CHAPTER SEVEN: CASSIE

We were all at Rachel's house again. Tobias, Rachel, and I were sitting on her bed. Jake was sitting in her desk chair. Marco was perched on the windowsill. I was trying not to look at Marco. I knew he would be upset if he thought I was being sappy, so I didn't tell him how much of a difference our talk earlier that morning had made to me. That him pointing-out that deciding to do nothing was as much of a decision as deciding to do something was what had given me the strength to decide.

We'd gotten very raw and honest, and it was good - we'd had important stuff to discuss. It had also helped me understand Marco a little more, to realize that what Jake had always seemed to see underneath Marco's flippant exterior really was there. But I also knew that Marco put a lot of value on that flippant exterior, and he wouldn't want me gushing to the others about what we'd said.

He had that whole "image" to protect, you know.

So Jake laid-out what we knew, what I'd told him when I'd asked him to help me call this meeting, and I nodded and tried to look confident and carefully didn't look at Marco.

Giggling over the idea of getting information from a whale helped break the tension, at least.

Then Jake got us back on track with the next phase of the plan. "Cassie and I have been going over maps," he said. "She says the location we're looking for is pretty far out to sea. Too far for us to swim and still have any time left of our two-hour limit."

"Well, that's the ball game, isn't it?" Marco asked. "Demorphing in the water with a whale standing by on lifeguard duty was one thing, but doing it in the middle of the ocean all alone, on purpose…"

He shuddered. I don't think he was the only one.

"Not quite," said Jake. He took a deep breath and I winced, bracing myself; I knew this next part wasn't going to go over well. That was the other part of why I'd been avoiding meeting Marco's eyes. It felt kind of like I was betraying him, since it was only because of him that I had the courage to go on with the mission at all, and my only plan for doing so involved doing something I knew he would hate…

"We're going to borrow a boat."

"Borrow a boat," Marco repeated. "Jake, buddy, I hate to break it to you, but I don't know anybody who owns a boat, especially not one that they'd just hand-off to a bunch of kids, and I don't think any of the local boating companies rent to middle schoolers."

Jake nodded. "I know," he said. "That's why we're going to have an adult get us the boat."

Marco went still. "No," he said. "No way."

"Marco-"

"No, Jake, are you crazy? Are you all crazy?"

"Who are we - oh," Rachel said, sitting up as realization dawned, "Tobias's mom."

Jake nodded. "Yes. Yes to Rachel, probably yes to Marco."

Marco was not appeased by the levity.

Jake sighed. "Marco - " he tried again, but Marco was having none of it.

"And how is that supposed to work, huh, Jake? We hop into this boat with Ms. Mullins and after we tell her we got some directions from a whale, we all putter out to the middle of the ocean and then ask her to close her eyes for a sec while we morph dolphin and drop over the side? And she just, what, sits around and waits for us to come back with an Andalite or three, and miraculously takes us back to shore with no questions asked?"

"No," Jake said, "obviously we'll have to let her in on the plan if we want her to help, but I think we can do it..."

Rachel was nodding. "Yeah," she said, "yeah okay, I can see how that would work."

"You've lost your minds! You've all lost your minds!"

Tobias, I realized, was saying nothing. Like me, he was keeping his head down and letting the others fight it out. That made me feel guilty all of a sudden. This was my idea, at least the initial part of it, and Jake was the one taking all the flak about it because I didn't like confrontation. Because I didn't want to stick my neck out.

"What would you rather we do, Marco? Just sit home and let the Andalite die, or worse be found by the Yeerks?" I took a deep breath and made myself meet his eyes as I did the cruelest thing I think I've ever done. I said, "Deciding to do nothing is a decision too."

Marco's jaw dropped. He gaped at me as though I'd just turned into a Hork-Bajir and stabbed him in the chest. I guess that was a pretty fair comparison. I felt a little like I'd been stabbed in the chest by a Hork-Bajir, and I was the one who'd done the stabbing.

Marco flopped out of the windowsill and slid down the wall to sit on the floor. "Fine," he groaned. "So what's the next part of this terrible awful suicidal plan?"

Some of the tension eased from Jake's strong shoulders. I think he was relieved to hear the resignation in Marco's defeated tone, but I just felt sick.

