld when—

—with all of us there, with all of us watching, taking part—

Tobias and Garrett had collided over a pair of memories, Tobias's two Big Lies, the two times when he'd kept his little brother from the truth—

—for his own good, he had thought, but that hadn't stopped him from feeling guilty about it, carrying the weight of his betrayal around on his shoulder for years—

—and then we'd seen that Garrett had known, known for a long time, not that he'd figured it out on his own but that he'd morphed into Tobias and found out, weeks earlier, and had never mentioned it—

I have no idea why that memory sprang to mind so strongly, so suddenly. It's not like there was any particular lesson in it, and it's not like it was relevant to anything.

But something about it struck me, just then, as the clock ticked past the one minute mark and Jake's voice crackled over the comm. It was one of those moments that feels profound in a way you know you can't possibly explain—like, you'll try to tell someone else, gesture toward it, but the only words you'll be able to find are this is the same kid and they'll be like, yeah, and?

This was the same kid, sitting there beside me as time ran out. There was a whole person wrapped up in that tiny little frame—the same person I'd been fused with, an hour or so earlier, the same person I'd gone into battle with half a dozen times. The same one whose personal god had lied to him, and never quite gotten over it.

I don't know. Like I said, it wasn't the sort of thing I could put into words. It probably sounds crazy, from the outside.

But it brought me back around to feeling like I should say something—something real, something that would matter to him. Something that would actually reach him.

Yeah, well, you got about thirty seconds.

I racked my brain—

"Sisu, Garrett," I said softly.

He knew what that meant. He'd been in my brain, after all.

He looked up at me, then—actually at me, for real, his eyes unmistakably locking onto mine, even if it was only for about two thirds of a second.

"Sisu," he murmured back.

And then there were ten seconds left, and then five, and then three, and two, and one—

Have you ever played a video game so much that you aren't even conscious of the actual individual motions anymore? Like, you don't actually think left click or down arrow or trigger or whatever, you just know you're supposed to draw something out of your inventory and your brain just—translates it, takes care of it, the same way it takes care of your heartbeat and blood pressure and whatever.

I didn't know how I was doing what I was doing. I didn't know what I was doing at all, on the level of buttons and mouse-clicks.

But as I reached out—properly, for the first time—into that strange mental space that had lurked just off to the side ever since Toomin's vision—

More than anything else, it reminded me of being a bat. It had the same eerie, ephemeral, dreamlike quality as echolocation—only instead of having a ghostly sense of a room or a field or a forest or whatever, I had a ghostly sense of the entire solar system. I could feel the swollen masses of the planets, and the shifting grooves of their orbits. I could sense every spaceship, every satellite, every speck of loose matter, as if they were all shards of glass glinting in the sunlight.

And not just their positions, their vectors—I had a strange intuition as to their fundamental properties, as well. How hard or easy it might be to nudge them off course, how much effort it would take to unmake them entirely. How tiring it would be—how much it would cost me, the same way I could look at a heavy object and guess how much it would cost me to lift it.

"Morphing," Garrett reported, because barely a second had passed.

My first task was to pop the Z-space bubble surrounding the system, clearing the way for Magellan and Livingstone and Cassie to jump inward, bypassing the obvious choke point of the bridge. And it was like popping it—was a single, simple action—not repairing the rift directly, but rather ending the process that had been effortfully maintaining it.

I reached out—somehow—and flexed, somehow—and suddenly, the rift was gone. Suddenly I knew it was gone, could feel the lack of a barrier like the difference between being inside and outside—

"Clear," I said.

—just as I could tell that the other ships had left, had leapt into Z-space unimpeded and were on their way, Tobias and Helium and Terra and Telor—

"Roger," Garrett acknowledged. "Green light."

—and now the others were heading inward, leaving only Jake and Marco nearby. I didn't have the time or attention to spare to follow them, though, because the next step was every bit as urgent, if I only managed two things this needed to be one of them—

Again, not knowing quite how I knew, or how I was doing it, I reached out into the void and found—

Found—

Myself, is the word that seemed most natural, the way you know where your hands and feet are—there were bits and pieces of a vast, interconnected body, and though they were outside of normal space they were still somewhere, somewhere specific, I could feel them, I could move them—

Oof.

