8. Three Mothers
"So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope."
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
Estrid-Corrill-DarrathThe Ralek River is named for a philosophical concept that originates in the westernmost Great Gardens. According to this philosophy, there are many thought-rivers into which one may dip one's hoof, and the key to the contemplative life is to drink these carefully and selectively. The Ralek River is the thought-river that flows from one's ancestors, a continuous stream of thought from every fallen Andalite of your ancestral land enshrined in your djesculi.
(If there really is such a thing as a Ralek River, then it is fortunate I bear my mother's djesculi, Corrill, so my mind need not drink from the open sewer that is Semitur.)
The thought-river of this ship, the Ralek River, is poisoned.
I passed by Arbat's quarters, and remembered all the times he would bring me there to teach me lessons, even as he secretly planned to make a fool of me. I did my best not to remember seeing his corpse spilling blood through the open doorway. I passed through the entrance corridor on my way for a walk through the Living Hive, and saw the place where Aloth had left a Hork-Bajir in a pool of green blood, repeating the violent cycle of my father's idiotic mistakes, just like me. In the drop shaft, I passed the second floor of the ship, poisoned by the ruins of my lab and all the mistakes I might have made that were now beyond my power to correct.
On the first floor, I came upon a doorway and paused. This room, too, was poisoned by my mistakes. But not everything here was dead. I pressed my hand to the lock panel and entered.
I stared down into the Pool that Aximili and the human named Peter and Mirazai had built for my use. Of the eleven Yeerks that the Animorphs had brought here, ten had survived, at least so far. The survivors had shown no side effects that I could detect, but so little time had passed since the infections. It was still possible that I was a foolish little girl who had ruined everything, and now that Aximili had destroyed my lab, I might never know for certain. I had no way to monitor their condition now.
And so, I realized, there was no longer any reason to keep them here.
I cast about the room for a bucket. I found the small one I had used to add essential electrolytes to the sludge and picked it up with my tail. I needed these Yeerks off the ship, now. It was wrong for them to be here. Perverse. Impatient, imprecise, I sifted through the opaque liquid with the net I had used to catch them for injections and fluid draws. Taking the twice the time I might have with patience and calm, I transferred them one by one into the bucket until I had all ten.
I walked out of the ship with no one to remark on the bucket hanging from my tail — the ship was agonizingly quiet now, with no work to occupy my mind — until I drew near the Aftran Plisam Pool, and a Yeerk was in my way. It was Illim, who had watched me lose a fight to brutish, desperate Aximili. Who had very likely saved my life from his fury. I owed my life to a Yeerk. My hooves choked with the shame of it.
He stood firm between me and the Pool, as if he were a meaningful obstacle. He said, "What are you doing here, Estrid?"
«I am not here to harm your Pool,» I said. I swung my tail forward, showing him the bucket. «I am here to grant clemency. My medical trials are over. The subjects may go free now.»
Illim stared at the bucket, then looked in my main eyes. When he spoke this time, his voice was quieter. "I appreciate the thought. But you can't release those Yeerks into the Aftran Plisam Pool. You should take them back to your ship."
«Why?» I demanded. I imagined returning the Yeerks to the Pool on the Ralek River, and my stomachs clenched with something close to panic.
"Those Yeerks are host-breakers. Do you know what those are?" I did not, and thankfully did not have to admit my ignorance, because the Yeerk went on without pause. "They are Yeerks who have specially trained in techniques of psychological domination and torture, the type that only a Yeerk can perpetrate. They discipline and control rebellious hosts. Like the disabled children with the Peace Movement who couldn't escape the hospital with the others." He gestured toward the bucket hanging from my tail. "These are war criminals. Do you have any idea how difficult and dangerous it is to integrate people like them back into society?"
I am largely ignorant of human body language, but I had a sense from Illim's cold look that he thought he had me cornered. That he was about to force me to admit my ignorance on a subject that I had only pretended to understand. In fact, he had done precisely the opposite.
I took a single step forward. «I know exactly what that is like, Yeerk. Better than you ever could. I have seen it all. The way a person who has made a terrible choice becomes an abomination in the eyes of his fellow people. The way they try to cut him off like a gangrenous limb, as if that could prevent his moral rot from spreading. The ones who hope they can make the crime disappear by never mentioning it. The ones who make the criminal into a lower species, so they never have to admit that they could have made the same choice. Yes, Illim. I am sure your fellows in that Pool would like to return these host-breakers to my ship, so they need never contend with how their actions reflect on who they themselves may be. Very well. I will quarantine this moral disease, the same way we have quarantined Aloth and everything he signifies. But I will keep them alive, and one day, I promise you, you will face them.»
