Every other week seems clearly better to me, but if you strongly disagree, please let me know via comment (and maybe drop some THOUGHTS while you're at it? Pretty please? Because I love your thoughts? Maybe even need them a little, in a way that's probably not at all unhealthy?) or head on over to r/rational and join the discussion there.

Note that I'm struggling with what to do about 30,000 word chapters. In this case, I decided to cut the chapter in half, and stagger the update. I could instead post 30,000 word chapters all at once, but would need to update monthly instead of every other week.

Uploading this a little early; I'm probably not going to be EXACTLY 14 days between each update, but I'll try to get each of them out "on the weekend."

Chapter Text

Chapter 37: Marco

—134217728—

People don’t understand the word ruthless.

They think it means mean. Cold. Heartless.

But it’s not about that. It’s not about emotion at all. It’s about clarity.

It’s about being able to see that thin, bright line that leads from point A to point B—that one, narrow path that dodges all the dead ends. It’s about seeing that bright, clear line, and not caring about anything but the beautiful fact that you’ve found the solution. Not caring about anything else but the perfection of it.

I think Cassie finally got that, in the end. Got it in a way that none of the rest of them—not Jake, not Tobias, not even Rachel—ever really understood. As dumb as her call was—as wasteful and shortsighted and wrong—she saw that bright line, and she followed it. No hesitation, no looking back.

I respected that.

But at the same time, I understood her mistake.

See, Cassie picked the wrong B. And she picked it because she could see the bright line leading to it. Not because it made sense. Not because it was worth it. Not because it would get her what she really wanted. She picked it because it was something to do—because it was the only thing she could do, in that moment, and she couldn’t not do it once she saw the way. Couldn’t bear to pick nothing over something.

That’s my guess, anyway. I don’t know. It’s not like I knew her all that well.

But that’s how most people go through life, as far as I can tell. Just following the path of least resistance.

It’s easier, you know? Like, who knows what you need to do to save the whales, or stop global warming, or prevent nuclear war—

Well, bad example. Visser Three took all the nukes.

But you get it, right? It’s hard to figure out how to save the whales, but if you swap in an easier question—

I mean, it’s not hard to figure out how to print out a flyer, or make a five dollar donation, or some stupid shit like that. Join a Facebook group. March in a protest, carry a sign. Get in a fight with your relatives at Thanksgiving, as if that actually makes a difference. If you make the distance from point A to point B small enough, anybody can find that bright, clear line.

Most people don’t even notice themselves doing it. They’re just—caught up in the moment. In the feeling of accomplishment, the thrill of knowing the answer, knowing what to do next. It feels so much better to be doing something, you know?

You can fill up a whole lifetime full of doing, if you don’t ever stop to ask what you’re doing, why you’re doing it. If you don’t ever bother to zoom out, and check to see whether it adds up to anything at all.

If I was honest with myself—

—and I do try to be honest with myself, I really do—

—that was the real reason why I’d spent the last couple of months making an army of clones. Not because I had a goal in mind. Not because I had any specific reason to believe it would help. Just because it was something, you know?

It was something I could already do, with the tools I had at hand, something better than just sitting around watching the heart monitors go beep. It was a step in a direction that felt like forward, even though it wasn’t toward anything in particular.

It was hard to go toward, these days. It got harder day by day, as the big picture got more and more complicated. Used to be, the goal was to hurt the Yeerks and free as many humans as we could. That was straightforward enough.

But now—

I had no idea what we were supposed to be doing. ‘Stop Visser Three,’ sure, but—stop him from doing what, exactly? Stop him how?

And so a part of me—

—a small part—

—a part that the rest of me was suspicious of, and watching closely—

—a part of me was relieved to have the scope narrowed down for once. To have it narrowed down for me, so that I didn’t have to feel guilty about ignoring the bigger picture. To have a simple, straightforward problem to deal with.

Point A: the eleven of us—Jake, Helium, and eight more of me, not counting the three that had broken off—stuck at the top of the valley.

Point B: Jake and Helium—at least—alive and well at the bottom.

I could work with that. And when we finished up with this little side quest, however many of us made it out alive—

Well. The rest of the war would still be there.

‹Shade here,› said a voice. ‹Crossing the boundary now. Catch you on the flip side, over.›

I turned my head to watch as the tiny black shape banked away from me, fluttering downhill toward the trees. I carried on straight for another twenty seconds, then folded my wings and followed suit.

‹Hedwig here,› I called out. ‹Crossing the boundary now, over.›

‹Good luck, Marco,› Jake whispered.

Down, down, down—an endless dive, picking up speed as I followed the steep slant of the forest floor. Down into the twilight, the bright, sunlit meadows vanishing behind me.

If you squinted a little, you could almost convince yourself that it was Earth. The last remnants of sky were blue, if a little too dark. The trees were definitely trees, even if no ordinary tree had ever come close to being that thick around. The mulch on the forest floor was just mulch. Even the ground—if you ignored the fact that the whole world was tilted, that the hillside went on and on in both directions as far as the eye could see, smooth as a playground slide—

I mean, still. There are probably places on Earth like that, right?

But no forest on Earth had ever been this quiet.

You know how they always say ‘it’s too quiet’ right before the jump scare?

It was too quiet.

Not a bird, not a bug, not a single alien squirrel. Even the wind seemed subdued, the breeze broken and diminished by the endless ranks of hundred-foot-wide trunks. If the canopy was rustling, it was too far away for my owl-ears to pick it up.

And once you noticed the silence, you couldn’t help but notice the rest.

Like the giant leaves littering the hillside, each one bigger than an umbrella. Or the way those leaves fell just a tiny bit too slowly, the gravity juuuust close enough to Earth’s gravity that it was easy to forget and get surprised all over again.

Or like how there were no other plants in the forest at all. No bushes, no ferns, no flowers or vines. Not even any saplings or seedlings that I could see—just giant, silent pillars of wood, stretching up for what might have actually been miles.

I shivered.

There was this book that my mom used to read to me, back when I was little. Like six or seven years old, you know? It was about a boy who listened to the devil and snuck off into a forbidden forest.

Like, right out of the gate. The book led with that.

And I remember—I couldn’t remember much about the book, but I remembered this one part—it talked about how creepy quiet the forest was. Like being among the dead men in an enormous green cathedral, or something like that.

And then there was, like, one sound. One tiny, faint, distant sound, and the boy just stood there listening, trying to figure out what it was, losing second after second as some giant, fire-breathing, man-eating monster got closer and closer and closer—

I couldn’t remember what happened to the little boy. But I remembered the nightmares, and I remembered what the forest had looked like, in the drawing in the book, and as I dropped deeper and deeper into the valley, I had never been so grateful to have wings.

‹Shade,› I called out. ‹This is Hedwig. You there?›

There was no answer.

That wasn’t surprising—I said to myself, firmly and deliberately—after all, the bat morph was a lot faster than my owl, and I’d probably flown another two hundred yards before turning into the woods anyway, and neither one of us was maintaining anything like a straight line as we zigged and zagged around the giant trees, he was probably half a mile away at this point at least—

Tk-k-t-tk-k-t-tk-k-t-tk.

My head snapped around entirely of its own accord, my eyes automatically trying to focus and finding nothing to focus on. Below me, the mist was thickening, had already completely obscured the slanted forest floor.

But it didn’t do much to dampen sound.

Tk-k-t-tk-k-t-tk-k-t-tk-k-t-tk-k-t-tk.

Something was moving beneath the slow-motion cascade, cutting across the slope at about two o’clock, maybe another couple hundred yards downhill. Flaring my wings, I leveled out, the mist falling away as I banked toward an outcrop of bark on the side of one of the massive trees.

Tk-k-t-tk. Tk-k-t-tk.

Tk-k-t-tk-k-t-tk-k-t-tk-k-t-tk.

It was fast, whatever it was—unnervingly fast. Beneath the layer of my control, I felt the owl mind trying to make sense of it, to square it with the terrestrial wildlife it had evolved to understand. From the sound of it, the unknown creature was no larger than a fox, but it would take an ordinary fox at least twice the time to cover that distance. And there was something wrong with the creature’s odd triplicate cadence, something that didn’t sound to the owl like legs—

Tk-k-t-tk-k-t-tk-k-t-tk-k-t-tk-k-t-tk-k-t-tk.

