Chapter 1

Marco

Now I'd gone and done it. I was the one who made Jake see that in order to beat evil, he had to be just as ruthless. Great going, I know. I'd just heard him give the command to ram the Blade ship. I saw the look of surprise on the creature's face that was still on the monitor. I felt the thrusters kick in and the inertial compensators valiant effort to keep us all standing. I saw the Blade ship, always an awesome sight, rushing to get up-close and personal with the bow of the Rachel. I saw-

-An Andalite fighter?! Where did it come from? Something was terribly wrong, and I knew I was dead. See, the Rachel had been about two seconds away from colliding with the Blade ship, and here I was, standing on cracked pavement, staring at a crashed Andalite fighter, creaking and smoking. Just like…

I felt a hand on my shoulder, but I couldn't bring myself to look. A single tear formed at the corner of my eye as the emotions came rushing back. Elfangor, dying…our decision to fight…the three long years of constant horror, fear, and helplessness…I gazed at the sky, and realized for the first time in a long time how beautiful the stars were.

"Marco?" Jake's voice whispered. Jake's voice, but somehow different. It seemed amplified in this silent parody of the night we met Elfangor. I turned to look and almost fainted. It was Jake, all right, but he was thirteen again. Seven full years younger than he'd been twenty seconds ago. My mind was spinning, reeling, and nothing made sense. Somehow, though, everything made sense. I looked down at my arms and saw that they were covered in barely visible, downy hairs, not the adult hair I was used to. My hands shot to my face and my head. My hair was still long, the way I used to wear it in my early teen years, and no harsh stubble on my cheeks grazed my hands.

The dream-like state got even more surreal when I looked around more. Cassie, Tobias, and..Rachel? I had been through all kinds of hell. I had seen things that were so far beyond belief that I still didn't know if I were just crazy. But seeing Rachel, beautiful as always, jaw locked in that look of determination that I'd seen so many times before…I swear to you, I was never closer to fainting than I was right then.

Past Rachel, trotting up to us, was Ax. His tail was raised and ready, fists clenched, stalk eyes looking in a million directions at once. He kind of broke us out of the dream state by shouting in thought-speak. (What in the seven hells of Boonti is going on?!) Ax has kind of gotten a lot tougher since being made a prince and captain of his own ship.

At Ax's cry, a bunch of things happened at once. Jake raised a hand to calm Ax, and I could see the gears grinding away in his head. I actually felt ten degrees calmer and automatically thought of a couple funny things to say, but I bit my tongue. Tobias, almost comically, looked like he was watching a ping-pong game on fast forward and jumped into the air screaming, "AW! AW!," flapping wings he no longer had. Rachel, shocked, sat down very suddenly. Suddenly enough that I winced and imagined a cracking tail bone. Cassie stopped everybody cold with what she said next.

"Calm down, everyone. Ellimist? We're all here."

(Yes, Cassie. It is I. If everyone will relax, I will explain everything,) came that everywhere-at-once voice I was so used to hearing in weird situations such as my current one.

"You'd better," I said. "I was about to be blown to atoms, something I was really looking forward to. Hurry up so I can get back to it."

Jake shot me a look, and I shut up. He was right: now was not the time to be joking. It was life or death here, probably death.

(Where are you?) Ax demanded.

The Ellimist appeared in the form of the blue-man torso I was also used to. I was glad. For a moment, I was afraid he would step out of the fighter in Elfangor's form, but he was far too smart for that. The confusion that would have come from that decision wouldn't help anybody. (I have brought you all here, now, to make a choice no less difficult or important as the first one you made here. Crayak and I have made a deal that will affect everything forever. I call on you again to be the heroes that you are, for the fate of the galaxy.)

Rachel was looking stupid and lost. Maybe it was insensitive, but I was getting pissed. I pointed at Rachel with a shaking finger and said, "Maybe you'd better explain that."

(It was part of the deal. Rachel is really alive. She is really with you again.)

"Why are we thirteen years old, Ellimist?" Cassie asked gently. Getting mad was not her style. She 'killed with kindness,' I guess you could say.

(Only a trick of time, Cassie. If you agree to what I offer, you will be the same exact age as you were when I plucked you from your timeline.)

"About to die, again?" I demanded.

(No. You will be in your homes on Earth with twenty-four hours to get your affairs in order before you embark on this final journey.)

I was about to agree, no matter what this 'journey' was, because anything was better than certain death, right? But Jake beat me to it and said, "As usual, you've put us in a position in which we pretty much have to do whatever you want. Marco, Tobias, Ax, and I can say no and die. Rachel can stay…the way she was. Or we can agree to go on your little mission. Clever as usual, Ellimist." He looked about ready to spit at the mystical being. I kind of wished he would.

