Chapter 28

*Visser Three is here,* I said.

Elfangor stopped, his butterfly hooves skidding on the smooth concrete floor. *What?!* I'm not sure what kind of reaction I thought Elfangor would have, but I was still shaken by his surprised reaction. I mean, he knew I had seen him last time. He had to know there was some possibility his former buddy Alloran could be here.

*I know he was important to you,* I said, trying to keep my own focus, *but that's not Alloran. That's a Yeerk. A very high-ranking, means-to-kill-us Yeerk. We have to go.*

No sooner had I said the words than Dracon fire shot through the door behind us. They had apparently learned from our last miraculous escape that we were using the heavy automatic doors as cover. The beam shot past Marco, barely missing Rachel, and burned into the other door ahead of us.

They really needed to figure out that Dracon beams weren't really the best solution for this kind of problem. They'd done more damage to themselves and the facility than they had to us.

Gunfire exploded through the hole in the doors. I watched as blood exploded from Marco's massive gorilla shoulder. Rachel hugged close to the wall and pulled the ape close to her. Elfangor was pinned in the corner a few feet down from them. I don't know how many rounds they'd fired off, but in just two seconds, our little section of corridor became a bullet storm. That is until Marco and Elfangor returned fire.

The beams of light lanced in both directions. Marco led Rachel and Elfangor to the far door and away from Visser Three. Me and the rest of squirrel patrol followed along the rigging.

The rigging.

*Marco,* I called, *Aim high. Take out the lighting fixtures in the next room.*

The gorilla nodded and he took a second to visualize the angles. And to make sure he didn't hit the three squirrels that were above him. He fired and I heard the crash as the rigging ahead of us collapsed. The lights in the corridors went out in a cascading failure as Cassie, Tobias, and I glided across the sudden gap to the next section of rigging.

*Oh, go fuck yourself, Jake,* Marco snapped. Of all of us, the gorilla had the worst low-light vision. The only light left was emergency track lighting at the edges of the the floor. It wasn't unlike the lights in the movie theater, and I knew it was dark, but flying squirrels being nocturnal, it didn't faze us at all. Grizzlies also have decent night vision. It's apparently a myth that bears are nearsighted. Elfangor wasn't much better off, though, and I already knew dark and Andalites didn't mix.

But apparently Hork-Bajir don't see well in the dark either. The humans seemed to be slowly adjusting to the dim light, but the Hork-Bajir were still groping blindly.

*Marco, three o'clock,* Tobias called down. Marco turned and hit the Controller in front of him with a hammer blow. *Hang on, bud, I'm coming.* Tobias launched himself down and glided effortlessly to the hulking black shape of the gorilla. A few inches of white amidst the otherwise dark mass. Tobias was volunteering to be Marco's eyes in the dark.

Eyes. Right, I was on lookout duty. *Rachel, the Hork-Bajir can't see in the dark. Marco and Elfangor can handle the humans.*

*Gotcha,* she called.

Elfangor was hitting the human-Controllers with the flat of his tail blade. I could hear the air whooshing as his elastic ribbon-like tail sailed through the air. I could hear the crack as he flicked the muscles, firing his tail like a bullwhip. Even if he wasn't using the sharp edge of his tail, the blunt side was striking harder than a golf club.

*Ah, aren't you clever,* said a voice. I'd heard it once before, as he approved plans for Gleet biofilters. The only known Andalite-Controller, Visser Three.

I didn't see him anywhere, but I could hear his thought-speech. Elfangor froze. *Alloran…*

*Can he hear us?* I asked.

*No,* Elfangor said. *Not unless you want him to. He's taunting us. Trying to find us.*

*Hey, I draw the line at being taunted by telepathic shadows in the void,* Cassie said. *Back to the retreat, okay?*

Rachel voiced her agreement by slashing a Hork-Bajir through the stomach and shoving the wounded alien to the ground. Rachel took off. She may have been raring for a fight a few minutes ago, but she was all about damage on the go now. With the Hork-Bajir essentially declawed in the dark, she didn't even have to engage them. Mostly, she was just shoving them out of the way. Hard.

Marco's weapon flashed in the dark, hitting another Hork-Bajir at Tobias's instruction. *Come on, Groot, keeping moving,* he said.

*Surrounded by assholes,* Marco grumbled, but I could hear the smile in his voice.

"Someone, anyone, get these lights back on!" a Controller thundered. It was weird, but it was one of the first times I'd heard one of them speak since the melee began.

Marco smacked him into the wall. *Guys, I'm beginning to think fighting is a zero-sum game. I mean, no matter how many of these guys we knock down, they're going to keep sending more.*

He had a point. And at some point they were going to get the lights back on. Or the next crew would just show up with flashlights or night-vision goggles. I suddenly felt very fortunate that they hadn't hit us with grenades. No, grenades would be too structurally damaging. Smoke bombs. Tear gas. That stuff, would work. I prayed no one else thought of that.

*Rachel, Marco,* Elfangor said calmly, *it may be time to join the others.*

*Yeah,* Rachel said, barrelling past another group of Hork-Bajir. *That's a great idea, but we need better than cover of darkness to do a morph switch.*

*Jake, which way?* Tobias called.

