I. Faith (Loren with Koril)

"In the beginning, God created the heaven and the worlds." I frowned. "Is that how it should go? It doesn't sound quite right."

"Genesis contradicts itself within two chapters," Koril pointed out. "You don't have to be precise."

"OK. So He creates the heaven, that's the universe and the stars, and the worlds. The worlds that are going to have life. He gives them water and sunlight and moonlight. He gives each of them their own form of life, according to the particular arrangement of water and sunlight and… well, I don't really know how that works. But then. He creates knowing beings – beings that can know Him – in his own image."

"Images," said Koril. "If He is infinite, then he can have infinite images of creation, can't he?"

"Yes," Jax said firmly. "It's like, there are all these paths to the Divine, and God created a different kind to walk each of them. If they choose to."

"What's a Yeerk's path to the Divine, then?" I wondered.

"Only one way to find out," Koril said. "Talk to a Yeerk."

I shuddered. "I'm afraid of Cassie's friend. Aftran. I'm afraid of Cassie. Even of my family, a little. After that battle, I've realized… there's so much I don't know about this boy they killed. David. There's a whole story there, and I have to find out if I'm going to play out this farce every time I fight the Yeerks. But if they've been so scared to tell me anything, then, well, I think I have good reason to be scared, too. The fate of his parents could depend on me."

"If it helps," Koril said, "Delia said they were all wrecks afterward, at the grave. Crying, or just standing there like broken dolls. That's the way she described them. All baby-faced like dolls, with no light in their eyes."

Now I wanted to cry all over again.

"It's for God to judge," Jax said. "The Yeerks, and the Animorphs, and everyone else, no matter what they've done."

"So wait," said Koril. "And try to hear them out when they tell you. Now, how do you think the doctrine of original sin applies when you consider the existence of other species? I've thought about this a lot over the centuries…"

II. Justice (Cassie with Aftran and Delia)

I held out my hand. "I'm ready."

Delia raised her eyebrows. "For what?"

"For Aftran."

Her face went flatter, the way it always did when Aftran spoke. "I'm not going in your head, Cassie. That's not how this is going to work."

"Why not? You'll know how I'm feeling better than anyone else ever could. That makes you the perfect therapist, right?"

"You can share all your feelings with me and never have to explain, but that's not how it works with other people. You have to communicate how you feel, and for you, that's the hard part. It's what you need to work on." Aftran smirked a little. "Now Marco, that's someone who could benefit from having someone in his head to help sort out what his feelings are. But of course he'd never agree to it. Nor would I want to. I like you better."

"I'm sure the inside of Marco's head is, um, interesting." I sighed. "OK. I guess… I've been thinking about my parents a lot lately. Where they fit into this war. It's hard not to, now that Loren's one of us." I looked up at Delia/Aftran's face. Not a flicker. Strange, talking about this to beings who didn't have parents. "I can't help but wonder if they would have made the same choice, if I'd offered it to them like Tobias did. Would they want to fight? Or would they try to help some other way? Or maybe they wouldn't want to get involved at all. I wouldn't blame them. I wouldn't even know which choice is right."

"Is that really true?" Aftran said. "Among Yeerks, poolmates fight together. We don't stay behind while our poolmates fight if we can help it. That attitude is one of the greatest obstacles I've had to overcome while advocating for the peace movement. Wouldn't you feel betrayed if they wanted no part of this war at all?"

"Maybe," I said helplessly. "And what will they think of my choices, when they find out? Because they will, sooner or later. Whether it's because we've won the war or…"

"Because they've been captured by Yeerks who taunt them with the knowledge of what their daughter did," Aftran finished. "Well, what do you think?"

"I don't know. I just know that I need to protect them. They're gentle people. They've devoted their lives to healing animals. I don't want them to have to do what I do."

"You speak of them like they're special. Like they need more protection than other people. Surely no one in this city should have to do what you do."

"They're my parents," I said.

"Humans are selfish creatures," Aftran sneered. "Our parents die in the making of us. We're raised by the pool as a whole. We owe everything to the pool, not just to two people. I believe everyone in my pool deserves to be free of the Empire and its imperial rule. Do your loyalties extend so far?"

"You're right. Of course you're right. No one should have to face these choices. It's just – when it comes to my parents, I can't see straight. Do you understand?"

"I do," said Aftran, giving me and then Quincy a penetrating stare. "I feel that way about my hosts. All of them."

I shivered. There was something I loved about that. To Aftran, I would always be her host. She would never forget what the inside of me was like.

So that's the real reason why she wouldn't infest us, Quincy thought. It would be too close. She needs the distance to see us clearly.

