4. As always, I love love love love love reading comments and reviews (shoutout to luvsanime02 who leaves me a little nugget of feedback on EVERY post), so if you like this story and want to add encouragement and incentive to get me across the finish line, please take a moment to share a quick response!

3. If that's not quite enough to feed your r!Animorphs thirst, please head over to r/rational, where there's tons of discussion and theorizing and sometimes super cool people leave long and interesting comments and reviews and sometimes they significantly alter the outcome of the story (which has dwindlingly few opportunities to be altered at this point).

2. I expect to continue making updates pretty regularly, but with the new house and construction and work and everything I think it makes sense to slow the schedule to once every three weeks instead of once every two.

1. This is a double update; if you didn't see Interlude 18 you may want to back up and give it a glance.

Chapter Text

Chapter 40: Garrett

“You gotta stop acting like—no, you know what? Fuck it—you gotta stop believing that the rules are real, or you are never gonna make it, kid. I mean that.”

Those were the first words that TOBIAS ever said to me. Not the first words I’d ever heard him saying, but the first words he’d said to me. The first time he’d said words that were just-for-GARRETT.

“You don’t ever know. You can’t ever KNOW, okay? All you get is what you’ve seen so far. All you ever know for sure is they haven’t YET.”

“She promised!”

I don’t know what his face looked like when I said that, because my eyes had been closed and I’d been lying on the ground and also hitting the ground and maybe screaming a little bit between my teeth. But I can guess what it looked like because I’ve seen him make THAT FACE a lot since then.

“I know,” he’d said. “And usually she keeps her promises, right? So you’re surprised. You thought she—what—you thought she was the kind of person who would always keep her promises, or something?”

“She promised!”

“Yeah, I got that. She promised. And then she broke that promise.”

“She promised!”

“Motherf—look, is there actually someone in there, kid? Are you listening to me? ‘Cause if you’re just tuning me out—”

“She promised!”

It’s scary when I think about it because I know TOBIAS really well now and I know exactly how much BULLSHIT he is usually willing to put up with, and he must have been in a very good mood or something because he gave me a lot more tries than he normally would and if he hadn’t done that then maybe we wouldn’t have ever started hanging out and then we wouldn’t be FRIENDS and if we weren’t FRIENDS then we would both be dead now.

“And?”

“She promised!”

“Kid. She promised, AND SHE BROKE THAT PROMISE. Say it.”

“She promised!”

“What did she promise?”

“She promised!”

“She promised what?”

“She—she promised—”

“She promised what?”

“She promised that we would play Octopus on Friday because we didn’t play Octopus last Friday and we played Jailhouse and we’re supposed to rotate the games and—”

“And?”

Although now that I think about it again maybe he wasn’t in a good mood at all. Maybe it was like that time when we were playing PENTAGO and I beat him four times in a row and he started to get angry but also didn’t want to stop and told me that I had better not go easy on him, OR ELSE, and we kept playing and I kept beating him and he just kept getting madder and madder but not at me exactly until finally he won the twenty-third game.

TOBIAS is like that, sometimes.

“Kid. And? Did we play Octopus?”

“NO.”

“They voted for Jailhouse. So what does that mean?”

“She promised!”

“She promised, and she broke that promise.”

“She promised!”

“Jesus fucking—okay, look. How about—how about this? Mrs. Stokeley is a liar.”

“She promised!”

“Right. She promised, and she broke that promise. So what does that make her?”

“She—she—”

“She lied, right? So—”

“She—”

“She’s a liar.”

“But she—”

“But she what?”

It’s funny because I remember that it was very hard for me to figure out what TOBIAS was trying to teach me, but when I look back now I can see it very clearly and I think that if I did a worse job of remembering I might have forgot that it was something I used to not-know. I think a lot of people do that when they learn something big and important that changes how they look at the world, they forget what it was like before they knew it and then it’s very easy for them to be impatient with other people who are making the same mistake and now that I think about it maybe that’s why TOBIAS was being so patient with me that day, is that he didn’t forget. He remembered when he learned the same lesson.

“But she told the truth!”

“When?”

“Before!”

“About other stuff?”

“Yes.”

“So you thought she was telling the truth about this, too?”

“Yes!”

“But she wasn’t, was she?”

“NO.”

“She was—ah, geez, here we go again. Can I maybe get you to chill out with the whole dying fish routine?”

And even though it took me a long time to learn the lesson, I did eventually get it and I think maybe that’s why TOBIAS decided to start hanging out with me after that—because he saw that I really would listen as long as the person who was talking to me made sense and didn’t give up right away if I was having a meltdown and there just aren’t that many people who really listen out there.

“…okay, now say it back to me.”

“Any time somebody tries to tell me the rules I should remember that they’re just guessing, or saying what they wish the rules were, or what they think the rules are but they might be wrong and there aren’t any real rules except just—just—”

“Just looking. You just look, and you remember, and you make a guess. And when something happens that you weren’t expecting—”

“Don’t freak the fuck out.”

It wasn’t that easy, of course. There were a lot of times that I still FREAKED THE FUCK OUT and I still FREAK THE FUCK OUT now, sometimes.

But what TOBIAS taught me was like opening up an extra eye or something and suddenly a lot of things that had been very confusing started to make sense because the problem wasn’t that people were breaking the RULES, it was that I had been wrong about what the RULES really were, even if most of the time it wasn’t my fault because they’d told me wrong. But TOBIAS said it was still my fault if I believed them, especially after what happened with MRS. STOKELEY, because there wasn’t any shame in getting taken to the cleaners once but if I let it happen again then I was just a CHUMP and why was I taking their word for it anyway when they were clearly DIPSHIT FUCKTARDS.

And I know it doesn’t sound related at first but the way it makes sense inside my head is that it’s like when they use the FIBONACCI SEQUENCE to calculate the GOLDEN MEAN. The FIBONACCI SEQUENCE is a series of numbers where the next number is always the previous two numbers added together, so it goes 1 and then 1 again because there’s nothing to add on yet and then 2 and then 3 and then 5 and then 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, 2584, 4181, 6765, 10946, 17711, 28657, 46368, 75025, 121393, 196418 and so on.

And if you compare FIBONACCI NUMBERS that are right next to each other you get:

1 compared to 1 which is 1

2 compared to 1 which is 2

3 and 2 which is 1.5

5 and 3 which is 1.6 with a line over the SIX which means the SIXES go on forever

8 and 5 which is 1.6 but just regular this time so it’s a little smaller

13 and 8 which is 1.625

21 and 13 which is 1.6153846 and then a bunch of other numbers that don’t matter

34 and 21 which is 1.6190476 and then a bunch of other numbers that don’t matter

55 and 34 which is 1.6176470 and then a bunch of other numbers that don’t matter

89 and 55 which is 1.6181818 and the ONE-EIGHT repeats forever

144 and 89 which is 1.6179775 and so on

And they never quite make it to the GOLDEN MEAN, which is ϕ pronounced “fee” and which starts out as 1.6180339887 but actually is IRRATIONAL and goes on forever. But you can see how they kind of zigzag closer and closer and in fact you don’t even have to go very far out before you get two numbers that match all the way out to the TEN BILLIONTHS place (196418 and 121393).