I turned my head to look back uphill. There were still fragments of sunlight there, just barely visible in the spaces between the most distant trees, maybe a mile and a half away.

I looked down—

The mist is not a natural phenomenon, Helium had said. It’s a gaseous suspension produced by the trees themselves, oxygen-rich and moisture heavy. It seeps out through the cracks in the bark and flows downhill toward the Arn settlements, growing thicker and deeper the lower you go.

I couldn’t see the ground, but the owl’s instincts told me that the drifting blanket was already five or ten feet thick, maybe as much as fifteen. Soon—according to Helium—I would need to drop into that innocent-looking blueness, and stay within it for the rest of my journey. The Hork-Bajir settlements began about two miles into the forest, and the Yeerks would have put all sorts of defensive tech in the branches beneath them—cameras, drones, autonomous artillery. The only way to escape notice was to go where the Yeerks wouldn’t bother to look, where the conventional wisdom said that no enemy intruder could possibly survive—

Tk-k-t-tk-k-t-tk-k-t-tk-k-t.

I shivered again. The fear was coming back, stronger this time, piggybacking on my memories of the book—the book, and all the other half-forgotten fears of my childhood, Jumanji and Jaws and Tremors, Alien and Pitch Black and Cloverfield and Starship Troopers, razor claws and dripping teeth, every lurking horror that I’d ever imagined or seen on screen—

—or worse, experienced in person—a memory I’d squashed so hard that I literally hadn’t even thought of it since, except in my nightmares—the pitch-black tunnels under the Yeerk pool—ravenous monsters crawling closer in the dark—the sound of Jake’s scream, of Jake being eaten—

—all of that and more, it all came seeping in, leaking in through the cracks of my composure, and meanwhile the tk-k-t-tk had gotten closer, had passed right under my perch and was still only a stone’s throw away, if it weren’t for the mist we’d be looking right at each other—

I had faced death before. But this was different. This wasn’t guns or knives or Hork-Bajir blades, wasn’t clean or noble or sensible. This was a deep, visceral awareness that I was no longer at the top of the food chain—the raw, primal fear of predators lurking just out of sight. If I’d been in my own body, I probably would have been in the middle of a panic attack; it was only the owl’s absence of awareness that was keeping me grounded and sane.

You have to fly past it, you know.

I knew.

You have to fly past it, to find out whether it can hear you, whether it can catch you, whether it’s safe for the others to use the owl morph.

I knew. I knew it was true—knew that I would take off, in just a few more seconds—knew that I was, truly, ready to die for this mission. For that clear, bright line.

But at the same time—

I don’t know how to say it.

Tk-k-t-tk-k-t-tk-k-t-tk-k-t-tk-k-t-tk.

It was like I owed it to myself to sit there for just one more moment. For what might very well be one of the last moments of my life. Owed it to myself to let the fear—the truth of the fear—to let it in, let it really hit me. It was like a tribute, a memorial—a brief honoring of what I was about to put at risk, what I was maybe about to sacrifice.

Tk-k-t-tk-k-t-tk.

It is horrible, I whispered to myself. It’s horrible and frightening and you have every right to be scared, it’s right to be scared, but it doesn’t matter, you’re going to do it anyway, because—

I had already launched myself off of my perch.

—you know if you don’t, then Jake will.

That was all that mattered, at this point. Not prophecies, not principles, not armies or empires. This wasn’t about the war at all, except in some distant, abstract sense. It was about my friend, and whether or not I could do anything to keep him alive.

Down I drifted, utterly silent in the air.

The bat for raw speed and maneuverability, said the Marco who’d provided the morphs. But the owl for stealth. This thing can fly two feet in front of your nose and you won’t hear a thing.

I was still afraid—still terrified—but as I dropped into the mist, the fear seemed to change, transforming from a solid barrier in front of me to a kind of crackling, electric awareness all around me. I was in it, now—had switched from freeze to flight, and the fear, instead of holding me back, had mutated into pure fuel.

Tk-k-t-tk-k-t-tk.

The sound was louder now, and I could hear other sounds underneath it—gurgling fluid, rushing air, something that might be the alien equivalent of a heartbeat. I twitched a wing, tilted my tail, settled into a course that should take me right past it.

Pictures taken seconds before disaster, said some demented, inconsequential corner of my brain.

Tk-k-t-tk-k-t-tk-k-t-tk.

I had already started banking by the time I saw it, looming up out of the mist—a set of upright, insectile legs—a flash of mottled carapace—a low-slung, armored body that seemed to be facing away from me—

—and was way, way bigger than a fox—

I blew past the alien creature at what felt like at least thirty miles per hour, turning downhill, skimming across the mulch for a terrifying, exhilarating dozen yards before pulling up to a cruising height of maybe ten feet, still matching the steep slope of the valley floor.

I wasn’t thinking in words—no complicated sentences like did it see me—but every last scrap of my attention was focused behind me, waiting to hear the tk-k-t-tk of the creature’s motion, or a cry of alarm, or any sign that it had noticed me—

Nothing.

Seconds passed.

I let out a mental sigh—

TREE!

I heard it maybe a second before I saw it—a sort of looming flatness in the feel of the air in front of me—and then it came roaring at me out of the mist, a vast, flat wall far too wide to dodge around—

It was too late. Too late to do anything but flare my wings, bleeding off a fraction of my speed before—

CRUNCH.

Pain.

Maybe I tried to cling to the bark. Maybe I tried to flap my wings. I wasn’t sure—couldn’t be sure, through the searing, blinding, deafening, all-encompassing pain.

I was on the ground—

Tk-k-t-tk-k-t-tk-k-t-tk-k-t-tk—

Shit.

I tried to roll over—

Pain.

To sit up—

Pain.

Tk-k-t-tk-k-t-TK-K-T-TK—

I braced myself, some part of me trying to calculate the distance, to estimate how many seconds I had left—

‹EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE—›

It was a hail-mary, a half-court shot—a last, desperate hope. None of us had ever managed to fully mimic Garrett’s thought-scream, but I’d been studying it, learning from his memories, practicing on birds and fish. Letting the fear drive me, I tried my best to unseal every gate inside my mind, to tap into my pain and rage and frantic will-to-live, to pour all of it into the single loudest mental sound I’d ever tried to make.

TK-K-T-whumpf. Tk-k-t-tk-k-whumpf.

‹—EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE—›

Sounds of scrabbling, scrambling—the movements of uncoordinated limbs, the slide of chitin against bark.

‹—EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE—›

I kept screaming for as long as I could—screamed until there had been nothing but silence for long, long, seconds, until the feel of the owl body dying out from under me could no longer be ignored.

‹—EEEEEEEEESUS CHRIST! FUCK, fuck, Jesus fucking Christ FUCK—›

I began to demorph, my thoughts slipping and sliding past each other, rattling around like bottles on the floor of a car. That had been too close, way too close—if I’d hit the tree a little harder, been just a little more impaired—

I turned my head, ignoring the explosions of pain, trying to track the alien creature before I lost touch with the owl body’s super-hearing. It didn’t sound like the thing was going to get up and come after me, but—

Fuck, shit, fuck, Jesus, holy fucking shit—

I gritted my rapidly emerging teeth. At this point, there was literally nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t stay in a dying body, and we’d decided in advance not to give any of our limited stash of guns and knives to the vanguard, since the odds were that we were just going to die anyway—

Goddamn fucking fuckery full of FUCK—

I lay as still as I could as the morph progressed, as the frantic, gibbering panic abated, softening back into ordinary terror. How long had it been? Thirty seconds? Forty?

Fucking died DEAD, DEAD, fucking dead done finished done over FUCK—

I could hear the feeble rustlings of the creature, unnervingly loud and close in the stillness, and off in the distance—

My heart sank.

In a minute, I told myself—

FUCK your minute, Jango Fett fuck, one time fucking fake photocopy fuck—

It felt like I had been broken into pieces, knocked out of alignment, my inner voices split apart and turned in opposite directions.

In a minute, the first voice repeated, along with a mental hint of warning, you’re going to have a decision to make.

I sat up—slowly, carefully, my still-growing body wedged into the corner between the steep slope and the sheer vertical wall of the tree.

Remorph the owl and keep going downhill. Remorph the owl and head back up. Morph something that can fight. Stay human, acquire the bug.