Illim stared at me. For the first time, I noticed that he too was carrying a bucket from the Ralek River, which he now held to his chest with both arms. "Who was it for you?" he said. "It was my grandfather. For me."
All four of my eyes locked on him. Grandfather. That was a meaningless term to a Yeerk. Which meant — «You are not Illim.»
The corner of the human's mouth turned up. "Too stupid to speak for myself, am I? Or does Illim disgust you so much that he drowns me out completely?" He raised an arm from its grip around the bucket and waved it from side to side. "Hi. Julian Tidwell." He shook the bucket a little, sloshing its contents. "You can't see her, but my dæmon Kalysico is in here. She's a four-eyed butterflyfish." I was honestly relieved that I could not see her; the way that human Guide Animals were always on display disturbed me. I only invite a very select few to come visit Surra Erf's grove. "You don't have to tell me who it was for you. I'll tell you mine." He stared into the distant glow of the Hive-fungus and stirred a finger absently in the bucket that held his Guide Fish. "My mother fled here from another human nation because of the ascension of a terrible dictator. My grandfather stayed there, because he loved the dictator. He reported his neighbors to the secret police. For all I know, he may have been the secret police. And when the dictator died, and his reign of terror was over, my grandfather was still part of our family. And somehow, we had to live with that."
I nearly told him. It mortifies me to admit that. I nearly told my father's entire story to an alien stranger. My knees went weak, and in all my shame and exhaustion, all I wanted was to fall to the ground and confess. To tell someone, anyone, what it was like to live tainted by the crimes of the father who had become the Abomination before I was out of the pouch.
No, that is not right. I am twisting my words again. Here is the truth: I am not ashamed that I nearly told Julian the story of my family, the public humiliations and private torments, my and Mother's desperate attempts to be feshlath between the herd of the honorable and the herd of the monstrous. I am ashamed that I did not tell him. It horrifies me that I am so imprisoned by my own shame that I could not even confess to an alien totally outside my world's hierarchies and preconceptions. I tried to make the excuse to myself that it was because he couldn't possibly understand, but I knew in my hearts that was not true. In truth, it was because I was weak, and like any injured prey animal, I was afraid to show any weakness. Perhaps that makes me a poor example of an Andalite, but after trying so hard to prove myself otherwise, I can now admit that that is all I have ever been.
«Tell Illim,» I said to the human named Julian Tidwell and his Guide Fish. «Make him understand.» I turned around, and as I returned the Yeerks from the bucket to the Pool, I wondered bitterly what my prisoners had made of this interlude, in their ignorance.
Toby
I heard the gasp and the thready cry as my father slit open the egg of my clone-sister so she could take her first breath. I should have been there to see it. Instead, I drowned out her baby cries with a roar and a kick to a Controller's chest.
The Gold Band fell, but landed on a branch below without injuring herself further. She called up to me. "There's no need for all of this bloodshed, Seer. You can end it. We don't want any of you dead, or even hurt. Just surrender and this will all be over."
"Free or dead!" I snarled in my language, and all around me, Hork-Bajir voices chorused along in spoken and in thought-speech voices.
In all the distraction, the Gold Band didn't notice Bej Weta in rattlesnake morph slithering along her branch to sink his fangs into her leg. She cried out and shook her leg, flinging him down into the brush, but I knew he would morph away any damage she had done. Rattlesnake morph had become a favorite of ours, because we had discovered that their venom incapacitated—but did not kill—Hork-Bajir. We could poison Hork-Bajir-Controllers and take their limp bodies away, get out their Yeerks, and hope the host survived the experience.
I flung myself through the trees full-tilt toward a moving blaze of hrala I spotted through the trees. I used all my momentum to launch myself at it, crashing both myself and the Gold Band down into the leaf litter. But another Gold Band caught up with us and dropped down on me from above, and we became a tangle of blades and roars down on the ground.
It was too many. I was trapped between them. I couldn't morph with both of their claws in me. I thrashed around violently, but I needed backup.
«Free or dead!» cried a familiar voice in thought-speech, and a red-tailed hawk came screaming down through the canopy, talons outstretched, and raked at the eyes of the attacker on my back. He roared in agony and disengaged. I sprung to my feet, stomped down on him, and launched myself back up into the trees, the other Gold Band in hot pursuit.
