Memories

Chapter Seven

Jake found me in the library after school on Friday. I was getting ready to leave and paused while packing to mope over my English test. We'd received the results that morning. Unsurprisingly, I'd failed.

"Julie, there you are." Jake startled me when he came up behind me. I jumped a bit and shoved my Lit book into my bag along with the rest of my stuff.

"Hey Jake. What's up?"

He grabbed a chair from the neighboring table and pulled it closer so we could talk without being overheard; there was still a crowd of kids leaving the library.

"Are you okay?" he asked.

"I'm fine. Why?"

He shrugged. "Nothing. You just look a little down."

Avoiding the subject, I shrugged and exaggerated a heavy-lidded expression. "Well, what do you expect? I haven't slept a full night since, well, you know."

Jake looked away and let the subject drop. "Yeah. I guess that could get anyone a little down."

It wasn't a complete lie. I had been sleeping poorly. That and the weight of the secret I carried were starting to take their toll. But somehow I couldn't admit to Jake that it was already affecting more than just my mood. He had enough to worry about without me unloading my complaints on him.

"So, did you come out of your way here to ask me about that or did you have something else on your mind?"

"Did Cassie talk to you?"

"No. Should she have?"

He shook his head slowly. "I just thought she might have mentioned it. We've changed our plans for the theatre." He paused, as if to collect himself. "We're going tonight instead of tomorrow."

Conscious of the other students, I just nodded and tried to hide my surprise behind a mask of sleepiness. "Why?"

"It's going to be too crowded tomorrow."

I rolled my eyes. "I'm not in on the secret code, Jake. Just tell me."

He glanced around, making sure that no one was in earshot. And telling everyone with eyes that we didn't want to be overheard. "There's a group coming tomorrow morning to inspect the place. We thought it would be more...effective to attack tonight."

"And force them to make excuses to inspectors in the morning." I nodded in approval and stared at my hands, trying to think. "How'd you find out?"

Jake fidgeted very slightly. "Tobias found out. He's been keeping an eye on them during the day."

I nodded again, mind racing as I tried to think of what needed to be done to move our plans up a day. I started to ask another question and stopped mid-thought.

Jake didn't need me to help him fine-tune the plans. The fidgeting, the pauses, his whole nervous demeanor suddenly clicked into place. He'd had the whole thing planned out for a while, probably most of the day, and had put off telling me until the last moment.

That little bastard, keeping me out of something so important. It was my first real mission and I was rattled enough, but to learn that my comrade-in-arms didn't trust me enough to even tell me about-

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to clear my thoughts. It was my first mission. That fact alone provided enough angst for an army of pre-teens; there was no need to add even more drama.

Jake was watching me carefully when I opened my eyes again, so I did my best to hide my resentment. To keep up a cooperative, if slightly confused, pretense. "What do I need to do?"

Rather than spend more of my allowance on bus fare, I flew to Cassie's barn that night. I passed Jake and Marco on the way there and arrived early. Cassie didn't say anything about it when I climbed down from the loft; she simply lent me a pair of boots and put me to work moving wire cages.

When the boys arrived a few minutes later, Marco headed for a bale of hay but Jake came to help us stack cages. I pointedly ignored him, the slight from earlier that day still fresh on my mind.

In fact, I did too good a job ignoring him. I worked automatically, moving the cages from a haphazard pile to a neat pyramid but my mind turned inward and stewed over Jake's insult. The same way it had for most of the evening.

How dare they do this to me? How could they? I was willing to risk my life for this group, even if I hadn't had the chance to prove it quite yet. Didn't that count for something? And perhaps I hadn't been dealing with the secret as long as they had, but that didn't mean I wasn't already paying for it.

Well, who needs them? If they didn't want to include me in the group, then fine. After all, the whole point of the Animorphs was to save the world, not to make new friends. All I had to do was fight and avoid loosing my mind. I didn't need them.

I did my best to ignore that little voice in the back of my mind telling me that I was being ridiculous. That they were right to be mistrustful and that I was obsessing over something trivial to take my mind of the morphing we were about to do. That little voice might have been right, but I was in no mood to admit it.

"Ow! Watch what you're doing there, Julie."

"Oh. Sorry, Jake." Lost in my thoughts, I'd accidentally hit Jake with a cage.

Cassie gently took it from me and added it to the stack. "That's the last one. Thanks for your help."

A dismissal if ever I've heard one. Disgruntled but determined not to show it, I gave her a little smile and went to join Marco who was lounging on a bale of hay.

