"You can't be serious," Cassie said, scooting forward so she could gently take Shara's hands in both of hers. Rachel, still a bit weirded-out by the subjects being discussed, decided to let Cassie handle things from here; she'd always been better at this kind of thing.

XXXX

She hadn't known; that was all Cassie could think as Shara turned and raised her eyes to face her again: she hadn't known what was going on with Shara. She hadn't even suspected that there was something going on. She didn't like what that might have said about her, that she didn't even think that something might be troubling a person that she saw three times every day; that she hadn't even thought to ask if there was something bothering the other girl.

And now, finding out that Shara thought that everyone else would have been better off if she and Slade had died... Well, it was clear that she had been neglecting her obligations as far as being Shara's friend was concerned, and right now she had to focus on fixing that.

"Well, Darkon aside," she said, suppressing a shudder as she thought about him again; there were reasons that she didn't want to use her Shara morph again, and not all of them were the obvious problems that morphing another sapient being brought up. "Idon't think that any of us here would have been better off if you and Slade weren't with us. You've both done a lot of good here, you know? I think we might even be able to win this fight with your help. You and Slade have done a lot of good."

"Against the Yeerks, maybe," Shara allowed, ducking her head slightly so that that her bangs shaded her eyes again. "I don't know what any of us are going to be able to do when Darkon starts mobilizing his forces."

"Well, I guess that depends on how many forces he actually has, really," she said, trying to be optimistic. She knew that Slade and Shara were both incredibly powerful in their own right, she couldn't help but know after all she'd seen them do, but the situation couldn't be as hopeless as Shara was making it out to be. After all, anyone who heard about the Yeerks and all of their soldiers might think that the Animorphs' situation was hopeless, and they'd done a lot of good already. "Do you think you'd be up to telling us, Shara?"

She wasn't going to start demanding information from someone who was as obviously distraught as Shara so clearly felt, but the information that Shara was willing to give would probably be useful to all of them; know your enemy and all.

"During the camping trip, when we stumbled onto Darkon's base, the only ones there were my family and a few friends," Shara said, clenching her fists and biting her lip as she finished speaking. "My father, my eldest brother Conrad, Ness and Cain," she said, looking over at Slade for a long moment before turning her attention back to them. "And my younger brother, Raven. Cain's friend Fritz was there, too, along with Devon, Ryan, and Cindy, who were kind of friends with all of us." Shara took a deep breath and let it out slowly, as if she was trying to prepare herself to say something difficult; Cassie could relate, it couldn't be easy talking about losing the people close to you. "I don't know how many of them survived the transformation process, but I think it was at least five."

"You know," Rachel said, speaking up for the first time in awhile. "Normally, I'd say that that doesn't sound so bad, just having five people to worry about, but if these guys are all like you and Slade, I think we just might be in trouble."

Cassie agreed, but there was something else bothering her; something about what Shara had said before. "What do you mean, survived the transformation process, Shara?"

"Anyone who's not up to the Radam's standards when they're captured is killed during the transformation," Shara barked a morbid laugh. "And not quickly, either."

"What?" she demanded, shocked; she'd known that the Radam were bad, anyone who'd gotten even the faintest glimpse of Darkon's mind couldn't help but know that, but she'd been thinking that they were at the same level as the Yeerks. This was... this was horrible.

"Imagine the worst kind of pain you've ever had in your life, then imagine something a thousand times worse, and you might be at least one tenth of the way to imagining what anyone who gets forced through the Teknoprocess feels," Shara said, her eyes distant but her face set in the hardest expression that Cassie had ever seen on someone who wasn't either Jake or Rachel. "No one without the qualities the Radam want in their soldiers ever survives it, and no one who goes through it ever really comes out the way they were before. I don't know what that says about me and Slade, or anyone who actually managed to survive it, but I'm fairly sure it's not particularly good."