A note on this chapter - you may observe a difference in style between this chapter and the last.
This difference is intentional. Readers of the original Animorphs will hopefully find it nostalgic, as I did.
Thank you for reading, and enjoy.


The Assignment

Star Trek – Animorphs

My name is Cassie.

I wish I could tell you more than that. My last name. My address. I mean, I could tell you my favourite snacks, least favourite movie, my friends' names. First names. Small stuff, right?

But that could tell you more than I can afford. The wrong person could realise which town released that movie last. They could check the places that sell fresh fruits, the seasonal kind, and when. Records exist for everything, right? Me and my friends aren't safe, even if I only share a little.

I hate the taste of it. The stench never overwhelmed a wolf's nose, but at times I wondered if it might overwhelm my human mind breathing through it.

«Cassie?»

«Fine,» I answered.

Not fine. The taste receptors in this morph didn't fire the imagination. I was grateful, I guess, but the one thing a wolf really enjoyed tasting was fresh blood. And it was drooling now. «Did they hit you?»

A mental shrug. Not in words, but in that strange way we could communicate without them. «Yeah. One of the big guys smacked me out of the air.»

«Are you okay?» My eyes cast up, through the continual rain. Against the pale clouds and distant flashes of lightning, the wolf's superior night vision caught the shadow of his hawk wings high above.

Birds are fragile. I should know. I've been one.

«Let's focus on where we are, first. I can't see much up here.»

You can see why I might have something to hide. What kind of normal kid talks about tasting blood, or smelling like a wolf?

The kind that has a really good reason to be paranoid.

It was just the two of us. Some kind of storm caught us in the middle of a mission against the everyday body-snatcher horror stories my friends and I get every Tuesday. I remember being taken off my paws and tangled in wet plant life, confused and caught in the darkness.

A burning in my shoulder brought the swift lope of my wolf morph to a staggering halt.

«You can't see anything, at all?»

«Day vision, Cassie.» He sounded terse. Tobias never liked being reminded of his hawk's natural limits. «Apart from getting flashed and nearly zapped, I only saw a mountain nearby. The cave you were in was connected to it.»

I couldn't wait for the burning to ease up, not for long. With the ease of countless times of pushing through the pain, I started running again. The ground ate up under my paws as I followed Tobias, my friendly neighbourhood red-tailed hawk.

Whatever had happened, I knew this wasn't home. The wolf knew it, too.

That mission hadn't been a world-ending one. The six of us in battle-morph, Jake as his intimidating siberian tiger alongside Rachel in elephant morph. We hadn't meant to go loud, exactly, but the Yeerks operating the seismic tremor device didn't give us much choice.

And when it came to Rachel, scaring and fighting usually meant the same thing. No evil, enslaving race would remain unflattened when she was through with them.

The absence of her thundering feet and joyful trumpets made the strange forest seem that much quieter.

«Just up this hill, Cassie,» Tobias said. «You'll see it when you get up here.»

A hot pink tongue lolled out as I dug claws into shale and loose dirt to climb.

At the top, I paused again. The fur on my belly felt damp and cold. Everything else felt hot. The wolf could keep running for hours, days even, but the battle just before showing up here took its toll. The moment let me look, really look, at the landscape.

It wasn't home. This wasn't even on the same continent. My heart dropped to the floor.

Enormous fronds, like great big palm trees on fat bases standing like natural skyscrapers in fields of scraggly trees. I couldn't see the shape of the hills or land too well. The storm kept moving everything. A pang of unsettled nausea brought the wolf to blink.

It looked a lot like the times I'd been in the middle of the ocean. My legs felt a little weak.

«This...» I whispered.

«...Isn't home,» Tobias finished.

«I don't think it's even...»

His sharp raptor head turned to stare at me. He couldn't see me too well in the dark, but this close didn't hide anything. «Guess we've got to find Dorothy, Toto.»

«Ha. Ha.»

But how could we even start? I didn't remember anything about how we got there. No explosions, at least. Anything else with the power to transport the two of us didn't make me feel any better about the situation.

«I think,» Tobias began and a flash of green light threw us both into a mad dash down the other side of the rise.

«Run!» He cried.

A skidding, wild race down the slope sent small rocks in my wake. My nose was alive. Everything, the strangely bitter scent of the local flora, the panic flowing from Tobias as he wheeled into the sky, even my own sweat read directly into my mind.

The stench of cleanliness, or rather a lack of recognizable scents. Behind us.

«What was that?!» I yelled.

«A dracon beam - no, wait,» Tobias spluttered. «It wasn't yellow.»

Shouting. I heard voices. The floor came up to meet me with a whump. My paws gathered to bound as quickly as the wolf could go, a gallop into the woods.

«I'm going to see who they are,» Tobias shouted. «That shot was green!»

«So?!» My thoughts thundered in my own mind. «No, Tobias, we need to get out of here. How did they-»

Flash! Pzshshshshshshsht!

The forest lit up in toxic green. The dirt, the most normal thing about the place, saved my furry butt as I dug in and skidded to a stop. A tree trunk caught the end of a bright lime laser beam and nearly burned the end of my nose.

«Aaah!» I yipped. I veered past the tree, ears flat against my head.