I didn't have time to ask Tobias what he was doing here, or whether more reinforcements were coming. I just fled through the trees, quickly as I could, knowing Tobias would back me up. I didn't look back to see what was going on, but I heard another raptor scream behind me, and another male Hork-Bajir roar.
I used the opportunity to gain as much distance as I could. The all-too-familiar sounds of Hork-Bajir-on-Hork-Bajir combat sounded all around me through the trees. This was our last stand. We couldn't disappear into the forest like we had so many times before.
In the distance, I heard my mother's low groans as she worked on birthing another soft egg.
"Tobias," I said, "do you have any more Animorphs up your sleeve?"
«No,» Tobais said. «Just me. I'm here to deliver a message, but it sounds like right now isn't a good time. How can I help?»
"You've had an overhead view of the situation," I said. "None of my morphers are in bird morph right now. If you see anyone closing in on my parents, and on her birth attendants…"
«I did,» Tobias said. «But I didn't realize your mom was… never mind. I saw a group of reinforcement Gold Bands coming up from the south along a ravine. Follow me— I'll show you.»
I followed Tobias through the woods. Now was my moment to ask him what he was doing here. "What was the message?" I said, a little breathlessly, as I moved through the trees as quickly as I could.
«We did it,» Tobias said. «We unleashed the virus on the Yeerk Pool. This wave of Gold Bands you're facing now—this might be the last wave they're able to send. As soon as you're able to get them off your backs, I think it's time to move in. Towards Santa Barbara. There's going to be a lot of new-frees very soon, and they're going to need you and your people.»
A bright flame of hope stuck in my throat like a burning ember. I hadn't earned its warmth yet, but I had earned the way it scalded me. I had spent so long fighting, I hadn't taken enough time to consider the after. In a world where the Yeerks couldn't enslave my people anymore, there was still so much work left to do, and Tobias was right: my people were the only ones who could do it. We just had to survive that long.
My mother needed to survive that long. My little sisters needed to survive that long.
«Up,» Tobias said above me. «Get a good look.»
I climbed as high up through the trees as I could. I saw the map of hrala blazing around me, like one of the wildfires that would start in the National Forest when lightning hit. Battles burned all around me. As Tobias had promised, a group of little flames moving along the ravine: the reinforcements that had been too far away for us to see coming. The brightest fire of all, the creation of new life as my mother worked on birthing another egg. But the reinforcements were too many for just me and Tobias.
"Call for others," I said. "Get as many as you can." I ducked back down into the trees. From my perch up there, I could see the reinforcements coming, but they could have also seen me.
For all the morphs we'd acquired in our time moving as guerrilla fighters in alien forests, there was no morph for fighting Hork-Bajir quite like a Hork-Bajir. None of the Earth animals we'd encountered here had the combination of deadly fighting strength and tree-climbing ability that we did. I assumed that the Gold Bands had seen me, so I got directly in their way and did what I had learned to do so many times in recent days: I set a trap.
There was an area that was a burn scar from a previous wildfire through the woods. Many of the trees there were crumbling and weak. They couldn't hold an adult Hork-Bajir's weight in the way that a living tree could. Some of them were ready to splinter. I knew this, but did they?
I led them toward the burn scar, holding onto trees I knew were stable. I didn't look back to see if they were following me. I was leading them closer, toward my family, but they'd been coming that way anyway. I was also leading them toward my fellow warriors.
I carefully navigated my way through the burn scar, then moved as quickly as I could through the living woods. I was panting with exhaustion. We usually didn't let ourselves get into battles this long. This was a problem I couldn't morph away; morphing would only make it worse.
Behind me, I heard the creak of a tree branch snapping, and a cry, but only one. It wasn't enough. The one who had fallen could just get back up again. As I led the Gold Bands into the thick of the fighting, I saw less hrala than I had before, lives snuffing out. To my horror, I saw a hrala flame break through our line, straight toward my mother and her attendants. Another broke through; another.
Tobias came screeching down from above. I broke through after them. Once I was close enough, I saw the nurse Kal Geta holding my mother. She strained over her egg. My father and Tom, meant to be the last line of defense, were perched in attack positions and ready.
I launched myself at one of the Gold Bands, trying to make a grab for her tail. My claws left bloody rakes in the base of her tail, but she got free of me and kept moving. I moved as fast as I could, but then she was coming for my father, and he was fighting her, and there were more coming, and it was too much! It was impossible!