And me thinking that MRS. STOKELEY was a PROMISE-KEEPER was like comparing 1 to 1 and getting 1, and TOBIAS saying that MRS. STOKELEY was a LIAR was like comparing 2 to 1 and getting 2, which was still wrong but closer, and the more I watched MRS. STOKELEY the closer I got to understanding what she was really like and there were always surprises but usually smaller and smaller surprises as time went on but the key thing was to never ever ever forget that I didn’t really know for sure and that just because somebody had never done something before didn’t mean they wouldn’t all of a sudden.

And I don’t know if I would have ever figured that out without TOBIAS’S help because I certainly hadn’t figured it out before and I had been thinking of everything as being BLACK OR WHITE in a way that was kind of like tying my own shoelaces together because it meant I was getting UNPLEASANT SURPRISES all the time and that meant I was pretty much always stressed-out and low-functioning. So it’s kind of like TOBIAS saved my life because I don’t think I would have had a very good life the way I was going.

Although I might not have a very good life anyway, the way everything else is going.

‹We are approaching the stratosphere. The atmospheric craft are peeling off. But three of the spacecraft are now converging on our new trajectory—›

‹ETA?›

‹The three ships are at various distances—›

‹Wait, three out of how many?›

‹There are five within sensor range, which would imply a total of roughly thirty in orbit around the planet—›

‹Jesus Christ. How did they build so many so fast? Doesn’t it take like two years to build one F-35—›

‹How much time do we have?›

‹The closest will be within beam weapon range in roughly twelve minutes, assuming that we hold course and that it does not wait for the other two to converge—›

I was in bird morph, a small brownish bird called a swift that ANTE had brought down for the two of us to acquire. We were perched near the back of the cramped space inside the cradle, along with HELIUM’S TAIL BLADE, which was waving around in a way that my bird instincts were specifically not happy about, on top of everything else they were already not happy about.

RACHEL was in morph, too, but that was a PUN sort of because she wasn’t actually inside the cradle with us—she was in morph, inside my morph, her body tucked away in Z-SPACE along with my own. The plan had been for all of us—except HELIUM—to get as small as we possibly could while still being able to see and move around, because the cradle was designed for just one single passenger and the idea was that we would be picking up a MARCO who might or might not be in his own real body and might or might not have time to get small, himself. Fortunately, HELIUM was still pretty young for an ANDALITE and so it wouldn’t be too crowded so long as the MARCO wasn’t in gorilla morph or something.

‹What about missiles?›

‹Non-nuclear human missiles are unlikely to be a problem—›

‹The fuck you say. What about the one that just knocked us halfway out of the sky?›

‹Unlikely to be a problem at this distance, as we can deploy countermeasures or outmaneuver them. And your F-35s are significantly more delicate and difficult-to-build than Bug fighters, which were reverse-engineered from superior technology specifically to be cheap and easy to produce.›

‹Superior technology like the cloaking device that’s currently hiding us from precisely no one?›

‹Marco.›

‹The cloaking device is functioning correctly. However, even a perfect mirror can be disabled by primitives smearing mud on it—›

‹Helium.›

‹Apologies, Prince Jake.›

HELIUM was standing in the center of the cramped space, his four legs on the flat metal deck and his two arms resting on the slanted control panel, his main eyes pointed down at a small viewscreen and his stalks rotating around between a number of strange displays. JAKE and MARCO were in morph, perched on his shoulders—or at least, the closest thing he had to shoulders—JAKE in the body of a small bat, and MARCO in some kind of tiny, armored, alien, armadillo-type body that I guess he acquired somewhere on the planet of the ARN.

I was watching the three of them very very carefully, because even though I had known them for more than a month that’s still really not a lot of time and this was a pretty stressful situation and TOBIAS wasn’t there and RACHEL had had a STROKE and CASSIE was DEAD and I had basically never met HELIUM at all, apparently, since he said he was a new person and not AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL anymore, and everything was happening very quickly and it seemed to me like there was a pretty good chance that things were going to go off the rails. I mean even more then they had already, since apparently VISSER THREE had taken off the KID GLOVES, which is one of those phrases that doesn’t make any sense at all but it means he wasn’t fucking around anymore, according to MARCO.

And the whole situation was especially tricky for me because as far as I could tell JAKE seemed to think that I was going to follow any orders he gave me, like if he told me to thoughtscream at somebody I would just do it, no questions asked, and that was not exactly what I had signed up for. I had thoughtscreamed at a lot of people when we went to blow up the pool, but we had talked that over in advance and decided that CIVILIAN CASUALTIES were probably unavoidable and that it was worth it overall because even if a lot of people died it was our best shot at saving the EARTH.

But that mission had actually worked and still the EARTH was very much not-saved, which is exactly the sort of thing that I used to find very upsetting back before I started hanging out with TOBIAS. It’s very easy for people like me to get fixated on stuff and what TOBIAS did was help me to get fixated on the process instead of on my current best guess, which is called SCIENCE and that’s why I’m sometimes willing to morph into birds and bugs even though I used to have a rule that was NO FLYING, for example.

But anyway, just because I had agreed to thoughtscream that one time didn’t mean I was okay with doing it whenever, I would maybe thoughtscream at somebody just because TOBIAS told me to but that was because I had known TOBIAS for a very long time, like long enough to get all the way out to 1.6180339887. I only knew JAKE and MARCO about 1.625ish at best. I had a MARCO morph and an AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL morph because the body was still an AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL body even if the new hivemind thingy was calling itself HELIUM, but I’d only had the chance to spend about twelve minutes in each of them before it was GO TIME, and that is not a lot of time to catch up on everything that I had missed while I was DEAD. And anyway some of the things that had happened since then made me more nervous, not less, especially because as far as I could tell nobody had made any progress at all on figuring out what the heck had happened on THE DAY THAT ALMOST EVERYBODY DIED.

And there was another problem, which was that I had already thoughtscreamed at the two soldiers who had been sitting inside the cradle when HELIUM took control of it, and JAKE had told me to do it but I had already decided I was going to do it because as soon as the door opened they had raised some very large GUNS and I didn’t want to get shot. But this meant that JAKE probably thought I had done it because he ordered me to, which is a pretty reasonable thing to think but wasn’t true at all and that meant that he was maybe being set up for a pretty nasty surprise later on if I said “no” out of the blue.

So what I really wanted to do was talk about it.

But there was kind of a lot going on.

For one thing, I was trying really hard to stop the part of my brain that was screaming GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT from taking over. It was screaming that because for the last few minutes there had been MISSILES and BULLETS and PROTOTYPE BEAM WEAPONS and very strong acceleration and we’d spent a lot more time upside-down than my morph body was comfortable with.

For another, JAKE and MARCO and HELIUM were all pretty stressed and talking very quickly one right after the other without identifying themselves and sometimes not even waiting for each other to finish, and also they were sort of making these little digs at each other, or at least MARCO and HELIUM were and I think it was getting on JAKE’S nerves.

‹Can we outrun them?›

That was JAKE.

‹No, Prince Jake. Remember, this cradle is what you would call an escape pod. That it functions as well as it does is a testament to Andalite thoroughness—›

‹Marco.›

‹I didn’t say anything!›

‹—but it can’t outperform a Bug fighter.›

I glanced over at ANTE, who hadn’t said anything in a while. He wasn’t super talkative to begin with and I’m not very good at reading bird body language so I couldn’t tell if he was okay or if he was maybe FREAKING THE FUCK OUT.

