Christopher Windward

I slept under a bridge that night. You'd think I'd have been unhappy – my boyfriend was captured by the Animorphs, and I was likely walking into a trap on the following evening. But after morphing and demorphing to heal the injuries from the hospital, I had managed to place a phone call to my brother. He was alright, the Kandrona was alright, and I knew he'd be meeting me along with Eric tomorrow, and apparently "with a guarantee that everything would be fine". He wouldn't get more specific than that – he said I'd have to see it to believe it.

So I wasn't unhappy. A little melancholy, though. I missed Eric. I missed Orkath. I missed the simple days of life before the war, even the simple days of just being a Controller in middle school. But I was pretty sure that, very soon, life was going to be normal again. Or normalish. One way or the other, I knew we were close to resolving everything, and I knew I was one of the key players in deciding how everything was going to go down.

So I guess, if I'm really honest, I was also feeling a little proud of myself. It actually crossed my mind that I might end up in a history book somewhere over what happened in the next few days, and I went to sleep imagining some poor kids listening to my name in class and not paying attention, or maybe, because I was a kid like them, paying just a little more attention than they did to stories of Paul Revere or Frederick Douglas.

Probably not. Jake was probably going to hog all the spotlight anyway.

Jake Berenson

I slept in a field a few miles south of the camp, the meeting with Arbron still fresh in my head. Tomorrow I would fly in at first light and tell the other Animorphs, and the whole dynamic of the war would change. But I was exhausted, and it was dangerous to fly the remaining distance to the camp tonight. The Yeerks could still have had a tail on me from the Taxxon tunnels, or I could be spotted by a patrol on my way in. Better to rest for the night.

My thoughts drifted quite a bit as I started to fall asleep under the stars. I thought about Cassie, and my suspicions that the Taxxon defection was going to be a lot less of a surprise to her than it would be to the others. I was already seeing her decision to let Tom take the morphing cube in an entirely new light, one that I suspect was in the back of her mind from the beginning.

Which made me think of the other morph-capable Yeerks. I'd been expecting to have to fear every errant squirrel I ran across, but it seemed like, a few battle morphs aside, the Yeerks hadn't really gotten the hang of all the possibilities that morphing should be opening up to them. And I started to wonder if it wasn't just because, perhaps, all the different emotional perspectives of their various animal morphs were altering their culture in unexpected ways.

For a few moments, my mind wandered to that gay kid from my old school. Chris Windward. I had seen him morphing at the battle with the National Guard troops, and his Yeerk had addressed me in thought-speak, so I knew he was one of the human-Controllers who'd been given the morphing power. If any Yeerk had seemed unaffected, ethically, by the morphing power, it had been him. He'd been just as ruthless and arrogant, and only my superior experience with my morph had kept him from killing me.

Still… his host was a reasonably bright kid, and the Yeerk had access to all his memories, so the fact remained – why /hadn't/ they ever tried to just follow us back to camp, or hop on one of us as a flea? Could they really have just not thought of it yet, including their hosts? Or were they enjoying the freedom of their animal forms so much that, subconsciously, they didn't /want/ to find us?

I was missing something. I wasn't sure what, and ultimately I didn't think it was a key factor in winning the war, but someday, if things went my way, I was going to find that kid and ask him. Just for the shits and giggles of it.

Assuming, of course, he was still alive.

Eric Campbell

I was assuming that he was still alive, of course. Not a horrible assumption – none of his injuries at the hospital had seemed severe, and even if our visit had tipped off any other Animorph or Yeerk factions, it would have taken them too long to get to the hospital before he left. Still, there's being 99.9% sure of something and being 100% sure of it, and sometimes the gulf of difference between the two is enough to fill The Grand Canyon.

I was sleeping in the very house in which I was to meet the Animorphs. They had chosen well – apparently the actual owner was a member of the National Guard and was probably mobilized over everything that was going on. The evening news program was doing a story on the military response to the Yeerk invasion, and what was interesting about it was that the interviewer was asking the general on the feed some fairly pointed questions that implied knowledge of the Animorphs' existence. I suppose some former human-Controller must have gotten out of the city before it was quarantined and been able to give the station a full briefing regarding what had been going on, because they seemed very knowledgeable. At one point they even mentioned Jake by name, which of course prompted the general to deny, with conviction, that any such person was serving in the military at this time.

