Chapter Fifteen

"Jake? Wake up, Jake."

I looked up. Cassie. Cute, down-to-Earth Cassie. Like Cassie before the war had gone on for three years, and before everyone I knew got so old.

I sighed. I hated dreams. I had no use for them, and they'd never done good for me.

"What is it?" I asked, weary. "What do you want from me, Cassie?"

"You haven't morphed back yet, not all the way. You still have a lot of injuries. You're not going to wake up if you don't finish."

"So what? I'm having this as like an out-of-body experience to tell myself I'm still in mortal danger?"

She rolled her eyes at me. "Out of body experience? No. But you are dreaming."

"Can't I just have normal dreams like other people? Where they don't know they're dreaming and it isn't to convey some message?"

"Jake, focus. We spent all day trying to catch this."

She put something wriggly into my hands. I looked. "The green-anole lizard."

"Yep. It was a tricky catch, took hours. Focus, Jake, focus."

I looked at her. "Should I? I mean, what if I don't? I could just let it go. I could drift away. You didn't stay. You're not here. You knew I was screwed up before the war had ended. Why should I keep going, Cassie? What is there for me?"

"You can't let them get what they want, Jake."

I looked up, wanting to argue with her. I'd given everything I had. Everything and more. I wanted to say I didn't care about who won or lost, I just wanted it to be over with. That I was tired.

But when I looked up, it was the Drode.

"Jake, the Yeerk Killer, give it a rest! You're no longer necessary, go ahead and put up your feet. Hang a while!"

Game? Was I still the Ellimist's game-piece?

"Not at all Jake," the Drode leaned in, bringing his voice down. "This was all on you. Let it go. You can be free. And all you have to do is let the thing in your hand go."

Lizard. The green-anole. I looked at the Drode.

I hoped I wasn't a game-piece anymore. I hoped this was all just a dream.

But I didn't believe in basing my decisions on hope by itself. I'd been around too much to believe anything out there would take care of itself for me. Unimportance wasn't a legitimate excuse.

"Drode? If you're really here, I hope you will relay to Crayak that he needs to go screw himself. You can tell the same thing to the Ellimist, too."

I focused on the green-anole lizard as hard as I could. I felt the changes, felt myself gaining consciousness, and left the dream behind.

In many ways, it was the weirdest morph ever, because I was purposefully using the memory of acquiring my morph to actually become that animal while unconscious.

Fortunately, this didn't seem to be a problem in my regular dreams – or whatever this experience was.

I heard Marco react to my body shrinking and changing back completely into the green-anole lizard.

"Jake! Jake! You're alive!" Marco said.

Ax came up, still in Andalite form. ‹Prince Jake, you are almost out of time for that morph. You must demorph again. You have less than five minutes.›

‹Did we alert anyone with that racket we were making in the vent?›

‹No, Prince Jake, we did not. At least, no one that actually would have cared. It appears no staff was present in the room at the time we met that... Animal.›

"Though obviously remaining inconspicuous is out the window as soon as someone sees this room," Marco added.

Demorphing took a lot longer than usual. I was still tired from the blood loss and other injuries I had taken in the vent. Injuries disappeared when morphing. But even so, it could cause a lot of extra fatigue.

I eventually got up on my own two feet again. Looked around the dank, empty room. It looked like it would normally be a control center.

"By the way, Jake? Thanks. You saved our butts."

"Where is that... That thing?"

Marco pointed to an area on the ground that had a dracon burn – nothing else to be seen, after the damage. "Ax cut it out of you – not that delicately either. Then he burned that nasty worm into the ground. I mean, along with a few feet of your lower intestines. That thing was like -"

"A piranha. Yeah. I had that thought when it was eating my stomach, before I passed out."

"Oooooookay. More than I needed to know. I guess we should just be glad that thing didn't travel in a group. We would have been toast."

I changed the subject instead of staying with the subject of my latest near-death experience. "Do you know where anything important is?"

Marco grinned at me. "Actually... Yes. The humans and Andalites are even together, near their spaceship. The maintenance crew is sort of waiting for the Kelbrid to come and pick them up, but they're late. Actually fairly late, for some reason."

I didn't like that. Space travel could be unpredictable, but since there were already a lot of complications involved with other factors, it hit me as a concern.