‹How far to Moscow?›

‹We are farther now than we were when we began, thanks to the attack of the atmospheric craft. We cannot reach the city before we are intercepted. Though—›

‹What?›

‹Our instruments show that it has been—targeted.›

‹Oh, God.›

‹The nukes?›

‹Not a traditional fission device. The radiation is consistent with a neutron dispersion—lethal to living organisms with minimal damage to infrastructure.›

‹What about Berlin? Rio?›

‹We are not high enough to make a direct observation.›

‹Helium. If Marco was—if the other Marco was put back—is he—›

‹The radiation is sufficiently strong to be lethal with ten minutes of exposure. Perhaps fifteen, depending on the distance from the epicenter.›

‹Dead in fifteen?›

‹No. Lethally poisoned in fifteen. Death would take longer. Hours, perhaps days.›

The bird that ANTE was being didn’t seem to react to this at all, which told me nothing. I turned back to the others.

‹He’d morph,› said MARCO confidently, still not bothering to identify himself. ‹He’d figure it out, and morph, and head away from the epicenter.›

I wanted to ask if MARCO was saying that because he actually believed it or just because he wanted to believe it but that didn’t seem super helpful so I just kept watching.

‹They’re still not responding to any communications?›

‹No, Prince Jake.›

‹Maybe they’re pulling a Doctor Strangelove? You know, shutting off comms, in case it’s Visser Three or whatever?›

‹We do not understand the reference. Also, the nearest Bug fighter will be in range in ten minutes.›

The bat and the armadillo-thing turned to look at each other as if to say oh no what do we do and it was suddenly very easy to see lots of problems that none of us had thought of back when we were on the ground, like what would we do if the military didn’t bother to listen to us at all and just tried killing us instead and also the cloaking device didn’t do anything because they’d put homing beacons on board the cradle.

But the solution still seemed pretty obvious, as far as I could tell, and I wasn’t sure whether they were not-mentioning it for some reason or whether they just hadn’t thought of it. I had started to get the sense that JAKE and MARCO were both very very tired and maybe not quite thinking straight—

‹Do we bail?› asked MARCO.

‹We could try a distress call,› JAKE suggested. ‹To one of the other Bug fighters—one of the ones that isn’t trying to kill us—›

‹Garrett here,› I said. ‹Why don’t we go down into the water? Over.›

The bat and the armadillo-thing both twitched, and one of HELIUM’S stalk eyes turned to look back at me.

‹Helium. Can Bug fighters—›

‹No, Prince Jake. As we said, cheap and easy to produce. They do not possess sufficient structural integrity to—›

‹Down. Now.›

There was a sort of swooping, prickly-tingly elevator sensation as the ship curved smoothly downward.

‹We will reach the surface of the water with…four minutes to spare, assuming that we do not have to deal with more hostile atmospheric craft.›

‹Will we be able to get deep enough?›

‹Beam weapons will be ineffective at a depth of seven meters. This cradle can go as deep as six thousand four hundred thirty meters, given the gravitational pull of your planet.›

‹Will they still be able to track us?›

‹We do not know, Prince Jake. Whatever device they have hidden on board—if it uses standard human technology, then no. Radio waves can’t penetrate seawater. If it’s something more sophisticated, then maybe. We also don’t know what other aquatic craft may be nearby, or what capabilities they might possess.›

‹We don’t know much of anything, do we.›

‹No, Marco. We do not.›

There was silence in the cradle for the next couple of minutes as we cut our way back down through the atmosphere. There weren’t any windows in the cradle, and none of the viewscreens were showing direct images—I’m pretty sure the cradle was beaming information straight into HELIUM’S head—so I couldn’t tell how high up we’d gotten, but if it was high enough to stop fighter jets from coming after us I was pretty sure that meant it had to be at least ten miles.

But now we were coming back down through the part of the sky where the fighter jets could go—

‹Missile,› said HELIUM, his mental voice flat.

‹What?›

‹It will not be a problem.›

There was another prickly-tingly feeling as the cradle zigged and then zagged.

‹What’s hap—›

‹There are several craft and ground installations that have fired missiles. Some of them are tracking us directly. Others are aimed at various points along our predicted course. We are assuming that they are triggered by proximity rather than impact, and are taking steps to avoid allowing any of them closer than three kilometers. This is a process which benefits from focus, and a lack of distraction.›

‹Garrett here. Sorry. Are there more fighter jets? Over.›

‹Yes. But none which will reach us before we make the water.›

‹Then what?›

The question was from ANTE, whose bird-body was holding stock-still except for a slight quiver in its wings, its pupils dilated.

No one answered it.

* * *

“I have a question and the question is do we really expect Visser One’s codes to make any difference at all.”

Nobody said anything. There was a kind of slurping-squelching sound as the demorph finished and RACHEL’S body fully separated from mine. She rolled away from me and pushed herself up into a sitting position, her movements still pretty clumsy and jerky but better than they’d been the day before.

“Whurr?” she asked, looking around the tiny space.

JAKE was still a bat and MARCO was still an armadillo-thing, and HELIUM was now a large and dangerous-looking hawk that seemed to be making ANTE’S bird-body nervous.

‹Underwater,› came MARCO’S voice, sounding weary. ‹Things got complicated. Again.›

‹The plan was not—›

HELIUM broke off mid-thought, and the hawk body sort of twitched irritably.

‹There were unforeseen difficulties,› he finished.

I looked at JAKE because of course I did, but the bat didn’t move in any way that told me anything.

‹What do you mean, Garrett?› JAKE asked.

His voice was weary, too, but more than that it had a kind of glassy, brittle sort of feeling to it, like maybe it was about to break. I don’t know what it would mean for JAKE’S voice to break, that thought doesn’t even really make sense, but that’s what it sounded like to me.

But also I didn’t know what I could do about that so I ignored it.

“Well,” I said, pulling my shirt up over my mouth. “The main thing is that Visser Three has known those ships were coming the whole time, and he’s not exactly on great terms with the rest of the Yeerks, so he probably has some kind of backup plan ready and I don’t see how us taking over the controls makes them any more dangerous than they already were when he definitely already thought about this months ago. Also if Moscow is gone then probably a lot of other cities are gone, too, like New York and Washington and—and Beijing and London, which might mean that there isn’t really a government or a military anymore and that would mean that there isn’t anybody for us to give the codes to and do we really know what to do with them all by ourselves. Also also I’m sorry I didn’t think of that before, when you asked if anybody had objections, but to be fair that was before we knew about Moscow and also before we knew that they were going to shoot at us without even talking first. Also I don’t really understand what we’re actually trying to do, like what do we think happens even if everything goes right and also I should tell you that I might not thoughtscream at people just because you tell me to especially because last time we thought we had a plan that would save the planet, it didn’t, even though it worked, and I’m talking about the mission to the Yeerk pool just in case that wasn’t clear. Also sorry.”

I had been curling up tighter and tighter as I talked and by the time I was finished I was in a sort of curled-up ball pressed into the corner, as far away from the rest of them as I could get, which wasn’t actually very far since the whole space was basically ANDALITE-sized. But they could hear me just fine so it didn’t matter which is why I was letting myself do it in the first place.

There was another long silence after I finished talking and then there was a dry sort of chuckle that I was pretty sure was coming from MARCO and then there was JAKE’S voice again, still sounding pre-cracked.