TSEEEEEWWW!
It was one of the loudest Dracon blasts I'd ever heard, an enormous beam thundering down. To my side, two Hork-Bajir Controllers were instantly vaporized, and the trees around them, leaving nothing but a swirl of smoke and dust.
Everyone stopped. We looked up.
I recognized the design and the aesthetic of three Yeerk ships, if not the exact models. Why had they fired on the Gold Bands? Could they just not tell one Hork-Bajir from another from up there? It seemed likely.
The reinforcements had come. We were doomed. The only possible choice we could make would be to leave my mother behind.
But even if we did something so terrible, we could still never flee from a spaceship.
TSEEEEEWWW!
The ship fired again, this time at a point where I couldn't see its target.
Then the ship landed in the burn scar it had just made. Then came the other ship, and the other—there were three in all, shiny new models of Yeerk ship I had never seen before.
Tobias said, «Is this one of these inter-Visser Yeerk rivalries? What's going on?»
"You don't know those ships either?" I said.
«No,» said Tobias.
The ships' doors opened. Hork-Bajir came flooding out. There were two dozen of them, armed with Dracon beams and more exotic weapons. Reinforcements, more Controllers—it had to be.
It was the worst-case scenario. I'd have to call for my warriors to all put their blades to their own throats. I held the terrible signal word in my mind.
But then I saw it: the scar of an eye that had been torn out by a red-tailed hawk.
"Fal Tagut?" I said. "But you went to the Hork-Bajir homeworld!"
He turned his good eye to look up at me, and grinned. "Hello, Toby Hamee. We are back, and this time, there are more of us. Show us which ones are the enemy."
"The ones with the gold bands wrapped around their upper arms," I said on autopilot, too stunned to question what was happening.
A Hork-Bajir girl-child had come out of one of the ships. No, not a child—the same age I had been when I had first started raiding to free my comrades. But that seemed so young to me now. She signaled to the warriors around her and said, "Go! Go! Go!" They dispersed through the trees, Dracon beams hoisted up on their shoulders in holsters made for Hork-Bajir.
The girl-child came for the Gold Band fighting my father and Tom. She tackled him full-force, separating him from my father, and pointed her Dracon beam at his head and fired.
TSEEEEEW!
I cried out in shock. We tried so hard not to use deadly force whenever we could, so that we could free people, but she had just—!
But I could only be grateful.
All around me, the reinforcements were fanning out, driving away our enemies. The group of reinforcements who had come along the ravine turned right back around the way they had come.
I went to my father to check his injuries, but he was already back at my mother's side. She was finally pushing out another egg. This one he didn't slit open. He let it wait until my sister was ready to come out.
"Is that all of them?" I asked him.
"Yes," he said. "Two living."
My mother was holding the other one, still wet from the egg. I wanted so much to hold her, too, but unfortunately, the birth of my new sisters wasn't the most important thing at that moment, even though it should have been.
I turned to the girl-child who had just saved my father from his attacker. "Who are you?" I said.
She smiled. "My name is Kory," she said.
"Kory?" I said. It was a strange name for a Hork-Bajir.
She gestured down at the ships. Chee-Koril was standing on the threshold of one, looking out at the forest. "I was named after them," she said. "The one who helped Quafijinivon the Arn make me and my siblings." When she saw my shock, she smiled and said, "Yes, Toby Hamee. I am different, too."
"But those can't all be Seers," I said, gesturing at the other warriors quickly chasing away or rounding up the Gold Bands.
"No," she said. "We learned something from Kref Magh, from your tactics. Once we had enough strength, we started freeing Controllers whenever we could on raids on the homeworld. We came up from the Deep and grabbed them one by one, and starved out their Yeerks. We are your legacy, Toby, or the beginning of it."
"Where is the Arn?" I said.
Kory tilted her head. "Quafijinivon did not come. It is almost dead, you know."
"Then how did you pilot the ships? Koril can't be in three places at once; you'd need a crew to handle ships that size."
"Toby, we are the crew," Kory said. "We don't need the Arn. We don't need the Yeerks, we don't need humans, and we don't need Andalites. We can fly ships from the Hork-Bajir homeworld all the way to here on our own."