*You're asking me?*

*You've been here before.*

Shit, he had me there. I had been here before. I wasn't an expert, but I was more familiar with this place than they were. I'd been more or less trying to get us toward the elevator, but once I stopped to think about it, I knew we couldn't get out that way. There was no way in hell we could get back there. There were just too many areas where we could get swarmed by more Hork-Bajir. And even if they didn't have Dracon beams, we weren't bulletproof.

The last time I'd come through, I'd followed other people in and out. And I hadn't been noticed as a lizard. The elevator couldn't possibly still be open. They had to be on lockdown by now. Plus, we'd have to go past the main concourse to get there. With as many Controllers as we were passing in this section, I didn't want to go anywhere near that concourse. Even if we somehow got Rachel, Marco, and Elfangor into squirrel morph, and tried to sneak out, it wasn't going to work.

I tried to focus, and when there's a gorilla, a grizzly, and a furry blue alien rushing behind you, that's something of a challenge. I knew only two ways into this place. And I'd made a pretty good argument against the first one.

The only other point of access in this whole facility that I knew had to go all the way to the surface was the Taxxon feeding room.

*Fuck, I got a way out, but it's going to suck for all of us.*

*You say suck like this is a fucking picnic,* Marco quipped.

I did not, under any circumstances, want to crawl up a drop shaft of fetid meat. Want to was immediately trumped by have to. But the gross factor was minor compared to the other problem. If we had to go up that drop shaft, we were going the wrong way.

*Um, Jake?* Cassie called, *aren't we circling back?*

*Yeah, we are.*

I was getting a crash course on battle decisions, and I was doing a shit job of it. But one of the first things I learned about being in a clusterfuck battle is that no matter how well you plan ahead, you end up making some decisions in the moment. Things can happen that you don't anticipate, and things happen that in retrospect you should've anticipated. This was the latter. We came in without an exit strategy.

The fucked up thing - like there's a part that wasn't - was that doubling back actually worked.

Apparently all the Yeerk forces were mobilizing in the direction they thought we were heading. Makes sense. So when we doubled back, heading in a direction the Yeerks though we'd already cleared, they weren't any real obstacles.

We ended up back in the tank facility.

*Jake, where the hell are we going?* Rachel asked.

I didn't want to answer. I didn't like keeping them in the dark, but under the circumstances, I didn't think telling them would necessarily help. Oh, I'm taking you to the rancid meat chute, follow me. I couldn't see how that would go well.

*We have Controllers ahead,* Cassie said, thankfully filling in the gap of my non-answer.

It was an engineering crew. They had set up portable lighting and were diligently working on one of the trashed tank units. I saw other lights and there had to be crews working on half a dozen units.

*They're trying to repair the damage,* Marco said. *Any chance they can fix it?*

*No,* Elfangor said. *At most, they could move the Yeerks to another tank facility, but with the life support systems offline, and the profound increase in temperature, only a fraction of Yeerks could be saved in the time they have.*

We could have stopped the crews. Marco and Elfangor had weapons, and it would have been so easy to destroy the rest of the tanks. But so far as I could tell, the engineering crews were armed only with the tools they'd brought. I didn't come here to shoot fish in a barrel. I had already killed enough people. It was something terrorists would do. To cause an incident and then take out the first responders. They were essentially paramedics, and Yeerks or not, it didn't sit right. They weren't a threat.

*Forget them,* I said. *The only other way I know out is through there.* I took off past the open space of the tank room and to the door that had last time led me to the Taxxon area. I couldn't see color as a squirrel, but I knew there was orange tape on the floor below.

*Wait,* Rachel said. *I thought you only knew about the elevator. Where the hell - * she trailed off. She figured it out. *Oh, fuck no!*

*What?* Tobias asked.

*We're going to that Taxxon room,* she said.

*Why would we head there?* Cassie asked.

*Because Jake here is taking us up the meat chute, aren't you, Jake?*

I sighed inwardly. *Rache, I have to assume the elevators are on lockdown. Even if we got through all the Hork-Bajir to get there… It wasn't going to work.*

*Like I said,* Marco added, *assholes.*

*We don't have time to argue,* Cassie said. *It's a way out, and it looks unguarded. Let's go.*

The part that I had forgotten, though, is that even the Taxxon feeding pens had been across the main concourse.

And the lights were still on in this section.

We came in behind a crew of Hork-Bajir and human-Controllers. That was our first little advantage. For a second or two, they didn't notice us. And the second advantage is that this crew wasn't armed. I don't know if they were on their way to an armory of some kind of if they were a different group that randomly became an attack squad by default.

Rachel and Marco powered through the Hork-Bajir as much as possible. Without Dracon beams, they used their blades, and Hork-Bajir are more athletic than they look.

And they look powerful.

Marco was thrown backwards, even as he fired his Dracon beam into the Hork-Bajir that threw him. Marco remembered our ace in the hole from last time. The Dracon beam hit the lighting fixtures just behind me and Cassie, and the cascading failure was just what we needed.