"Oh, Aftran," I said. "I'm going to be fine." I held out my hands, until she reached out and squeezed them. "With your help, I'll be fine. I promise."

III. Prudence (Marco with Luis)

"I'm not here because I want to join Cassie's kumbaya circle," I said, sprawling out on Luis' couch. Not a shrink's couch – damned if I was going to let him sit in a chair and take notes on me – but a cozy L-shaped couch. Luis and Zefirita were on the other leg of the L. "Or because Loren gave me one of those mom looks and made me feel bad."

Luis, slowly petting his dæmon between the ears, raised an eyebrow. "Why are you here, then?"

I gritted my teeth, and the words got trapped behind them. I considered just getting up and leaving. But no, that wasn't an option. Diamanta, porcupine-shaped, raised her quills and said, "Because we had a panic attack in school, and that shit has got to stop."

Luis didn't look sad or pitying. I would have left if he'd been like that, to hell with the consequences. He just looked concerned, like if Dia had said I'd sprained my ankle at school. "What happened?"

"We're reading that book Night in English class. The one written by a Holocaust survivor," Dia said. "We were fine reading at home. Seriously. I mean, it wasn't a walk in the park, that book is brutal, but we weren't freaking out. But then in class, we were talking about that scene when they're being rounded up from the ghetto, and the rabbi tries to get away and they grab his dæmon. Everyone in class was talking about it.

"And suddenly, I was terrified that someone in the room was going to touch me. It wasn't like I didn't know it was crazy to think that. But I couldn't stop. I became a frog and hid in Marco's pocket. He started hyperventilating, and his heart was beating so fast, and he felt so warm he was going to burn up. He couldn't stop watching everyone in the class like they were going to jump up and attack me. So we left. We just barely managed to get to the bathroom and curl up in a ball in one of the stalls before anybody noticed something was wrong."

"You seem very worried about anyone knowing what's wrong. Why is that?" Luis asked.

"Please. The last thing I want is Chapman asking about my mental health. And if Dad and Mirazai find out, they'll start asking way too many questions. They won't let us out of their sight. That can't happen. So can you do something about it?"

"Maybe," Luis said. "I hope so. Here's what I think right now. What you're describing sounds like what psychologists call hypervigilance and hyperarousal." I opened my mouth to make a comment, but he cut me off, saying, "Not that kind of arousal. It means a fight-or-flight response at an inappropriate time. That reaction is useful when you're in real danger, but not when you're sitting in a classroom. I can't say anything for sure yet, but these symptoms are characteristic of post-traumatic stress, not a panic disorder. Which tends to be triggered by something related to the traumatic event."

He wasn't asking me to tell him. But he was looking at me expectantly. Dia reminded me, silently, that Luis had treated soldiers in World War II who had probably been through what I had and worse. I wasn't so different from those soldiers. Not even that much younger, probably. "That kid David," I said. "The one we killed. You know about him, right?"

"Delia mentioned it," Luis said, his voice carefully neutral.

"He touched me, OK?" Dia said, every quill bristling at its full length. "Not Kirianor. Him. Then he knocked us unconscious, acquired Marco's DNA, and left us tied up in our own closet."

Luis paused in his stroking of Zefirita, and hugged her close to him, as any human would if they heard a story like that. Everyone in English class did the same, during that discussion. But it struck me as kind of odd. Zefirita was just a hologram, and he didn't have to pretend she was real in front of me. Maybe it was just habit. "Why did he do that?"

"Because he was an amoral creep," I said, coaxing Dia into a shape that would be easier to hold. "Because I fought back and he thought he might lose, so he did the one thing I was least ready for. Because the Yeerks had hurt him and he wanted to take it out on someone. I don't know." Finally, Dia decided on being a monitor lizard and sat on my leg.

"I'm sorry about that. Dæmon-related trauma is just about the hardest to shake." Luis loosened his grip on Zefirita. "We'll see what we can do. For now, I think the most important first step is identifying triggers. Things that set you off, so you can try to avoid them. Have you had any other episodes?"

"Yeah," I admitted grudgingly. "At home with no one around, thank God. I was watching TV, and this fucking awful criminal on Law & Order had a wolf dæmon who was about to attack…"

IV. Temperance (Rachel with Lourdes)

"We're not going to braid each other's hair and talk about our feelings, OK?" I said. We were in a park, because Lourdes was homeless, but she could put up holograms so no one would hear us or see that I was talking to a homeless person. My mom would kill me if she heard about me doing that. Anyway, in most people's houses Abi had to stand outside, and I liked that I could touch him here.

"All right," said Lourdes, leaning back against the park bench. "What are we gonna do, then?"