I leaned back against the tree, looking up the slope as my eyes melted from owl to human.

I couldn’t see anything. The ground in front of me sloped upward into the blueness, completely invisible past maybe ten feet.

But I could hear.

The creature, no more than twenty or thirty feet away. And further beyond that—further downhill—

Sounds of movement. Distant. Faint. But definitely there. And unless I was totally losing it, just making things up in my fear and confusion, they were headed my way.

No time you have no time—

If I went back now—turned uphill and just flew back to the rendezvous—

What could I tell them? Just that the owl morph wasn’t safe, which they were going to find out anyway—that was the default assumption, if I didn’t make it back.

Yeah, okay, but it’s not just about THEM, there’s also YOUR life to consider—

Except—

Except there wasn’t. Not really. If I went back now, we’d just have to turn right around and come back into the woods anyway, and we still wouldn’t really know what we were up against, and this time Jake would be right there, too, would be vulnerable—

I took a step away from the tree, immediately missing its firm, reassuring presence at my back. The mulch slid a little under me, and I leaned forward to rest my hands against the slope.

Fuck.

I ran. Ran, slipping and sliding—ran on all fours, tearing my way crosswise up the slope. I was still scared—could feel it in the trembling of my hands, the dryness of my mouth, the electric thrum of adrenaline in my blood—but the fear was distant, muffled, irrelevant.

Still, I almost screamed when the creature faded into view—almost, but I caught myself, caught the sound at the last possible second as I saw that it wasn’t really moving, was just sort of twitching and writhing on the forest floor. Giving myself no time to look, no time to even think, I lunged forward, grasping one of its—

—who gives a shit what you call it—

—one of its legs, whatever, keeping my other hand up as a guard as I began to acquire it.

The other noises were growing louder, now—were distinct enough that I could tell that there was more than one of whatever-it-was—one in the front, and others further behind.

Releasing the buglike appendage, I scrambled around the creature and crawled another dozen yards up the slope, remembering the monsters beneath the Yeerk pool—the ones who’d stopped to eat their dead and wounded, buying us time.

Fuck shit fuck shit not okay not okay at all gonna die gonna get eaten alive—

I began to morph again, settling on the bat without any conscious deliberation, my thoughts all coming after the decision, as if I was explaining to myself why it was the right call. Speed—I needed speed, and the ability to dodge trees in the mist. The bat could break a hundred miles per hour in level flight—heading downhill, it might be able to do as much as one-twenty.

Get as far as you can, learn as much as you can, try to get back alive.

It was a tense ninety seconds, but the oncoming creatures were still well below me by the time the morph completed. Flapping awkwardly, I sprang forward into the air, grateful for the additional help of the slope.

Squeak.

The picture came back, a single freeze-frame image, every outline crisp and sharp. The buglike monster below me. The trees around me. The hazy shimmer that marked the border of the mist above.

Squeak.

The first of the oncoming nightmares—a predator roughly the size and shape of a lion, but where the lion’s head would be, there was only a gaping mouth, surrounded by four arm-like appendages that were already reaching out to grab the collapsed, twitching bug-thing—

It was behind me already, behind and above me as I dove downward into the valley, riding the edge of the mist, staying as high as I could. Ten feet, twelve feet, fifteen feet—each inch bringing with it a tiny scrap of relief, a microscopic lessening of fear as I moved further out of reach of predators on the ground.

Squeak.

I passed another pair of monsters, also headed uphill—these looking almost like normal Earth alligators, except that their legs were as long as a horse’s. They seemed to hear the sounds of my echolocation, but did little besides glance upward as I left them in the dust.

Squeak.

What seemed like another nondescript acre of hillside, except that the echoes told me there were hollows beneath the mulch—dozens of them, maybe hundreds, each covered by a patch of some thin, unknown material. I kept my distance.

Squeak.

At close to a hundred miles per hour, it took only about a second to pass each of the giant trees, and only a few seconds to cover the distances between them. Thirty seconds in, and the mist had thickened to something like thirty or forty feet. And as the mist grew thicker, so did the wildlife—by the time I had been flying for a minute, the hillside beneath me was as thickly populated as an African savannah on a Discovery Channel special.

Squeak.

And not just the hillside, but the trees themselves—creatures boring into the trees, or occupying strange coral-like growths, or stringing vast gossamer webs between them.

Squeak.

I was squeaking and chirping almost nonstop, and still I was barely able to process what I was seeing—by the time a creature came into ‘view’ around one of the trees, it was only a second or two away from me, and I would often get as few as two or three snapshots of it before it was already beneath me, then behind me.

Squeak.

A trio of lithe, scaled predators—like raptors, but with one leg shorter than the other, as if permanently adapted to facing only one way on the steep slope.

Squeak.

A skittering insectoid like the one I had acquired, somehow rolling like a tumbleweed as it chased after a number of squirrel-sized rodents with six legs each.

Squeak.

‹AHHHH!›

It was like a frog’s tongue, but a hundred feet long—aimed exactly where I would have been, had my echolocation not warned me just in time. I dodged—another one!—juked—another one!—turned completely upside-down—another one!

And I was past them.

It was surreal, how quickly the dangers arose and how quickly they fell behind—like the most intense video game I had ever played. There was no time for thought, no time for fear, no time for anything except the next moment, the next tree, the next monster.

A flock of avians, bursting forth from pecked hollows in one of the trees, shrieking like Native Americans in some old western movie—but they weren’t fast enough to catch me, and a larger avian dropped out of the mist, dragging one of them down to the ground.

A blob of black venom, fired up out of a deep, dark hole between two giant roots.

A hulking giant, like the offspring of a troll and a dinosaur, so wide and tall that I turned tail entirely, looping around one of the giant trees to pass through a different gap.

And not just hunting me. Not even mostly hunting me. For the most part, they were hunting each other, with fewer than one in ten of them taking a pass at me or even bothering to notice as I flew past. I saw more of the avians, trapped in a web that spanned a gap the size of a football field. I saw a flock of what seemed like giant hedgehogs, swarming over the corpse of something both dragon-sized and dragon-shaped. I saw something like a six-legged boar chasing after an eight-legged rabbit, only to be ensnared by a writhing mass of thorny, muscular vines that had been lying hidden just beneath the mulch. The violence was insane, unreal—even accounting for how quickly I was passing through it, all of the distance I was covering, it seemed impossible, unsustainable. And all of it invisible, hidden by the mist, perceived entirely in the colorless snapshots of echolocation, an endless slideshow of carnage.

It wasn’t until I tried to turn that I realized—

The bat was faster than anything the forest had to offer. Faster and more maneuverable, capable of detecting and dodging all of the hidden traps, all of the various predators. And although I was tired, I could feel that I had energy yet—enough to make it all the way through to the bottom. This planet might have monsters that could eat an elephant in a single gulp, but in the air, I had superiority.

But that was going down.

I turned, flying parallel to the slope for a minute, hoping to get away from the column of creatures that had just seen me fly past. Then I turned further, angling my body uphill, shooting for the gap between two giant trees. Almost immediately, a pair of—

—spider-monkey spiders—

—detached themselves from the tree on the right and sailed toward me, trailing gossamer threads behind them. I dodged—barely—then dodged again as a—

—bark wolf?

—burst out of a shallow hollow in the ground, its jaws snapping shut a millimeter away from my face.

I could feel the strain in my muscles, the drop in my speed—I was going fifty miles per hour if I was lucky, and there was no way I could keep it up for long.

Fuck.

If I’d had a human mouth, I might have laughed. It was just—just perfect, you know? Perfect in that perfectly fucked-up way that I couldn’t help but find funny.

Maybe they’ll figure it out, I thought, as I curved around another giant trunk and pointed my nose downward once more. Jake and the others. Maybe they’ll realize.

But of course they wouldn’t. We’d agreed, after all—if neither of us makes it back, that means that flying doesn’t work.

I didn’t have much space left for thinking, once I got back up to full speed. And I wasn’t much for promises or threats, either. But—

To do what you do, the avatar had said. To act as seems appropriate, under the circumstances.

I didn’t know what I’d find at the bottom of the valley. But if Helium was right, all of the death and horror I was witnessing were artificial. Had been created, by the puppetmasters at the center of the rift.

Normally, I try not to be too judgmental. Live and let live, you know? Different strokes for different folks.