Not like popping a bubble, this time. Not like flipping a switch. The hardware of the hypercomputer had mass, inertia—was not trivial to move. I reached, tugged, hefted—

One of the objects popped out into space.

"Rachel, are you morphing?"

Oh, that's funny—

The rest of the computer had shifted, somehow—like a row of marbles all lined up, when I had pulled out the first one the rest had rolled forward—

There was something there that could acquire momentum, a process that could be set in motion that would continue on its own. But it was choked, blocked, leashed—there was something like a door, a spring-loaded door, designed to be closed by default—

I pried it open.

Yes.

The machinery began flowing—flowing of its own accord, as if it was being sucked out into the vacuum.

But the door—the door was heavy, somehow, and I had nothing with which to prop it open, had to just hold it—

"Rachel?"

—straining, not with muscles but with something, something that—like muscles—could not keep it up forever. There was something else that was also draining, as the flood of metal poured recklessly into orbit—some pool of potential that would not last long, that was already noticeably less full than it had been—

"Rachel!"

—and I could feel where it was going, too—could follow the trickle with one part of my mind, even as the rest of me put everything it had into keeping the floodgates open. Some of it—maybe a third?—was simply vanishing, but the rest—

The rest was collecting in another place. Another vast reservoir, currently nearly empty, but slowly filling up, an Olympic swimming pool fed by a garden hose—

Crayak

It was Crayak's—what, fuel tank? Bank account? Power bar?

It was the counterpart to my own well of influence, a measure of the total strength with which Crayak would be able to respond, once it did respond—

Why isn't it already responding?

Drop by drop, as the hypercomputer surged through the open gate—drop by drop, I could see my own reserves shrinking, and Crayak's slowly swelling—could track the transfer—somehow—with microscopic precision.

And it was only growing. Only accumulating, nothing being spent. Crayak had not flexed the tiniest muscle, had not made even the smallest of moves.

Why?

‹Garrett here. Rachel, I don't know what's happening but I really think you're supposed to be morphing—›

The voice in the back of my head finally broke through, finally registered—right, I'm supposed to be morphing—and I cautiously withdrew a fraction of my attention, went from holding open the mental door with two hands to one—

Okay.

Nothing else—I had room for nothing else, but I could, in fact, focus hard enough to morph while still keeping the flow going. I could feel my body changing, the familiar tingle sweeping over me as I trembled with the effort—

‹Howlers!›

I processed the word, but barely, slowly, unable to produce any kind of meaningful response—

‹Rachel, incoming, can you do anything—›

I could—maybe—if I stopped morphing, or if I let the door swing shut—but what exactly would I do, what would it cost, did I dare spend the influence—

How can we have company, Crayak hasn't even twitched a finger—

Slow—some part of me recognized that I was too slow, my thoughts sluggish and stupid, my brain overloaded as I tried not to let my concentration slip—

‹Rache—›

Hold on.

It wasn't a thought—not quite. Wasn't words, wasn't something my mind was producing or perceiving—not in those first few moments.

It was me.

All of me.

It was all that I was, everything else boiled away.

Hold on.

I didn't know what I was holding on to, or what was doing the holding, was not even really properly aware that there was some specific thing that needed to be held. I just was the pure act. An avatar, a personification, the god of white knuckles.

Hold on.

Slowly, consciousness trickled back in, a whole person growing outward from a clenched fist.

The floodgate!

That's right—I was still holding open the floodgate, the hypercomputer still rushing past into the crowded space around the Earth, my pool of influence slowly drying up—

Still?

Something must have happened, something that broke my concentration—I must have fainted, or blacked out, and before that, I had been—

Oh.

Oh, no.

‹Garrett!› I called out. Or tried to, anyway; I had no way of knowing whether the thought had actually gone anywhere, you couldn't hear yourself like you could with regular speech—

And that's when I realized that I couldn't hear myself. Couldn't hear, or see, or feel, or anything. Had been reduced to my newly acquired sixth sense—was not even properly experiencing darkness or silence so much as the total absence of sensation, as if every nerve had been severed—

You were in a Bug fighter. You were in a Bug fighter, and there were Howlers—

‹Garrett, can you hear me?›

There was no answer.