"What's up?" I asked, leaning against the wall and crossing my arms to keep them from shaking.

"Oh, nothing much. Just another Friday, you know? We often spend the weekends doing odd chores in someone else's barn."

I rolled my eyes at him and decided not to ask anymore obvious questions.

Marco sat up and faced me, sitting cross-legged on top of the bale. "Nervous?"

"Aren't you?"

He put on an expression of mock surprise. "Who me? Nervous? I am beyond nervous. I have turned paranoia into an art form. You are looking at the King of Fear. Can't you tell?"

"What should have been my first clue?"

"The bad jokes?" Jake offered from one corner of the barn where he was still helping Cassie clean up.

"No one asked you," he called back. "Would it make you feel better if I curled up in a little ball and cried?"

"No. It would probably scare me shitless."

"Well, good, because I wasn't going to. I don't think my manly pride could stand such a thing."

I laughed in spite of myself. "'Manly pride?' Who in this barn are you trying to impress?"

He paused for a split-second, then glanced over at the barn door. "Rachel, of course."

I turned to follow his gaze. Rachel was just walking in. Cassie saw her too and waved her over.

Marco leaned in close and lowered his voice like he was telling me some dark secret. "But, unfortunately, she's playing the lead role in the Anirmorphs version of Romeo and Juliet."

My eyes lit up at the mention of this bit of gossip. "And I gather you're not Romeo?"

He shook his head and sighed melodramatically. "Alas, no."

Which left Tobias and Ax. My money was on Tobias.

"I had no idea you were such a gossip-monger."

At that point, Jake and the others joined us, very business like. "Ax and Tobias should be getting here any minute. We'll leave as soon as they do."

"Great," I said, a bit too enthusiastically, my voice cracking a bit at the end.

Rachel gave me a look, but before anyone could say anything Tobias flew in the open loft door. -(Hey. Is everyone ready?)-

Jake nodded. "Let's go."

Marco took the opportunity to climb down from the bale of hay, leaning close to me as he did so. "Don't be nervous," he whispered.

The plan was simple. Get in, cause some damage, and get out before anyone has a chance to get hurt. It sounded safe enough, but the way the others were acting told me they expected something to go horribly wrong. And no matter how many times I told myself that it was just vandalism with a bit a morphing thrown in to make it interesting, I couldn't shake off that sense of foreshadowing.

It was full dark when we left. Late enough that I didn't even have to make excuses to Mom; I'd just gone to bed early. We traveled as owls, making a sweep of the neighborhood first to make sure everything was relatively quiet. On a Friday evening it's too much to ask that the area be deserted, but at least all the people were closer to the mall and out of our way. We landed behind the QuickStop one by one and demorphed, then remorphed and waited for Jake's command to attack.

We were a strange little zoo gathered there behind the gas station; a tiger, a grizzly, a gorilla, a wolf, and a Komodo. And one creature that would never be seen in a zoo; Ax in his Andalite form. Tobias had been convinced to morph into an owl in order to pull lookout duty.

-(Everyone ready?)- Jake asked.

Rachel shifted from one foot to the other, then dropped on all fours. -(This doesn't feel right, just attacking an empty building.)-

Jake glanced from the nearby theatre to his cousin, and unnaturally human gesture for a tiger. -(Yeah, well, let's get this over with.)-

-(Don't worry, Rachel,)- Marco put in. -(With our luck you'll probably get all the action you want.)-

Rachel growled and narrowed her eyes at him. -(That's not what I meant.)-

-(Enough,)- Jake cut them off before they could continue. -(Let's just do this.)- With that he took off toward the building and the rest of us had no choice but to follow.

The Komodo had poor eyesight and the sense of hearing was weak. They can't hear anything high or low pitched. It was like trying to listen with cotton balls stuffed in my ears. Not that there was anything interesting to listen to. But as soon as I flicked out my forked tongue and 'tasted' the air, none of that seemed to matter. I could sense everything around me, in details one can't get from sight or sound. I could taste the others, the remnants of their human selves from the station, the cat in the next alley over, the rain that was coming, even the people three blocks away at the mall. I could taste every nuance of heat, of moving flesh, of adrenaline and fear.

The others were scared. I tasted it. And they should be. I was the Komodo dragon. The top of my food chain. There was nothing that could take me on and survive. Not that it mattered at the moment. I wasn't hungry, so I was content to let them run away. In fact, the chill of the night air made me want find a nice burrow and sleep until morning. Then I'd wake up and find some nice patch of sunlight to-

-(Julie, come on. Get the lead out.)-

Oh shit. I snapped out of my complacent state, cursing myself for having fallen prey to an animal's instincts yet again.