"Tobias's mom knows a guy - another alien-hunter - who has a boat that Tobias thinks she can probably borrow. The guy's apparently pretty wealthy for ah, uh…"

"A kook," Tobias supplied.

Jake winced. "A kook," he said. "Sure. Well, the guy has a boat down at a local marina that he likes to take out for UFO sightseeing trips, apparently, and like...comet-watching or whatever…"

"You can get better views of the night sky when you're far enough away from land to dodge the light pollution," Tobias informed us all in a toneless voice.

"Right…" said Jake. He took a deep breath and forged ahead. "Well, anyway, the guy is apparently in the hospital for cancer treatment right now, and really distraught that he can't go look for pieces of this alien ship that crashed. So Tobias thinks that if his mom goes to visit and offers to try and find him some wreckage, he'll let her use his boat."

"Just tell me we're not actually going to give this guy alien wreckage?" Marco groaned from behind his hands.

"Of course not!" said Jake, affronted. "These people are used to not finding anything, remember? So when Loren turns-up again empty-handed it won't even be a surprise."

I wonder if Jake felt as bad as I did at taking advantage of a guy with cancer. If he did, he didn't say it.

"So we're only spilling the beans to one massive security risk, not two," Marco said. "Great."

"My mom is not a security risk," Tobias protested.

"Oh no?" Marco dropped his hands so he could raise an eyebrow. "Right, because she was so discreet when Chapman asked her why we were all hunting for alien salvage the other day…"

"Actually," I said, almost before I knew I was going to speak, "I think that worked in our favor."

Everybody turned to stare at me.

I could feel my cheeks get hot. "Well, I mean, if we were trying to keep the fact that we were looking for a spaceship secret, don't you think we'd try to...to keep it a secret instead of just telling anybody who asked what we were doing?"

"That's what I'm saying!" Marco exploded. "She just straight-up told him - !"

"That's my point," I interrupted. I folded my hands together so nobody could see them shake. "No way would anyone suspect anybody who told the truth about something like that to really mean it!"

There was silence for several seconds as everybody puzzled their way through my words, I guess. I'm not at my best when I'm flustered, and I hate when people fight.

(You'd think, being Rachel's best friend, I'd be more used to that. But I'm just not.)

"You think we were too obvious to be suspicious," Marco said at last.

I nodded. "I do," I said.

"I think Cassie's right," said Rachel. "I think that being open about it instead of trying to come up with a cover-story totally disarmed any suspicions Chapman might have had."

"How do you know?" Marco said. "How do you know he isn't just biding his time to get more information?"

"Because Melissa didn't say anything about it to me."

It was time for us all to stare at Rachel now. She, like the superhuman she is, somehow did not blush under the scrutiny.

"If Chapman wanted to fish for information, don't you think it would have been super easy for him to casually mention to Melissa that he saw her friend out looking for aliens on the beach, isn't that weird, what's up with some people's hobbies, huh?" Rachel said. Her mocking sing-song didn't sound much like Mr. Chapman, but I don't think she meant it to. "And then Melissa would totally have asked me about it, because of course you'd want to know what was up if you heard one of your friends was out looking for a crashed spaceship, only she didn't say anything to me at school on Thursday. Not even when I made a point of mentioning that you'd learned how to use a metal detector," she added with a nod at Jake.

He looked pained. "Why would you tell her that?"

"Uhh, because 'my dorky cousin just learned how to use a metal detector, can you believe what a loser he is?' was a great way to subtly raise the subject and give her a chance to ask about it if she'd wanted to."

Jake looked more pained. "Thanks," he said.

Rachel smiled sweetly at him before turning back to the rest of us. "So, what I'm saying is, Chapman doesn't give a crap about us right now."

I hadn't realized how anxious I'd been about running into Chapman on the beach until Rachel said that, and I felt my muscles unclench. "That's great," I said fervently.

"Yeah," Marco agreed, "great. Except that if somebody spots us putting out to sea with Tobias's mom tomorrow, that'll raise all kinds of suspicions all over again. It's one thing to see us goofing around on the beach with the resident alien-chaser for kicks or pity, but chasing rumored spaceships all the way out to the ocean…?"

