The squadron of hawks piled down on me from all angles. They didn't hit me, but their smaller bodies were forcing my Yeerk to bank the eagle's wings down and to the left. They were no longer including us in their thought-speak, but it was clear that they were still communicating privately. The owl was likely guiding the less darkness-oriented fliers.
I thought about Craig. The boy I'd tried to save from the bear. I wondered if this sacrifice, my death at the hands of the human resistance, would be as pointless as that one had been. At least I could no longer be used to help take over my own species.
«We're not dead yet,» my Yeerk reminded me, dipping my wings close to my body as he dove for the ground. We landed in the baseball field. Two boys were there, boys from the team. Cody and Martin. My Yeerk was past the point of caring. Right in front of them, my body started to emerge from the eagle's.
The hawks were a little more cautious - they landed in the nearby woods, presumably to do their own demorphing.
Why, I thought to myself (and of course, to my Yeerk, since all my thoughts are his to hear), would Jake and the others care? We already know who they are and what they are.
I could sense that the Yeerk realized the significance of my insight. And I again felt the pang of guilt, betraying the resistance with my very thoughts. But he was too busy concentrating on my demorph to comment.
"Hey look," Martin said, lowering his bat as he pointed towards me. "An eagle."
"What's /happening/ to it?" Cody asked in confusion. And then both boys started to scream.
«What?» my Yeerk complained, projecting my thought-speak voice aloud. «Never seen a boy grow out of an eagle before?» By now I was almost two feet tall, my feet having already emerged from the eagle's talons and my beak curled up into a human mouth and nose.
Cody ran to Martin's side, eyes never leaving my shifting and twisting body. Martin was paralyzed with shock and fear. Neither boy was going to be sleeping well for awhile, that was certain.
Too certain, I thought. They'll both be Controllers by the morning.
By now I was more human than eagle. «Look at it this way,» my Yeerk said almost jovially. «Two of my brothers will acquire more of an appreciation for baseball.»
"I know it's scary," my mouth said as the last of my fingers and toes formed. The Yeerk turned my head towards the bushes. "And it's about to get scarier."
"How... how did you /do/ that?" Cody asked, stepping slowly forward.
"I don't have time to explain," my Yeerk replied. "It's something you learn in the Sharing." The mental image of the cougar was already bright in my head while he spoke. "Some kids are abusing the power though," he clarified, jerking his head toward the woods. "Go inside the school and tell Chapman, he'll know how to talk to them. He'll take care of you, too."
The kids - my friends - wordlessly started to obey "my" command, unaware that they were taking their last runs as free human beings. Why would they be? They had just seen me emerge from an eagle's body, but I was still their trusted friend.
My waves of guilt grew stronger. I'd almost been ready to consider this Yeerk passable for a decent creature. But the small things he did for me meant nothing. He was still using my relationship with these kids to turn them into helpless puppets for two of his fellow Yeerks.
«If it's any consolation,» my Yeerk told me as he completed the cougar morph, «We may not live long enough to see them as hosts.»
I hadn't paid attention to the changes as they'd happened. I'd been too wrapped up in feeling sorry for my friends. But as the morph completed and my new body sprang to life, I became instantly aware of all that had changed.
My skull was short, rounded with powerful jaws and strong teeth. The heavy bones of the jaw, augmented by strong neck and shoulder muscles, made me feel like I could pounce on prey as large as an elephant and still take the impact well.
My sense of smell was incredible. I raised my cream-colored snout to the air and knew instantly what the enemy was. Bobcat. Bull. Crocodile. And Lion. All approximately three thousand yards away, covered only by a sparse layer of trees.
The bull and the croc were nothing. They didn't bother me. But my fellow cats did. They were in /my/ territory, and that was not acceptable. I lurched down onto my haunches for a moment, padding the ground with my front paws.
And then I flew! Thirty, thirty-five miles an hour from a standing start, padding my way straight towards the woods around them. But I was not so stupid as to go directly after them, no. I kept the distance between us constant, loping around on the edge. The lion started to move as well, trying to surround me, trap me in my section of the woods. But I knew the way to handle them.
I leaped up almost fifteen feet into one of the trees above me and opened my mouth to let out a scream. It was not a roar, exactly - roars are for the less subtle of my breed. I could not roar, but I could chirp, peep, purr, growl, moan, whistle and scream. All acts of subterfuge, of course. All to make the foolish cat think that there was human prey in the area.
It worked, but it was not the cat who arrived first, it was the bull. This was a good thing, as I would need a full stomach for the work to come. I kept myself upwind, so that the bull could not smell me. Such a thing would ruin the hunt, or at least make me work harder for it. It was thinking strangely, this one... almost like a human being. Searching the ground. Unaware that it's threat was to come from above.