‹What are you sorry for?›

“I don’t know exactly it’s just that it seems like—like you guys are all really tired and maybe getting mad at each other and it isn’t fair and none of what I just said is actually helpful and you’re supposed to say sorry if you’re not helping. Also I just now realized that I was kind of asking you for the answer and maybe you don’t have any more answers than I do so why are we all asking you but in that case what I’m saying is my best guess is that Visser One’s codes don’t help us, what do you think.”

Suddenly something landed on my back and I screamed a little and flinched before I realized it was RACHEL’S hand and she was trying to sort of pat me on the shoulder but she’d missed.

“Sorry,” I said again, and I reached behind me without looking and kind of groped around until I found her hand and picked it up and put it on my shoulder because I didn’t want her to think I was mad.

“Sssssss oh,” she replied.

‹Kid has several points.›

For a long time nobody else said anything, and eventually I got curious enough that I decided to uncurl a little and look. The bat was looking at me, and the armadillo-thing was looking at the bat, and the hawk and the swift were looking back and forth. I couldn’t see what RACHEL was looking at because I was turned so she was sort of behind me but I could still feel her hand on my shoulder and she squeezed a little which I did not like at all but which I was pretty sure was meant to be nice so I didn’t say anything.

‹Yeah,› said JAKE. He said it in the sort of way that people say Mmm-hmm or wow, that’s crazy when they’re not really listening—like he was just stalling for time.

More nobody-saying-anything.

“Um—” I began, just as JAKE spoke up again.

‹Helium.›

‹Yes, Prince Jake.›

‹How long until we clear the peninsula?›

‹We have already cleared the peninsula, as well as the shallowest and most dangerous waters. We are currently at a depth of seventy-two meters, heading due north into the Barents sea, following the sea floor. We have detected two subsurface vessels and a number of surface ones. They do not seem to be aware of our presence.›

‹What’s our speed?›

‹Roughly one hundred and sixty kilometers per hour, relative to the surface.›

‹How far to—Marco, where—›

‹Are we giving up on Moscow and Berlin? If so, then it’s either Cape Town or Rio.›

‹How would we find them in Cape Town or Rio? Without comms?›

‹Uh. Cape Town, I don’t know. Rio—that’s the one with the statue, right? Giant Jesus?›

‹Helium, how long would it take—›

‹If we remain underwater, the journey will take approximately eight days. Also, the cradle’s fuel reserves will be at well under twenty percent when we arrive.›

More silence.

Then more silence.

Then even more silence.

I glanced at the others. They were all looking at JAKE.

I looked at the bat that JAKE was being. It was sitting very still, its eyes pointed at the deck, its wings sort of slumped like a falling-down tent. I couldn’t tell if it actually looked distressed or if I was just imagining that it looked distressed because I was pretty sure that JAKE was distressed.

But it looked distressed. I tried to think of something helpful to say but I couldn’t come up with anything.

“Nnnnnn,” said RACHEL.

The bat looked up.

“Nnnn. Nnnaauuuuuh. Auuh. Nuu.”

RACHEL looked over at me. Her eyes were very serious-looking.

“Can you say that again, please?” I asked. “I didn’t understand you.”

“Nnaauu. Auuhnnyuu. Himmm. Nnau auhn izh.”

“One more time, please?”

She looked away from me, fixed her eyes on the bat. “Nnau auhn yu.”

‹Not on you.›

ANTE.

‹Right, Rachel? It’s not on Jake?›

RACHEL nodded.

‹Agreed.›

HELIUM.

The bat closed its eyes in a very human sort of way.

‹No.›

MARCO.

The bat opened its eyes.

‹No, you know what? Fuck that. Jake. Cope. Now.›

‹Marco, Prince Jake has—›

‹Helium, you know I respect you, I know you’re brilliant, but be quiet. Jake. Listen to me. We have zero time for your wallowing. I know you’re exhausted. I know you don’t know what to do. But this is the hand you’ve been dealt. Play it.›

‹Garrett here. That’s not how it—›

‹Garrett, he’s not you. He’s not Tobias. He’s not even me. He’s Jake. Sympathy is not the solution here. What he needs to do is shake it off, or else we’re going to be the ones calling the shots. You know, the stranger, the alien, the stroke victim, the kid with his shirt in his mouth, and the guy who just threw a whole mission out the window to save his mom.›

The bat was trembling, its whole body shaking as its eyes darted back and forth around the tiny space, from hawk to swift to armadillo-thing to RACHEL to me, around and around.

The bat was trembling like it was about to cry.

‹It was a bad plan,› MARCO continued. ‹You’re thinking, it was a bad plan, we almost got shot down, now what. But guess what? None of us had a better plan.›

For some reason, I wanted to see what RACHEL’S face looked like, but I wasn’t at the right angle to look and it didn’t seem like I should move around to where I could see because that would have been sort of a distraction.

‹And we still don’t. It’s not like you can make it worse, buddy. The default thing is we all die and Visser Three wins. That’s not on you. But if we’re going to do anything about it—›

I suddenly sort of…popped out, or something, in the sense that I wasn’t just looking at JAKE myself but also realized that we were all looking at JAKE, all five of us—that whether or not MARCO’S overall plan was working, he’d at least managed to make JAKE the absolute center of attention where before we’d all been sort of looking around at everybody. I wasn’t sure if I should look away because if I was in JAKE’S shoes then having everybody stare at me like that would absolutely definitely very very much not be helpful at all and would only make me FREAK THE FUCK OUT but also MARCO knows JAKE a whole lot better than I do, maybe even better than I know TOBIAS, maybe all the way out to 1.6180339887498948482.

‹Jake, you give me a clear target and I’ll get us there, but I need you to call the shot, first. We need you. There’s only one person here who can tell us what Visser Three is going to do, and that’s you.›

I looked at the armadillo-thing.

It was looking at the bat.

I looked at the hawk.

It was looking at the bat.

I looked at the swift.

It was looking at the bat, although it also noticed my head moving I guess because it looked at me for a second and then looked back at the bat, and I guess if I imagine myself in ANTE’S shoes, which means if I imagine that I’m inside his body and his life and not just wearing his shoes, then this whole situation seems pretty bad and scary because ANTE has been imagining MARCO and the ANIMORPHS for a long time and thinking that we are some crazy awesome superteam and then as soon as he actually went on a mission with us he got shot at pretty much immediately and then this happened. So I was a little nervous about ANTE and what he might do and how he might react and whether he might WIG OUT which means exactly the same thing as FREAK THE FUCK OUT but if you say the same words or phrases too many times they start to sound weird and lose their meaning and that is called SEMANTIC SATIATION so sometimes I switch it up even inside my own head.

But I guess he hadn’t WIGGED OUT yet, so that was a good sign.

I looked at RACHEL, who was looking at the bat.

It seemed like we waited for hours but it was probably actually only thirty or forty seconds, and then all of a sudden the bat stopped trembling.

‹Okay,› said JAKE, his voice sounding clear and strong and not at all pre-cracked.

There was another little pause, like long enough for someone to breathe all the way in and all the way out if they were in a human body but I don’t know whether that’s the same for bats.

‹Okay,› he repeated. ‹New plan, same as the old plan. Rio de Janeiro, pick up Marco and Visser One-Quarter.›

It was funny, because I don’t know if MARCO knew this would happen or if maybe he was trying to make it happen or if maybe it was just because it wasn’t me or because it was the second time hearing it or something. But hearing JAKE say it did make me feel better. It felt more solid or real or possible or something, more like The Plan with capital letters than just I Guess Let’s Try It And See What Happens. And when I looked around at the rest of them it seemed like they felt the same way, at least as far as I could tell when three of them were animals and one of them was RACHEL who still wasn’t really in control of her face all that much.