Rachel stuttered, like she didn't know how to use her own voice. She did not rise from the pavement. "I was somewhere cold. Dark. Lonely. Is that what it's like to…die?" she whispered.

I almost broke down at hearing that. I'd never heard Rachel sound like that, so small, weak, insignificant. If there was one thing that was constant in our little war against the Yeerks, it was Rachel always out in the front. She was brave to the point that I almost thought she was stupid sometimes. She'd even died bravely. Valiently, even. Nothing that King Arthur, George Washington, or Davy Crockett had ever done could begin to compare. I realized I'd begun to think of Rachel like a mythical being, like Odysseus or Xena or somebody like that – someone who could never be as courageous as they were without supernatural help from the gods or whoever. I found myself wanting to run to her, comfort her, hold on to her until she got a grip on herself and became the herculean warrior that I knew her as. Tobias realized that he wasn't a bird, I guess, because he was just standing there with his arms wrapped around himself like it was cold, except this place the Ellimist created didn't really exist, and temperature didn't exist either. He just stood there, shivering, staring at Rachel like he didn't know what to do. Cassie looked about ready to cry. Jake and Ax, though from different species, had the exact same look somehow: cornered, but hard and dangerous at the same time.

"What is it that you wish for us to do?" came a grating voice from behind a humongous portion of a concrete pipe. A seven-foot-tall, bladed dinosaur stepped out and quickly surveyed the situation with extremely intelligent eyes. Her eyes went big at the sight of Rachel, but there was no hesitation in Toby Hamee's steps as she went to her. Toby gently lifted Rachel off of the ground, careful not to let her blades get in the way, and this act of emotion must have overwhelmed the newly reincarnated girl. She turned to the hulking beast we called a friend and buried her face into the pebbly skin and steel-cable muscles of Toby's chest, sobbing softly. Toby wrapped her snake-like neck around Rachel and let a soft purr escape her throat, probably the Hork-Bajir equivalent of, 'shhh.'

The Ellimist waited for Rachel's sobs to die down, which they did very quickly. Toby did not let go of Rachel, but lifted her head from Rachel's shoulder and gave him an inquiring look. The Ellimist spoke. (If you accept, you will go to a planet called Xylen. There you will find a sentient species that call themselves the Taruffs. As soon as I receive your answer, assuming you agree, seven of Crayak's chosen diplomats will visit a race in a solar system neighboring the Taruffs. All I can tell you of the people Crayak wishes to subvert is that they are called Trunsk. His diplomats will do everything in their power to incite the Trunsk to destroy the Taruffs. The Trunsk are warlike as it is, and on the verge of zero-space travel. With Crayak's diplomats to push them over the top, I fear that the Trunsk could be able to reach Xylen in force in less than a standard year.)

"Great!" I fumed. "Wonderful! So we try to get the wimps to defend themselves against the new bad boys of the galaxy who are going to come in, guns blazing, and blow them away. That sounds somewhat familiar. Oh, that's right. Story of my life," I complained. Jake shot me another look with his strangely unfamiliar teenage face, but I ignored it. "What's the trick? What could be in this for you?"

(There is no trick, Marco,) the Ellimist said calmly. (This is different from previous games that Crayak and I have played.)

I started to tell him what to go and do with his games, but Cassie spoke first. "Different how?"

(The loser of this is going to be exiled and, more than likely, destroyed,) the Ellimist said, sounding as subdued as a super-powerful being could sound.

Ax spoke, and he didn't sound mad anymore. (If we succeed, Crayak would be gone forever. You would be the one and only power in the galaxy. You could make life for everyone happy and prosperous. You could make hunger, fear, suffering, and grief disappear entirely. You could rewrite everything so none of us ever knew what it felt like to be afraid, to feel pain.)

The Ellimist seemed to smile. (I could, but I would never do such a thing.)

Cassie nodded. "You can't take away everything negative and only have positive. It would never work. If you didn't know sadness, you could never know happiness. If you never knew fear, you couldn't possibly know relief."

The Ellimist's not-quite-real smile broadened. (Young Cassie, you amaze me. It will be millions of years before any sentient species embraces that idea, but you have achieved the highest level of understanding the physiology of the human brain could allow.)

"Yeah, yeah, great," Rachel said, wiping her face on the sleeve of her sweater that didn't even really exist. "Crayak bad. No more Crayak, good. We got it. How do we make it happen?" she said, and I swear to god I almost died of relief. Even returning from the dead, it didn't take Rachel long to get back into butt-kicking mode. I saw Jake's slow grin, and felt a similar expression come across my face like a spilled liquid. With that statement from Rachel, it was if a message was carved in stone for the galaxy to see: we were back.