"I think I'm going to change my vote," Marco said, in the echoing silence after Rachel's outburst. "If the Ellimist asks again, I'm saying yes."
"What?!" Jake demanded. "Why?"
"Rachel's losing it," Marco said, shrugging, though he still seemed tense. "If she loses it, how long are the rest of us going to last?"
"Shut up, Marco," Rachel snapped, shrugging Tommy's hand off as she stepped forward. "I'm not in the mood for your jokes."
"Neither am I," Marco said flatly. "You know how much sleep I got last night? About an hour. I was up with nightmares the rest of the night. I was a zombie in school today. I felt like⦠like my skin had been rubbed with sandpaper. I'm jumpy; I'm scared; I'm stressed."
"Yeah," he allowed himself to admit. "My sensei told me that I was unfocused and twitchy through my entire lesson."
"This was bound to happen," Jake said, sighing softly.
"This was always insane, right from the start," Marco said, arms tightly folded across his chest. "A handful of kids fighting an alien invasion? Look what's happened: Tobias is trapped in morph, and Rachel is starting to use morphing to get away from her problems. The other night, I woke up in bed, and I didn't know what I was; I didn't know if I had hands or fins or talons or wings. Maybe you and Cassie are immune, Jake, but I doubt it."
"We can't just give up," Jake argued, folding his arms and narrowing his eyes.
"All we ever do is lose!" Marco snapped. "We annoy the Yeerks; maybe we blow up a ship, or have some little success, but the invasion marches on. All we ever do is barely escape with our lives. We're like some baseball team that never wins a game. And now, according to the Ellimist, we know it's going to be a whole losing season. We're not going to the playoffs."
"I don't care," Jake said, scowling determinedly. "I'm not giving up."
"Jake," Cassie called softly, moving in closer to Jake. "See this?" she held up her left arm, pointing to a scar above her wrist. "I got this from a raccoon that had been caught in a trap. Its leg had been broken, and I was trying to free it so I could save it. It bit me."
"We're not raccoons," Jake said, while Tommy found himself wondering just what it was that Cassie was getting at.
"Aren't we? Compared to the Ellimist?" Cassie asked. "Isn't it just possible he's right? That what he's trying to do is save at least a part of the human race? That he's trying to get us out of the trap and fix our broken bones?"
It didn't take long for Marco to agree with Cassie, though considering everything he'd clearly been going through, Tommy could fully understand where Marco was coming from; though he still agreed with Jake. They couldn't just let the Yeerks take Earth, they couldn't let them go on imprisoning people in their own bodies. They couldn't just give up.
