Rachel

Jake was too mad for words. Or maybe he was in shock. He was pacing Cassie's barn with a completely unreadable expression on his face as Marco and I sat in silence, Tobias perched in the rafters, and Cassie absentmindedly cleaned out animal cages. Only Ax was making any noise, in his human morph he was devouring a bag of M&M's that Cassie had given him. Ax eating anything is always loud.

Jake stopped for a moment and looked at me like he was going to say something, but only sputtering noises came out.

I sighed.

"Yeah, I did it, Jake. We can skip the dramatic accusations."

Jake's shoulders slumped and the color of his face drained from brick red to a lovely shade of rose pink. "But…how?" he asked. "I didn't think it was possible with all of us. How did you do it by yourself? Where did you even get the explosives?"

I avoided his eyes and focused on a small bundle of hay I was fiddling with. "I figured it out. Does it really matter how?"

"Yes, of course it—"

"I agree with Rachel, Prince Jake," Ax interrupted, spraying the floor in front of him with chewed up bits of candy. "The specifics of Rachel's actions are far less important than the fact that she has betrayed our trust and damaged our group dynamic."

It was hard to take him seriously with chocolate smeared all around his mouth, but I still wanted to punch him in the face.

"To be fair, we've all done that at one point or another," Marco said. I shot him a look. He held his hands up helplessly.

Jake sighed and sunk down onto a bale of hay. "I don't know what to say to you, Rachel. What will we be as a group if we all start ignoring votes and going rogue? We've only lasted this long because of our strength as a team. "

Jake was right; Jake was always right. I was becoming the thing that everyone had always feared: reckless, dangerous, violent. But I had never before been the traitor.

(Do you really believe Rachel did this on her own?)

We all craned our necks to look at Tobias, up in the rafters. All of us except Marco, who was pretending to be incredibly fascinated by an owl in its cage.

"What do you mean, Tobias?" Cassie asked, putting down the bag of bird food she had been holding.

I couldn't speak, couldn't say anything to defend myself. Was Tobias just guessing? Did he know that it was Marco who had helped me?

"Did you help her?" Jake asked, misinterpreting Tobias's accusation as a confession.

(No,) Tobias said. (I didn't.)

He didn't say anything else, but he didn't need to. Jake looked around the barn, clearly trying to figure out what he was missing. He glanced over Ax, still deeply involved in his bag of M&M's. Cassie gave a quick shake of her head when he looked at her, and I knew that she had already figured it out, possibly before Tobias had ever said anything.

And then his gaze landed on Marco. His face was still puzzled for a moment as he studied Marco, who had turned away from the bird cage to meet his gaze, somehow defiant and apologetic at the same time.

"But you voted no…" Jake began, but his voice trailed off as, finally, Jake got it.

"Oh," he said, clearly at a loss on how to continue.

"It's my fault," I jumped in quickly, desperate to make the situation better. "I just asked Marco to help me because I needed a distraction—I didn't want anyone else to get hurt, you know, so I figured I would just bring Marco. I had to blackmail him into it, of course-" I tried to laugh, but it got caught in my throat and came out as more of a cough.

I could tell from the way Jake looked at Marco, then Tobias, then back at me, that it was pointless to try and convince him. Jake knew. Jake knew there was something going on between me and Marco, and why he had helped me. But did Tobias…?

(Rachel.)

With that one word, my question was answered. I didn't know how, but Tobias knew.

"It was my fault," Marco said this time, standing up from his seat on a hay bale. "I was just being stupid because, you know…you all know…how I feel. It wasn't Rachel's fault." He stared at the floor as he said the last part.

My stomach dropped at the sweetness of Marco trying to help me hide my betrayal from Tobias. But it was too late for any of that.

(Why?) Tobias asked me, and I realized I had nothing to say.

What could I possibly tell Tobias? I could try to blame it on hormones, a nothing fling. He might believe it. Maybe he could even forgive it.

But it would just be another lie. And it wouldn't change the thing in my chest. The thing that had been there ever since I had turned around and seen Marco standing in that school hallway. Stupid fucking Marco, who had gotten drunk with me at a party, jumped in front of a gun for me, and somehow managed to be there for me when no one else had been.

"I didn't mean to hurt you," I said, not sure who I was talking to, but it didn't really matter, because I was hurting everyone.

I wanted Tobias to yell at me, rage, and demand an explanation. Instead, he remained silent, staring with his completely unreadable hawk eyes that could have been looking at me or the barn floor. "How did you know?" I asked him, wondering if he could somehow see the thing inside my chest with those powerful hawk eyes.

Tobias answered slowly, his thought speak voice concealing any emotion. (I went to the elementary school last night. I thought you might try to do something. I got there too late. All I saw was the two of you running from the building.)