I was rocked by that. I nearly fell off my branch. It was something I'd never dared to imagine: my people, journeying through the stars without needing anyone's help or permission. It was a staggering thing to imagine. Interchange between my homeworld and Earth and other places, self-determination, our own chance to learn and meet new peoples. The chance to come home on our own terms. It was more than I had ever dared to imagine.
I came toward Kory, and I touched my forehead blades to hers in greeting. "Welcome to Earth, Kory," I said. "Welcome to all of our comrades from the homeworld. We are so happy to have you here." I pulled back. "Would you like to meet my little sisters?"
She smiled, and I led my fellow Seer toward my mother. Kel, the nurse, was guiding her through some kind of hrala-focusing exercise to help her galm and ground herself after the intensity of birth. Their beaks were pointed up toward some point in the sky. I looked up and saw the vortex of hrala dispersing up above us, and to the trees around us in every direction.
My father and Tom were with them in the tree. They were both bleeding freely from wounds. Jara held the soft unhatched egg. It moved and warped as the baby inside worked to burst the egg open with her sharp beak. Tom looked on in wonder.
"Mother, father," I said, "this is Kory. She and her fellows came here from the homeworld to help us. Kory is different, like me. Kory, these are my parents, Jara Hamee and Ket Helpak. With them are Tom and Kel."
Kory leaned in a little to look at the egg in my father's arms. "This reminds me of seeing my younger siblings hatch," she said.
"You have younger siblings?" I said.
"The Arn didn't stop with me. There are Seers who are too young to go. They are still with the Arn in the Deep valley. We had to leave them behind," she said. She looked wistful.
"What is it like to grow up on the homeworld?" my father said hungrily. My father had grown up on stories of the homeworld. They had been his only salvation living in bondage. I could see why he cared about it so much, even more intensely than I did.
Kory considered the question for a while. Finally, she said, "I've spoken at length with the Hork-Bajir who came from Kref Magh with Quafijinivon to help raise us. They are my parents in all the ways that matter. Fal, Jot, and Maka, my two fathers and my mother. Fathers and a mother to all of us who the Arn created. From what they have said, it seems to be both kinder and crueler that we grew up so close to our home.
"On some days, when the coast was clear, we could climb up above the mists. Sometimes it was to raid and to free our people: a quick strike, to pull them back down into the Deep. But sometimes, we went just to look, to see the remnants of the great trees our ancestors tended. But we couldn't go there. We could only look. It was so close, and yet so far. All of you here on Earth, you never even got the chance to see it; only to imagine it. I don't know which one is better."
Just then, the younger twin's beak broke through the firm membrane of the egg, and it opened in a rush of fluid. Jara eased her out, and gave the rubbery shell to Kel, who also held the shell of the first egg to give a live sister, and the two stillborns as well. Soon we would bury them in the woods and say the right words for them, but first there were words we had to say to the living.
"What will we name them, mother?" I said to Ket. She looked at the little baby held to her chest, then to the one in my father's arms.
She hefted the one in her arms and said, "This will be Tashir," which meant, we will climb. "And the other will be Tekat," which meant, we will leap.
EvaIt was Sanity Restoration Hour chez Visser One, and I was pretty sure that Aftran was drawing the Psaarig. It was a strange picture she was drawing with my hands. Blurred, like she was trying to translate across senses. She was trying her best to make a swirl of fuzzy shapes within a vast darkness, erasing tiny patches of it to make a shape like a murmuration of starlings in migration.
Aftran caught me looking, and snatched back the paper. "Stop spying," she snarled in my voice.
I leaned back in my chair and grinned. "You get to spy on my thoughts all the time; I have a right to spy on yours. It's only fair. Is that your ceremony? The Psaarig?"
Aftran looked down at the paper and back up at me. "How did you know?"
"You're not opaque to me, Aftran. Not completely. I can tell you've been thinking about it nonstop ever since. It's been two weeks."
Aftran tightened my face with anger. "How could I not? I couldn't see the virus, of course, but I couldn't stop imagining it the whole time, passing through the Pool water, from Yeerk to Yeerk, palp to palp, infecting us even as we did something so essential. It's not..." She started to crumple the paper a little bit in her hand, then unclenched and smoothed the paper back out. I wondered why it mattered to her, when the paper would have to go into the incinerator at the end of Sanity Hour anyway.
There was a ping! at the terminal that signaled that someone was trying to get access to my quarters. Mercurio popped his wet head out of the bathroom at the sound, and he trudged damp footprints after me as I went to the terminal to check it out. There was a message there from Trafit, my personal assistant. It read:
I have some important post-Psaarig follow-up to discuss with you, Visser. Please let me in.