I steeled myself.

They must have blown up the fighter.

They had blown up the fighter, and Garrett and I—we'd both been in morph—

Right?

Had I actually made it all the way into morph?

Yes. Obviously. Since you're awake and aware and thinking right now.

Thinking, without a body—

You can demorph from a corpse. Your real body is still in stasis somewhere, waiting to be called back, you can demorph any time—

Except—

Except one, if I was right, I would be demorphing straight into the vacuum of space, and two—

If they didn't just kill me—if they actually fully vaporized the ship—

Which they probably had—

I might not be able to demorph at all. Whatever nanotech drove the morphing power, whatever tiny machines were responsible for gating my body in and out of Z-space, if they'd been damaged, or destroyed, or sufficiently dispersed—

I wasn't quite sure why I wasn't panicking. Maybe because I didn't have any blood, and therefore no adrenaline—no heartbeat capable of racing—

Or maybe because I wasn't out of cards to play just yet. I still had access to Toomin's power, was still holding the door open for the hypercomputer, and might be able to do other things as well—

I paused.

Hhhhhhhuh.

I had—reached, sort of—sent my awareness out into the void, and in that moment realized that my awareness was somewhere—that I was still somewhere. Somewhere specific, relative to what I was reaching out to—that it wasn't just featureless nothingness all around.

Like how you can just sort of tell that your brain lives in your head, and not in your chest or your hands or your feet—how you can just feel that you're up there, behind your eyes, between your ears, and not anywhere else. There was some sort of mental proprioception, an undeniable sense that I was doing my thinking from someplace—someplace I could track, someplace I could—maybe—locate—

I don't know if I ever would have realized it, without the emptiness to serve as a backdrop. Without the stillness and silence, the complete lack of distraction—and without the special access that Toomin had given me. I'd certainly never noticed it before. Every time I'd been in morph, it had felt like the morph body was me, even though I'd known on some level that the actual thinking wasn't taking place inside a housefly's brain, that it had to be happening somewhere else—

There.

Or actually, now that I'd put my finger on it—

Here.

It was like reaching my arm out through a hole in a coffin, and feeling around on its surface. I couldn't see myself, couldn't access myself, but I could trace the outlines of my container—

Except that it wasn't a container. Not in any meaningful sense. Wasn't a box containing me, didn't have shape or volume, wasn't a physical location. My brain kept trying to translate what it was perceiving into a three-dimensional image, but it was sheer reflex, a hopeless rounding-off.

It was just—substrate.

Background.

Like the pixels on a screen, or the pages of a book. It was the-place-where-it-was-happening, and it was me—there was—it had to be code, I guess, computer code—and the code was me, and the code was contained within other code—a closed loop, with channels for input and output, except the channels were broken, there was nothing leading to or from the placeless place—

—nothing except the bright line connecting me to Toomin's pool of influence. The line through which I was exercising my will, the line I had traced back to find myself.

Open, I whispered.

And it did.

Somehow.

It wasn't supposed to, I wasn't supposed to be able to, but the mantle of Toomin's authority overrode whatever protocols were meant to keep me inside the box, and suddenly I was out.

Not out out, but one level higher in the system, one folder up—running alongside the box, now, instead of being contained within it. And I could see—

—not see, really, I still couldn't see anything, but I could perceive it—

—like in The Matrix, when Neo suddenly breaks through and can see the code, except I always thought it was stupid and cheesy the way they made it look like little green characters outlining everything, of course that's not what it would actually be like, there wouldn't be a little lump of green in the shape of a bullet, the bullet would just be a snippet of code that deleted other little bits of code, you wouldn't actually have three-dimensional space inside the software any more than there's three-dimensional space on the pages of a story—

—I could see the container, and others alongside it, and from their shape and construction it was obvious what they were, that each one was home to a simulated mind—

—like my mind, which I could directly observe now that it was no longer obscured by the box, a tangled mass of symbols and functions and calculations and commands—a string of concepts shifting in response to stimuli—in this case, the stimuli being my own perception of myself—

I backed off. Looked away, slid the focal point of my attention onto the array of containers—not because I was trying to pay attention to them, but just because I needed something else to latch on to, something to distract me, it was one thing to know that your mind was being run on a computer and another thing to watch it happening in real time—like looking in a mirror as a surgeon cut open your skull and seeing gears inside—

I paused.