But my best friend was up there, and in a few hours, he was going to be fighting his way downhill through this meat grinder. Slowly. Painfully. Dangerously.

And if he didn’t make it through—

Well. Under the circumstances, there were a lot of responses I would be willing to call appropriate.

I might even pick up a couple of new morphs along the way.

* * *

—34359738368—

“Jake?”

I watched as my doppelganger approached my friend—

Our friend.

—his shoulders tense, his movements radiating a kind of awkward uncertainty.

So that’s what that looks like from the outside.

“Jake,” he repeated.

Jake didn’t move, and for a moment the other me looked up, locked eyes with—

I turned to the Marco beside me, just in time to see the Marco beside him turn to look, too—

—our eyes met—

—rolled precisely identical amounts in exactly opposite directions—

—which caused both of us to snort—

—after which, entirely independently, each of us raised a hand into the air, two fingers extended, and twitched them, just as the Marco between us said, his voice heavy and tired—

“Fuck off.”

There was a pause.

“God damn it, do I have to say it?”

Giggles.

“Fine. ‘Twice.’ Can we stop doing this, already?”

More giggles.

The Marco gritted his teeth.

The silence stretched out, expectant.

“Fine!” he snapped “‘Twice!’ Again! Come on, I know this is getting old for you, too.”

This time the silence was thicker, more contemplative.

“Nah, it doesn’t work,” said another Marco.

“Not as funny if you force it,” another agreed.

A moment, as it sunk in—

“God damn it,” I said, along with six other voices.

And somehow that did it. For the moment, we were free again.

It was strange, being around six clones of yourself. Or rather, six clones of my self—I honestly wasn’t sure whether Jake or Rachel or Tobias would have had anything like the experience I was having, under the same circumstances.

It was like having a song stuck in your head, only it was worse than that. Like if having a song stuck in your head had a baby with having a rock in your shoe. All the little random snippets of thought that were constantly floating through my mind—all the memes and comebacks and old movie quotes and off-color jokes—all the things that would usually just float right back out of my head, unspoken and unremembered—

Suddenly, I knew that someone else was thinking them, too. Six other someones, in fact. And they knew that I was thinking them, and we each knew that the others knew that we were thinking them, and somehow that—

I dunno. It made them more real, or something. Made all the little bits of mental fluff stick, made them stick around. It was like if somebody got up and sang Gonna take my horse to the—

—and then just stopped.

It was unbearable. Literally unbearable—we’d tried resisting, at first. But somehow, that just made it worse. It was like trying not to think of a pink elephant—you could get away with it for a few seconds, but it just got harder and harder and harder—

That’s what she said.

Now, we were just giving in. Going along with it. The meme would seize us, and we’d play it out, and then we’d be free again—for a minute, or five, or ten, until something else triggered it.

Like I triggered your MOM last night.

The worst part was, this—this thing that was happening, it had absolutely no regard whatsoever for mood, no sense of decency or propriety. It didn’t care in the slightest that—

“Jake. It’s been five hours, man.”

“I know.”

I could see in the other Marco exactly how I felt, hearing that voice—the way he very specifically didn’t flinch, the way he was almost able to cover up his helpless need-to-help, the almost frantic desire to do something to take that dull, leaden quality back out of his best friend’s voice—

“Yeah, well. I hate to put this all on you, but. We kind of need our fearless leader to say go.”

Jake lifted his head slowly, his expression tired. “They’re dead,” he said flatly, looking my doppelganger straight in the eye. “Right? I mean, that’s what we’ve got to assume.”

The other Marco shifted uncomfortably.

I didn’t blame him. I didn’t know what to say, either.

The truth was—

—and this was embarrassing—

—we’d kind of cooled off in the intervening six or seven hours. Since yelling at Jake to take it seriously, I mean. Yelling at him—apparently—successfully.

It’s not that we’d stopped taking it seriously ourselves. It’s just that—after a while, it kind of fades into the background, you know? You’re mad about it, you know you’re mad about it, you know you’re going to keep being mad about it, but if there’s not any way to do anything about that, eventually you just—

Cool off.

Besides, it was a little bit different for us. I mean, everything we’d said before—about this being the avatar’s fault, about it being unnecessary, malicious even—

That was all still true. But from the inside—

Every single one of us had killed “Marco” at least thirty or forty times by now. Every one of us had thirty or forty memories of waking up copies of ourselves in morph armor to ask them for advice, use them to think something through, and then—

I mean, it’s not like we had a choice. That’s how the morphing tech works.

But it meant that, despite everything we’d said to Jake, it really was starting to feel like—

Well. Not like we were spares, exactly. Not like seven copies of one person. More like—like one person in seven bodies. Like there really was just one individual there, like there was some essential thing that was “Marco,” and instead of plugging into the rest of the universe in one spot, it was now plugging in through all seven of us. The same software, running on seven different machines.

Which really did make it hurt less, somehow, imagining two of me dying in the forest. Even imagining dying myself. Because—I dunno—if it happened, the ur-Marco would still exist, or something? Like, I’d only be losing half of what people usually lose, when they die. I’d be losing the first-person experience, the chance to live the life myself.

But the things that I wanted for their own sake—

—like keeping Jake alive—

—it’s like, if you think of the universe as this vast bucket full of LEGO, and everybody’s wandering through it, and some people are sticking pieces together, making spaceships and castles and train sets, and other people are knocking things down, or tinkering with the color of the hills, making little surgical changes—

—every choice that I would make, wandering through that landscape, the other Marcos would make too. Including choices about where to go, inside the bucket. They’d follow the same paths, build the same spaceships, help the same people, make the same judgments I’d make about right and wrong and everything in between.

And even if we all kicked it—we’d made thirty-seven copies of ourself, back on Earth, and the little blue fucker had only brought twelve of us. That might mean that the other twenty-six were all dead, but probably at least some of them just hadn’t woken up, yet. And even if none of them ever did, Tobias still had the cube.

That helped, given what we were up against. It helped a lot.

“All right, then,” said Jake, breaking the silence. “Everybody knows the plan. Saddle up.”

With barely a whisper, Helium dropped down out of the sky and landed among the flowers, blue fur already beginning to show between his feathers. As he grew, Jake shrank, his skin darkening, the bones of his hands thinning and stretching in a way that was horribly reminiscent of Freddy Krueger.

The other Marcos were changing, too—two of them seeming to melt and deflate while the other four were swelling, their absolutely identical nature vanishing briefly as each progressed through the morph in slightly different ways.

As for myself, I closed my eyes and focused on my most recent acquisition—Marco 2199023255552, who had woken up eighteen days ago in a hospital in Botswana and had been looking for a way to make contact with the German government when we’d all been yanked away.

When I opened my eyes again, I saw Helium, halfway from Andalite to Hork-Bajir, a Glock 21 in each hand and a tiny bat on his shoulder, next to four outrageously massive gorillas—two of them gently settling large snakes into makeshift bandoliers—all standing awkwardly in what could have been a queen’s flower garden, if it hadn’t been tilted forty degrees to the right.

“You know,” I said out loud, bending down to pick up our single stolen Dracon beam. “If you think about it, gorillas don’t know any bodybuilding techniques, so we’ve probably never seen one at full strength.”

I grinned, knowing as I did that the rest of them were all—inevitably—thinking the same thing—

“Of course I did,” I said.

‹Did what?› asked Helium.

‹They were all thinking, did you really wait until none of us had mouths just so you could be the only one to say that,› said a weary voice.

‹Wait. Was that the voice of our fearless leader?›

‹Marco, I might not be a copy of you, but I’ve known you for a very long time. Is it out of your system yet?›

Out of your MOM’s system—

Like my mom would ever let you into her system—

What can I say? The system’s corrupt, and I know how to work it—

Like I worked your MOM last night—

‹Twice,› came a chorus of voices.

‹Yeah,› I said. ‹Sorry.›

‹This is unsettling,› said probably-Helium.

‹At least this way he’s not making us participate,› Jake grumbled.

We Marcos exchanged glances. That had sounded just put-upon enough that we were pretty sure it was on purpose, which meant that Jake was playing along, which meant that he had shaken it off and was back to normal, at least mostly.

Which maybe wasn’t the best place to be right before we all threw ourselves into the meat grinder. But it was better than that dull deflated already-defeated thing.