Cassie slammed the door of a cage shut, and we all jumped for a second, too tense and caught up in the moment. Tobias continued: (Unless you're asking me how I knew about you and Marco. I think I knew about that before, a long time now, maybe even before you did.)

So Tobias didn't know, not for sure, that I had kissed Marco, touched Marco, wanted Marco. He hadn't seen anything physical, and I was probably in for a horrifying how-many-bases conversation somewhere down the line. But Tobias hadn't seen any of that, which meant that he was seeing something else. Something that couldn't be explained away by hormones. Tobias saw the thing.

There was nothing I could say.

And there was nothing left for Tobias to say. He flew out of the barn without another word.

"I am confused," Ax said. No one bothered to explain anything to him. He looked around at all of us, then added, "Although my understanding of human relationships is at times limited, I believe that I have just witnessed a romantic betrayal. Is that correct?"

Jake and Cassie looked at each other. Marco stared up into the now-empty rafters.

"Yes, Ax," I said, standing up so I could pace the length of the barn. If I sat still any longer, I was going to throw up from the tension. "You are correct."

"I see." Ax began demorphing to his natural Andalite form. (Prince Jake, I would like to go and be with my shorm.)

"Go," Jake said.

I had told Marco that I wasn't picking Tobias because there was never any contest. Yet Tobias had left and I was still in the barn.

"Rachel," Jake said wearily, leaning back onto the bale of hay until he was looking straight up at the roof of the barn. "Damn it, Rachel, what did you do?"

I wasn't sure how, but I had destroyed more than just a school.

...

Up in Cassie's bedroom, I flopped face down on her bed and tried not to imagine the conversations that were undoubtedly taking place between Jake and Marco, still out in the barn, and Ax and Tobias, deep in the woods.

Cassie settled onto the edge of her bed and rubbed my shoulder reassuringly. "Do you want to talk about it?" she asked.

I groaned. Cassie took it as a yes.

"What's going on with you and Marco?"

I squeezed my eyes shut, even though my face was still buried in Cassie's pillow. "There's a thing," I admitted, my voice muffled.

"A what?" Cassie asked. "A thing?"

"A thing," I confirmed, then whispered, "in my chest."

Cassie squeezed my shoulder. "For Marco?"

I nodded, and summoned the courage to sit up, holding the pillow against my chest. "I'm sorry, Cassie. This is so fucking stupid. Aliens are invading the Earth and I'm messing everything up with my relationship issues."

Cassie scooted up so that she was sitting next to me on the bed. "Don't worry about that. Tell me about the thing."

I leaned back against the head board so I wouldn't have to look at Cassie. "He was there for me, in the school. He could have stopped me or turned me in to Jake, but instead he helped me with this crazy thing that I had to do. We both could have died."

I had lied to Marco when I told him that his showing up at the school didn't change anything. It had changed everything. It changed the thing between us from feelings that I believed I could bury deep under all my other problems into feelings that were hot, burning, and threatening to explode out of my chest.

"But I can't do anything about it," I told Cassie, gripping the pillow tight in my hands. "My chest is going to explode and I can't do anything about it."

"You're not going to tell him?"

"No," I said firmly, loosening my death grip on Cassie's pillow and setting it in my lap. "I can't."

"Why not?"

"Because of Tobias."

Cassie turned around on the bed so that she was facing me and crossed her legs. "You want to stay with Tobias and pretend that your thing doesn't exist? Even though Tobias knows?"

"If Tobias stays with me, yes." I could do it. Even if my chest really did explode, I could do it. I'm Rachel. I do the hard things.

"And if not?"

I chewed at the skin on my bottom lip. "What, you think I could just be with Marco? How could I do that to Tobias? We are a very, very small group, Cassie. And the thing will go away."

"Do you want to be with Marco, Rachel? Because that's the real question."

It was a significant question. But it wasn't the only one, not by far. "You know there are more important things than that, Cassie."

As Ax had pointed out, I had already damaged our group, possibly beyond repair. If I couldn't fix it, the least I could do was keep things the same and not break anything else. Everything depended on it. The freedom of the human race was potentially being decided by my messy love triangle.

"I think you're just scared," Cassie said.

I laughed. "Of course I'm scared. I might have fucked up humanity's last defense against an alien invasion."

"More than that. I think you're afraid to let yourself be with a guy that's still human."

"You think I have a bird fetish?"

Cassie put her hand on my arm. "I think you're afraid of the future and Tobias lets you ignore it. I think you're afraid to let yourself want the things that you could have with Marco—or any other guy—marriage, children. A life after all of this."

I shoved her hand away and clutched at my chest, at the place where the thing seemed to be swelling, painfully hot and tingling "You're not being realistic. We're not going to get any of those things."

Cassie didn't flinch. "Maybe not. But you shouldn't be afraid to hope for them."

She leaned over and hugged me, letting me rest my head on her shoulder. "You should never be afraid to hope."