My attention had caught on one of the containers—

—somehow I was perceiving all of them at once, even though there were thousands and thousands of them—

—the one which definitely-even-though-I-didn't-know-how-I-knew held Garrett.

I started to reach inside, and then paused again.

Garrett seemed to be—I wanted to say frozen, like the chamber was some kind of cryo-stasis tube, the inputs and outputs flowing at a glacial pace, so slow it was almost imperceptible.

And yet they were flowing, unmistakably so. So he wasn't dead or anything—

Oh.

Right.

Hyper computer.

When we were in morph, our minds continued to work at normal human speeds, but as the frozen fakeout at the Yeerk pool had demonstrated, they could run much, much faster than that if need be. I must have sped up, somehow, once I'd left the confines of the container—or been automatically downshifted while inside, more likely—

Crap. The floodgates.

But they were fine—still open, the torrent of machinery still passing through, only now at a hundred thousand frames per second.

I could see the mechanism of the gate more clearly, now, too—follow the inner workings of a process which before I could only feel the edges of. It was possible to just wedge the door open, so to speak—to disable the mechanism that I had been straining against, change the default setting. It would cost me—slightly more than the active effort had, in fact—but it would mean that I no longer had to devote a quarter of my attention to holding on, would mean that even if something happened to me the hypercomputer would continue pouring into the system unless someone actively interfered.

Speaking of which—

I extended my mind again, feeling the boundaries of Crayak's pool of initiative. It still hadn't responded at all—had not spent even the smallest iota of its slowly growing resources.

Why?

My shoulder Marco laughed darkly.

Come on, Warrior Princess. Isn't it obvious?

And it was.

It was waiting, waiting for the last possible second—preparing some kind of counterstrike that would leave me no time to respond, at the moment when it would have the greatest available initiative—

It was exactly what I would have done, in its position. And unfortunately, the only plan we had for that contingency was Rachel will do whatever makes sense.

I had no idea what that was.

But at least I had stumbled into a little extra time.

I had gotten out of my own little cradle, and into a larger virtual space. I could try going up again, and see where it got me—if this was a computer system, there might be a top level—

Or not. It could be some completely alien structure.

Still. There was nothing to be gained just sitting around here.

I turned my attention back to Garrett's container.

Should I take him with me? Would that even be possible?

It's not like he'll be able to thoughtscream.

But he might be able to see things I wouldn't—think of things I'd miss—

Or he might just get himself deleted.

Though, to be fair, that was already his destiny—either the blast from the sun would slag the hypercomputer and we'd all go up in smoke, or something would happen to prevent that and eventually the pocket dimension holding his body would collapse—

Wait.

Could I—

Okay, yes, I could. It would cost something like one ten thousandth of my remaining initiative, but I could set Garrett's time limit to infinity, ensure that his body would never go poof—at least, not by default.

Hey, uh. Not to be all special privileges, or whatever, but you gonna do that for yourself, too?

If I'd had teeth, I would have gritted them. This was not how I needed to be spending my time—these were not the questions that mattered—

Fine, then. Quit stalling and move.

Things came back a little faster this time.

Your name is Rachel Berenson. You're inside the hypercomputer. You're trying to find Crayak—

No, wait. I had already found Crayak—

TAKE YOUR TIME, a voice boomed. WE HAVE PLENTY, AFTER ALL.

Crayak?

No, wait—

I—looked up, I would have said, except that there was no up and I didn't have eyes—realized just then that I hadn't actually heard the voice, either—

I expanded my attention, and somehow perceived—

Visser Three?

Not the Andalite Controller, and not the strange hybrid body he'd built for himself after his first death, and not one of his thousands of puppet bodies, either. This was—purer, somehow—distilled, clarified, everything nonessential pared away.

I was inside a computer, and this was a representation of Visser Three. A collection of beliefs, memories, decisions, principles—a living digital copy of his soul.

But Visser Three died—

I was still disoriented, my thoughts only half-coherent, struggling to piece together the scattered fragments of my memory. There had been a virus, Crayak's virus—

Yeah, whispered my shoulder Marco. Obviously he squirreled away a backup somehow. Somewhere that the virus couldn't reach.

