Taylor had been carrying the cube when she walked in. That helped me to relax a little. I was still shaken up from hearing the sirens in my cat half-morph and having to quickly reverse and come up with an alternate plan. Owl, that had been a good plan, sure. In that town. If any of my friends... if any of the Controller Animorphs had seen me, it would have been all over. But hey, less conspicuous than eagle, right? I was still alive, and free, and in those troubled times I couldn't expect anything better.
The guy named Patrick had been arrested. That was depressing. In him, I'd seen a shadow of myself, a shadow of a blond girl in a construction site drawing the Hork-Bajir away from her friends. I remembered that moment. It was the first moment when I'd really lived in my own skin.
His nearly delirious joy fleeing the cops had been obvious to my owl eyes. He'd felt it, as I had: the transcendance from a normal life.
There were no rules. At school, I was a pretty obedient kid. Follow the rules, stay on the teacher's good side, be proper, make the good grades -- be the model student, Rachel, don't ever cross the lines. No one would have believed that of me, but it was true: those were the thoughts swimming in my head at the honor assemblies, the gymnastic meets, everything. Upholding propriety. Upholding my image. And the darkness in my eyes never showed. Don't cross the lines, Rachel.
But in this world, in my world, the lines had been crossed for me. You had to fight, fight, fight up against a far greater enemy that could destroy you but maybe I loved it, maybe I loved it, because, in just that one area of my life, there were no boundaries. There was no propriety to be upheld. There was no doubt about what we had to do. I could do it, throw myself into it entirely. Don't worry about ticking anyone off. Just worry about stopping them. Be the bear, Rachel, be what you want to be -- not just the highest you have the potential to be. Don't let your abilities control you. Just fight, Rachel.
And Patrick had felt that. It had glowed in his wild green eyes, wild green eyes that were doubtless no longer his. He had to be infested already. The Yeerks don't want that fire, sure, but what was more of an insult was the fact that they probably hadn't noticed. He was no threat; he could not morph; his fire was useless. Mine was not.
Tobias, Tobias, where are you? I need you... Unbidden, the cry flowed from my soul.
I heard a hacking cough from the upstairs, and it jarred me out of my thoughts. I glanced at the clock. I'd wasted a half hour lying on the Oriental rug, my blank stare fixed on the blank wall.
The cough rattled in the air again. I trotted upstairs, dimly remembering that Taylor's mother was out of town, visiting some friend. For some reason I felt uneasy being alone in the house with a sleeping girl and -- judging by the smell -- her cigarette-and-alcohol addicted father.
The study was smoke-filled. Bored, I crept inside and sat down silently behind the chair across the desk from the old man. He didn't see me. He was sobbing too hard to see much of anything.
"The company..." he moaned softly, talking to himself. "We were doing so well, and... now..." His head slid into his hands, the classic picture of grief. "How can I tell them that this is all over, how can we just move on? They can't live without this, they won't live without any of this..."
He sprang up and threw a paperweight at the stars that smirked through the window. The glass shattered. "We're falling apart anyway!" he cried out, snarling at himself through clenched teeth. "They'll leave, Mark, you know they will. They'll just leave." His face crumpled. His eyes were empty. He was a shell of a man; the soul had taken its leave already.
A knife of pity cut through me. Something about tears trailing down those high, sunken cheeks would have wrenched the heart of a Taxxon. It was so classic -- something out of a book, a movie -- the businessman destroyed by the failure of his company, talking to himself, drinking, smoking, crying...
Desperate, he moved back to the desk, snatching up a cigarette. His trembling fingers fumbled with the lighter, then dropped the lit white cylinder in the ash tray as he groped for the liquor glass.
Fire. Alcohol.
I shot out of there.
I don't know if it was intentional or not. I don't know if the empty-eyed businessman took his life, or if it was just a freak accident. I don't know if he planned to destroy the family he imagined -- or knew -- no longer loved him, or if he died calling their names. I don't know. I couldn't hear. The explosion drowned everything else out.
I felt it singe my fur. I felt it hammer the adrenaline through me. I felt it drive the fear through my head. I ran.
I demorphed as I ran. It didn't matter if Taylor saw me now. There was no way anyone could survive this.
You could save her, my nagging conscience whined. You have morphs that can survive anything. You could drag one girl to safety.
Compromise. I won't kill her. Let nature take its course. See what would have happened if I wasn't here. Like the Ellimist, haha, I'm as powerful as the Ellimist, and I just sit back and let things happen...
I pushed those thoughts out of my head. It was time to focus.
The whole place was going to go up in flames, and I needed that box.