Well, damn. That could very well be important. Sanity Restoration Hour would have to come to an early end, as it had before. I turned to Aftran and shooed her toward the bathroom. "Get back there; demorph. Come back out when I signal that it's okay."
I heard her push the chair back in, and a crumpling sound as she picked up our papers and took them to the bathroom with her. Only when I heard the bathroom door slide shut did I press the button to open the door to the quarters.
There was a pneumatic hiss as the door slid open. Standing at the threshold was my personal assistant, the Gedd-Controller Trafit, and none other than Michelle Clark, host to the notorious host-breaker Efdram 58.
They were both holding Dracon beams pointed at me.
I only had just enough time to register the situation before they fired.
TSEEW! A wound to the side of my neck, instantly cauterized.
TSEEW! Another to my chest, a hole straight through.
Morph— I had to morph!
I focused on the timber rattlesnake within me, but my mind was fuzzing in and out of consciousness. I was losing too much blood. I couldn't—I couldn't breathe. I couldn't think.
There was another pneumatic hiss behind me, another TSEEW! TSEEW!
Then everything went black.
AftranI picked up the Dracon beam from Eva's nightstand as I half-slid on the slippery floor into the bathroom. I remembered our last near-assassination way too well to go without one, even though it was probably just Trafit with some stupid paperwork to fill out. I felt ridiculous standing in the wet bathroom in Eva morph, holding a deadly weapon in one hand and some crumpled up drawings in the other.
TSEEEEW! TSEEEW!
"I knew it," I hissed, running out of the bathroom with my Dracon beam raised. I didn't stop to figure out who the attackers were or what was going on. I just stunned them and left it for my future self to figure out.
That was when I noticed that Eva was halfway to rattlesnake and had too many holes in her body. Her gray scaly body thrashed on the ground as she gasped, "Mamá! Mamá! Help me!" Mercurio was splattered in Eva's blood, dark red against the black and white.
I knelt on the floor, getting her blood on my knees. I looked at Mercurio, who at least didn't have any holes in him. Something knotted up in my throat. I knew from Cassie's mind how to talk an injured morpher through a morph. I had to be gentle, familiar. Gentle and familiar just wasn't me. I had to be somebody else.
Paloma. I knew how to talk like Eva's mother. I had heard her in Eva's dreams. In morph as Eva, I would even sound like her mother, at least a little. "I will help you, Merqui," I said. "Do you remember being a snake as a child? What was it like?"
"Laid out in the sun," he murmured. "Basking…" Eva began to shrink and shrivel in on herself.
"Curled up in the courtyard?" I prompted.
"Yes," Mercurio said dreamily, and he disappeared.
I looked at the fully morphed rattlesnake on the ground and waited for Eva's clarity to return, but there was no response. "I need to get her human again," I told myself, and lifted her up into the bed. Feeling like a total fool, I stroked her scales with two fingers. "Hey," I tried. "You want to be human again?" Nothing. I remembered some half-lost dream of Eva as a child hearing a terrible mariachi band with her mother, and the jokes they made about it for years afterward. "Ayyyy," I sang, as awful as the mariachis. "Jalisco no te rajes!"
The scales turned to brown skin beneath my stroking fingers. I yanked my fingers back as if burned. I looked away from her, and finally noticed who it was that had attacked her. "Trafit, you rat bastard," I snarled, and went into the weapons locker to get the force cuffs.
EvaWhen I came to, I was human, in one piece, and lying on my bed, my hand resting on Mercurio's neck, draped over the bed beside me. Aftran, still in morph as me, stood at the foot of my bed, holding one of my Dracon beams pointed toward the two Controllers attached to my chairs with force-cuffs. They were still unconscious.
"What happened?" I said groggily.
"I grabbed a Dracon beam from your nightstand on the way to the bathroom," said Aftran, with a smug little smile I've felt but never seen on my own face.
"How am I not bleeding out?" I said. Mercurio prodded at me with his beak, checking that I was in one piece.
"After I stunned them, I found you half-conscious. You were raving. I talked you through the rest of the morph and demorph. I guess you don't remember any of that."
I could imagine the scene. Aftran knew the inside of my mind. She'd know exactly what to say to help me focus on the rattlesnake, and then back on my own body. I imagined her kneeling over my prone body, talking a stream of consciousness to me until Mercurio appeared again and I was whole.
