[A/N: At the end of #17, everyone but Rachel, Marco, and Cassie had been captured. However, the Yeerks released them all due to the oatmeal thing. This never made sense to me. They could have infested at least one of the Animorphs then and there and no one could have stopped them. So I decided to write a fic where they had done that, and this is what emerged, due to my fascination with Rachel and Taylor... Obviously, since this is before #33, they've never met Taylor (or David, for that matter, as he shows up in one of the chapters). Anyway, read on, and enjoy!]


I woke up and it all rushed back. I understood living death; I understood everything, or so it seemed for one long moment. Then I remembered Tom and I understood nothing, because I remembered that, broken as I was, I still faced a choice. It is easy for people without choices to understand, I thought.

I felt my muscles, stiff from days of lying unused. I still didn't know how long I'd been unconscious - did I? Had someone told me? How long had I been asleep?

"Ehxx.." I tried to cry out to see if anyone was there, but the sound gurgled with the pain of thorns in my tender throat. No one answered. No one was there. Were they supposed to leave people like me alone?

Despite the agony, I tried to raise myself up with my bloody stump to see the door. Empty hallway. I was alone. I twisted my neck to lay what was left of my cheek against the pillow.

In doing so, my left eye could see what my right eye should have seen - the hand of a nurse lying against the tile floor. I jerked and cried out as my wasted muscles wrenched in protest. I felt one of the few whole bones I had left snap. I fell back against the sheets helplessly, but not before I saw her.

"Good morning," she greeted me, leaning over the bed. "You're Taylor. And so am I."

And she was - in every sharp feature of her face, in the mocking curve of her smile. She wore a simple leotard that accentuated her - my - perfect figure. I recognized my chin tapped on her face; I saw my high brows at the limits of her forehead. I would have screamed but suddenly I realized there was no point and I only whimpered.

"I pity you, Taylor," she told me softly. "Honestly, I do. But I tried to warn you. I told you to get out. I did, you remember." Her brows wrinkled over her glittering eyes. "Am I trying to convince myself? I guess it doesn't matter..." She shook her head. "You don't know what the Sharing would do to you. It wouldn't be worth it. And everyone knows you'll die in just a few days, Taylor. But none of those are the reason I'm going to kill you. No, it's much simpler - survival. You can't survive because I have to."

She walked around to the other side of my bed, presumably so I could see her better. On the way, she gently closed the door. Her movements were so graceful; were they hers or mine? The lines between us unraveled like broken threads. She placed one hand on my stump. I saw no revulsion on her face.

"Yes, I've seen worse. I've been worse. I've had stumps too, before... grizzly stumps." She laughed. "I guess it doesn't matter what you know now, because you're going to die..."

Her face crumpled. "I don't want to kill you. I don't want to kill anything else, Taylor. But I want so deeply, so desperately, to live... I do..."

Suddenly her long fingers reached under my bed and drew out a small pod, not longer than my forearm. "This is what would have been in your ear in another fifteen minutes," crooned my voice from someone's else's lips. It was so unfair - she had my body and I had nothing, nothing at all! "And then it wouldn't have been you watching someone else control your body in third person, it would have been you watching someone else control your body in first person. Control the original.

"You don't understand, and you never will, but it's okay. I swear what I'm doing is kinder than what they'd do. It is kinder, isn't it?" she babbled as she drew the Yeerk out of the pod. She threw it to the ground quickly, full of disgust. She hit it with the metal pod in a quiet, controlled way, devoid of hate or pleasure. "I don't like killing things anymore, Taylor," she went on. "I don't want to kill anything."

Then she turned back to me. I realized that I still did not know her name. I had nothing to call her but "she." The inhuman cruelty of being killed by someone whose name I did not even know made the death seem more horrible, made the adrenaline rise in my veins. I struggled but ceased with the first stab of pain through my body.

Cool, distant eyes stared into ragged, half-closed ones; both pairs of eyes were mine. I saw the gun as she picked it up from the table by my head. I saw her push a lever up. I knew that she was going to shoot me with it, with this horrible gun that didn't even look real.

"We are each other, Taylor. I'm just making it official."

Tsseew!

The girl dodged hard and fell onto my body. Two more bones snapped. I screamed as she rolled over me and sprang for the window, throwing all of her weight against it. The glass caved beneath a body that was already being covered by coarse brown hair.

"Rachel!" Tom Berenson howled from the doorway, hair falling over his face, hands grasping a gun like hers. He rushed to the window and I heard a solid thump. A slow grin spread across his face.

"She's out," he reported to two nurses in the hall. "Get her. Quickly. Or I'll make sure you're all killed."

A/N: Well, here's the long-awaited chapter 17. I love this chapter, mainly because of the parallel between her intents with Taylor and David's actions with Saddler in book #21. Please review! I haven't written in almost nine months, and I need feedback. With that said, thanks for reading. =)