The mad dash took me over a small gully. I saw it just in time. The dirt on the other side touched the underside of my jaw and I shook my head to clear it of the light bump.

«It's them!» Tobias yelled.

«Who? The Yeerks?»

«I don't know. Maybe? The ones from before,» he said. He sounded frustrated.

«How have they kept up with us? I've been going faster through the thick of these woods than a human can on foot,» I said, dismayed. The ones I'd attacked. They were the ones chasing us?

Neither of us had an answer. I kept running. The burn in my shoulder worsened. Every step felt like it was pulling on the ribs of my other side. If these guys kept up with us, we'd have to break off and away somehow. I needed to demorph. That would solve the pain, get my energy back. Reset the clock.

«How long has it been?» I asked.

Tobias knew what I meant. «Almost an hour. You've got some time.»

Not knowing made this so, so much worse. «We don't even know where the others are. If they're here, too. We could be running away from them, for all we know.»

«I tried calling to them, but if they're here, they're either not morphed or can't do it,» Tobias said. «Maybe these guys know what's happened to them.»

«Well, I'm not stopping to ask. They'd probably shoot me first.»

Tobias didn't respond. Not seeing him through the huge palm trees which had begun to tower overhead made the feeling of being alone that much louder. If loneliness and fear can be loud. My paws felt numb, cold, as the earth changed to rock under them and I turned abruptly to scamper up the side of a rocky shelf.

«Tobias, I'm changing course,» I called up to him.

«What? Why? I can't see you,» he answered.

«Found that rock you were talking about. Even if these people are super fast, there's no way they could follow me through this,» I said in a rush of energy. It felt like joy as I scrabbled over a short lip and between two natural pillars. In a strange quirk of the landscape the forest, or jungle, ran straight up to the foot of a mountain. At its base lay crazy configurations of rocks.

I couldn't see past them but the entrance looked very promising.

«No, Cassie,» Tobias said, «that's not the way we need to go. Trust me.»

My wolf body paused to take a breather. It didn't need it. Or it shouldn't. Still, I panted and threw my tangle of annoyance and fear up at my friend. «But Tobias, you can't see well. Remember?»

«I can see well enough that you're heading into a trap,» he replied flatly.

But the small spaces in the cliff appealed to my wounded wolf's mind and even as I looked down to the original path, I saw the strange lights that decided which direction I'd be fleeing to.

Golden flecks gathered into tall spires, shorter than a hork-bajir. I watched, in awe and confusion. The lights looked like fireflies.

It brightened. I blinked.

In the seconds of seeing the trees for the forest again, as my night-vision returned, a deep instinct in my gut said run. Go. I moved.

Flash! Pzshshsht!

«Cassie!»

Heat on my tail. The burn didn't register anymore. Running, dash, a wall just past my nose and I was out! For moments! Running across a gap and feeling less protected than a hare beneath an eagle, I dove into another black hole. This one led past another rock pillar within a natural tunnel into another section of boulders.

I twisted and turned. My fur slid past the jagged edges as I fled, up slopes, down short inclines, but always further up.

«Cassie?!» Tobias sounded frantic.

«I'm fine!» I shot back.

«I thought they'd hit you,» he said, relieved. Then, «I told you that was a bad idea!»

I didn't have the mental space to explain that the lights that had just tried to kill me appeared right where I'd have been if I hadn't gone off-course.

The distant rumbling of the storm covered the sounds until it was almost too late. A hum. High-pitched and obvious to the wolf's ears. The fireflies. Just around the next corner!

The next gap led down into darkness. To my right. A hop, skip and a jump-!

«AAAAAAH!» WHOooaa! Freefall!

Nothing under me! And, thump.

Oww!

Contact. Painful. Crippling. I knew instantly that I wouldn't be loping again at the same ground-eating pace without demorphing first. A whine left my muzzle as I took a second to breathe.

«Cassie. You need to get up! You-» Tobias cut out to silence.

Green light. My stomach turned as I gaped up to the skies.

«Tobias?» My voice went into the void. «Tobias!»

Nothing. I was alone.

My legs. One of them flared as I moved it, but just pain. A strain. The other... It bent badly in the wrong direction. Despite the things I'd seen, things I'd done, the sight of bone sticking out from the fur brought nasty bile on my tongue. Demorph. Can't stay here. Need to go... bird. Yes.

The osprey would do it.

I concentrated. The fur on my legs began to shrink back into smooth skin.

The bones of my head just began to shift when a shout from a human throat made my heart stop. Someone was there. They could see me. Maybe. At night, in a gulch, in the shadows - but if they had some kind of technology to see me...

I stopped the demorph. The fur grew back and my skull refitted to the lupine shape.

And I recognized it. A deep timbre, for a human, and way too familiar. Cold leeched into my body as I realized how very badly we'd lost, in so short a time. The man from before. He'd somehow travelled all the way from the cave, and now I couldn't move. Couldn't demorph. Tobias was...!

"We come in peace! In peace!"

The echoes of his shout rang, undisturbed, through the hollows and hidden places of my resting place. They faded.

My head tilted to the side, very dog-like.

Did he just say he came in peace?