I side-eyed her. Why did I get the smart-ass Chee? "Have you ever been a shrink?"

She snorted. "No. But I've been a nun a bunch of times, and for a good chunk of history we were the best option a girl had."

"A nun?" I looked at this Filipina woman in ratty clothes and tried to imagine it. "Why?"

"It was the only way I could travel as a woman without being questioned or harassed too much. And I prefer to be a woman. Feels more comfortable for some reason, even though Chee aren't really programmed to have gender." She smiled wryly, and her dæmon flicked an ear. "I've never been good at working the way I was programmed to."

I wasn't sure whether I was relieved or not that Lourdes had never been a shrink. Abineng raised his head high to hide his own shame. "Listen. I don't know if you can actually help with this, because you probably have no idea what it's like, but do you know how to, uh, stop having violent thoughts? Like at random times, when you shouldn't?"

Lourdes tilted her head back and laughed, hard and long. Her dæmon bared his teeth in a doggy grin. "Oh, Rachel. Just because I'm programmed to be non-violent doesn't mean I can't have violent thoughts. Among the Chee, I'm famous for it. Most of them won't come near me. They're afraid they'll catch my cooties."

"You think about hurting people?" I tried to wrap my brain around it. It was so unlike Erek and Mr. King. But then, they weren't the only Chee, and why couldn't they be as different from each other as humans were?

"Not your people, usually. My creators." Now when Euscavier bared his teeth, it wasn't in a grin. "They had no right to create me to serve them. I never wanted to serve. I never wanted to be what they made me to be. I wanted a choice. But they were destroyed before I could be reprogrammed. If they'd only done it a little sooner – well. You can imagine how often I've fantasized about hurting them."

I had never thought of it that way. Erek seemed to love the Pemalites. But Lourdes had a point. They had created this whole species just to be their companions. That wasn't exactly fair to the Chee. "But you don't go crazy or anything."

"No. Because I can talk about it. To Erek, mostly. He doesn't hate the Pemalites like I do, but he understands my frustration." She raised her eyebrows. "Don't you have anyone to talk to about it? I imagine your cousin Jake would understand, from what I've seen of him."

"He understands," I gritted out. "But I'm not sure he'll try to stop it. He's too much like me."

"Then what about Cassie?"

I flinched. "I don't want her to know that about Abi. That he says these things to me."

Euscavier eyed Abi. "Then you underestimate her."

I sighed. "I can't even tell you about it, and let's be real, you're not my friend and I don't care what you think."

"Then work up to telling me, and maybe you can get around to telling Cassie eventually. Sound good?"

"OK." I narrowed my eyes a little. "But tell me more about you first."

"Well, this one time when I was a nun…"

V. Hope (Jake with Luis)

"Did you treat any of the Tuskegee airmen?" Jake asked. Merlyse was coyote-formed, like Zefirita, her ears pricked forward in interest.

Luis chuckled. "Everyone asks me that. No, Jake. I was a medical officer with the Army infantry, not the Air Force."

"What about the 761st Tank Battalion?"

"Sure, I got some of them. But it doesn't seem right to tell you what they said to me, even if they're mostly dead by now. I take my confidentiality agreements seriously."

"Did you help people in other wars too?"

"Not the First World War. I was a child back then. But I did in the Civil War. Not what I did in World War II, because they had no real notion of shell shock or combat fatigue back then. But I helped patch up black soldiers in the war. On both sides."

"On both sides?" I said. "The Confederates had black soldiers?"

"Toward the end, but not by their own choice." He studied my face for a moment, as if checking that I really wanted to know this. Zefirita nodded at him, and he relaxed. "I worked on the Union side first. Plenty of volunteers there, though they were treated like scum for it. The white medics got better bandages, more equipment. But they were glad to fight, mostly. Then I was 'killed' on the Union side. No way to play it off like I survived. Usually I start again as a child when I die, but I felt I could do some real good as an adult. So I put my face back on and tried to do the same on the Confederate side. It was 1865, and General Sherman was blazing a trail to Richmond. The plantations along the way mustered their slaves to fight. They had no choice. There was nowhere to run. They fought, and they bled just the same. The masters gave me even less in the way of medical supplies in the Union Army."

"It was different from World War II." I had read more about that war. There was more information, and anyway it was… cleaner, somehow. Still war, still ugly, but not like some animal clawing itself to death.

"The unequal treatment was only a little better. But yes, it was different. There was a sense of purpose to World War II that the Civil War never had. What really got to me, though, was some men whose families were on the other side of the line Sherman was slowly sweeping across Virginia. Men whose brothers and fathers and sons they were afraid they might have shot. I always told them that even if they did, it wasn't their fault. But I felt god-awful, because sometimes I had seen their brothers, treated them for wounds, had them die in my arms, but I couldn't tell them. There was no way I could know that they would believe."

