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Christopher Windward

Okay, I admit it – I'm not always the sharpest knife in the drawer.

All I have to say is, don't judge me until you've been there yourself. Unless you've actually been buried under two tons of rock and worried about how much air you've got left, you have no idea how hard it is to think clearly and remember everything you have at your disposal. So just shut up and don't laugh.

It had been forty minutes. Just me and Jake's mom, buried alive with a machine that was making the room hotter by the second as those bouncy rays, lifegiving to Yeerks, were being deflected back at us. I guess there was only so much solid mass that the rays could actually get through – I mean, I know we, err, they, used to keep a Kandrona on the top floor of a skyscraper, but really when you think about it, that's not many layers of solid to go through. Just the paper-thin glass of the building and the fifty or so feet from the street to the Yeerk Pool, and even then there were all the openings that the rays could travel through. Probably like a cell phone signal.

Well now we were the only ones getting the signal. Well, us and the twenty or so Yeerks in the bucket, who were all swimming violently around in a panic.

"Guess I saved you guys for nothin'," I mumbled at the bucket, sitting dejectedly against one of the metal walls. To my right was a small pile of rocks, barely a foot tall, where I had been trying, despite the waves of pain in my chest from the broken ribs I had attained during the fall, to dig our way out. A useless, counterproductive effort – I had wound up shifting the other rocks so that they caved in even further, shortening the room by half a foot and probably plugging up whatever air holes there might have been.

Jean shook her head, crouching by me and placing a hand tenderly on my shoulder. "You're a better person than me for trying," she said gently. "I'd have just let them starve."

I shrugged. "They're not /all/ bad, y'know," I told her. I didn't see any harm in telling her now – Orkath was most likely dead anyway. "Some of them are… were… pretty decent people." I bit my lip and choked back a tear. There'll be time to mourn later, I told myself, although I mostly said it just to convince myself that there would /be/ a later for us.

"I know," Jean admitted. "My Yeerk was… well, he didn't even want to be in me, really. He'd always wanted a different host body, something called a Naharan. He wanted something with a really good sense of smell, because he wanted to study botany." She smirked. "I used to picture him as a slug with glasses." She sighed, her face taking on a hard edge. "My husband's Yeerk was a real bastard, though. I won't shed any tears when /she/ starves."

I sighed, keeping my attention on the bucket. I didn't want to hear about the Yeerks she'd known. Not for the first time, I found myself wishing they'd never found my planet, although this time it wasn't for what they'd done to us – it was because I felt like a part of me had died. "I wish I could tell them what's going on," I said, nudging my head towards the bucket. "We're toast, but they'll be safe and well-fed in that bucket for years."

"You could always take one, let it inside you," Jean suggested. "Then it could tell the others when it crawled back out."

I shook my head. "We don't know who they are," I told her. "We get one of the harsher ones, he's liable to use my morphing power to b—" My eyes went wide. I stared at her, and then the bucket, and then the wall of rocks.

I had forgotten that I could morph.

Like I said, I'm not always the sharpest knife in the drawer.

"Stand back," I told her, concentrating on the form of the Hork-Bajir guard that was floating in my DNA. The first thing to change was my height, shooting me up two feet higher. Then my legs fleshed out, becoming the well-toned, muscular legs of a bodybuilder before Hork-Bajir scale patterns erupted from them. Then, blissfully, the pain in my chest disappeared as my broken ribs shifted with the others into a perfectly healthy Hork-Bajir torso, protecting both my regular heart and the extra one that had sprung into existence near my spleen. Then, the blades came – they shot out everywhere at once, from my arms, legs, even my still-human head. I glanced at the metal of the Kandrona, and sprouted a smile. "I look like a demon," I commented. I would have said more, but my tongue suddenly shrank and forked, like a snake's, and my vision changed, suddenly becoming like a computer with the color scheme dropped way down and the contrast pumped way up.

When the morph completed, I raised one bladed hand and looked over at the rocks entombing us. «This should be easier now,» I commented in thought-speak.

Here's the thing, though – turns out a Hork-Bajir warrior is even less useful against a stone blockade than a human teenager. Sure, they have great strength, but their blades were designed for stripping bark from trees. Bark was tough, but not even remotely as tough as solid rock, and my first swing at the rock wall nearly snapped one of my arm blades in twain. "Gffffraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaash!" I screamed, the guttural roar of pain garbled by my literally alien vocal chords. Even when I tried gently moving the rocks, I found that my blades would prevent me from getting a good grip on one or another. It was like trying to do a puzzle with gloves on – I needed more finesse than my hands would allow.

Frustrated, I demorphed, only then realizing that I had shredded the clothing Eric had gotten for me when I went Hork-Bajir. I let out a sigh, cursing my stupidity, although truthfully, modesty was the furthest thing from my mind. If anything I was glad that I didn't have to endure the Kandrona-generated heatwave in long-sleeved clothes. But it was, again, evidence that I just wasn't thinking.

I looked at the impenetrable barrier before us and tried not to succumb to my growing weariness. I needed to start using my head. "What would Jake do?" I asked, turning curiously towards his mother.

Jean smiled wistfully at the question, pride in her son's accomplishments obvious. That pride wasn't going to get us out of here, though. "I don't know," she admitted, shrugging her shoulders. "He had to keep this part of his life secret from us; to be honest, I didn't think he had much in the way of leadership skills, always mimicking what his brother did."

I nodded solemnly, smirking at the irony. "Well, he'd have an idea for this, I'm sure."

Jean nodded. "I suppose. He never really got into chess, but he was always into video games that involved strategy and tactics."

"Strategy and tactics," I murmured, looking around for inspiration. "Okay, so for assets we have a bucket of Yeerks, a super hot Kan…" I stopped, staring at the infernal heat-generating machine like it was a fully stocked refrigerator. "The Kandrona."

Mrs. Berenson's brow furrowed. "What, can it get us out of here somehow?"

I smirked. "Oh yeah, 'somehow'. It's the Yeerks' only Earth-based food supply, and it would take months to get another from the Yeerk home world."

"So?" Jean asked.

"So we don't have to dig our way out of here," I explained. "Any Yeerks who survived the explosion are going to be doing the digging for us. Getting this thing out and securing it is going to be, like, priority one for them."

"That just means we have to get out of here quickly, before they get here!" Jean insisted. "I don't want them to take me over again!"

I shook my head. For once, I was thinking ahead. "Oh, I've got just the morph for handling /them," I assured her. "But you'd have to trust me."

And so it was that a few hours later, when we heard the sound of Dracon fire and Taxxon breathing heading towards us, I put my plan into action. "Don't let the Taxxons lead!" Jean shouted as I began morphing. "I'm alive in here and I have an injury!" She shouted it again and again, even as I felt the world shrinking away from me. Even as I lost the ability to see, and her voice lost any meaning for me. Even as I surrendered myself to the instincts of my new morph, letting it take me where it wanted to go.

By the time the rescue teams broke through, I had no trouble seeing them. The lead human glanced me over suspiciously, glancing at the tears in my dress. "Identify yourself," he demanded.

"Sub-Visser Eighty-Three," I responded haughtily, using my connections to Jean's brain to twist her mouth into a wry grin. So, I thought to myself, this is how Orkath felt.

I had to admit, it was a good feeling.