Marco, who had been comfortably settled on a bale of hay, jumped back to his feet. "What? What?!" he started to pace, clearly agitated; or maybe just annoyed. "We have green Kryptonite here! We have something that can make Yeerks go nuts. How is this not a good thing?"

(It sounds to me like they get addicted to it. Like it's some kind of drug.)

"It's oatmeal, okay?" Rachel said, with a slight wince. "Not anything illegal."

(A drug is in the eye of the beholder,) Tobias returned. (If you get addicted to the illegal stuff and it messes you up, that's a drug for you. If you get addicted to oatmeal and it messes you up-)

"It's still just oatmeal," she said quickly, cutting him off. "Oatmeal is oatmeal. Jeez; I can't even believe we're having this conversation."

"Look," Marco said, drawing the attention of everyone else in the barn. "The bigger question here is who cares?! They're Yeerks; they're the enemy. They attacked us, not the other way around."

(What about the hosts? The humans?) Ax asked, speaking for the first time since the meeting proper had started. (The Yeerks are made invulnerable to their normal hunger for Kandrona rays. They can live inside their human hosts forever, even if the oatmeal is later taken away. These hosts would lose all hope.)

"If we lose this war, we're all going to be without hope, Ax," she said, giving him a Look. "I can't believe that you, of all people, would have such a problem with this."

(We Andalites have been at war for far longer than you,) Ax said, swiveling his stalk-eyes so that he could look at her straight on. (We understand the temptation to sink to the level of your enemy.)

"Sink to the level of-!" she began, supremely annoyed.

Ax cut her off before she could truly build up any momentum. (We also know that you cannot win if you aren't prepared to be a little ruthless; sometimes more than a little. However, it remains a question of balance? How far into savagery do you go to defeat the savage?)

Turning her attention outward, not wanting to answer a question that had struck closer to home than she was ever going to admit, Rachel took in the positions of her friends and fellow Animorphs. She and Marco had drawn a bit closer together, almost certainly unconsciously since they seemed to be on the same side of this particular argument. Tobias had taken his usual position in the rafters, keeping his sharp eyes and keen hearing attuned for anyone who might have tried to approach the barn while the rest of them were all exposed like this. Ax himself was shifting a bit restlessly; shifting on his sharp, deerlike hooves and stretching his scorpionlike tail.

Slade and Shara both seemed to be off in their own little world, Slade with a blank non-expression on his face, and Shara with her eyes fixed on the floor. She looked almost troubled, the way Jake did, but probably not for the same reasons. Or, maybe she was; no one really knew what had happened to her and Slade's parents.

Rachel knew Jake's reasons for being a bit dubious about this latest plan of theirs, but it was Cassie's reaction that surprised her the most. Cassie, after all, was usually the one getting on them about the morality of what they were and weren't doing to stop the invasion. It wasn't like her to be so silent about a plan like this; not about something so morally dodgy.

"Cassie," she asked, turning to look at her friend of many years. "What do you think?"

XXX

"I... I don't know anymore, okay?"

She really didn't; she'd used Slade, used what he was and what she knew about him, to kill someone. And while she also knew that Slade would never call her on it, never speak against her to the only higher authority that he believed the Animorphs had, she was still horrified that she had let things get that far. Everything else aside, everything else she had seen that evening and night notwithstanding, she had done something horrible.

After all that, how could she be fit to judge what was right and what was wrong?

Rachel stared at her for a few, long moments, as if she didn't know how to react to that. As if she didn't even know what to say. Cassie knew that Rachel sometimes counted on her to tell the other girl what was right or wrong, or at least what her own principles told her about what was right or not, but after everything that had happened, Cassie didn't feel that she was the one best-suited to judge that.

Not anymore.

XXX

It was weird, and a bit frightening, not to have Cassie ready and willing to pull them all back when she thought that they were about to step over some line that they probably shouldn't be crossing. Rachel had often – though more often now, it seemed – counted on her oldest friend to act as a sort of counter-balance to her own tactics and plans. Cassie was supposed to be the one that held them all together, and kept the eight of them balanced.

She was supposed to be moral, when Rachel herself – and probably Slade, if Jake didn't give him an order contradicting that – was ruthless. Cassie was supposed to be sensible when the rest of them were being reckless. But, Rachel supposed that things had changed for all of them; some more than others, it seemed.

"Look," she said, deciding to speak her mind even in spite of the fact that she was still little off-balance from what Cassie had said. Or, really, from what she hadn't said. "Okay, so maybe this oatmeal is a drug to the Yeerks. But, you know what? This is a war. Sooner or later, if we're successful; if the Andalites send help, or if the human race rises up somehow, we're going to try to kill every Yeerk on planet Earth. Right? That's our goal. This isn't like some normal war, where you hope you can make peace and compromise. We can't compromise; the Yeerks are parasites. How would we compromise? Let them have a few million humans to use as hosts?"

(They will never compromise, anyway,) Ax said, sounding about as disgusted as he ever did when the Yeerks came up in conversation. (They must be forced back to their own homeworld.)

(So, we try to feed them addictive drugs?) Tobias asked, his distaste for the idea obvious.

"It's OAT-freaking-MEAL!" Marco burst out, never one to keep quiet when he had something on his mind.

Cassie laughed suddenly; it wasn't a laugh that any of those familiar with her had ever heard before: this was cynical, and far more bitter than any of her close friends had ever thought her even capable of. "All the rights and wrongs, and all the lines between good and evil, just go wafting and waving and swirling around, don't they?"

That, more than anything that anyone else had said, seemed to stir Jake from the funk he was in. Making his way to the center of their group, Jake paused for a moment to take all of them in, his gaze lingering for a longer on both her and then Slade, though Rachel was sure that it was for different reasons. "I have to ask myself: if it were Tom, and it may very well be Tom, in the end, would I do this to him? On the one hand, life as the slave to a Yeerk; no free will at all. On the other hand, the way we saw with Mr. Edelman; some free will, and some ability to communicate, but with an insane Yeerk in your brain."

(So?) Tobias prompted. (What's your answer?)

Jake shrugged. "During the Civil War, they were fighting to end slavery. Most of the Southern soldiers who were killed during the conflict weren't slave owners; they were just guys trying to be brave. Maybe they could have worked out a compromise; maybe they could have ended the war earlier if the North had agreed to leave some people as slaves. But, would that have been right? No. So the war had to go on, until everyone was free."

(Or dead,) Tobias added, his tone grim. (But okay, that's a pretty good example. You're right. I hate it, but you're right. We have to win.)

Rachel laughed her own, cynical laugh after Tobias had finished speaking. She might have been one of the more gung-ho members of the team – second only to Slade in what she was fully ready and willing to do to the enemy – ruthless enough to scare herself sometimes, but even she knew where the lines were. Even she knew that the words "we have to win" were the first four steps on the road to hell.

She also couldn't help but notice that Jake had never actually answered the – perhaps rhetorical – question that he had posed to himself. Would Tom maybe be getting some of the special oatmeal slipped into his breakfast some time soon?

Rachel almost scoffed at her train of thought; there was no way in hell that Jake would ever use that kind of thing against his own older brother. Everything Jake was – well, nearly everything – was dedicated to saving Tom from being a Yeerk slave. And, given what Mr. Edelman had told her while she had been speaking to him, there was no salvation from a Yeerk that had succumbed to the oatmeal addiction.