‹Helium.›

‹Yes, Prince Jake.›

‹Eight days is too long and eighty percent of the fuel is too much.›

‹Agreed.›

‹What can we do about this tracking device?›

‹We have time, now that we know we can evade detection underwater. If the device is inside the ship, we may be able to locate it and disable it. If it’s outside—›

‹Burn it off.›

I knew who the voice was but the others didn’t, which is why we have RULES about how to use thought-speak, even if nobody ever follows them.

‹New guy, is that you?› asked MARCO.

‹Yes,› said ANTE. ‹Helium—when we were going through the atmosphere, we were shielded, right?›

‹Yes. Ah. Yes. It’s a good idea.›

‹Explain it to me,› said JAKE.

‹If the device is on the exterior of the ship, it is at least possible that it may be vulnerable to extremes of pressure and temperature. We could try burning it off by following a rocket trajectory with the shields disabled.›

‹The cradle can withstand that?›

‹Easily.›

‹What if the other ships come after us?›

‹We have some data on ships and ship movement, collected while we were in flight earlier. It’s likely that we can choose a time and course that guarantees us sufficient time to abort and re-enter the water, if we are closely pursued. And we will search within the ship first, anyway.›

‹Great. Do it. Garrett?›

I twitched, because I wasn’t expecting it, but I kept my shirt down. “Yeah?”

‹I won’t try ordering you to thoughtscream at anybody, but it needs to be okay for me to ask. Is it okay for me to ask?›

I thought about it, but not for very long.

“Yeah,” I said.

‹Okay. Helium, do you need to be in your own body to do the search?›

‹No, Prince Jake. The ship will be doing most of the actual scanning.›

‹How long will it take?›

‹No more than half an hour.›

‹Make it two hours.›

‹What?› asked MARCO. ‹Why?›

‹Because you’re all going to demorph and remorph to reset your time limits, and then I’m taking a nap. We’ll figure out the rest after that.›

* * *

“Everything is fucked.”

It was six hours later, although it was the exact same time according to clocks because we had gone very far to the west and TIME ZONES are a thing. We were sitting on the rocky slope of a tiny island, maybe half a mile across, almost exactly eight miles south of the giant Jesus statue and five and a half miles offshore. HELIUM had brought the cradle in among the trees and foliage on the southern side of the ridge, away from potential observers on the mainland. In front of us, there was nothing but open ocean, broken only by a smaller island a short swim away and a lone, low boulder maybe another mile or so out.

We’d all demorphed, tumbling out of the cramped spacecraft and spreading out under the bright afternoon sun. There was ANTE, and HELIUM, and JAKE, and MARCO, and RACHEL, and MARCO AGAIN.

There were TWO MARCOS now.

It was funny, because one part of my brain had known that there would be TWO MARCOS and understood how it had happened and why it made sense and had totally been expecting it—that was the plan, after all—but another part of my brain did not want to let go of the fact that there were TWO MARCOS and was having a very hard time deciding to look at or think about anything else.

“The other three are all alive, and safe. They’re—let’s say listening in, right now. I don’t think anybody ended up with more than two full minutes of radiation exposure in their natural bodies, and Edriss—Visser One—thinks that being inside a human skull will have provided enough shielding to keep her from getting sick. But Moscow is gone. Berlin is gone. Seems like a safe bet that places like Tokyo and D.C. and New York are gone, too. L.A. Silicon Valley. Probably some military bases? Cape Town is not gone but internet is down, satellites are down, there’s a ton of radio interference because everybody who can’t use internet and satellites is trying to use the radio so basically radio is down, too. Same situation here in Rio. Nobody has any fucking clue what’s going on.”

Also I didn’t know what to call them in my own head because MARCO and MARCO AGAIN was too vague really and it was probably a bad idea to think of them as MARCO WITH A BLACK SHIRT and MARCO WITH A RED SHIRT because that wasn’t going to stay true for very long and I could maybe think of them as MARCO WITH A YEERK and MARCO WITHOUT A YEERK but if we went and picked up more MARCOS then that wasn’t going to be enough and I remembered from my very short morph-check that the MARCOS had come up with a very sensible system for referring to themselves with numbers but I didn’t know which numbers these particular MARCOS were and it wasn’t the right time to ask so my brain just kept sort of spinning and slipping and tripping over it every time I looked at them, like HICCUPS but for thoughts. I was very used to being able to tell people apart very very easily, even in thought-speak where everyone else seems to have trouble, but the two MARCOS sounded exactly the same, even to me.

“Fisss,” said RACHEL.

She was sitting between the two MARCOS, sort of half-propped up against one of them, who had his arm around her shoulder to stop her from falling down.

“Yeah, obviously,” said that MARCO. “But why? Why now? What does it get him?”

“Softening us up for full-scale invasion?” offered ANTE. “Now that the fleet is almost here? According to Helium, those bombs left a lot of infrastructure intact.”

“I don’t buy it,” the other MARCO said, shaking his head. “Not when Telor and Tyagi have been pushing for peace this whole time. I don’t see that fleet actually coming in guns blazing.”

I was starting to think that maybe the two different MARCOS shouldn’t have different names, that maybe they were both just MARCO. They were even talking like they were one person, switching back and forth talking like—like—I don’t know, like the way you might switch back and forth between hands if you were AMBIDEXTROUS or something. Like they were thinking the same thoughts at the same time, so it didn’t matter which one spoke up.

It made me want more GARRETTS very, very badly. More GARRETTS, and maybe more TOBIASES, too, because apparently at least three MARCOS had already died but there were still two of them right here in front of me and three other ones out there with the rest of VISSER ONE in their heads and probably a bunch more waking up all over MADAGASCAR and FINLAND, whereas I’d had to kill myself just to bring back TOBIAS and then the new me had been in a coma for weeks and weeks before finally waking up and it just seemed safer and smarter and better in pretty much every way to go ahead and make some backups as soon as possible.

‹And yet,› said HELIUM. ‹If the Visser’s actions make sense only in a context where he can seize control of the reinforcement fleet, it seems reasonable to assume that he can seize control of the reinforcement fleet. More likely that than that he has made such an elementary mistake.›

“Bluff?” said RACHEL.

“Maybe,” said the MARCO that wasn’t holding her, while the one that was sort of squeezed her shoulder in a half-side-hug kind of thing. “But like, what exactly would he get out of seeming like he was going to use that fleet, when he isn’t?”

‹We are certain that Quatazhinnikon was unable to provide a…coercion protocol? That none of the tools he developed for the Visser could allow him to seize full control?›

“He didn’t finish anything like a mind-virus or whatever, if that’s what you’re asking. He’s got a bunch of stuff that could kill everybody dead, but not any faster or better than just throwing rocks around.”

“There’s some stuff that we don’t quite understand, though,” said MARCO, the other one I mean, the one sitting next to RACHEL. “Stuff that Q was working on sort of in the dark. Like, ‘make me something that does X if you plug it into Y,’ but that’s it, and who knows where Y came from or where X goes.”

“So he could have a mind-virus?” asked ANTE.

“Maybe, but if he did, why would he be blowing up cities? I mean, that’s what he wants, right? Is cities? People?”

