I'd been having the same dream every night since meeting the Andalite. In the dream, I'm walking through a field of green grass. I come up to the top of a low hill, and see the landscape unfold around me. All around me, the world suddenly becomes a strange checkerboard that alternates between a grassy field on Earth and an alien landscape full of strange blue trees and purple shrubs under a red-gold sky. Somehow, it all feels familiar to me. Elfangor is standing nearby, watching me. I race over to him. He holds up the Herok disc, and his voice echoes in my head.
(...for my son...)
"I'm sorry," I tell him, "I don't know how to find him. We don't know where-"
Then I hear his voice again. But when I wake up, I can never remember anything he said to me.
Frustrated, I punch my pillow, take a deep breath, and start the day. Dry toast for breakfast again. Listen to Uncle Carl complain about how much money he lost betting on the Brewers-Dodgers game last night. Walk to school. Suffer through geometry, science, and history classes again. Eat an allegedly nutritious school-provided lunch of canned peaches, asparagus, undercooked chicken nuggets, and skim milk. Round out the day with gym class, language arts, and pre-calculus.
As I opened my locker to get my math books, I saw that somebody had stuck a note inside - written in what looked like the secret code Rachel had shown us yesterday.
FITVMG NVVG ZG XBYVIRZ ZUGVI HXSLLO
I spent most of my next class trying to decrypt the message without anyone around me noticing. Fortunately, I'm not the only one who thought pre-calculus was boring, and the kids to my left and right had completely zoned out. I didn't have my copy of the code with me, so I had to do things the slow way. Eventually, though, I did get the message unscrambled:
URGENT MEET AT CYBERIA AFTER SCHOOL
No indication of who'd left the message, of course. The rest of the school day passed by in agonizing slowness. I swear, the clock started running backwards a few times just to spite me. Eventually, though, the last few minutes came and went, and the final bell rang.
When I got to Cyberia, Jake and Marco were already there, sitting at a table with a nearly empty bowl full of nachos and cheese dip.
"Hey guys, what's up?" I said.
"I ate a spider," Jake whimpered through a mouthful of chips, "And I can't get the taste out of my mouth. Trying to see if the salt will make it go away."
"Ew. How the heck did you wind up eating a spider?"
"We'll tell you once everyone else gets here," Marco answered, "I don't want to tell this story more than once."
The last few nachos disappeared into Jake's mouth. He didn't look any happier.
"I'm gonna go get more snacks," Marco said. "This time, try to leave some for the rest of us."
While Marco was up getting more food, Rachel and Cassie wandered in, pretended they hadn't expected to see us, and came over to say hi. Lee showed up just as Marco finally returned with a big tray of food. Jake took a bite out of a pretzel, swallowed, and started talking.
"We might have found the entrance," he said. He didn't need to clarify which entrance - we wouldn't be going to the trouble of all this subterfuge for anything short of Yeerk business.
"Cassie's idea was for Marco and I to morph lizards-"
"Green anoles," Cassie interrupted, "They live in our barn. Lots of them. We caught one in a bucket and-"
"Can I go on?" Jake said.
"Oh. Sorry."
"Right. Marco and I acquired green anoles - small and easy to miss. Perfect for sneaking around school to spy on Chapman."
"I figured we could afford to skip geometry and science class," Marco said, as Jake paused to eat more pretzels, " So right after the bell rang for first period, we hid in an empty classroom and morphed - and oh my god, turning into a lizard is so creepy. I'd actually rather do the osprey again. But anyway, we morphed, crawled under the door out into the hallway-"
"And then the lizard brain suddenly switched on," Jake said, "Turns out green anoles are predators, at least as far as bugs are concerned."
"That's about where Jake at the spider," Marco commented.
"I couldn't stop it," Jake shuddered, "the lizard brain was running the show. My head snapped forward and... oh, it was so gross. It was still alive and trying to crawl back out. It felt like slurping down a giant can of SPAM in one bite. I've been trying to get the taste to go away all day now," he said, before biting into another giant pretzel.
"Anyway, we got the lizard instincts under control just in time to see Chapman walking through the hallway, so we followed him down to the janitor's supply closet. He stopped in front of the sink, and... well, neither of us really got a good look at exactly what he was doing, but he did something with the faucet handles, and then suddenly the whole wall opened up like it was one of those doors in Star Wars. There was some kind of tunnel in there. I went down a little bit, and it definitely goes under the school. I don't know how far, but it looked pretty deep. The air smelled..." Jake paused while he failed to think of a comparison. "Well, I don't know how to say it in a way that corresponds to human senses. But I could hear things, too. Kind of hard to tell with lizard ears, but I swear I could hear human voices down there. It... it sounded like they were screaming."
"It was definitely screaming," Marco said, "And it was the most horrible thing I've ever heard. Even worse than anything we saw in the construction site last week." There was a strange, faraway look in his eyes. Whatever he'd heard in that tunnel really spooked him.
"Anyway, we're pretty sure it's the entrance to the Yeerk Pool."
Rachel smiled.
"So we finally know where to go to bring the hurt to THEM," she said, in a vicious, menacing tone. For a moment, I didn't even realize it was her speaking, because it felt so different from the Rachel I knew. "When do we attack?"
"If we're going to fight the Yeerks, we need something a little more dangerous than dogs, cats, and lizards," Lee commented, "Right now we don't have any dangerous morphs. We should get that sorted out first, THEN we can plan our commando raid.
"Let's go to the Gardens, then," Cassie suggested, "I guarantee we'll get some good battle morphs there."
The Gardens is this big amusement park. One half has a whole bunch of roller coasters and tilt-a-whirls and other cool carnival rides, and the other half is a zoo. Cassie's mom is one of the veterinarians there. I've only been in there once, and it took me months to scrape together the spare change to cover the entrance fee.
"Um... if we're going to do that, I... I don't have enough money to pay to get in," I said.
"Don't worry, I'll pay for your ticket," Lee said. "Actually, I, uh... I can pay for everyone to get in. That Trent guy paid my parents a LOT to move out here, and they give me a lot of money every month as an excuse to not actually have to do anything with me." His face turned bright red. Whether with anger or embarrassment, I couldn't tell.
"You know what?" Jake said, "I really like the idea of using money provided by the Yeerks to find tools to use right back against them."
"We can probably get in for free if we just tell the zookeepers that we're Animorphs," Marco said.
"Ani-what?"
"Animorphs. Animal-morphers. It sounds a lot better than 'idiot teenagers with a death wish' doesn't it?"
"'Animorphs'... that actually sounds like a pretty cool name," Cassie said. The rest of us quickly agreed.
"All right," Jake decided, "We're Animorphs, and we are going to acquire some fierce creatures. We'll do it on Saturday so we have time to get it all done. We'll meet up outside the Gardens at 10:00. Any questions?" There were none. "Then I'll see you guys at the Gardens."
We all got up to go our separate ways. As the others cleared out, Rachel caught me by the arm.
"Hey. You said to let you know when I wanted to go flying with you."
"You want to go tonight? Like, right now?"
"Was there something else you wanted to do?" she asked.
Flying was all I had to look forward to for the rest of the night anyway. It couldn't hurt to have some company for it. Especially Rachel's company.
"There's literally nothing else I'd rather do right now. Let's go!"