When he'd gone back to his teknopod, curled inside the alien plant like it was some kind of strange womb, Gunnar tried not to think about the things that he'd just seen. Kathy and Cain were both gone now; worse than gone, really, since he'd still be seeing their faces while he looked at Sword and Saber. His old friend and his older sister might have the same memories that he had of them, but nothing was the same.

Not them, and not even him.

Maybe it would have been better for him if he'd just been a normal Teknoman, brainwashed to be loyal to the Radam, but that wasn't something that Gunnar let himself dwell on. The thought really only came up when he was at his lowest, so like always he shoved it aside and tried to move on. There might not have been much he could do to halt the invasion and frustrate Darkon's plans for the Earth, but he was determined to do all he could.

Darkon or no Darkon, there were just some things that a man had to do when his home was at stake.

XXXX

Winging her way back home, after having said her goodbyes to the others, Rachel scanned the familiar rooftops of her neighborhood. It was good to be going home after such a long, satisfying day. Heck, she'd saved someone's life; well, her and Shara together, but someone who would have otherwise have died was alive because she had been good enough to spot him before he'd managed to throw himself out of that window.

It was a good feeling, knowing that she had made that kind of a difference; like the better missions she and the other Animorphs participated in, fighting for people who hadn't been given the chance to fight for themselves.

She almost wondered if the fights they were going to be having against the Radam were going to be the same. Sure, those Teknomen were pretty tough, and the things she had seen Slade and Shara do made her kind of uneasy when she let herself think too much about them, but the Radam were enough like the Yeerks in enough respects that Rachel didn't have any qualms about resisting them. They were just one more enemy for her and the others to fight, that was all.

Spotting her house after a bit more flying, Rachel tucked her wings and dove in through her bedroom window. Flaring her wings to cancel her momentum, Rachel landed in the middle of her floor and began to demorph. As her Eagle body reshaped itself by fits and starts into her normal, human form, Rachel yawned.

She was looking forward to getting some sleep after all this excitement.

XXXX

As she settled back down next to her brother, Shara contemplated what she had helped Rachel to do earlier. Her father would have probably said that it was noble of her to have risked herself for another person's life like that; at least, he would have if the Radam hadn't killed him for not being as young and strong as most of the rest of the people they had captured in those horrible pods of theirs. Still, she could see the point that Jake had been trying to make.

They really couldn't afford the kind of breach in security that her and Rachel's impulsive actions had risked causing them. The Animorphs were Earth's- were humanity's only real hope of holding out against the Yeerks until the Andalites either arrived to save them, the Yeerks gave up on Earth and returned to their own planet, or... Shara wasn't going to let herself think about the third option; possible or not, she wasn't about to let the Radam take her home. She'd die fighting them first.

Slade had already fallen asleep, she noticed then, and as Shara herself settled down for the night, she wondered for a moment just what the Animorphs' next mission was going to be.