‹Anybody got anything else to say? Last thoughts? Tweaks to the plan?›

‹Other than—›

‹Other than the speech from Independence Day, yes.›

I laughed aloud as the others chuckled telepathically.

The silence stretched out.

‹All right, then. Let’s go.›

* * *

—137438953472 —

Somehow, I ended up in front.

I mean, one way or another, “I” would have ended up in front. But it was interesting to see the difference it made. How taking up that position, assuming that role, broke the symmetry between me and the other Marcos.

‹Next tree…ten o’clock, two hundred feet away. Another one at noon-thirty that’s maybe four hundred,› said Jake, from atop Helium’s shoulder.

‹Any signs of life yet?›

‹Still clear so far.›

‹Let’s go for the long shot.›

It didn’t mean much, by itself—being out front. We were a pretty tight little group, never more than seven or eight feet away from each other, and if something was going to attack us, there was no guarantee it’d come from straight ahead. It was probably more likely to come from the sides, or from above, all things considered.

But still. I was the one piercing that opaque, perilous frontier. I was the closest to whatever unknown dangers lay ahead.

I used to be scared of the dark, you know. Like any kid. Zombies, vampires, things that go bump in the night.

My mom would make me drag the garbage can down to the street, so that it could be picked up the next morning. Made me wait until after dinner, so I could throw in the last bag from the kitchen. All the way down that long, dark driveway, with the trees looming overhead and the house looking so small, so far away, that one bright light over the front door casting everything in creepy shadows.

I’d tremble, stepping across the threshold, hearing the door swing shut behind me. I always started out slow. Slow is good. Once you start speeding up, the panic sets in, and pretty soon you’re running, and you know it’s going to catch you right on the doorstep—

But one night—

I can’t remember why I had the thought. Don’t remember where it came from. Maybe some movie I’d watched—Blade, or It, or something.

But anyway, that night, I decided that I was going to be the hunter. I snuck a steak knife out of the kitchen drawer, tucked it into my belt. Decided that any monster that came after me was going to get what was coming to it, that even if I died I was going to go down fighting.

And as I walked down to the curb, everything was different. I still heard every sound, tracked every rustle in the leaves, every chirp and chitter coming from the woods. But they weren’t threats anymore. They were clues. They were the sounds of monsters too dumb to keep quiet, too dumb to let me know they were leading me right to them.

Or at least, that was the fantasy. I mean, I didn’t actually go running off into the woods or anything. I don’t think I even pulled the knife out of my belt.

But that’s because I didn’t have to. It was my darkness, after that.

There’s the kind of fear that stops you from walking down to the end of the driveway in the first place—the kind of fear that’s designed to protect you, keep you out of danger, keep you safe.

It was the other kind of fear that I let go of, that night.

And being in front, as we crawled down the endless slope, slipping and sliding and bumping into each other—

It was sort of like that.

I didn’t have any illusions. I knew that a gorilla was no match for the kinds of monsters Helium had described. I knew that I wasn’t in control.

But like—

That was the game.

Most of the time, I think, when people are miserable or suffering or whatever, it’s because their minds are trying to—I dunno—just magically teleport them into a better universe, or something? Like some part of them still believes that if they just sad hard enough, they’ll somehow be able to undo it, travel back in time and make the other choice.

Once you let that go, and really start playing the game that you’re actually in—

Sooner or later, we were going to find the enemy. And when that happened, it was more important that I kill them than that I stop them from killing me.

After all, I was the vanguard.

‹Wait,› said a voice.

We all halted.

‹What?› I said, speaking up for all of us.

‹The tree we’re heading toward. There’s stuff moving in the bark.›

‹Moving? Moving how?›

‹Crawling back and forth. Up and down.›

‹Like bugs?›

Jake squeaked some more.

‹Like dog-sized bugs,› he said.

‹Have they noticed us?› I asked. ‹Like, are they reacting to your echolocation?›

‹Not yet.›

There was a brief pause.

‹Left or right?›

‹Right,› Jake answered.

We turned and began slip-slide-scrambling along the slope, unable to keep from angling downhill as we went. Around us, the mist was darkening, though I couldn’t tell whether the sun was going down or whether we were just getting too deep for light to penetrate.

‹Anybody know any camp songs?›

There was a halfhearted ripple of laughter, and then silence again.

‹Wait.›

Again we stopped.

‹Something’s tracking us. Can’t really tell if it’s following my squeaks or if it senses us some other way. Um. Three of them—okay, I see them. Three of them. Coming from downhill, two o’clock.›

We shifted position, forming up with Helium, Jake, and Marco-with-a-Dracon-beam-callsign-Simo-Häyhä in the center, and the four of us in gorilla morph in a diamond around them.

‹They’re about wolf-sized,› Jake continued. ‹Hundred and twenty yards, incoming at—jogging speed—maybe thirty or forty more seconds—›

I could hear them now. Gorillas have excellent hearing—they have to, since visibility in the jungle is often barely any better than it is when you’re surrounded by mist. Beneath the surface, I felt the gorilla’s instincts stir, felt my body grow tense as the soft patter grew closer.

‹Get ready.›

The rustling of mulch was clearer now, was so loud and sharp that it seemed impossible that we couldn’t see them, the mist wasn’t that thick—

‹What—›

The sound split, footsteps passing by on either side of me, heading uphill.

‹They’re coming around from the top!›

Height advantage.

Easier to strafe past your target heading downhill, rather than up—

But—

I thought I’d only heard two sets of footsteps go past me. Two evenly-matched sets, one on each side—

In a flash, a tiny fraction of a second, I considered asking Jake to check again, then discarded the idea—by the time I conveyed what I wanted him to tell me—

‹They’re turning—fifteen yards—›

I stayed facing downhill as I heard two other gorillas roar, as bodies crashed against the mulch and against each other, as the Dracon beam fired and something gave an alien shriek—

Come and get it, motherfucker.

There was sudden noise as the third predator leapt up from wherever it had gone to ground, leapt up and came barreling up the slope, visible for less than a second as it lunged at me like a jumping spider, all teeth and tentacles—

I twisted out of the way just as the jaws snapped shut, my hand flashing out to snatch at the root of one of the tentacles. Whirling, I slammed the creature into the slope and brought my other fist crashing down in the middle of its back.

Let me tell you this: gorillas are strong.

I felt the creature’s bones snap like twigs beneath my fist. Lifting it up into the air, I slammed it down again, then dropped my fist into it again. It twitched once, and then lay still.

‹Company,› said Jake. ‹We’re drawing attention.›

I turned to look uphill at the others, saw the bodies of the other two predators—one smashed flat like mine, the other burned and cut by laser fire. One of the gorillas was bleeding, a trio of long, deep cuts running across its chest.

‹Are you—›

‹I’m good to move. Jake?›

‹We’re in a clearing right now,› he said, his words fast and clipped. ‹We’ve got—›

‹Don’t waste the time,› I broke in. ‹Just pick.›

‹Okay. Okay. Right. We’re gonna stand our ground. But if we do have to run, head down and to the right.›

‹What’s incoming?›

‹One bogey, quadruped, maybe—maybe hippo-sized? Long neck, long tail, armored back—›

‹Where?›

‹Straight right.›

We reshuffled, turning to put Jake and the injured Marco at the back of the formation. I could feel my heart pounding, feel adrenaline burning through the gorilla’s veins. It was happening fast, too fast—the previous attack had lasted maybe ten seconds and it had only been thirty seconds since it ended—

‹Wait. I want to try—Simo, get in front. Quick.›

I moved aside as the Marco with the gun stepped past me.

‹Raise your arm to fire. Okay. Up. Higher—there. Now left a little—back—stop! Ready?›

‹Ready.›

‹Fire.›

TSEWWWWW!

The beam lanced out, vanishing into the mist.

‹Down a hair—›

TSEWWWWW!

‹Stop. You got it, it’s down.›

We could all hear it—the sound of something sliding and tumbling downhill—something big. The sound grew fainter and fainter, until—

THMP.

‹Tree?›

‹Yeah.›

‹Anything else?›

‹Hang on.›

There was a soft fluttering as Jake took to the air. I bit back a curse, and knew that the others were doing the same.