"Okay, then lead the way. Let's get everyone out of here."

Ax led the way, weaving through the building like he'd been born there.

"Ax found a map with the structure of the zoo in that room," Marco explained, "It didn't take him long to make sense of it."

Down, left, right, down again. I wasn't sure how long we'd been walking, but eventually, I heard crying.

Human crying.

"This way!" I began walking in the direction I'd heard crying from. Ax went ahead so he could use his better understanding of the building to find it faster.

Ax began trying to get a response in thought-speak. Thought-speak can be directed, so in this case he was just trying to get a hold of another Andalite. In the meantime, we kept getting closer to what were human cries.

"Shut up!" a voice cried. Cryhali, from the sound of it. "Shut up and sit down! The Kelbrid are on their way."

I heard a thud. Someone cried out, and another person yelled, angry. Frightened.

But the Cryhali – or Cryhalis, it sounded like there were a few – just laughed.

"We need a distraction."

"Any ideas?"

No one said or did anything for a few moments. Then Ax slammed his tail suddenly into the wall. It got the attention of whoever was in the room, Marco said something inappropriate.

"No time to dispute methods now. Let's get out of here and duck down!"

Running back, there was a hall to our side, and we jumped in that direction, huddling against the wall. I could hear the Cryhalis muttering about babysitting Kelbrid cargo and the general treatment they received from visiting planets. When they got to the hallway, they stopped.

Marco and I braced ourselves.

Before they had so much as a chance to scream, Ax's tail flew, knocking the two of them out.

"Okay," Marco yelled, "Forget stealth. Let's go!"

Running down the hall we went into the room. My eyes took a second adjusting to the light – the brightness gave me a huge headache.

There were two cages. Nothing fancy, just steel bars the same as people imagine old zoo or circus cages for animals. Or in your typical horror movie. Ten humans, two Andalites. I wasn't that great at telling Andalites apart, but they were a bit smaller and thinner than Ax, with smaller blades – I figured they were female. Everyone else looked like they were part of some sort of rich kid club – wide variety of hair styles, clothes styles, and ethnicities.

This obviously wasn't exactly a military operation. I wasn't sure who they were, or why they were flying around on a human craft before capture – but these were not exactly the strategically planned crew I would have imagined for some of our first spacecraft. My hopes went down considerably.

Marco took up the slack of my dumbfounding disappointment.

"Well, well well," Marco said, "Anyone here need any help?"

I never liked being a celebrity. And this was one of those times. Instead of responding, everyone in the cages spent some time gaping like idiots – except one guy who looked as though he had been roughed up a bit.

"Your... You're Jake Berenson," one of the girls said. She was dark, maybe south Indian. And had some yellow and red streaks in her short, jet-black hair.

"Hey!" Marco complained, "I'm just as famous as anyone else here."

But I could see she was coming back to her normal mind-frame. She was impressed. She wasn't going to let herself be pushed around by that impressed attitude.

"Ax! Get them out."

"You guys," I asked everyone else, "Names?"

"I'm Kat," the first girl said, "I am the captain of the Estrella. This is Sam and Isaac, these two are Jaela–Itstiek-Litso and Lahsailat-Jahar-Sirinial."

She pointed to the other cage. "Those are Jessie, Lisa, Caleb, and Zach. So, you guys gonna get us out?"

I nodded at Ax and Marco, who began working on the cages. I backed away, slowly, to try to keep an eye on the door, which was really our only exit.

"So, question."

"Shoot," I said.

"Why didn't they just morph away from the cages?" Marco asked.

"It is true that morphing power is pretty uniform among Andalites. And pretty much any human space traveling should have the ability to morph. Why did you guys stay in here? Especially when you were obviously not being treated neutrally."

She rolled her eyes.

"And conspiracists claim you guys were Kelbrid spies back on Earth," she snorted. "Two of our crew are Andalites. If we have Andalites here willingly, we start a war between the two species. So we've been behaving and twiddling our thumbs waiting to hear about negotiations or if we really were going to be stuck as zoo commodities for the rest of our lives, instead of breaking out with Andalites and exploring the region."

"Besides, not all of us can morph," one of the boys added. He was young. Actually, they were all pretty young to be flying a spacecraft.

"Fair enough."