I leaped! One hundred and sixty pounds of hungry kitty slammed into the side of the bull's leathery hide as my sharp, searing teeth ripped into it's flesh. «AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!» the bull cried, in human thought-speak.
The scream made me stop, my teeth just inches from ripping open the bull's throat. With a sudden jolt of awareness, I knew who I was. I was Chris. Chris, the human-Controller. And once again, the first to remember who and what I was. That I was not really a cougar, just a person being controlled by the cougar's instincts. A disturbingly familiar situation for me, but even with the smell of the "kill" fresh on it's lips, the cougar was easier to fight off than the Yeerk would ever be.
This time, I wasn't stupid enough to waste time waking up my Yeerk. «Over here!» I cried in open thought-speak, not that the rebels could possibly be unaware of the smell of blood coming from the injured bull. Then, I took off at a trot back towards the schoolyard.
It was only a matter of seconds, but I'd already covered almost half the field before my lithe cougar legs stopped responding to my commands.
Surprisingly, my Yeerk wasn't angry. Just annoyed. «Thought you'd go for a stroll, did you?»
I grinned inwardly. «Just helping you get away. They'll be too busy with the bull now to chase us.»
The Yeerk sighed, and again the cougar started to run, but this time it was away from the attackers. «I don't know why you bother trying to lie to me. You know I can see your thoughts, your memories. You were trying to save that rebel from me. You knew that once I'd regained control I'd have bitten it.»
The cougar could easily smell that it was not being followed, at least not by any out-of-the-ordinary animals. Birds and rats and raccoons and other animals native to the area were everywhere, and any one of them could have been a rebel in morph, but at least they were not a danger.
A quick jump to a rooftop and the Yeerk reached my bedroom window. It was only open enough to let a bird in, but that presented no problem for the cougar's teeth. A small red blood stain tainted the blue paint of the windowsill as he lifted my morphed head up, pushing the window open enough to leap into the room.
We were demorphed and asleep before anyone at home knew the wiser.
The next morning my big brother woke me up by dumping a cup of cheery Kool-Aid on my forehead.
"Jeez, you jerk," the Yeerk whined, sitting upright in my bed. My hands pulled my shirt off and started patting the juice out of my face and hair with it. "What was /that/ about?"
My brother just rolled his eyes. "It was about your alarm clock going off for half an hour and you laying there like a sack, numbnuts. 'Sides, you got a friend downstairs waiting for you."
"I do?" the Yeerk said curiously. I got excited thinking that maybe it was Eric! Maybe he wanted to discuss details of tonight's movie. Or wait, maybe he wanted to cancel the movie. I wasn't sure which option would make me happy and which miserable, with this accursed Yeerk scrambling my brain.
"I'll send him up," my brother said, walking out the door. Moments later Cody walked in.
No. Not Cody. I could see that in his eyes long before his words confirmed it. "Ah, good," he said, "You're okay. You should have called last night. Exas One-Oh-Six was worried that the rebels had captured you."
I wanted to cry. I sat there staring through eyes that were no longer mine and realizing that, yet again, one of my friends was staring back at me through eyes /he/ could no longer control. It was all my fault. I'd turned another one. This rampant plague of Yeerks was going to run all over the world before anyone noticed, and I would always be remembered, voicelessly, as one of the first who'd helped them do it.
My Yeerk ignored my rantings. "I was exhausted. Four morphs in less than an hour, I have no idea how the rebels do it."
Cody's Yeek nodded. "It /does/ sound rough, I admit." He tapped my shoulder. "Thanks for the body, by the way. I'm Ryos Six-Twenty-Four."
My Yeerk smirked. "Orkath One-Seven-Two. Any problems adjusting to your host brain?"
"Not really," Cody's Yeerk shrugged, sitting down at the chair by my desk and propping his feet up. "He was almost glad for the company. Lonely sort. /Sad/ life. Totally obsessed over this girl and this baseball trophy, neither of which he has /any/ hope for."
My Yeerk laughed. "For me, it's a boy and watching 'Buffy, the Vampire Slayer'. Strange obsessions, to be sure, but much more attainable."
«Great,» I mumbled, «another member of the team who knows I'm gay. If we ever /do/ get out of..» I stopped ranting and thought for a second. «Wait, did you just say "me", or "my host"?»
«I said "me",» the Yeerk admitted snippily. «I /am/ pretending to be you, remember.»
«Not in front of your fellow Yeerks,» I pointed out.
Cody's Yeerk laughed. "Wow, you've made my host here somewhat paranoid. He says that you are something called a 'fag' and that you will now attempt to make me do things which are extremely pleasurable against my will."