‹It could be a political gambit. Escalate the tension, then appear to be defeated when the fleet defects to the side of humanity, return later to capture the converted species—›

HELIUM broke off. ‹No,› he said. ‹Too absurd.›

“Jake?” said MARCO, the one with VISSER ONE (QUARTER) in his head. “You’ve been pretty quiet. That a good sign, or a bad one?”

Everybody turned to JAKE, who had been sitting there saying nothing as MARCO explained the situation to MARCO and then MARCO explained the other situation back, I really really really didn’t like there being two MARCOS with only one name, it suddenly felt kind of like that thing that the ANDALITES have about how there should only be one copy of any given mind except that I didn’t want to solve it by erasing one of the MARCOS or making it so they didn’t exist, I just wanted a way to think them apart.

Fine.

MARC0 and MARC1.

That was good because MARC1 had VISSER ONE (QUARTER) in his head so that was easy to remember even though it might be a little misleading if it turned out that MARC1 had come first and besides neither one of them was really MARC0 who had been dead for weeks anyway.

“I’ve been thinking,” JAKE said softly. “There’s really only one thing we can tell for sure from what’s happened. Everything else is up in the air, could mean this, could mean that. But this one thing—I don’t know, maybe you guys will disagree. But there’s just one thing that feels solid to me.”

He paused, and I noticed that he still looked tired and sad and harried and more just like a regular kid than like some kind of warrior or general. I don’t know why I noticed that right at that exact moment but I did, and I felt a little bit sorry and even a little bit guilty because like I’d said earlier it didn’t seem fair and none of us were really helping.

“The thing is—if Visser Three went to all the trouble of killing the internet—bombing a bunch of cities—bombing a bunch of cities with bombs that are specifically designed so they don’t kill the infrastructure—”

He broke off again, shrugged. “I don’t know,” he repeated. “Maybe this isn’t as big as it feels to me. But—it means he still cares.”

“What?”

“Like, the Earth still matters to him. He’s still interested. He still wants it. He’s still trying to win.”

“So?”

“So.” He heaved a big breath, and looked around the circle at each of us, one at a time, his eyes sort of sharp and glittering where a second ago they’d been soft and whatever is the opposite of glittering. “So it means we have something he wants. Something we can hold hostage.”

Up until that point about half of my brain had still been spinning on the whole MARC0/MARC1 thing because that’s what it’s like when you get fixated on something but the thing JAKE said got my absolute undivided attention.

“Uh,” said MARC1. “Just so you know, Visser One is laughing. I. Uh. I don’t know if it’s good that Visser One is laughing—”

“What are you saying?” asked ANTE. “What exactly are you saying?”

Jake turned to look at ANTE, and it was weird because not only was ANTE taller than JAKE, he was also sitting a little bit higher up on the hill, but somehow the way JAKE looked at him made it seem like JAKE was looking down at him, not like “looking down” in the way that people mean when somebody is being judgmental or whatever but like looking down as if ANTE was a puzzle piece on JAKE’S desk and JAKE was figuring out where to put him.

“I’m saying that maybe Visser Three has finally made a real mistake,” JAKE answered. “Based on what we’ve learned from Visser One and Quatazhinnikon, he’s been ridiculously, ludicrously overprepared this whole time. He started out with comprehensive knowledge of the entire Andalite military complex. He’s got god-level biotech at his fingertips. He’s been running in and out of the system this whole time, while the rest of us have been trapped by the bubble. Telor probably literally killed him, and I’m betting they messed with a bunch of his failsafes, too, or it wouldn’t have taken him a couple of days to retaliate, but even so he was able to take out the internet, the phones, the satellites, and what looks like half of the major cities on the planet.”

JAKE stopped talking, and seconds passed.

“I don’t get it,” said ANTE.

“Me, neither, for what it’s worth,” said MARC1.

“He shouldn’t still be here. He’s got no business being here. It’s like—it’s like—look, no matter how valuable the Earth is, compared to the rest of the galaxy, he doesn’t need it to win. He’s been running circles around everybody for two years straight, and then he gets here and suddenly all kinds of headaches start popping up. He should’ve just blown us up and left. But he didn’t.”

“The Ellimist?” ventured MARC0.

“Maybe,” JAKE said. “Maybe the Ellimist, maybe Alloran undermining him from inside his own head. Maybe neither of those. Maybe he just—can’t see past it. Maybe it’s just a mistake.”

He paused again, took in another deep breath. “But whatever it is, it means we’ve got him. For now. Maybe not for long. Maybe he’s going to snap out of it. But right now, he’s—he’s attached, or something. He doesn’t want to give it up. He’s not thinking straight. We can exploit that.”

“How?” I asked.

“The Bug fighters,” JAKE said.

‹We can’t control more than one at a time using the cradle’s processing and transmitting power,› HELIUM said. ‹The rest of them will simply—›

“We don’t need to control them,” JAKE said. “At least, not for very long. Just long enough for one hyperspace jump.”

I got there about three seconds before ANTE, who managed to say “But isn’t there a hyperspace bubble around the whole—” before he got it, too.

Everyone got it.

Everyone got it, and everyone went THARN.

THARN is a word that I learned from the book WATERSHIP DOWN, which somebody donated to OAK LANDING because they thought that a book with bunnies on the cover was a children’s book, which is a good guess in general but was pretty wrong in this specific case. But I read it anyway and I am a children so maybe that doesn’t matter.

What THARN means is that you are a rabbit and a fox sees you and it’s too close for you to escape and so you just you just you just freeze and you don’t move and there’s nothing you can do about it because what’s about to happen to you is just too big for you to deal with. It’s like the opposite of FREAKING THE FUCK OUT in the way that water is the opposite of fire even though really the opposite of fire is no fire and the opposite of FREAKING THE FUCK OUT is not FREAKING THE FUCK OUT. It’s like the negative opposite of it, or something—just as big and just as bad, but in the other direction.

And I’d never really seen people go THARN before but I felt my own whole body do a thing that felt like all of my blood had turned into liquid nitrogen and even though I suddenly couldn’t tear my eyes off of JAKE I could still see out of the corner of my eye that everyone else had frozen and MARC0 had gone pale and both RACHEL and ANTE’S jaws were hanging open and even HELIUM had sort of dropped to the ground like he was trying to protect his soft parts and suddenly the word THARN popped back into my head.

Only MARC1 wasn’t THARN and I guess it’s because he had VISSER ONE (QUARTER) and three other MARCOS in his head too and they sort of helped him deal with it.

“Just to be clear,” he said. “We’re talking about a threat to blow up the planet, here?”

“Not just the planet,” said JAKE. “Helium. I’m guessing we could do something like, send three or four ships zipping away from the rest of the fleet one after the other, and then bring one of them right back through, right? Before anybody had time to react?”

“You’re talking about—are you talking about the fucking Last Jedi?” MARC1 sputtered.

JAKE nodded grimly. “Helium,” he repeated. “Could you do it?”

‹We—Prince Jake, there is a reason such things are not done—›

“Helium. Could you do it?”

‹We—it would—in theory, yes, if we could hold one ship in position we could collide another with it, but—›

“And you could save out a few others? Get them far enough away that we could use them later? Say, against the Yeerk homeworld?”

‹Prince Jake, this—this is—›

“This is the gloves coming off, Helium. Telor killed itself trying to stop this guy. That’s a pretty big deal among Yeerks, I’m told.”