I winced. He had a point.

I saw Jake wince, too, and knew that he agreed. But now that I'd decided that this was something we needed to do, I didn't want to just abandon the mission - and the Andalite - because of Chapman.

"What if they don't see us on the boat?" I suggested. "What if we sneak aboard?"

Marco turned to Tobias. "Have you seen this boat before? Is it big enough for us to hide on?"

Tobias looked at his knees and shook his head. "It's big enough to fit us all," he mumbled, "but it's just a little power boat. There's no, like, below-decks area where we could hide."

"We could morph something small," I said. "Like a squirrel, or - "

"No lizards," said Jake. He was smiling, so I think he was just trying to defuse the tension, but I think he meant it too.

"Or shews," added Rachel.

We all laughed.

"Seagulls," Tobias said.

We all turned to look at him. He ducked his head, but repeated louder, "Seagulls. We could morph seagulls and then fly out and meet mom when she's already out on the water. Nobody is going to notice a few more seagulls flapping around out there."

"You just have an obsession with anything with wings," Marco grumbled.

"Oh and you hate flying so much," Tobias retorted.

"Touché," said Marco.

"That's a good idea, Tobias," Jake said. "We should definitely consider stuff like how well we blend-in to a place when we're picking out morphs, not just the animal's capabilities. Seagulls are perfect for this."

"We always have seagulls at the clinic," I offered. "I think we have three right now, in fact."

Rachel was nodding eagerly. "If we can figure out the boat's speed - and the average speed of a seagull - we can plot out a place to meet-up that's out of sight of land, join Tobias's mom on the boat and demorph, use Cassie's whale-mapping to find where the spaceship's supposed to be, jump overboard and morph dolphin, find the Andalite or Andalites, bring them back up to the boat, have them morph something small enough to hide once we get back to shore, and bam! Mission accomplished."

I grinned until Jake turned to me and asked, quite seriously, "Do you know the average speed of a seagull, Cassie?"

I stared at him. "Uh, no," I was forced to admit.

"At least that saves us from the whole 'if one boat leaves the marina traveling at twenty knots, and one group of idiot seagull children leaves the beach traveling at ten knots, what time will they meet in the middle of a Yeerk-infested ocean to try and get themselves killed?' math question Rachel was setting us up for," Marco muttered.

"Ha, ha," said Rachel.

Jake waved the problem away. "We can just follow the boat by sight. No one is going to be paying that much attention to a bunch of seagulls over the beach."

"Marco does bring up a good point, though," I said nervously. "The Yeerks are going to be out there, too. We know of at least two groups just from what Marco saw in the paper this morning, and there may be more we don't know about..."

Jake nodded. "There may," he said. "There will definitely be Controllers out there, searching for the same thing we're searching for."

"But they don't have a whale helping them," Tobias pointed-out. He sounded completely serious.

This time, none of us laughed.

"Still gonna be dangerous," Marco said. He looked up at Tobias. His dark eyes were hard. "Are you sure you want to bring your mom into this? Put her in danger by telling her our secrets, then leave her sitting all alone in a boat in the middle of the ocean with Yeerks all around?"

Tobias lifted his head enough to meet Marco's gaze beneath the curtain of his hair. "She already knows enough to put her in danger," he said coolly. "She knows about Andalites, Yeerks, Taxxons. And she knows enough about us already that if she gets infested, we're screwed. So what do we have to lose by telling her the rest?"

"Uh, the fact that we're the 'Andalite Bandits' they want to murder?"

Tobias's smile was pitiless. "You think that any Yeerk that ends up in her head won't be able to put two-and-two together better than she has and figure that out?"

Marco didn't have a smart answer for that. None of us did.

"It is a big risk for her, though, Tobias," I said gently. "Are you sure…?"

He nodded. He didn't meet my eyes, but he nodded without hesitation. "Yes," he said. "She already knows enough to get her into danger. Knowing more might help keep her out of it."

I wasn't sure that that was true. But then, Loren wasn't my mom. Tobias sounded like he was sure. The only thing we could do was trust him.

Besides, if he changed his mind, how else were we supposed to rescue the Andalite?