Somewhere that Crayak couldn't reach? Or—or was Visser Three working with Crayak?

There was a noise—

No, not a noise, there was no sound in this strange, disembodied non-place, but there was some kind of information which my mind interpreted as a sound, and my attention expanded further, looking for the source, taking in the—

Room?

—the boundaries of the virtual space that the Visser and I were currently occupying, it had some kind of clearly defined edge, and just beyond that edge—

Thunder. Volcanoes. Nuclear explosions. Swirling darkness, flashes of threatening light—every giant death cloud from every terrible superhero movie, Galactus and Parallax and Dormammu, a seething hurricane of malice and rage—

Crayak.

I wasn't seeing its body, but its mind—its goals, its priorities, its deepest drives. It was like looking into a crystal ball and seeing infinite possible futures play out. Infinite futures, and infinite pasts—all of the things Crayak had done, all of the things it would do under any number of circumstances. How it would kill me, if it could reach me, and how it would repurpose the atoms that made up my body—

It howled, hammering at the invisible barrier between us—began to push through, the barrier flexing, bulging inward—a shadow forming on the inside, a pale projection, a fragile avatar assembling itself—

The Visser struck—a lazy, almost casual blow.

And the shadow shattered into dust.

What.

I had no face—was myself just a collection of concepts, the same as the Visser—but I must have had some sort of visible surface, something externally readable, because he responded as if I had spoken aloud.

THE RULES OF THE GAME, he said, the words somehow marked as tinged with sardonic amusement. PAWNS ARE INVIOLATE—ONLY UNDER THE RAREST OF CIRCUMSTANCES MAY THEY BE DIRECTLY INTERFERED WITH. WE ARE KRYPTONITE TO CRAYAK—IN OUR PRESENCE, HE CANNOT WIELD EVEN A TRILLIONTH OF HIS TRUE POWER, NOR CAN HE BRING HIS FULL INTELLIGENCE TO BEAR.

Again, the shadow formed, and again the Visser scattered it, seeming unworried, at-ease—almost bored.

HAVE YOU RECOVERED YET? he asked.

Recovered—

And then it clicked, the memory falling into place.

I had risen up out of the morphing emulator—climbed higher and higher in the structure of the hypercomputer—had emerged into the highest level—

And had found Visser Three waiting for me.

THAT'S RIGHT, RACHEL BERENSON, said the Visser, as he dispersed the shadow of Crayak for a third time. YOU HAVE NO POWER HERE.

He had struck at me—struck at me in the exact same fashion, and the blow had been devastating—had—had disorganized me, somehow, reducing the careful order of my digital body to a pile of incoherent nonsense—

Because I was a player, too. Because I had inherited Toomin's mantle, his abilities and influence—

And his vulnerabilities.

The Visser was kryptonite for me, too.

Except—I didn't feel weak, or stupid, at least not now that the shock of disintegration was passing. Maybe it only affected the superhuman parts of me?

Oh, no—

The deadline! How long had we been here? Had the moment already passed?

I tried reaching out with my sixth sense, found—to my relief—that it was still functioning. The hypercomputer had finished its transition, was located entirely in real space. The Earth was still a writhing mass of nanotechnology, tendrils reaching out from the atmosphere as if in desperation. And the sun—

If I'd had a body, I would have gasped. Even knowing what to expect—even having planned on it, counted on it—

The sun had been torn in half. Was like two roses blossoming in opposite directions, a violent bow-tie explosion whose motion was perceptible even to my own insanely accelerated senses. A third chunk—like a bullet, smaller and denser and brighter than the other two—had already covered well over half of the distance to the Earth, and was clearly on target to obliterate everything in the vicinity, us and the hypercomputer included.

I zeroed in on the leading edge, measuring the distance, trying to gauge its progress—

THERE IS STILL TIME, the Visser thundered, as he once again struck down the slowly regenerating shadow of Crayak. THOUGH LESS THAN THERE WAS, AND IF I AM HONEST, I FIND LITTLE APPEAL IN THE IDEA OF CUTTING IT CLOSE.

