"So, where do we go to find a bunch of human-Controllers sitting down to eat?" Marco asked, despite the fact that Rachel knew that even he wasn't dense enough to have forgotten a place that had been all but burned into their collective memory after the first time they had been down to that underground hell.

"The Yeerk Pool, Marco," she said with a sigh. "The Yeerk Pool."

"What's a Yeerk pool?" Slade asked, after a few moments of sitting in silence.

XXX

A shared wince traveled between all of the "old hands" of the Animorphs, with the obvious exception of Ax.

"I keep forgetting that you guys haven't been here for all of our missions," Jake admitted, feeling sheepish that he'd forgot yet again that Slade and Shara were fairly new and hence couldn't be expected to know everything that there was to know about the Yeerks and what they were doing.

With Shara's usual reserve, and the way Slade acted all the time, it was entirely too easy to forget things like that. And that wasn't good; powerful as the both of them were, it was never a good thing for anyone to go into a situation like this one when they didn't have all the facts.

So, taking a deep breath to steady himself – he didn't particularly like remembering these kind of things, necessary as it might be at the moment – Jake laid out just what the Yeerk Pool was, and why it was so important to the Yeerks.

"So, it's the enemy's main stronghold," Slade summed up, a thoughtful expression on his face.

"Yeah, pretty much," he heard Rachel say, clearly trying to sound nonchalant.

It fell pretty flat as far as he was concerned, but he'd been right there with her and the others while they fought their way out of that horrible place. He knew, just as well as any of the others, what kind of horrors lay in wait for the unwary, there. In a way, Jake almost envied Slade and Shara their ignorance.

He knew it wouldn't last; nothing like that ever did, and especially not when they were all going to be going down into that hellish underground very soon to see what they could do about this whole oatmeal thing. He knew that Slade didn't really think like a human anymore, he couldn't help but know it after spending so much time working with the older boy, and Jake couldn't help but wonder if that would be a good thing in this case.

Maybe Slade, at least, wouldn't be so shaken up when they all came out of there; god knew he was going to be having nightmares just thinking about the place they were all planning to go.

With no one else needing any further information, the meeting broke up and they all went back to their respective homes; those of them that had homes, anyway, Jake thought, feeling a swell of his usual sympathy for the four Animorphs that couldn't go back. He was sure that Cassie was treating Slade and Shara well, and Tobias had often told him that he was all right when Jake would ask him, but he couldn't help what was going through his mind. He always found himself coming back to the fact that neither Ax, nor Slade, nor Tobias, nor Shara had any kind of real home to go back to.

He couldn't help thinking just what he would have felt like if he'd been in that same position, and wanting to help the people who had become so close to him over all the time they had spent together; horrible as it may have been, at times.

Winging his way back home, using his owl morph since the air had long since cooled off and the light was beginning to fail, Jake considered again what they were all planning to do when they found another way into the Yeerk Pool. He didn't like it, he could admit that much to himself right here and now; fighting the Yeerks was one thing, everyone knew where everyone else stood, and as horrible as it was, you could at least tell yourself that you were justified in attacking someone who was attacking you right back.

It was a far different thing when you were deliberately setting out to poison someone; using what might as well have been a type of biological warfare agent to set them up to get them addicted and then have them inevitably poison themselves… it just didn't feel right to him. Still, most of the others had agreed to this course of action, and it would probably cripple the Yeerks' efforts at least as badly as the destruction of the Kandrona.

In then end, however, no matter how uneasy it ultimately made him feel, Jake knew that they would all go ahead with it.