‹Yes, Prince Jake, but—›

“This is the moment, Helium. This is the only moment. He was dead for two days. We took out Quatazhinnikon. The fleet is arriving. And he isn’t running. He’s never been more vulnerable.”

‹Prince Jake. What you are proposing is a war crime. It is beyond a war crime. It is an act so destructive that no one has ever carried it out—›

“Says the memories of an Andalite,” JAKE shot back, his voice cold and razor-sharp. “Do you know the name Mertil-Iscar-Elmand?”

‹What? No. Who—why—›

“He was a vecol. A vecol who was friends with Alloran-Semitur-Corass before Alloran murdered him—Alloran, and the rest of their little Boy Scout troop. And then Alloran confessed, and the Andalites buried it. They buried it so hard they literally didn’t remember doing it.”

‹We—we don’t understand.›

“Yes, you do. You do, Helium, because you’re not just an Andalite anymore. You knew before I even got to the end of the sentence. Admit it.”

‹Prince Jake—›

“That’s right. I’m your prince, and I’m giving you a direct order. Tell the truth.”

‹What do you want us to say?›

“The truth, cadet.”

There was a long, long silence. I still couldn’t move, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but sit there and watch.

Finally, HELIUM spoke.

‹The taboo against planetary destruction via near-lightspeed attack is likely to have been developed after instances of such attacks actually being carried out.›

“And the galaxy is still here,” JAKE said. “It didn’t result in the end of all things. But if Visser Three wins, it will be the end—of everything.”

“Jake,” said MARC0, his voice just a tiny bit unsteady in a way where I couldn’t tell if he was scared or mad or pleading or what. “Jake, are we really—”

“We end the threat,” JAKE interrupted, cutting him off. “Isn’t that what you said, back on monster world?”

“Yeah, and then you made a big deal about how maybe it’s a bad idea to plan on blowing up the planet. You specifically used those exact words.”

“That was before—”

He broke off and started over. “The point here isn’t that we blow up the planet,” he said. “It’s that we can, and that that matters to Visser Three. This is the bargaining chip.”

“This is the whole war!”

“And if we can’t stop him, we need to weaken him enough that the Andalites might.”

“Jake—”

MARC0 broke off himself, scrubbed at his hair. “Jake, a second ago I’m pretty sure you almost said ‘that was before we went down into the mist’ or something. Are you—are you sure this isn’t—”

“It’s a bad plan,” JAKE admitted. “But you’re the ones who told me to come up with something. Anybody got a better one?”

Silence.

“It’s a last resort,” he continued. “We grab a Bug fighter—one Bug fighter. We try one more time to get in touch with some kind of resistance—Tyagi, if she’s still alive, or these YEM guys.”

“Or China.”

“If we can’t make contact, we go up. We get in touch with the fleet, see if there’s anything there we can work with. Maybe give them the cube, or even the Quat morph—if they made the Hork-Bajir, they can make a whole species of non-sapient bodies for Yeerks to infest all day long. But if they don’t have anything worth bargaining for—if we can’t find some way to get a message to Visser Three—”

He shrugged, in an empty, hollow sort of way.

“Then we send a message some other way.”

More silence, shocked and horrified and helpless.

I wanted to argue. I wanted to say that we couldn’t, that we couldn’t—to scream and yell at JAKE for even thinking of it.

But—

THE TYPE OF PERSON WHO DOES THE RIGHT THING EVEN IF IT’S HARD.

JAKE was that type of person.

Maybe.

Probably.

TOBIAS thought so. And I thought so, too, from what I’d seen.

But—

Surprises.

Neither one of us knew JAKE that well, and MARC0 did, and MARC0 was—

Well, he wasn’t FREAKING THE FUCK OUT.

But he didn’t seem happy.

There was a little part of me that was sort of downvoting MARC0 or something, since if I was understanding JAKE correctly then MARC0 had been saying words about doing whatever it takes to end the threat, and now he was kind of backpedaling now that we actually had the means to end the threat.

But maybe that wasn’t fair because if you thought something was a good idea and then somebody else who was really really tired and stressed and maybe not thinking straight and maybe even depressed or something if I was right that MARC0 had been kind of hinting that, if that person also said it was a good idea then maybe that would make you think twice, and it wasn’t like MARC0 had said no, exactly, he’d just been saying wait, let’s think about this for a minute.

MARC1 seemed to be okay with it.

I looked at ANTE.

ANTE was still THARN.

Am I still THARN?

I didn’t think so because my blood wasn’t cold and I could move my head now but I noticed that I was doing a lot of thinking about MARC0 and MARC1 and looking around the circle to see how everyone else was reacting and maybe that meant I wasn’t really thinking about it myself and maybe I should. I had already told JAKE that I wouldn’t thoughtscream at random people just because he said so and this was a lot bigger than that.

But for some reason, now that I was thinking about it again, this didn’t seem as hard or as scary as the idea of thoughtscreaming at people, and maybe that meant that there was something broken in my brain, something about whether or not it was me doing the thing instead of whether or not the thing was bad, or something about big numbers being too big for me to really understand.

But actually what JAKE was saying—

Once I really actually thought about it—

I don’t know. It seemed a little arrogant or whatever to say that it made sense but I guess I could say that it seemed to make sense or that my best guess was that it made sense, or something.

VISSER THREE was very, very scary.

VISSER THREE was very, very good at what he was doing.

There didn’t seem to be any way to stop VISSER THREE—not when we didn’t know how many copies of himself he might have made or what kinds of bombs or traps he might have set up or what other crazy weapons he might still be sitting on. The only way to stop him that was anything like guaranteed to work was to make him want to leave us alone—

Oh.

“What if he wants to negotiate?” I said.

They all turned to look at me.

“I mean, if we say ‘stop this right now or we’ll blow up the planet,’ then he doesn’t have any reason to stop, right? Because either we blow up the planet and he gets nothing or he stops and he gets nothing, so why would he care except maybe then he wants us to blow up the planet because at least then we don’t win, either.”

“We could threaten to blow up—”

JAKE broke off halfway through the sentence, and frowned.

“He doesn’t care about the Yeerk homeworld probably, and he doesn’t care about the Andalite homeworld probably,” I said. “If he doesn’t care about anything being alive at all except him, then we can’t really threaten him into doing what we want. We have to offer him something that he wants.”

The words were coming out of my mouth pretty fast—almost as fast as I could think them, fast enough that I didn’t really know exactly what I was going to say next.

“A truce?” said MARC0.

“He’s too dangerous for a truce,” said MARC1. “Any kind of negotiated cease-fire is like what’s-it, Czechoslovenia or whatever it was, back before World War II ramped up. We’d be basically handing him the game five years down the road.”

“Well, we can’t kill him—not for sure, not with all the backups he’s made. And he clearly doesn’t just want bodies, because he’s had Quat on his side since almost the very beginning. He could’ve made bodies any time he wanted.”

“I’m telling you, he wants the Earth,” JAKE said. “That’s it. That’s the only thing we know he wants—the only thing he wants bad enough that he’s, what, actually trying, or whatever.”

“Okay, but we can’t use the Earth to bargain for the Earth,” MARC0 snapped. “So what, then?”

“Non-involvement, maybe?” suggested MARC1. “Non-involvement, non-aggression? He can’t use us to take over the galaxy, but we don’t help anybody else stop him—no, that’s dumb, we die five years down the road that way, too.”