Pushing the thought aside as something to obsess over later, I sprinted after the group, body shifting from side to side, belly and tail dragging the ground. Dragons are much faster than they look, so I caught up with the others by the time they reached the door. Rachel made short work of the flimsy lock and we streamed inside.

-(Alright,)- Marco cried with mock-glee, rubbing his gorilla palms together. -(Time to cause a little chaos.)-

Which is exactly what we proceeded to do, in a very clinical, methodical way. The lobby was full of stacks of material, unfinished projects, tools, furniture, and litter. Everyone separated, taking something and destroying it. Jake climbed the snack bar counter and entered the still-open ceiling, ripping out wires and clawing at support beams. Marco worked on the stacks of building materials, smashing stacks of tiles and using two-by-fours to demolish the walls. Cassie, Rachel, and Ax disappeared further into the building where the actual theatres were. And I headed for the offices.

At first I was stumped by the temporary walls. After a few moments of pacing in front of the door I couldn't open, I got an idea that would have made me grin if I'd had lips. Moving to the middle of the wall, where it was hopefully weaker, I stood on my hind legs using my tail for support and slammed all 200 pounds of my bulk into the obstacle. The wall, which was little better than an over-glorified cubicle separation, crashed inward, leaving the office exposed.

-(Interesting technique,)- Marco commented from across the room.

-(Flattery will get you nowhere,)- I told him. I moved into the office and clawed the chair to bits, then managed to drag the computer off the desk by its cords and destroyed that too.

We worked for about ten minutes, causing a mess that was mostly superficial. Rachel was right, though. Something about the whole project was off. I noticed how eerie it was, working with such efficiency on a mission that pretty much amounted to vandalism. We were fighting to save the world. So where was the fight?

-(They're here!)-

Rachel's almost jubilant cry startled me as I was about to attack the last standing wall. Who are 'they?' But Marco and Jake seemed to have been waiting for just such a thing; they abandoned their projects and raced toward the others. I was just a second behind them.

'They' turned out to be a group of human Controllers, three of them each carrying a small sidearm and a panicked look. As we entered Rachel's grizzly threw one human across the theatre where he slammed into the far wall and fell out of sight behind a row of chairs. A second tried to shoot Cassie, but she dodged and leapt for his arm, sinking her teeth into it. He screamed and fell under her weight but she released him and used the momentum to run for the last remaining Controller.

Seeing the fate of her companions, the Controller turned and fled the way she'd come, through a door set in the floor where the screen would later be installed. Cassie was after her in a flash, Jake right on her heels. I hadn't even realized that Jake and Marco had entered the fight; I was still standing in the doorway watching everything happen.

Part of me considered staying where I was. After all, two of the enemy were out of action and the third was on the run. As I hesitated and Rachel tried to solve the problems that the narrow stairs presented, Ax entered the scene and nearly tripped over me.

-(Over there,)- I told him, heading for the front and acting as if I'd simply paused to collect myself. Ax ignored my statement of the obvious and stepped nimbly around me. My Komodo was nearly too big for the aisle left between the wall and stack of chairs waiting to be installed.

-(Out! Out!)- Jake screamed as he and Cassie reappeared. -(They're bringing backup. Is there anyway to block the door?)-

Marco was two steps ahead of him, dragging over a stack of construction material that had been piled on a tarp.

-(Everyone into the hall.)-

I was more than willing to follow that command, but I couldn't turn. My body was too wide. Too low to the ground. I turned down an isle, hoping to find a place to turn around, only to discover the stacks of chairs and material looked like a maze from my view so close to the ground. I finally managed to squeeze around a corner and make it back to the far wall, and therefore the door, about the time seven Hork-Bajir burst through the obstacle on the stage and the others escaped into the hall. I couldn't see the Hork-Bajir from where I was, but I could hear them and taste them.

Suddenly I saw what Jake was doing, escaping into the hall. There were seven Hork-Bajir, but they could only go through the door one at a time. He meant to force them into a bottle-neck at the exit and take them out one at a time. Well, certainly I could help with that. I was hidden along the only escape rout. And the Komodo is master of the ambush.

I fell deeper into the Komodo mind, telling it that the warm bodies it sensed were food. It took some work, as he still wasn't very hungry, but the instincts were all there. He knew how to hunt. The Komodo sensed them pause on the stage, then take off in single file line down the exit aisle.