"And you dragged me onto the bed? That was sweet of you," I said, propping myself up on my elbows.
"Shut up," said Aftran. "What are we going to do about these two?"
I got out of bed and flung open the wardrobe. "Before we do anything with them, we are both putting on some goddamn clothing. We are not interrogating prisoners in my naked body." I grabbed a suit and shoved another one at her. When she put down the Dracon beam so she could get dressed, I threw a towel at her. "And for God's sake, wipe yourself first! You have my blood all over you! Jesus, I thought Yeerks were obsessed with hygiene!"
"We are," Aftran said, wiping my blood off. "It's just that for us, getting covered in each other's slime is hygienic."
"Hurry it up, will you? We need to interrogate them and find out what they were doing here," I said. I picked up the Dracon beam and gestured at the prisoners with it. "I guess I should hide out in the bathroom while you do the talking. You'll know how to get the truth out of other Yeerks. They're going to have a lot of questions, if they see both of us looking like…" Mercurio looked back and forth between us, our identical suits half-buttoned up, our identical hair in disarray.
Just then, Michelle said, vaguely, "What… the fuck?"
Then Trafit said, "Rrrrr-Animorphs!"
"Shit," I said. I had never heard Trafit speak so many syllables out loud before, but I guess they didn't bring their tablet along on this assassination mission.
Michelle's eyes went huge. Her degu daemon, Dashiell, ran up to Mercurio and started sniffing him, as if he could figure out the truth by scent alone. "Are you Animorphs?" he said. "Which ones?"
"Efdrrrrram?" Trafit said. "We. Rrrr. Must go."
"Shut up, Trafit," Michelle said cheerfully. "Efdram 58 isn't home. I used you to help me kill Visser One, but I'm not on your side, you Empire trash."
"You. What?" said Trafit. Aftran didn't say as much, but her expression on my face said the same thing.
Aftran looked to Trafit. "Okay, I've had enough of you." TSEEW! I took her cue and stunned them quiet.
She turned to Michelle. "All right, what's going on?"
"I'm not Efdram 58," said Michelle. "That's what's going on. Have you been to the main Pool on the ship recently? It's getting more and more chaotic over there. I managed to slip away. Can you tell me which Animorphs you are? And how did you get here?"
I turned to Aftran. "How do we know she's telling the truth?"
Aftran kept my face carefully blank. "There is one way to know for sure."
"Right," I said. I turned to Michelle, if it really was Michelle, and not Efdram 58 putting on an elaborate act. "I'm sorry, Michelle. If you're a Controller, then after we have this conversation, I'm going to have to kill you. But if you're not, let's introduce ourselves. My name is Eva López." I focused on the rattlesnake again, and watched gray scales race up my brown arms. Michelle gasped. I focused back on myself, and the scales disappeared. Dashiell looked up at Mercurio in awe. "And I'm an Animorph."
I looked at Aftran. Slime started to ooze out of her eyes and her nose, leaking out of her pores as she began to demorph. "And I'm Aftran 942, and I'm an Animorph, too."
Michelle watched in mute, transfixed horror as Aftran demorphed. It was always an unspeakably disgusting sight, and it must have been even worse with me there for comparison. It was like watching a version of myself melt away, like that scene with the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz, but with nauseating sound effects.
When she was done demorphing, I picked her up from my suit puddled on the floor. "There's only one place we could have gotten the morphing power from," I said. "You know we're telling the truth. But now we have to find out if you're telling the truth, too. Will you let me?" I said.
Michelle looked down at the Yeerk in my hand, and back up at me. Dashiell extended a little paw to feel into Mercurio's feathers, as if to test if they were real. Mercurio allowed it, tucking his head down to watch him. Michelle bit her lip, and nodded.
"I'm sorry, by the way," I said. "I know exactly how much this sucks. But Aftran will be as gentle with you as she can." And I held Aftran to Michelle's ear.
I had no idea what would happen if Aftran tried to infest someone who was already infested, but everything that happened from that moment seemed normal. She wriggled her way into Michelle's ear. There was a tiny glistening slime trail left there. Michelle's expression went vague and fuzzy. Dashiell collapsed in a limp little fur pile on the ground.
I waited about ten minutes. I took the time to zip up my fly, button up my dress shirt, and let Mercurio comb my hair with his beak. Finally, Aftran appeared again in Michelle's ear. I held her in my hand, and I almost put her back in my brain, but then she started growing again. I put her down on the bed and let her morph me again. By the time she was done with the morph, Michelle had come out of her post-infestation funk.
