The final bell of the day rang, and I let out a sigh. It was partly a sigh of relief at the school day being over, and partly from nerves because I was going to talk to Rachel. She had been acting angry and distracted for a few days, and had been avoiding the rest of us as much as she could. I found her at her locker, packing her bag as fast as possible. She sighed when she saw me.

"How's it going, Cassie?" she asked, forcing the words out.

"I'm fine," I said. "But I'm worried about you."

"Can we not do this here?" she asked, sounding tired.

"I was gonna walk home," I said. "Walk with me?"

We walked out of the school and down the road, not speaking for an uncomfortable few blocks.

I broke the silence. "Rachel, I know we're probably going to have to kill this guy in the end," I said, quietly enough for her to hear, but not to be overheard. "I stopped you not just because it scares me to kill, but because it's so irreversible. If we have a chance to save the people he's absorbed, we owe it to them to try."

Rachel was taken off guard. I think she was expecting a yelling match, but my admission had taken the wind from her sails.

"Cassie, he's trying to absorb everyone on Earth," she said. "Everyone he absorbs is getting condemned to a fate worse than death. I can't imagine anything worse than being conscious, but unable to control myself, possibly forever! Everyone inside of him doesn't have to eat or sleep because they're in Z-space. Maybe they don't even age. It's potentially forever!"

"When you put it that way," I said. "Killing them all does seem a little less cruel than allowing more people to get stuck that way. I still hate it though."

She nodded and said, "If we didn't kill him, what would our next move be? He's morph-capable, so he'd be hard to hold onto. We don't know if the Andalites are even going to come to Earth, so we can't count on them helping us. Is he even on this planet anymore? What's his goal now?"

I cringed internally as I told her, "He's not on Earth anymore. The Chee told us that they observed his ship leaving the atmosphere. You haven't been super easy to talk to the last few days, or I would have told you."

She groaned, then said, "Okay. If we ever see him again, how would we free all the people stuck inside him?"

I hadn't really thought about that before. I thought for a minute, and answered her. "The only thing I can think of is to convince him to let them all go."

Hearing myself say it aloud, I added, "Though, that seems like a really hard sell."

"It does," Rachel said. "And even if he did, they'd all be trapped as Yeerks."

"There are some Yeerks who don't agree with what the rest are doing" I said. "Like the Yeerk Peace Movement. After what these human-turned-Yeerks have been through, they'd be more likely to be on our side."

"We'd still have to put them in someone's head for them to have any impact on the resistance," she said. "Unless we put them in horses, like when we were looking into Zone 91 a long time ago."

"Yeah," I said. "I don't like that idea or hate it. It's just its own category of weird. It also just occurred to me that if he releases them, we're going to have up to three days to…Never mind, they'd still need to go to the Yeerk pool as horses.

I sighed. We walked in silence for a few moments.

"Okay," I admitted. "I think we're out of options for saving them."

"Speaking of options," Rachel said. "I had a dream the other night. I was walking along the beach as the sun started to set. Tobias flew down to join me."

"That sounds nice," I said.

"I talked to Crayak, Cassie," she said suddenly, catching me off guard. "He offered me power again. He still wants me to kill Jake, and I'm not going to, of course, but he brought up how Zenguh keeps getting away, and it really bothered me. I felt like…like I have all this power as an Animorph, more than normal people would dream of having, and it's still not enough. I really want to save the world, and now in addition to the Yeerks trying to enslave the world, we've got someone else that's threatening to absorb it. It's just overwhelming!"

"I know how you feel, Rachel," I told her. "I've got all the same enemies that you do, and I have to deal with these feelings that we can work things out with them without getting violent."

‹That's gotta be tough,› Rachel said, not moving her mouth.

"Did you just thought-speak?" I asked. "Are you in Rachel morph again? I haven't seen you use it since our fight in the ham shop, where you kept re-healing with it. I never even thought about you getting your own DNA from my set of morphs when you acquired me."

‹Yeah,› she said. ‹It's kind of a nervous habit now.›

"I think I'd be too scared to do it," I said. "I'd be worried that I'd accidentally get stuck in morph as myself and be unable to morph anymore."

Rachel froze and her eyes grew wide. Then she started breathing hard, and sat down on the curb.

I sat by Rachel as she worked through her panic attack for a few more minutes, and then Tobias flew by and circled overhead.

‹Hey guys!› he said. ‹Erek says that the Yeerks have got a new scheme going. Anyone wanna crash a Sharing meeting?›

Later that night, I told my parents that I was going to a study group with Rachel. I left the house, and met up with the rest of the Animorphs on the roof of the Community Center. We morphed to sneak into the building. Jake was a squirrel, Marco and Ax were mice, Rachel and I were rats, and Tobias was a raccoon. We were an odd looking bunch, but no one was going to see us together.

‹Too cool to be a rodent like the rest of us, Tobias?› asked Marco.

‹Rodents are food,› Tobias replied, with a quickness that implied that it wasn't even banter. ‹Present company excluded, of course.›

We moved through the ventilation system until Jake asked, ‹Does anyone else smell that?›

It took me a while to notice, as I was expecting something disgusting, but then I smelled it.

‹Is that chlorine? Do they really have a pool?› I asked. ‹I mean, of course they have that one, but, like, they have a swimming pool?›

We made our way toward the smell, and crawled out into the rafters above a large room with a gigantic pool in it. The room was elaborately decorated with streamers, banners, and gold painted accents.

‹Do you think this is it? Their scheme?› Jake asked us. ‹A swim meet doesn't really seem all that nefarious.›

‹Nefarious?› asked Marco. ‹Someone's been getting a jump on his SAT studying!›

‹Hold on,› said Tobias. ‹I think I see something in the water, but these raccoon eyes are garbage.›

He morphed back into his hawk form and squinted at the pool. He flew down to the water's edge, and began to morph again.

‹I need to check it out closer,› he said.

‹Are you turning into a Nar…bus? Narduck? What were they called again? The Atlantis people?› Marco asked.

‹Nartec,› Tobias corrected. ‹I hate the water, but these guys love it, so it should at least balance me out. Plus, since they can breathe air too, I won't be stuck in the water if someone walks in and sees me.›

He slid into the water, and swam up to a dark spot next to a pool light. He poked at it a bit, then laughed. Thought-speak laughter sounds strange, especially from a boy with increasingly fewer emotions. We crawled down some streamers, down to the floor for a better view.

‹What do you see?› I asked.

Tobias answered, his tone incredulous, ‹There are these little underwater doors all around the pool, about the size for a Yeerk to swim through. I think they're going to have a swim meet, and infest the swimmers while they're in the water.›

‹That's even dumber than putting Yeerks into cell phones,› said Rachel.

Just then, I heard the click of the door opening.