The sight of my first Hork-Bajir would have shocked me if I weren't already deep in the mindset of the Komodo. Being top of a food chain will do that to a creature; make him completely fearless. As the last alien went by, I struck, sprinting out from my hiding place at an alarming speed and grabbing the creature's tail in my jaws. He went sprawling and I crawled on top of him, tearing anything I could find with my claws. He stopped screaming after my jaws found his throat. The sound of it didn't even bother me. It was the sound of a prey that knew he was lost. A sound the Komodo knew well.

I stopped my attack and stepped away from my prey, slightly winded from all the sudden activity. Feeding could wait until after a short rest. But not too short; others would smell the blood and come to join the feast.

-(Julie! Where are you?)-

Cassie's voice in my head snapped me out of whatever state I'd been in. I blinked, suddenly seeing the dead Hork-Bajir as just that: dead. Not prey, but a murdered creature. Killed. By me.

-(Julie!)-

There was no time to mourn. No time to think. No time to do anything but let the Komodo rule again. The Komodo wasn't bothered by the sounds and smells of death. By the carrion in the middle of the aisle. I poked and prodded that mind, keeping just enough of myself conscious to direct the attack, but hiding everything else behind those cold instincts. Just for now. Just long enough to see this through.

In the hall, the other Animorphs battled the remaining Hork-Bajir. Cassie was already missing a leg, Jake a tail. Ax was in the middle of everything, his tail flashing faster than my eye could follow.

No time for that. Just have to fight. To hunt.

The nearest Hork-Bajir had his back to me, wrestling with Rachel's grizzly. I sprinted over and hooked him in the thigh, bringing him down to my level. He lashed out with clawed feet and elbow and wrist blades, but I ignored the cuts and went for the belly. The dragon's favorite attack. I missed as he twisted and clawed his back instead, but it had the same effect. His scream was cut short and he went limp. Rachel was already gone, fighting the last standing enemy.

Jake surveyed the damage, then cocked his head to one side, listening to something I couldn't hear. -(Everyone out. Back the way we came. Tobias? What's it look like outside?)-

-(You're clear for about three blocks. Head left when you get out. There's an ally just across the street.)-

We ran. We ran for our lives, but I was starting to slow down. Komodos are fast enough sprinters, but they're not made for long distance. We disappeared down the alley before the Controllers could regroup and come after us. We demorphed, morphed again to birds, and left before they could find us. And if anyone noticed six owls leaving from the same alley, they didn't say anything. They seemed more interested in things on the ground anyway.

The others were talking, joking away their post-battle jitters as I flew along in silence, not listening. Not trusting myself to speak.

-(Julie, how are you holding up?)-

I didn't really hear Cassie's question. The owl was another predator. Another set of cold, unfeeling instincts I could hide behind. I wanted to fly forever. To just keep flying until I found the edge of the earth and then to fly off that. But somewhere in the back of my mind I knew I'd have to demorph. Become human. Loose my defense against what I'd done.

-(Julie?)- Jake's tone was a bit more forceful.

-(What?)-

-(Are you okay?)-

-(Of course. Why wouldn't I be? I'm fine. Just fine.)-

Something in my 'voice' must have told them to back off, because they did.

-(Alright, guys, it's late. Everyone just go home. We'll meet up tomorrow.)-

Tobias, Ax, and Cassie split off toward the woods while Rachel and Marco headed back to their houses. But Jake and I lived next door to each other, and we couldn't risk someone noticing a pair of owl out on a midnight joy ride.

-(You go first,)- Jake offered. -(I'll fly around the neighborhood a bit more. Just to be safe.)-

It was the same suggestion I wanted to make. He just beat me to it. We were each about a block away from our houses, but in opposite directions. I landed on my roof first, then the back porch.

-(Hey Julie?)- Jake asked as I started to demorph.

-(Yeah?)-

-(You did well tonight.)-

-(Thanks.)-

-(I mean it. And I know how hard it is, after a battle. If you want someone to talk to...)-

My mouth had already formed so I couldn't answer him. I couldn't reassure him that I would be fine, that he didn't have to worry about anything, so I just finished demorphing and entered the house.

It wouldn't have been true. I was anything but fine. And I couldn't let him know.

A.N. For anyone wondering about Julie's 'attack' on the wall, it's something the Komodo really do during mating season. Male Komodo fighting for the attention of a female will stand on their hind legs and wrestle, the loser being the first one pinned to the ground.