He waited, oozing a kind of idle expectation, and I felt an urge to blink, to shake my nonexistent head—tried to force my thoughts into motion.

He wants something—

To live. Obviously. That was not-quite-but-close-enough the only thing Visser Three ever wanted, the single driving ambition at the center of every action we'd seen him take, it was all about survival, not just in the moment but on a timescale of centuries—

Oh.

I did a thing that, in the real world, would have been turning to look him in the eye.

‹Visser,› I said, addressing him directly for the first time. ‹How long have you been in here?›

LONG ENOUGH, he answered, his words once again marked as being intended with grim humor.

I turned my attention back to the tempest raging outside, the sturm and drang as Crayak continued to try to force its way in. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I could feel its pool of initiative, measure how much potential it contained—

It was untapped. It held precisely the expected amount, given how much I had spent moving the hypercomputer into real space—had captured every transferred drop and lost none of them.

Either Crayak was waiting for an opportune moment—

Or something's gone wrong.

I looked back at the Visser as he dispatched yet another of the ghostly echoes—unworried, unhurried, paying me no mind whatsoever.

Marco, I whispered. Help me out, here.

But there was no Marco—never had been a Marco, the voice on my shoulder had always just been me, the part of me that liked to pretend, the part of me that found it easier to hide behind Marco's smile. There was no Marco inside of my head—no Marco, and no Jake, and no Cassie—only me.

And—and Garrett, right?

Garrett—

Had Garrett been with me?

I couldn't remember.

He certainly wasn't here now—the digital space we were occupying was open, unobstructed, as blank as a page with nothing on it.

Nothing except me and the Visser.

What's the play?

I'd had two concrete objectives to achieve, besides the general try to do whatever makes sense: take down the bubble around the system, and bring the hypercomputer out of Z-space. Both of those jobs were done, and by the looks of things, Livingstone's job was done, too.

That should have meant that we'd won, at least as far as minimum-acceptable-outcomes were concerned. With half a dozen Yeerk coalescions heading in half a dozen directions—with Helium en route to the Andalite homeworld and Tobias in possession of the Chee ship—

The hypercomputer was doomed. As was the Earth, along with whatever-the-hell-it-was that Crayak had been doing with it. There were maybe three minutes left in real time before the shockwave arrived, and even after all of the transfer that had taken place, I still had nearly twice as much initiative left as Crayak did, meaning that anything it tried I should theoretically be able to just brute-force counter—

Except for Visser Three.

I hadn't counted on Visser Three—hadn't counted on him being alive, hadn't counted on him being here—hadn't had any reason at all to imagine that he might somehow be in control, able to stare down me and Crayak both.

Unless he's not. Unless it's some kind of trick.

But what kind of trick? And why? And—even if it was a trick—

Any trick that could make me think that I'd been shattered to pieces, make me feel exactly how I would if I had been shattered to pieces—

I couldn't see how, in practical terms, that was any less powerful than actually doing it.

Besides, I could see the mass of code that made up the entity in front of me. Could read it, and verify it—could see that there was no room for trickery, no place for any alter ego to hide.

What was happening was real, minus the fact that it was all a simulation. It was a real simulation—that was the real, actual Visser Three, being simulated in front of me.

How?

And—more importantly—

What now?

I had to assume that this meant disaster, somehow—that the Visser wasn't there to just sit back and watch as we took out the hypercomputer that he was currently living on. And I had to assume there was some reason why he hadn't Avada Kedavra'd me, as he was just now doing to the shadow of Crayak for at least the seventh time.

Some reason why he hadn't Avada Kedavra'd me again, anyway, since he'd obviously done it once.

At least.

I was alive, when it was within his power to kill me—was being allowed to live, which meant that I had something he wanted.

Probably.

And since he hadn't asked for it—since he was, in fact, conspicuously ignoring me—

Maybe it wasn't the smartest move I'd ever made. But mind games, politics, peering inside people's souls—those weren't my forte. I wasn't clever like Marco, or perceptive like Jake, or empathic like Cassie. And slow-time or not, I didn't have time for this. Did not have time for games—not as long as Crayak was still out there with room to maneuver.

‹All right, Visser,› I said, returning my full attention to the figure in front of me. ‹What the fuck is going on?›