Chapter 6 (Jake)
Now we definitely had a bad situation. It was the next night and we were all in Cassie's barn again, trying to come to some agreement about what to do about this Joseph character. "There is no way I'm going to let this one slide." That was Lee. She was stationed on her usual bale of hay, and she jumped into the discussion headfirst. "He wasn't in school today, and that suggests bad things to me."
"Maybe you just didn't see him," said Rachel helpfully. "You don't know which lessons he's in with you do you?"
"I had English today. And I know he's in my English class."
"Okay," said Marco, "what if he's just off sick? Or what if the slug in his head's away getting it's butt whipped by Visser 3?"
"He's not a…"
"Controller? How do you know that Lee? You only knew the guy for less than an hour." Marco was getting pretty rattled by this. He hadn't cracked a single joke since they caught up with me yesterday. Funny or otherwise. "You can't tell."
Lee stood up and turned on Marco. "You think I don't know that Marco? You honestly think I'm completely oblivious to the fact that they could be almost anywhere? You have a lot to learn about me – Shorty."
Rachel and Cassie pulled faces to indicate Ouch! Tobias's wing went over his head in the same gesture. Rachel put a hand on Lee's shoulder and I put one on Marco's. I heard Rachel's solemn sounding whisper. "That was a nice one Lee, but you pulled it at completely the wrong time." I glared at her and she shrugged.
"Okay, this isn't what we set out to do." I glanced first at Marco and then at Lee. "We're going to get nowhere if we break into a brawl."
The possible fight was interrupted at this point by the arrival of Erek King. He's a Chee. Meaning that he's an Android. Only he uses holograms to look like a normal boy.
Erek walked in. Looking like a boy. Looking like a boy with a very odd expression on his face.
"You two aren't about to hit each other, are you?" He looked first at Marco and then back at Lee. I couldn't blame him. Marco? In a fist fight? Not exactly Marco's scene.
Ax, who was present in his human morph, was the only one to remember why we were all actually here. "Do you have any information Erek? May-shun. In-four-ma-shun." Ax has this habit of playing with words in his human morph. Andalites don't have mouths you see. It gets slightly irritating after a while.
"What? Oh yeah. Sure." Erek finally wrenched his gaze away from Lee and Marco and concentrated on why he was here. "There's big word going round that Visser 3 has one of the 'Andalite Bandits'. But," he continued, glancing round, "You all seem to be here. So I'm not exactly sure what's going on."
Lee opened her mouth to speak, but held her tongue. I took up the conversation. "There's a kid from our school has disappeared." I explained the connection to Erek. "He wasn't in school today and we think they may have taken him, mistaking him for one of us."
Erek looked thoughtful for a second. "He could be a Controller you know. Maybe the host gained control for a second and shouted that one word."
I glanced at Marco. He had a smug expression on his face, and Lee was seething silently. "Apparently, it wasn't blurted," I concluded. "He thought about it before he actually answered."
"So," said Erek, voicing his thoughts slowly and deliberately. "He's either a good Yeerk, one opposed to the whole earth domination thing, or we have someone who knows about the Yeerks, but not how dangerous they are. Either way he's innocent."
"Either way he's innocent," I repeated in agreement.
After about half an hour's discussion we'd still failed to come up with an answer. Lee and Marco were still on their original teams, Rachel had sort of sided with Lee, and everyone else was still impartial.
I pedalled home fast that night, considering that the skies were threatening to open up. It didn't slowly drizzle, it literally opened up, and completely drenched me. I was dripping by the time I got home.
Tom was sitting in the front room when I got in. "Hey Midget," he called. He saw how wet I was and laughed at me. A big brother type of laugh. Not an alien invader type of laugh. "You go swimming or something?"
I shook my head and the droplets flew all over him. "Pedalled through a storm."
I took the stairs two at a time, making the excuse that I needed to change or I would catch my death of cold. Really, I just needed to get away from Tom. Because I knew it wasn't Tom anymore. That comment about my swimming is what Tom would've said, I didn't doubt that. But Tom was a Controller. The Yeerk in his head was completely controlling him. My brother was trapped in a tiny corner of his own brain and he couldn't get out. What a thought.
I had trouble falling asleep that night. Sleep just refused to come. I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling. My thoughts swayed to Joseph. What was happening to him right now? Was he scared? Would they infest him straight away, or would they wait until the two-hour limit to see if they could get him to morph by himself? But he couldn't morph, or so we thought, so they would have a long wait. If he didn't know anything, he was probably going nuts with all the words they would use, or refer to him by.
I sighed. When we voted, I knew which way I would vote. I just hoped he was still alive to be rescued.