Too fast, this is happening too fast, if something else comes along—

I tried to squash the thought. The whole point of having Jake in bat morph was to prevent things from sneaking up on us. He’d be fine, he’d be back in a second, he’d know if there were any other threats nearby—

But that wasn’t really the thing. It was more about the way the two consecutive attacks had come out of nowhere, how quickly we’d had to go from zero to sixty. Even with Jake watching, it wouldn’t take all that much for us to be overwhelmed—

‹I don’t see anything,› Jake said, reemerging from the mist and settling back onto Helium’s shoulder. ‹But we’re in it now. I say we keep moving.›

Do we—

‹Do we want to acquire the thing we just shot?› someone asked.

‹Not big enough.›

I felt a chill.

We began moving again, angling down and to the right, sometimes sliding ten or fifteen feet downhill before managing to dig into the mulch enough to brake. I felt disoriented, off-balance. My heart was still pounding from the previous attacks, and it took two or three minutes for the adrenaline to clear out of my bloodstream, for my thoughts to get themselves back into something resembling order.

Fast—

There was something wrong about how quickly the two attacks had happened. The monsters—the first three, and then the fourth one after—they hadn’t waited, hadn’t hesitated, hadn’t even paused to scope out the situation. They’d just charged straight in, already in kill mode, like the raptors from Jurassic Park.

Animals didn’t behave like that. Not real animals. There wasn’t a predator on Earth that did that—was there?

Ants, maybe? Sharks, once there’s blood in the water?

I shook my head. I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that I was missing something, something critical—

‹Crap.›

‹What?›

‹We’re gonna—okay, turn downslope. Everybody, straight down, right now.›

We turned. ‹What’s going on?› I asked.

‹We’re trying to put a tree between us and a—thing.›

That doesn’t sound like—

‹That doesn’t sound like a very permanent solution,› someone said.

‹Shh. Okay, stop—stop!›

We stopped.

‹Where are you—›

‹I need to take a look on the other side of this tree.›

‹Jake—›

‹Stuff it, Marco, I’m a part of this mission same as you.›

This is it. This is where it all unravels. He’s on the wrong side of the tree when something sneaks up on us, or something chases him faster than we can follow, and we all end up scattered and the monsters pick us off one by one—

I ignored the words coming out of the back of my head.

‹Stay put. I’m going to see if I can lead it away.›

‹JAKE!›

There was no answer.

Without a word, without any glances or gestures at all, we decided to circle up, the four of us in gorilla morph elbowing Helium into the center—along with the human-morphed Marco—as we turned to face outward.

‹So, this is not great,› one of me said.

Indistinct noises came floating out of the darkening blue, faint and distant and hard to pinpoint—low rumblings like construction equipment, high-pitched yelps like small dogs barking, the sounds of shifting mulch.

‹Jake?›

Still no answer.

What could we have done differently, what can we do differently now, do we trade a gorilla for a second bat, do we put Jake in gorilla morph, no, the whole point is for him to be mobile if shit hits the fan, okay, do we give up one of the snakes, then—

‹So, uh. Turns out you can heal injuries without demorphing all the way.›

I turned my head.

How did we never test that before?

How is that what you should be focusing on right now?

I closed my eyes, willing the mishmash of soft sounds to resolve itself into some kind of clear picture. It seemed like maybe the low rumbling had moved farther away, and—

‹Does anyone else hear that?› someone asked.

‹Yes,› I answered.

It was a thin, faint—squelching? I couldn’t quite make it out, but it somehow reminded me simultaneously of water gurgling through a hose and the sound of a shovel cutting through damp soil.

‹It’s getting louder.›

‹Does anybody see anything?›

‹Jake! Can you hear us?›

Silence. Well, not silence, but no answer—no answer, and the sound most definitely getting closer, it sounded like it had to be close enough for us to see it, now, even in the misty twilight—

‹FUCK!›

I turned at the sound of a body hitting the slope—hitting the slope, but not sliding—one of the other Marcos had been tripped, was being held in place by—by—

TSEWWWW!

The Marco with the Dracon beam fired, and the—mulch elemental?—recoiled, letting out a shriek like a tea-kettle as the beam severed the tentacle that was wrapped around the gorilla’s leg. It surged backward, not made of mulch so much as passing through the mulch, like a wave—

‹AHHHHH! It’s still got—›

Crack.

We could hear the bone break, even as Helium darted forward to help, as Simo fired two more times into the flat, rippling mass of bark, as one of the other gorillas lunged forward to catch the first gorilla’s hand, to stop him from sliding further down the slope—

Ssssssssssshshshsh ch ch ch ch ch.

The monster reared, making a sound like a rattlesnake as chunks of mulch and bark rubbed past one another.

‹Look out!›

It struck like a snake, lashing out with two long, thin cones of debris that grew thinner and sharper and thinner and sharper as they stretched away from the central mass. One of them flashed past me, toward Simo and the last gorilla, and the other stabbed straight toward my heart—

‹ARRRGHGHHH!›

It took everything I had to keep the scream mental, to keep the gorilla body from howling with pain. I had tried to twist out of the way and had almost made it, but a shard of weathered wood the size of a waffle cone had pierced my shoulder, driven like debris in a hurricane. I felt something surge—

Reacting with sheer, animal instinct, I grabbed the long tentacle of bark with both hands and pulled, ripping it apart as easily as a human might tear a sheet of paper. The tentacle recoiled, but the part that was still embedded in my shoulder continued to writhe and wriggle and in a moment of pure horror I felt something moving inside me—

‹Low power!› someone shouted.

‹What—›

‹It’s not the mulch, it’s in the mulch! It’s wearing the mulch—turn the power down, wide beam, burn it away, don’t just cut—›

TSSSSEEEEWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW—

There was the scent of burning wood, and behind it a sharp, heavy smell like boiling soup. I didn’t look, didn’t care, was only half-aware that I had fallen over and was now lying sideways on the slope.

It was inside me.

I could feel it poking, prodding, sliding through my veins, my arteries—could feel it searching—

‹Marco! Marco, are you okay?›

Empty words, empty sounds all around me, screams and shouts and laser fire, none of it mattered, the thing was looking for my heart, my lungs, it was looking for them and it would find them, it was already in my chest—

The Pop Tarts.

Like Archimedes leaping up from his bath, my brain threw up the crucial memory, the key piece of information, from so long ago—we had morphed into ourselves and eaten until we couldn’t eat any more, and then we’d demorphed and the food had vanished, it had vanished, if I demorphed back to my own body then the thing would go away too—

‹Pop Tarts,› I said, directing the beam of thought at the other injured Marco, the one whose ankle had been broken.

Go away, I whispered, focusing harder than I ever had before. Give me back my own body, and take this thing away, take it away, take it away take it away take it AWAY—

The horror inside me twitched, surged, crawled deeper and deeper into my chest and reached out a finger to touch my heart—

No.

My heart stopped. I could feel it stop, but it was too late, the morph was already in progress, even as my vision began to darken I could feel my organs shifting and shrinking, feel the invading violator dissolving away—

Fuck you, motherfucker, NOT TODAY—

Some distant, detached part of me noted the shift, the almost instantaneous transition from terror to vindictive triumph.

Slow your roll, amigo, we’re not out of this yet.

The mulch shifted beneath me as my weight changed, and I twitched like I was falling asleep—

‹Whoa, buddy, we got you.›

A thick, leathery black hand rested on my shoulder, pressing me back into the slope. I looked around, suddenly aware of the outside world again.

There was Simo, standing alert with the Dracon beam, and Helium beside him, brandishing the two handguns. Downhill of them both, another human Marco was just sitting up, with another gorilla Marco crouched at his side. I couldn’t see the two snakes—

‹They’re right here.›

I sat up myself, the morph finishing. “What—” I began.

‹Shhhh! Listen.›

My jaw clicked shut—

‹—there? Guys, can you hear me? I’m coming—›

‹Jake!›

Visible relief.

‹I tried to lead it away but it heard—what happened? Is everyone—›

‹We’re all alive, but two of us aren’t in morph.›

Jake swore. ‹All right,› he said. ‹All right, um—geez—okay, okay—›

It really didn’t help, hearing the panic in his voice.

‹Okay. Here’s the plan. I’m going to try to lead it right past you, heading downhill.›

‹Lead what right past—›

‹Shut up, no time—›

I realized now that I could already hear it, a low, rhythmic rumbling growing louder and louder.