“We don’t have to have a plan,” JAKE said, his voice firm. “We just need to move forward. We can cross the next bridge when we come to it.”

“Are you serious?” MARC0 shot back, sort of half-laughing incredulously underneath the words.

“Getting him negotiating is a victory,” JAKE insisted. “It’s a delay. It’s breathing room. He just blew up a billion people, for god’s sake. Even if we don’t have a clue what to negotiate for, we’re still buying time.”

“And if he says—what—he’ll leave us alone as long as we give him seven out of every ten people? What do we actually say to that? What’s our actual line?”

“We don’t have to figure that out yet.”

“Bullshit we don’t have to figure that out yet, you’re talking about sending a ransom note that says ‘if you want your kid back, too bad, it’s our kid and we’d rather kill him than give him back.’”

JAKE’S face started to turn red.

“You think I like this?” he growled. “You think I want this? I’m saying we don’t have to figure it out yet because I don’t think we can. Because I think if we try to, we’re going to get bogged down and we’re going to panic and we’re going to bicker and in the meantime Visser Three’s going to keep on doing whatever the hell he wants and nobody’s going to stop him. We need to move, and this is a way forward. You got a better one, spit it out, but if you don’t, we’re doing this. You said it yourself—we’re not all getting out of this alive.”

“None of that is an argument you’re just saying words—”

“Lll,” said RACHEL.

Heads turned.

“Lllee-llan.”

“Leeran?”

RACHEL nodded.

“What’s a Leeran?” I asked.

“It’s an alien that Visser Three uses when he negotiates,” said MARC1. “It makes a kind of telepathic field so that everybody can see what everybody else is thinking. No lies, no tricks.”

“Which means,” MARC0 added wearily, “that if we’re going to threaten to blow up the planet, we have to actually be willing to blow up the planet.”

There was a long pause.

“Helium,” said JAKE.

You don’t actually need HELIUM you have an AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL morph and so does MARC1—

I didn’t say it out loud.

“Helium, Elfangor came here to blow up this planet. He thought it was the only way to stop the Yeerks—to stop Visser Three. He was willing to do it. And as for crossing lines that Andalites don’t cross—he gave us the cube.”

‹We are not Elfangor. Even Aximili is not Elfangor.›

“I know that. What I’m saying is—”

“What he’s saying is, be like the wind in thought and deed.”

HELIUM’S stalk-eyes narrowed as he reared, his tail suddenly unfreezing and lashing around like a cat’s.

‹You are in agreement with this plan?›

“No,” said MARC0. “And I object to calling it a plan. But he wasn’t asking me. He was asking you.”

HELIUM’S eyes swiveled so that one was pointing at each of them.

‹Shorm,› he whispered.

“What does that mean?”

‹It doesn’t matter.›

“Will you do this?” JAKE asked. “If I give this order, will you follow it?”

There was another long silence as they locked eyes, JAKE’S deep brown against the alien’s dark gold.

‹If you order it, we will comply,› HELIUM said. ‹But—›

The alien twisted the end of its body in something like an imitation of a human shaking its head.

‹If it comes to that,› he said, ‹then we will send our own ship into the fire as well. Do you understand? We will allow these others to escape—Marco, and Garrett, and Rachel, and Ante. But you, Prince Jake—you and we—we will not send those others into oblivion and preserve our own lives at the same time. If we cannot find a better path, then our own strategic value is not worth saving. If the victory is worth that much death, it is worth ours along with it.›

JAKE’S eyes flickered toward MARC1, who gave the tiniest little shadow of a nod.

They’ll just bring him back. Him, and maybe you, too—

I didn’t say that, either.

“Marco.”

“We reserve the right to come up with a plan that’s less fucked,” said MARC0. “But okay. If V3 pulls a Leeran, he’ll see that we’re ready to follow through.”

MARC1 nodded—a full nod this time.

“Garrett. I’m not going to—look. You know what we’re planning, what we at least might end up doing. You—I’m not asking you to be a part of that. But if we bring in a Bug fighter, and they come out shooting. What—uh. What will you do?”

It was funny. I hadn’t thought about it until right that second, but—

Just like THARN was the negative opposite of FREAKING THE FUCK OUT, the negative opposite of saying yes to JAKE’S plan wasn’t saying no, it was doing something to actually stop it. Like waiting until we were all back on board, and then using a thoughtscream against all of them. It might even work on HELIUM as long as HELIUM was in morph.

And if I decided no and I really meant no, then that was what I would have to do. Otherwise I wouldn’t really be saying no, I’d just be saying yes but I don’t want it to be my fault.

And maybe it was the same kind of brain-broken as being more upset about thoughtscreaming than about killing everybody—maybe my brain couldn’t really understand what it meant for everybody to die—

But I didn’t want that.

I didn’t want to kill JAKE and MARC0 and MARC1 and RACHEL and HELIUM and ANTE.

I didn’t think that was THE RIGHT THING, even though they were talking about a plan that might kill everybody else.

Everybody else meant seven billion people. That was seven billion times worse than killing one person. More, maybe, since there was also something bad about a whole species dying out—about the end of everything that made up “humanity” above and beyond “a bunch of humans.”

I had killed maybe five hundred people already, when we took down the pool. Not just me, but I’d done the thoughtscreaming and I’d carried the bombs. It was more my fault than RACHEL’S, that was for sure.

And this would be about fourteen million times worse.

I didn’t know how to do the math to compare fourteen million times worse to how well I knew JAKE. But I knew that 1.625ish wasn’t enough. 1.6180339887498948482 wouldn’t be enough. I wouldn’t even trust TOBIAS with a call like that, if someone asked me. I wouldn’t even trust myself. I get lots of things wrong.

But—

That didn’t matter?

It didn’t matter, because VISSER THREE was out there. VISSER THREE was winning. And as long as he was winning, we were all in danger. All of us, HUMANS and YEERKS and ANDALITES and HORK-BAJIR and TAXXONS and ARN and whatever a LEERAN was and all of the other people and critters.

And so even though it felt like I couldn’t be sure enough to say yes, it also felt like I couldn’t be sure enough to say no, either. There was something dangerous and wrong about that whole thought, something I wanted to sit down and try to figure out, but we didn’t have time and everybody was looking at me and in the end I don’t know, maybe I wasn’t even really thinking, maybe my brain was just flipping a coin but

“I’ll stop them,” I said.

JAKE nodded.

“Rachel?” he asked.

“Chh,” she answered. “Chur, us.”

“Trust?”

“You.”

JAKE let out a breath.

“Ante,” he said. “I’m sorry. I really, truly am sorry. But—I don’t know you. We don’t know you. You don’t get a vote on this one. I want to say we’re going to just drop you off someplace safe, and that’s it.”

“Nnnnno.”

“Yeah. I want to say that, but Rachel says you stay—if you want. So, uh. Morph up, everybody—morph up and load up. Ante, if you’re coming—come.”

I looked at the tall Finnish boy. We’d talked a good bit over the last two days, and of course I’d morphed him to look through his memories—

Right.

“Wait,” I said. “Before we morph, we should all acquire each other again. We should do that all the time.”

—but really I only knew him 1.5ish, maybe 1.666-and-so-on-ish.

But three minutes later, as the cradle door slid shut behind us, there he was, beside me in swift morph once again.

1.6.