My Yeerk accessed my memories, and I found myself paradoxically attempting to explain bigotry to him. Like a Yeerk needed any lessons in intolerance.
"Pay it no mind," my mouth said, although I was uncertain about whether the Yeerk was speaking to Cody's Yeerk or to me. "Come on, we'll be late for school."
The walk to school was almost uneventful and boring. Just the beginning of another day in a long string of days that no longer mattered.
«Look,» the Yeerk said to me, adjusting my eyes upwards. «That cloud... it has a familiar shape. It is shaped like one of your human frogs.»
«We don't really own frogs,» I commented, unnecessarily.
«Still,» the Yeerk commented, «the vision of it makes me feel... connected to it somehow. Like it is more than a cloud because of what it reminds me of.»
I actually half-laughed when I realized it. The Yeerk was trying to cheer me up. The Yeerk realized that Cody's slur had bothered me. «Well congratulations,» I said sarcastically. «You've developed an imagination.»
«I've always had imagination. Most Yeerks do, you know.»
«Whatever,» I scoffed. «If your people had imagination you'd be busy thinking of ways to get your own bodies instead of taking /mine/.»
The Yeerk became angry - his anger felt different from my usual experience of it, though. It was almost an anger of passion. «What do you want me to do?» he complained. I'm /trying/ here, a-»
«Trying?» I interrupted. I became more and more angry myself, at every word. «I'm sorry, I didn't realize I should be so grateful. Wow, my Yeerk feels sorry that something some jerk who doesn't even have control of his own voice was thinking about me bothered me. What about all the damage /you've/ done to my feelings over the last year, huh?»
I expected the Yeerk to make some kind of witty response. Something about that not mattering, about how I should be grateful to have him for a Yeerk instead of some of the crueler ones. Same crap you hear from a cruel parent all the time - I'd heard my friends' parents say it often enough. I'd always thanked God that my parents were never like that - they never considered "mild" atrocities to be acceptable just because there were worse out there.
But the Yeerk's retort never came. He started to again ignore me, branching out into some conversation with Cody's Yeerk about some seaweed they'd heard about on the Yeerk home world and how they couldn't wait to retake their planet from the Andalites and wrap themselves around in it. And I was left alone with my thoughts.
The Yeerk's first act of kindness, if you want to call it that, occurred when my dad died, in the hospital. He was already incredibly sick before I became a Controller, but it was in the month afterwards that he'd gotten so bad that hospitalization was necessary. I couldn't help but feel like part of it was because I wasn't spending as much time with him. Of course I wasn't - my Yeerk had other plans for my body.
Nevertheless, I was still the one he was closest to, in some ways even closer than my mom was. And so my Yeerk had no choice but to visit him in the hospital - to do less would be to blow my cover. He sat there, looking at my father breathing through a labored tube, listening to me crying in my head because I couldn't walk over and hug him. It was the first time that my thoughts, my rantings, had ever really bothered him.
Finally, one day, he said, «Okay.»
Not being privy to his thoughts, I was confused. «Okay, what?» I asked.
«Okay, I'm giving you control of your body.» Sensing my rapid elation, he added, «Not permanently, just for an hour or so. Just so you can say and do what you want, for your dad. But mind me, human - if you breathe a word to him about my people, I will wrest control of you so fast you'll never know you had it, and spend the next month making you pay for it.»
Suddenly I felt my body go limp in the chair that I was sitting in. I flexed my hand, and for the first time in any place other than the Yeerk pool it was answering me on it's own. I stood slowly, steadily, on my legs and walked over to the dying man on the bed. He lifted his weary eyes and, despite the best efforts of the Yeerk's deception, could tell instantly that something had changed.
"The spark," he mumbled. It was a longstanding word between us. When I'd asked him how I would know when someone loved me, he said, "The spark."
I smiled softly at my father and placed my small hand in his larger one. "Yeah," I said.
"I thought..." A coughing fit interrupted my father, his grip on my hand tightening a bit. "I thought... I'd lost you."
"Never," I stated firmly, leaning down towards him. "I'll /always/ love you."
With nary more than a smile, my father replied, "And I, you." And then the spark of life left him. One hand still holding my father's, I reached up with my free hand and closed the lids of his eyes one final time. Then I walked back to my chair and cried until my mother and my older brother returned.
I looked up at my mother. And then my hand, not of my own will, wiped my tears away from my eyes as my body stood to walk to her. My first reaction was anger. «No, damn you! Let me tell them! Let me hold them! NO!»