‹—you guys come at it from behind. Snakes and guns. I think we can bring it down.›

‹Jake, what—›

‹One of you needs to go downhill now. Downhill and to the right. Make noise.›

Without a word, a gorilla leapt into the darkening mist, sliding down the slope like a fallen skier.

‹All right—stop, but keep making noise.›

The rumbling was louder now, much louder—loud enough to drown out the sound of the Marco downhill running his hands through the mulch. I felt the burning thrill of adrenaline, felt my heart pounding in my throat—

‹You two stay here,› said a voice.

No shit we’re gonna stay here, what the fuck could we possibly contribute to this—

‹It’s going to pass right below you,› Jake said, his words quick and commanding, all of the uncertainty gone. ‹Simo, shoot it. Helium, take the snakes, climb up on its back. There’s a spot behind its head where I think it can’t reach you, can’t throw you—›

Two guns were pressed into my hands as Helium stepped quietly past me on the slope. I looked down at the other human Marco, tossed him one of them.

‹They won’t be able to bite through its skin. You’ll need to cut a hole.›

The sound was no longer a rumbling, was more like the noise of logging equipment. There was one last moment of horrible anticipation—

‹Now.›

Simo began shooting a split second before it passed into view, the mist parting and rippling around it. It was like a massive water wheel, a spinning cluster of six huge, muscular limbs, each ending in a clawed scoop, digging deep into the hillside one after the other, dragging it forward as if were swimming across the slope.

TSEWWWWWW!

The beam traced a line of fire across all six limbs, causing the creature to flinch and recoil. Its arms ripped from the hillside and it tipped—rolling downhill—revealing a massive, armored body the size of a school bus—visible for just a fraction of a second before the mist closed in around it—

‹GO!› Jake shouted, and they leapt into motion, Helium and the last remaining gorilla—leapt forward as Simo fired off three more shots into the darkness, as the creature let out a deafening roar—

‹It’s stopped,› Jake said. ‹It dug in, stopped rolling—Stop! Uh—split! Helium, go left; Marco, go right—›

Sounds of footsteps, barely audible under much louder sounds of thrashing limbs—

‹Simo, can you get closer? Slowly—›

I felt stuck, paralyzed, the exact opposite of how I’d felt in the vanguard.

‹Now, Helium! Go! Simo, aim right—›

More bellowing, more laser fire—

‹Right there, Helium! Simo, back up, get out of there—›

I looked at the other Marco just as he looked at me, each of us a perfect mirror of the other’s desperation, indecision, dismay. There was a pressure building up inside me, all of my sense and pragmatism fighting to hold back the rising need to go down there and help, they need you—

‹Did it work? Did it work?›

‹I’m empty—›

‹Me, t—›

‹Marco!›

‹I see him, I see him—Marco, demorph!›

I saw it in his eyes, the exact moment of revelation, the two of us crossing the finish line at the exact same time.

‹It’s not slowing down!›

‹Simo, can you—›

‹—skin’s too thick, it doesn’t—›

What the fuck could we possibly contribute to this, I had wondered—

Without a word, we both turned, bombing down the slope one-handed, trying not to point our guns at each other as we plunged toward the chaos. In seconds, my arm was scratched and bloody, but that was nothing, it didn’t matter, as long as we got there in time—

‹—for the eye! The eye!›

‹Watch out for its—›

‹Marco, can you hear me?›

‹Oh, fuck—›

We nearly slammed into it, skidding to a halt as the massive shape came emerged with shocking suddenness from the darkening mist. The smell of blood and burning flesh was everywhere, the creature twisting and turning and lunging at the shadowy shapes dancing around it, lit up every few seconds by the otherworldly glow of Dracon fire—

We looked at each other one last time, took in a pair of identical breaths—

* * *

—2199023255552 —

It wasn’t magical or meaningful, and it wasn’t random, either.

You see, the monster had ripped me in half while I was in snake morph. That meant that I was the first one to demorph back to human, which meant that I was the first one available to take the Dracon beam to cover everyone else while they demorphed and acquired the monster, which meant that I wasn’t one of the ones to morph into a copy of it, to guard against further attack.

That’s how I ended up watching myself die. Ended up right there, kneeling on the slope with Jake and Helium, as I took my last few breaths. It didn’t mean anything, that it was me instead of one of the other Marcos. It was just another domino in the chain.

“Stupid,” said dying-me, the word half-garbled as a bubble of blood came up out of his throat.

“No, man, it’s not—”

“He’s not talking about himself,” I cut in, my throat strangely dry. “He’s saying it’s stupid that morphing technology can’t fix this, when it clearly could.”

The version of me lying on the slope cracked a wry, broken smile.

“Least I get a—”

He broke off, coughing—coughing and then wincing, moaning, gritting his teeth with the pain, curling up for several long, horrible seconds while the blood trickled out between his teeth.

“Least I get a good death scene,” he said, more quietly this time, relaxing back into the mulch.

I looked over at Jake—Jake, who looked stricken, whose fists were clenching and unclenching and whose jaw was trembling under bright, sharp eyes—

“It’s fine, man,” I whispered. “Not your fault.”

Jake said nothing. Only stared down, transfixed, as if he was making himself watch.

“Listen,” said the Marco on the ground. “You can’t be more broken-up about it than I am.”

Jake’s face screwed up—

Crack in the armor, buddy?

“Why aren’t you more broken up about it?” Jake asked, his voice shaky.

Dying-me coughed again, more carefully this time. “Duh,” he said, letting his eyes fall shut. “I’ve got to keep you from going over the top.”

There were sounds of battle behind us, further down the hill—roars and crashes and yelps. I looked down at the Dracon beam in my lap, wondering if I should go and help—

‹Stay there. We got this.›

Meanwhile, Jake’s eyes had brimmed over, tears streaming silently down his face. “Still Marco, huh?” he said softly. “Can’t stop being Marco for two damn seconds, can you.”

“You”—cough—“you know it, buddy.”

There was a long silence. I looked down at the deep, black wound just below his—

—my—

—ribcage, at the crushed, twisted shape of his—

—my—

—right leg.

“You could morph,” Jake said. “Morph and—a couple of hours—there might be medical equipment down there—”

“Nah,” the other Marco said. His face was pale in the twilight, and growing paler by the minute. “Don’t want—fuck with the objectives.”

He opened his eyes, looked straight at me.

I nodded.

Jake made a sound so soft I wasn’t even really sure I heard it. “Aren’t you—” he began, before breaking off to scrub at his eyes. “Aren’t you scared? Or—or angry? Don’t—don’t you—”

The boy on the ground shrugged, then winced.

“God damn it, Marco, don’t—don’t shrug this off, man. You don’t have to—you’re allowed to feel—”

He broke off, and when he spoke again it was quieter. Softer. I almost wanted to say younger, though that wasn’t quite it.

“I don’t want to talk to your face,” he said. “Not—not now. Not like this. I want to talk to you.”

He reached out, pulled my dying self’s hand toward him, squeezed it. They stared at each other—almost glared at each other—for a long moment.

Marco broke first. “Fine,” he said hoarsely. “Fuck it.”

There was another pause, as he looked up at Jake, his eyes searching—

“I guess I’d take a kiss, if you’re offering.”

My eyes snapped toward Jake’s face, took in a dozen tiny clues—

“Fuck me,” the other Marco said. “You didn’t know?”

“We reset,” I reminded him.

“Know that, but”—cough—“months”—cough—“what the fuck”—cough—“thinking?”

“Don’t look at me,” I said. “I woke up in Botswana eleven days ago.”

I looked back at Jake.

Man. Hell of a time to spring that on a guy.

“Don’t,” the Marco on the ground warned. “Don’t fucking—just because—”

“Shut up,” Jake whispered. Edging closer, he leaned over and pressed their foreheads together, whispering something I couldn’t hear. Then he tilted his head, and lowered his lips to the other boy’s—

—to mine.

For once, my brain was mercifully silent. No stupid jokes, no cynical comments, none of the distractions and diversions that it usually offered up without effort or permission. I just sat, and watched, and let it hurt for once.

My dying half coughed, breaking the kiss, and Jake lifted his head, sitting back up. He coughed again, harder, and then again a third time, spitting up thick, dark blood that looked almost black in the failing light.

“Don’t you dare say it,” Jake cut in, as the other Marco opened his mouth.