A very suspicious denial, since how would the general be /so/ sure that none of the thousands of soldiers under his command carried that particular name? "They know more than they're letting on," I murmured to myself.

Cassie Godfrey

"He knows more than he's letting on," James whined, tossing the bottle of vodka angrily against the wall of the cabin. "I'm… I'm gonna squish him. I'm gonna make that Yeerk pay. For Ray." He giggled drunkenly. "Pay for Ray. Hah. That rhymes. He'd have liked that." He glanced up at me. "Did Jake rhyme?"

I closed my eyes, taking a moment to push aside my own grief. It was just too hard to focus on this conversation at all, not with Jake gone. Jake. Gone. Dead. How could that happen? How could that have been the result?

But I couldn't get lost in my misery. There was still a war to win, and this formerly disabled kid was the best candidate we had for taking up Jake's mantle of leadership. He already commanded seventeen of the Animorphs anyway.

No. No, sixteen, I reminded myself. Ray hadn't made it either. Which was why the new best hope for humanity was lying drunk on my floor. He didn't know how to go back to the safe house and face the grief of his friends. Marco had led the other Auxiliary Animorphs back in his stead.

"You do know that all the alcohol in your system is just going to be dissolved by the morphing process, right?" I pointed out.

James looked up at me with bleary, bloodshot eyes. "How d'you know?" he slurred at me.

I let out a sad laugh. "Please. Three years of this and you think we've never gotten blind drunk about it before?" I smirked, giggling a little bit as I sniffled a tear away. "I remember the first time, when we were thirteen. After David. Rachel and Ax were messed up over… well, what we had to do. They'd had to do. So Marco decided, 'Hey, we should show him the human custom for dealing with fucked up shit like that, right?' He showed up at my barn that night with two bottles of Tequila and Erek, you know, just in case he had to put up a hologram for our parents or something like that." I sighed. Erek. I missed him, too. "You should have seen it. Ax isn't that good at walking in human morph /sober/, much less with three shots of tequila in him. It was like he and Jake were competing to see who could fall over more." The memory brought me a smile, but imagining Jake again, healthy and happy (well, drunken happy) was starting to bring the tears forward again.

James could tell. He pulled himself up and wobbled over to me, wrapping his arms around me. "Shhh. It'll be okay, Cassie. You'll see. We'll make that Yeerk pay."

Craig Tozier

«I'm gonna make that Yeerk pay.»

I stood in front of the bowl that had Ewell in it, holding my hands outward. Facing me, teeth bared, was Timmy, in his bobcat morph. He was in morph because he wanted the flexibility that he didn't have in his natural form. Flexibility and /teeth/.

"No," I insisted. "This isn't the way, Timmy. We have a deal."

Timmy responded by letting out a roar that probably woke up half the neighborhood. «A deal. With /them/? How can you talk about deals, Craig? Ray is DEAD, do you understand? He took a Dracon Beam to the head tonight. One of those THINGS killed him, and you can stand there and defend it?»

I took a deep breath, stifling the pain I, too, was feeling for Ray. "This Yeerk was here all night, Timmy. It wasn't involved in the fight that killed Ray."

«Ray would still be alive if it weren't for his people,» Timmy retorted angrily.

I shrugged. "Ray would still be in a wheelchair if it weren't for his people," I countered. "I think if you could ask him, Ray would tell you that the few months of freedom he had were worth it, don't you? I know that if death comes for me in one of these battles, that's the way I'll feel."

Timmy didn't say anything further. He just stalked away and sprawled himself across the living room couch before beginning to demorph. Erica came over to me and put her arms around me.

"That was close," she whispered, once she was sure that Timmy's hearing had returned to human normal.

I nodded, sighing. "Hmph. Who'd have believed this morning I would be trying to keep a Yeerk alive long enough to return it to its host. It's like the whole world's turned upside down."

I glanced down at her, and suddenly she was leaning up and kissing me fiercely and I was kissing her back. She smiled at me when she broke the kiss. "Sometimes the changes are good, right?" she quipped, poking my nose and walking away from me.

"Hmph," I repeated, and I could feel the ridiculously wide grin on my own face.