"Did any of them get to find their families? Who fought on the other side?" I whispered.

Luis shrugged, and looked genuinely sad. "I don't know. That reunion would be something kind of private for the family. It wouldn't be for me to see."

"I hope the black Union soldiers forgave the ones who were on the other side."

"This much I know: they did. After all that destruction, everyone was just trying to make it in this new world together."

"Would you," I said. "Look, I know it's probably not your thing, being non-violent and all, but can we talk about military history again sometime? It's… important. I haven't been through officer training or anything. I need to learn how this works."

Luis gave me another searching look, as if waiting for me to say something else, but then Zefirita nosed him and he said, "Sure, Jake. Anytime you like."

VI. Courage & Love (Tobias and Ax with Loren)

«So we decided to give him the morphing power,» I said. «Make him one of us.»

We were in the woods by the creek where Loren had baptized me. The sound of burbling water soothed me, as much as anything could.

«It was a mistake,» Ax said, scuffing his hoof miserably against the dirt.

«What were we supposed to do? Let the Yeerks take him?»

Ax looked even more miserable at that, his tail drooping. He considers infestation a worse fate than death. By that logic, we should have just killed him there and then. But of course Ax wouldn't have wanted to do that either. I looked at Loren. She was biting her mouth closed. Jax paced fretfully back and forth. She didn't like hearing this story, as I'd known she wouldn't. But she needed to hear it – and you and Ax need to tell it, El added.

«Anyway. He had no place to stay, so Marco put him up for a night. He snuck off to call his parents, but they were taken already. The Yeerks nearly caught him, then. Would have, if Marco hadn't gone after him. And then we had to take him on a mission right afterward, a really important one. He got thrown in the deep end, and he couldn't swim. He nearly blew our cover twice. Not that I could really blame him.»

«You give him more sympathy than he deserves,» Ax sneered. «He tried to betray us to Visser Three.»

«I know,» I returned. «He was a bully. I know bullies. He wanted to hurt Marco and, I guess, the rest of us just because it made him feel strong, and I've never been like that. But betraying us to Visser Three so he didn't get a fate maybe worse than death? I haven't always been brave, Ax. I learned how from Jake and Elfangor. If I had come into this the way David had… I don't know. I just don't know.»

«You would never,» Ax said with quiet certainty.

«Thank you, Ax.» I preened a wing to hide my face, because I felt such desperate gratitude I was afraid it might show even in my hawk face.

"What did he do to Marco?" Loren asked quietly.

Ax and I exchanged a look. «I don't think that's really for us to say. But let's just say he acquired Marco's DNA without permission and impersonated him at school, and that's not even the worst of it.»

«He tried to kill Tobias,» Ax said, gold-green eyes blazing. «I thought he was dead.»

«You did? I didn't know that.»

«I would have killed him right then, no matter what the cost,» Ax said, exchanging a look with Loren that scared me in its determination. Those two might tear apart the world for me. El wasn't scared, though. It made her feel protected as she never had before.

«He did other things,» I said. «Terrible things. I don't want to get into them now. So we killed him.»

A thin, hard rain began. Loren shivered and put up her hood. "How?"

«I pretended to be the Visser,» Ax said, his thought-voice entirely flat. «The boy didn't know any better. Tobias was my Hork-Bajir guard. I told him I had arranged a meeting with his parents according to his demands.»

«They weren't his parents,» I said. «They were Cassie, Marco, Jake, and Rachel in morph as them and their dæmons. They fooled him for long enough that he demorphed, let his guard down, then…» I snatched out with my talon as if catching prey.

"Cassie planned this," Loren whispered. "Didn't she?"

«Yes.» I tried to look away, but the hawk could see so well. «I have learned to be brave, Mom. But this wasn't one of those times. Takes cowards to beat a coward, I guess.»

Ax's tail blade nearly touched the ground. He looked to Loren with his stalk eyes for benediction, reproach, anything.

"Do you think you could have done it differently?" Loren asked Ax.

«Not that I know of. But I would like to believe there could have been. I would prefer a world where there was some other way out. So that is what I think, though I have no way to prove it.»

"Thank you," Loren mumbled, tucking her face against Jax's neck. "Did that help? Telling me about it?"

«Yeah,» I said. «A little bit.»

She flashed a smile into Jax's fur. "Then I've done my job." She shook her head, scattering raindrops off her jacket. "Storm moving in. I should go home. You two, be sure to take shelter."