Disclaimer: I don't own any of the Animorphs, nor any of the species presented in this story.

Chapter Thirteen.

Jake.

She was dead.

She was dead.

That was all I'd been thinking for the last three weeks –all I'd been able to think.

Cassie –my Cassie, the Cassie I'd loved and kissed and fought beside –was dead. Not dead in battle against the Yeerks, the way we'd always thought that one of us –if we were to die –would go.

No. She was dead of infection. Of blood poisoning. Of something so, so human that it almost seemed absurd.

There was no body. There was still a chance for hope, I guessed. But it was very faint.

Fact was, if she was still alive, she would have found a way to get back. She would have gone home. For a week, for two weeks, we'd managed to hold onto our hope. But now…well, the traces of infected blood pretty much told their own story. And from the air, we'd seen tracks –scuffed up earth, as though someone had been moving slowly, weakly –that led to a cliff, and to the river. Could have been someone else's tracks, but we…we were thinking the worst.

Three weeks. By now, I knew she wasn't coming back.

They were going to bury her in two days. There would be no body at the funeral, just an empty coffin. Nothing tangible was there to bury.

I –all of us –lived as normally as possible. I went to school, did my work. I carried on functioning. But I couldn't keep the tears back, sometimes. I couldn't stop thinking about her.

Cassie. Young, calm, quiet, loving. Wiser than some people. Caring, nurturing. She'd fought for Earth, for the freedom of humanity, even when she hadn't wanted to. I closed my eyes and saw her, working in the barn, morphing dolphin, smiling…

I opened my eyes again and tried to focus on the textbook. The letters were blurry. I swiped the back of my hand across my face. It came away wet.

Cassie. Dead.

The bell rang. I got up, moving mechanically. I put my stuff away. Walked out of the room. My mind not really registering the building around me. My face locked into the same blank, miserable expression I'd been wearing for what felt like a year.

And that was when Rachel walked up to me.

I hadn't been paying much attention to Rachel lately. I mean, I'd noticed when her carefully-applied appearance had started falling apart. And I'd noticed that she, too, had been mourning. But I hadn't really looked at her for a few days.

But this time there was something about her that caught my eyes. Something in her expression. Something fierce and confused and urgent that made me want to hear what she was thinking.

"Behind the gym," she muttered as she brushed past me. "Five minutes."

What can I say? I didn't have anything else to do.

----

I walked down there with Marco. Marco looked morose. Not that he'd been anything but grim for the last week and a half.

There's a space behind the gym. Bare earth, a few weeds. Not a very inviting place, and a bit difficult to get to. But with the gym one side, the wall on another, and a few straggly trees on the remaining sides, it's as private a place as you can hope for on the school grounds.

Rachel was already there, leaning against the gym wall.

And there was an osprey sitting in a tree.

Don't ask me how I knew. I mean, I'm not psychic or anything. But I had a strange feeling about that osprey. And I'd seen Cassie morphing that bird more times than I could count.

My breath caught in my lungs. I swear my heart stopped for two eternal seconds.

The osprey hopped out of the tree, flared its wings, and landed.

And then it changed.

It grew. The legs elongated. The three toes shrank and split into five, losing their scales. The feathers collapsed into feather patterns and faded into skin and fabric. The wings widened and narrowed into arms.

The osprey's beak retreated, and Cassie's wonderfully familiar face appeared from the bird's head.

Cassie. My Cassie.

Alive.

I stared at her like she was a miracle –and to me, right at that moment, she really was. Then, as she finished demorphing, I stepped forward and grabbed her in a hug. I just held onto her, revelling in the fact that she was alive, she was not dead, she was here and alive. I could feel her heart beating in her chest, healthy and strong. I could feel her warm breath on my cheek. She was hugging me back.

I could hear Rachel making a sound halfway between laughing and crying. I think maybe I was making that same sound.

Then I stepped back and yelled, "Where the heck have you been?"

----

We huddled behind the gym, the four of us. Marco hunched over. Rachel leaning against the wall. And Cassie, looking upset and guilty and happy, all at the same time.

"We thought you were dead," Rachel said, glaring.

I mean, I was happy to see Cassie –ridiculously happy. I know Rachel was, too. But we'd been through so much, thinking she was dead, that when she showed up alive we were kind of angry that she'd made us go through all of that. By 'kind of angry', of course, I mean furious.

"I nearly was," Cassie said simply.

Add 'confused' to how I felt right then.

"Look, we know you had blood poisoning," I said impatiently. "But going on what Ax told us, for you to still be alive it must have been cured at least two weeks ago. So where have you been? And why, why didn't you come back earlier? Do you have any idea what we've all been going through?"

Cassie bit her lip. "I'm sorry, Jake. But I had to…I had to…"

"Had to what?" Rachel demanded.

"Rachel, there's a Pemalite ship up on top of a mountain out there in the forest."

"What?" Marco said. "I mean, I think the Chee know better than –"

"No, Marco. Not that Pemalite ship. That one's still down in the ocean, as far as I know. This one's different."

"Spaceships," I said slowly, "don't usually go flying around on their own."

"No," Cassie agreed. "And…Jake, the ship on that mountain landed three weeks ago. And it's occupied."

Occupied.

Now, normally that word would have had more of an impact on me. As in, slowed me right down to near-coma levels for a moment. But right then, strange as it sounds, the fact that Cassie was alive and well mattered more to me than that some ancient and supposedly extinct species had taken up residence in the national forest.

Although that fact registered.

"Occupied by Pemalites?"

"Yes." Cassie nodded.

I digested this. "And you decided to hang around up there with them letting everyone think you were dead instead of coming back here and telling us all about this?"

Cassie winced, like I'd hit her with something uncomfortable. Like the truth. "Jake…"

"We thought you were dead," Rachel growled. "Do you know what that felt like? Having to go through life for over two weeks, thinking your best friend is dead? And now it turns out that…that…"

"We need to tell the Chee about this," Marco interrupted. "I mean, if anyone has the right to know about this, it's them, right?"

"I should have told you," Cassie said softly. "I shouldn't have…I was an idiot. I just kept thinking, what if the Yeerks found them? We'd have lost the war, then."

I laughed. It sounded strange, forced past my lips. "The day you think about tactics rather than people, Cassie, is the day we lose our collective conscience."

I should have been glad that she'd been thinking about the overall good of Earth. I should have been glad that she'd learned to set aside small-scale personal feelings when there were bigger things to do. I should have been glad, like any general would be.

I wasn't.

Like it or not, I'm no general. We're people who happen to be soldiers, not soldiers who happen to be people. And I didn't, on the personal scale, like what Cassie had done.

Besides, it made no tactical sense, either. If more of us knew about it, we'd have a better chance defending it.

We started walking to Erek's house. Cassie walked behind me, talking quietly to Rachel.

By the time we got there, Rachel was looking a little happier.