It wasn't until days later, sitting in my classroom as my Yeerk zoned out on the lesson the way I always did, that I said, «Thank you.» I didn't have to explain what for - the Yeerk knew what I was thinking about when I said it.
It was a small thing. A small gift, made smaller by the memories of all the atrocities that the Yeerk had forced me to commit. And yet, it reminded me that deep down, somewhere, underneath all that the Yeerk did to me and through me, there was a sentient creature who actually cared.
«I do, you know.»
The thought-speak voice snapped me out of my memories and back to the present. The Yeerk, realizing my disorientation, repeated himself. «I /do/ care.»
I couldn't be as angry with him as I wanted to be, the memory of being allowed to say goodbye to my father still so clear in my head. «You're alright, Orkath. If things were different... who knows? Maybe we could have been friends.»
The Yeerk's emotions again changed - strange, how you never really notice the rapid changes emotions can go through until you're feeling someone else's. This emotion was very clear - bitterness. «I doubt that, Chris. I doubt that you or any other human could ever have seen me as something other than one of your disgusting slugs.»
I didn't have an answer for him. I wanted to believe he was wrong, but the truth was that I simply didn't know for sure, and I didn't want to think about it. I focused on the outside world, instead. Cody and I had completed our walk to school and were standing in the hallway, speaking to Vice Principal Chapman, the other new Controller Martin, and Mister Tidwell. One of the school secretaries was just breaking it up, telling Chapman that he had a phone call in his office.
The rest of us started on down the hall. "So," Mr. Tidwell said, "Martin, I'll need to see you after third period to discuss your English paper. You will remember, won't you?"
Martin nodded. "Yeah, Mister Tidwell. I just.."
He was interrupted by Chapman's voice, screaming "My HOUSE?!" loudly enough for the whole school to hear. For a moment it made all of us cringe.
"I just have to see my Social Studies teacher about an assignment first," Martin continued. "Then I'll be there."
My Yeerk tapped Martin on the shoulder. "Hey, I've got a 'date' of sorts with this kid Eric. If you're not doing anything this afternoon, why don't you check with Jason, see if he can get you to take my spot on the squadron. After you're given the proper... upgrade, shall we say." My mouth made an evil smirk.
Mister Tidwell and Martin seemed happy about the idea also. "That's not a bad idea, Martin. The more people we have capable of that, the better." He looked over to me, lowering his voice a bit, the way I /wished/ my Yeerk would when he decided to bring up things like Eric. "Think the Visser will approve?"
My shoulders went up and down in a non-committal shrug. "I think Tom would, that's the important thing, really."
We had arrived at my classroom. "Well," my mouth said, jerking my thumb toward the door, "Another lovely classroom experience awaits."
Classes were less boring for me than they used to be before I became a Controller. I guess, when doing physical things is no longer possible, the mental are just naturally more exciting. I was actually learning a lot about what the teachers were talking about, at least when my Yeerk was kind enough to focus on their voices or what they were writing on the blackboard. I couldn't get my mind off of seeing Eric that night. It had become the talk of a pretty large segment of the Yeerk pool - several Controllers had offered us luck with "the big date".
In between classes my Yeerk made his report about last night's battle, particularly about his inability to control the morphs before I did. Sub-Visser Eighty-Two, the Yeerk of a rather ruthless-looking ten year old, ensured him that it was only because it was the first time trying those particular morphs, and that everyone had a problem with the animal instincts the first time. He then gave us our orders for the afternoon and sent us on our way.
After my last class, Eric was waiting for me outside my classroom door. "Hey," he said in that unbelievably shy way of his.
"Hey," my Yeerk replied. There was a moment of awkward silence between us - well, between /them/ - as we started to walk slowly down the hallway. "So," my Yeerk said, "we're still on for tonight, right?"
"Oh, yeah, of course," the other boy stammered. "I mean, that is, if you're still up for it."
The Yeerk knew how to play me to the tee. "Well, I am if you are."
Eric smirked. "Well, I am if you are."
The Yeerk rolled my eyes. "I think there's a 'yes' buried in all this somewhere."
Eric blushed, pushing back a lock of that beautiful golden hair. "Yeah," he said nervously, "I guess so." Another moment of silence. This time Eric broke it. "Soooo... I guess I should meet you at your place later? You're pretty close, it shouldn't be much of a walk from your house to mine."
"Sounds neat," my Yeerk said.
"Okay, so, uh, I'll see you at around seven." Eric started to quicken his pace a bit, to move on with his afternoon.
"I'll be there," the Yeerk called after him, provoking quite a few knowing looks from the boys and girls in the hallway who were Controllers. The Yeerk rolled my eyes again and then turned down a side hallway and out of the building.