But then a blade slashed downward, and Marco lost the hand that held his Dracon beam. The gorilla howled and grabbed the attacking Hork-Bajir with his other hand. He broke the alien's neck with a simple twist. He took a moment and pried the Dracon beam from his own severed hand and tried firing at the other Hork-Bajir, but the weapon had broken when it hit the floor. A weak flash and then smoke. Marco hurled the object into the Hork-Bajir's face. It screamed, but didn't go down.

Rachel came to Marco's rescue. She was stained dark with blood, but it wasn't all hers. She tore through a Hork-Bajir with her claws. Her muzzle was dripping blood and I saw one of the fallen aliens had its throat ripped out.

Elfangor was dealing with the human-Controllers. He'd lashed several of them with his tail, and in the dark without weapons, the Controllers fled back up the corridor and out the way we'd come in. At first, I figured they'd must've decided discretion was the better part of valor.

But that wasn't it. They were getting out of the way. Backup had shown up.

I couldn't see what was coming. Squirrels have really good night vision, but there are limits. I could only see in about a twenty- or thirty-foot radius. But I could hear it. Whatever was coming down the corridor was big. Bigger than Tobias's elephant morph. It reeked like the dead, and I could feel the vibrations even in the lighting rig. It was like an earthquake trying to sneak up on us.

*What is this?* Cassie asked. She was terrified. She wasn't the only one.

*I-I don't know,* I said.

All I could sense was a gargantuan mass in the black ahead where the corridor turned.

*I applaud your efforts,* Visser Three said, suddenly. *At current estimates, some seventeen thousand Yeerks are projected to be lost in your assault.*

Elfangor wasn't doing well in the dark. The track lighting didn't do as much in this space as it had in the corridor. The concourse was just too big for the limited lighting. I could feel Elfangor's sense of dread.

*Hang in there, Elfangor,* I said, trying to send back as much calm as I could.

*Show yourself, coward!* Elfangor shouted.

*Coward, am I?* Visser Three snarked, maliciously amused. A shape moved in the dark, it was too vague and I couldn't make out any details. *You were the ones that attacked the tanks. What is a Yeerk without a host, Andalite? Blind, helpless, defenseless. Seventeen thousand, boiled alive, and you try to flee. No, you know which of us is the coward, don't you?* The Visser actually laughed. It was a sickening, dark mirth. *Oh, some things never change, do they, Elfangor?*

You could've cut the silence with a knife. Rage sizzled from Elfangor's mind. Visser Three, in Alloran's body, with all his memories, knew Elfangor. And he knew what buttons to push. He was trying to needle him.

And it was working.

Visser Three could feel it too. *Oh, Elfangor. Did you ever think you'd be on this planet again? After all your many failures the last time you found this seemingly insignificant rock, so fitting that you should die here.*

My thoughts raced. Again? Elfangor had been on Earth before! It made so much sense. The way he nodded or slouched, gestures that seemed too familiar, too human, the way he evaded certain questions, all of it was because he had been part of that Andalite mission to Earth.

He had been the one that left Alloran behind.

Elfangor fired into the dark. And in the flash of his weapon, the aptly-named shredder, I saw Visser Three.

The shadows writhed like snakes, and while I could only see it for a second, it was enough to snuff the last shred of hope from my mind. Visser Three didn't just have access to Alloran's Andalite codes and military tactics, but also the Andalite morphing technology. And Visser Three could morph more than that fucked-up fish bird.

All I could see of the creature was tentacles. Hundreds of them. Like a creature made out of squid. But these tentacles didn't have suckers and they weren't slimy. More like giant segmented rat tails, covered in thorn-like hooks.

Elfangor fired into the monster, and in each flash, all I could see was more tentacles. But then, in the last flash, I saw teeth. Giant teeth, longer than my arm, set in rows on a bizarre four-sectioned jaw.

*Run!* I screamed, throwing all my panic and desparation into the word. Rachel and Marco took off after me, Tobias guiding Marco in the dark.

But Elfangor wasn't following us. I saw the flashes. I stopped and dared to turn around.

Elfangor was wrapped in tentacles. He kicked his powerful legs, trying to break free, but the tentacles pulled him down. His tail sliced at the tendrils, but there were too many. Another flash, and then I heard his weapon hit the floor. I saw him dragged, kicking and bucking, into the darkness.

*Run,* he said. It was the last word he ever said to us. There was no fear in it, no heat or anger. Just… resolve. He knew this was the end for him. I think, maybe, looking back, that Elfangor never planned on coming back. Every thought he'd had, every action he'd taken since we'd found him was to come here and simply do as much damage as he could.

His mission was complete, and the only thought he had left was that we get out with our lives. He knew we couldn't save him. And he didn't want us to die trying.

I was running as fast as my squirrel body could run. The others followed along. No one said a word. No one had any words.

I heard the telepathic scream through every thread of my consciousness. My soul would forever after carry the stain he left on us. Anguish, fear, the cacophony of pain. But also his hope, his pride, and his unyielding sense of rebellion. His last conscious thought was of defiance.

And then there was only silence.

Elfangor was gone.