"She's telling the truth," Aftran said. "She's fully herself. That host-breaker was no match for her. The Hork-Bajir guard leading her away from the de-infestation pier had an episode," she gave me a significant look, "and Michelle managed to get away in the confusion. She found Trafit while pretending to be her Yeerk, and convinced them to join her in a coup."
I looked at Michelle and smiled. "Did you really come to my quarters to kill me?" I said.
"Uh… yes?" Michelle said awkwardly.
I pressed my thumbs to the force-cuffs so the biometrics would release them. I kissed Michelle on the cheek. "Thank you, Michelle. That was good of you."
I sat back on the bed and looked at Michelle. She rubbed at her sore wrists. Dashiell had backed up from Mercurio as if he had some kind of disease. Michelle's eyes were as wide as saucers. "Hey, I mean it!" I said. "If I had still been a slave to Visser One, I'd have been so grateful if you had come to kill me. Now, there's some things I've got to catch you up on. If the guards at the Yeerk Pool are starting to break, well… I think it might be time to make a move. Don't you, Aftran?"
Aftran nodded. "Yes. This is a sign. Now is the time," she said.
"Great." I picked up the suit and threw it back at Aftran with a glare. "Now put this back on, you're giving Michelle an eyeful."
Michelle laughed. "Sister, you have nothing to be embarrassed about."
"Don't give her ideas," I said, staring meaningfully at Aftran until she put a shirt on.
It took us a while to explain everything to Michelle, but when we were done, Dashiell stood on his hind legs and reached up a paw to touch the tip of Mercurio's flipper, and said, "You don't have to do this alone anymore. I'm here with you. And I'll be with you until we've won this thing, or we all get ourselves killed."
Mercurio dipped his penguin head solemnly. I grinned at Michelle. It felt so unspeakably good to have an ally on my side who wasn't in my brain all the time. A real friend, not a parasite.
"You ready?" I said.
Michelle laughed and shook her head. "No, but let's do it anyway."
I didn't even bother asking Aftran if she was ready. She had been with me through all of this, and she would be with me now. She started to demorph back to Yeerk. We'd practiced with the audio file the Animorphs had sent me from the rebel Taxxons, and I couldn't make the sounds properly without Aftran's help. This time, Michelle was smart enough not to watch. Once again, I picked up Aftran from my crumpled suit on the floor, and held her to my ear. Inside of my mind, I felt her nearly vibrate with excitement.
I went up to the terminal and programmed in a command to activate every speaker in every available room of the Pool ship, including sonar-electric speakers inside of the Pools, both the main pool and the special high-ranking Visser Pool. Everywhere, throughout the ship, our voices would be heard.
I put on my best talking-to-politicians voice and said:
"Hello to the residents of the Pool ship Hett Simplat. Yeerks may be experiencing issues with controlling your hosts. If so, don't worry. We've got everything under control. Please peacefully return to the Pool and surrender your host. The illness will resolve. You will most likely recover. You just won't be able to control your host anymore.
"Any newly-freed hosts who are wandering the ship, please only use violence in self-defense. Wait for assistance. We are going to arrange a transfer of power as peacefully and smoothly as we can under the circumstances. You may be wondering why you should listen to me, and why Visser One is advising you that you all resolve this situation peacefully. Allow me to introduce myself. I am not Visser One. My name is Eva López and Mercurio."
Michelle leaned toward the microphone at the terminal. Her smile blazed at me furiously. "I'm Michelle Clark and Dashiell."
Aftran leaned in and said, "And I'm Aftran 942."
Then Aftran focused on my timber rattlesnake morph, my reminder of Diamanta, channeling everything she'd learned from riding in the mind of an estreen. Gray scales crusted over my face. My tongue became thin and forked in my mouth. The glottis that kept food and water from going down the wrong pipe filled my throat, nearly closing it off completely.
Then we said our names again. Who we were, and what we stood for. This time in Sky Hive's language, and the language of ver people.
A deck below us, there was a sound so vast that it resounded through the floor. The whole ship seemed to creak and groan as Sky Hive blasted the doors open to Cargo Bay 3 and flooded outward in a mass of fungi and mud and joyous Taxxons. Michelle and I looked at each other and grinned. I morphed away all traces of the snake. We leaned into the microphone and said together:
"Welcome to the Peace Movement, motherfuckers!"
19