It took fairly little time for Marco and Ax to open the doors. The cages hadn't exactly been made for tough life forms – any of us could have cut them out with a Hork-Bajir morph, and the Andalites themselves would have had an easy time if they weren't trying to cooperate and prevent political complications. Everything was still clear as everyone was out of the cages, continuing to be debriefed.

"Okay," Marco said. "We need information. First of all, who is not morph capable?"

Two of the people raised their arms. Lisa, a girl with red hair and freckles, and Zach, who was fairly well built.

I looked at them. "Go over to Ax."

"Next question: Does everyone have a small morph?"

"Everyone who can morph here has cat, rat, fly, and sparrow," Kat said. "We made it part of our training to handle morphing."

Marco's eyes narrowed, "Why would you be practicing with morphs like that? Wouldn't the teachers want you to have firepower?"

Kat rolled her eyes, but I gave Marco a glance, and he kept prodding.

"Why just morphs you can find anywhere in the United States? Why is everyone here so young? And what do you guys know about your situation?"

Kat seemed to look down, but then she met Marco's eyes directly. "We are students, not the intended test crew. Some of our mothers and fathers were going to be on this flight. And we thought we'd just take it for a ride."

"You what?"

"We're pretty good with this stuff – we had no reason to think we'd be doing anything more than a small joy ride! And it wasn't exactly government guarded -"

"It was a private industry's product -"

"So it wasn't like we were breaking any national security -"

"We made a mistake with navigation, though," Caleb explained, "We got lost. After we roamed around for a while we saw evidence of Dracon smuggling-"

"Which is everywhere-"

"And we thought we'd see if we could find some of the people who had gone missing," Caleb finished. "We thought if we rescued some people we'd get into less trouble. And, well, that they might know how to get home."

"But then something attacked the ship," Sam said, "And then the next thing we knew we were being towed away. When we realized we were in Kelbrid space, we just tried to be as diplomatic as possible. Wait for orders. Hope someone came."

I hoped my expression was more diplomatic than Ax and Marco's faces were. Ax's tail-blade rose a few inches and his stalk eyes stretched, a sign of intense aggravation. But I was pretty disappointed too. Other than the Andalites, we were dealing with a gaggle of school kids. No one trained, no one experienced with war. And the actions that had brought them here were nothing short of selfish.

And from what they said I wasn't exactly sure of their flight skills, either.

Ax looked at the two Andalites.

‹How could two trained Andalites lose their way in space? You are not the trained crew, but I hardly believe you had no training to make it out this far.›

They waved their stalk eyes in a sort of eyeroll. I wasn't sure if the look was a native Andalite gesture, or one of the things they had been picking up from people.

‹We weren't 'lost'›

‹Though› one of them amended, ‹We did have a difficult time keeping track of things when one of the humans deleted the navigation system. There isn't exactly a lot of open documentation about this region of space, since it is, as you know, off-limits.›

"Okay, I hate to break it to you guys," I started, "But we can't just take you home. I mean, the Kelbrid situation and all. It's going to be a bit of a detour. Plus, we have other issues going on."

"What issues?"

"Not relevant to you at the moment. How broken down is the ship you used to get out to the border?"

"On the ground, the thing would have taken a few hours at most, at least, depending on the tools we had access to. In space, a bit longer. After being abducted? Well, it depends."

I thought it over.

"We need the best people with computers and technology working on that spacecraft, get it up and running. From my team, that's Ax and Marco. Anyone else want to volunteer?"

Two people beside Kat came up. Sam, and Caleb.

"We have two friends," I continued, "One is with the Researcher, the spacecraft we came in on. The other might need to be busted out, but we'll explain that later. Ax, Marco, you go with Sam and Caleb. See if we can't get it off the ground, and quickly. We'll... Hopefully be able to keep anyone from noticing that people are missing in here."

‹Us, as well.› One of the Andalites spoke up. ‹We have experience in technology as well, and the more people working on it, the faster it can be repaired.›

"Shouldn't be too bad," Caleb pointed out, "The Cryhalis can't see very well. Even if they had a good count on us, they're not hard to take out in a fight."

I grinned, "If only it were ever that easy."

To everyone else, I said, "I know this would ideally be solved in only a few hours. However, we should assume we only have an hour or two to work on it, at most. We have to get out of here before the Kelbrid get back."