He smiled. “Whatever—say—Fearless Leader.”

His eyes shifted, and I looked over at Helium, who had made no sound at all, who had been sitting there in human morph the whole time, his expression unreadable—

“Ax,” said the part of me that was dying.

The shape beside me stiffened.

“Yeah—know—you’re like—hive-mind—new name—whatever. But I want—talk—just Ax.”

“Yes, Marco.”

“You had—dope prayer.”

“Yes, Marco.”

“Am I?”

I didn’t expect the question, wasn’t ready for the weight of it—felt tears springing to my own eyes as it sank in, as the alien answered without hesitation, his voice clear and calm and steady as a bird in flight.

“Marco was the servant of the people,” he said, as the blood of my other body trickled downhill. “He was the servant of his prince. He was the servant of honor.”

The boy on the ground closed his eyes. Beside him, Jake was shaking with tight, silent sobs.

“Marco’s voice was heard, and it lifted the chorus. Marco’s feet moved, and they followed the Path. Marco’s—Marco’s hands parted the vines. The food that Marco found was clean, and nourishing, and he shared it with the people.”

I reached out to take Jake’s left hand. His right was still holding—

—my other hand.

“Marco’s life was not his own,” Helium continued. “Marco was one with the people. His life was given for the people, and for his prince, and for his honor. Marco will be remembered.”

The last sentence was spoken in unison, Jake and Helium together. The boy on the ground gave a faint half-smile, and nodded, and opened his eyes again.

“Thanks,” he said. “Helps.”

For a moment, there was quiet, backed by the distant noise of ongoing battle.

They’re fine. They’d call us if they weren’t.

“Jake,” said the other Marco.

“Yeah?”

“Been saving one.”

“What?”

“Last joke. Good joke.”

“Wh—oh. Okay. Sure.”

I could see the way that Jake was steeling himself, could tell that he was pouring every last ounce of self-control into holding himself together, holding himself in shape.

I could tell that the other Marco could see it, too.

“Here goes,” the dying boy said, his voice taut and wavering. “Why—blind man—fall down—a well?”

Jake’s lip trembled. “Beats me,” he said. “Why?”

“Because,” said Marco, grinning. “Couldn’t see—that well.”

There was a moment in which it seemed as if Jake might hold it together, and then the dam broke and he half-collapsed against the other boy, unable to hold himself upright any longer as it all came pouring out of him.

I got up and slid downhill a little ways, giving them space.

I’ve always believed that people have a choice, when it comes to how they see the world. That most people chose to see the world as tragic, chose to ignore the humor that’s unfolding right in front of them. I always kind of felt like they were making a mistake—like, sure, if you want to see everything as being sad, terrible, unfair, boo-hoo, that’s fine, but what kind of life is that?

Only now—

It wasn’t that it was me dying. It had nothing to do with the fact that it was my twin, my doppelganger, my clone.

It was Jake.

I didn’t want him to be up there, crying—no matter what I’d said before, back when we first showed up. And yet, when I tried to imagine being lighthearted about it, trying to get him to see the humor in it, it just felt—hollow. Somehow, I couldn’t imagine looking at Jake, and thinking to myself that he’d chosen this—that he’d made the wrong choice.

Would you cry like that for Jake? For just one Jake, if there were five or ten more?

I thought I would, but I wasn’t sure. And suddenly it seemed really bad that I wasn’t sure—like that part of me that just kept going was broken, like it was bad or blind or made of ice or—or confused, I wasn’t sure what but it didn’t seem right, anymore, I ought to be feeling something right now, and I ought to know what I was feeling without having to look.

I wanted to mourn.

I wanted to mourn, but I didn’t know how. Didn’t know what I was mourning, because I wasn’t really sure what had been lost.

I heard the sound of shifting mulch above me, and turned as Jake emerged from the mist.

“Helium’s going to strip the body of anything useful,” he said, his voice perfectly, completely neutral. “Then it’s downhill.”

I nodded.

He stepped toward me, sat, slid down until our eyes were at the same level.

“So,” he said.

“So,” I replied.

He bit his lip. “I don’t know how many times I can do that.”

I thought I heard a hint of accusation, and I tried to look contrite. “Sorry.”

Around us, the sounds of battle were slowing, growing quieter as more and more monsters died and fewer and fewer came to replace them.

“What were you thinking, Marco?” Jake asked quietly.

I looked down at the Dracon beam in my hand. I knew what he was asking. It felt strange, answering, because he wasn’t really asking me. He was asking about some other Marco entirely.

But of course, I’d been there, too.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I remember thinking, you know, what if Jake never wakes up again. You’d already—I’d already—Tobias and Tom made a new copy of each of us, and they just—never woke up. Died in their sleep. You and I were both on our second try, and when I woke up first—”

I broke off. I could feel Jake’s eyes on me, but I didn’t want to meet them.

“And then I thought about making—making more of you. Just to be sure. But I knew you wouldn’t—knew you didn’t—I dunno, consent, or something? And then after that, it just seemed like—there were so few things to do. I kept thinking there was nothing I could do. I got tired of thinking it.”

Jake was silent.

“I didn’t ever think we’d run into each other,” I said. “I planned on us not running into each other. I went—I sent them off in every different direction.”

Double meaning, double memory, déjà vu—it hadn’t been me who had done these things. But it would have been me, if I’d been there. If I’d been the first.

“You, uh,” Jake said, faltering. “You and me—”

“To be perfectly honest, we’re kind of more into Rachel these days.”

The words just rolled off my tongue, fully automatic—came out faster than my brain could vet them. I felt my shoulders tighten, felt Jake shift in the mulch beside me.

“Really,” he said.

I turned to look at him—at the streaks of dried tears covering his cheeks, the red rims of his eyes, the smears of blood around his lips. All of my options—all the jokes, all the dodges, all the clever little half-truths and non-answers—they all fell away, leaving me with no other choice.

“Yeah,” I said honestly, feeling my mouth go dry. “But—”

I hesitated. Jake turned to look at me, and I shrugged. “First loves, and all that.”

I winced. I hadn’t quite been able to keep the artificial lightness out of my voice. Hadn’t quite managed to just say it, without leaving myself some plausible deniability.

Time passed.

“We cool?” I ventured.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s just—first time. You know. Since Cassie.”

I just barely managed to catch the question before it left my lips, stopped the words from becoming real at the last possible second.

Both, obviously.

Jake’s expression hardened. “If Helium’s right about how big these monsters get,” he continued, the iron creeping back into his voice.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

The original plan had been to trade our way up the food chain, working together to subdue larger and larger monsters, acquiring them until we had the biggest, baddest bodies in the valley. We’d figured that, between four gorillas, one Hork-Bajir, one Dracon beam, and two completely different kinds of extremely powerful snake venom—inland taipan and saw-scaled viper—we’d be able to take down something the size of an elephant at least.

But the gradient hadn’t been as smooth as we’d hoped. The churner monster had been bigger than an elephant—a lot bigger—and nothing we’d thrown at it had even slowed it down, until—

I looked back up the hill, where somewhere in the mist lay the broken, empty husk of my own body. Two of me had come charging into the middle of the fight. Only one of me had made it.

But the acquiring trance had been the edge we needed. It had worked, where nothing else had—slowed the monster down, tranquilized it—given the rest of us the opening we needed to deal the killing blow.

You had to be in your own, real body to acquire something.

“It’ll be different next time,” I said, one half of my brain trying to project confidence while the other half tried to ration it.

After all, the bigger they get, the slower they’ll be, right? We might even be able to drop down on them out of the air, demorph on their backs. And we all have the churner morph, now, and five or six of those working together is nothing to sneeze at—

“Yeah,” Jake said darkly, interrupting my thoughts. “It will.”

I turned to look at him, raised a questioning eyebrow. He shook his head.

“You morph the bat this time,” he said, pushing himself to his feet. “I need to kill something.”

* * *

—562949953421312—

There were only six of us left by the time the mist brightened back to blue.

‹Do we even want to acquire this fucking thing?› I asked wearily, pulling my claws out of its abdomen with a sick, squelching sound.

No one answered.

The latest in the constant stream of monsters had been some kind of giant tree octopus, stretched out like a volleyball net in the space between two trunks. It had a shriek that was the audible equivalent of Garrett’s thought-speak weapon, stunning everything in range and triggering a small landslide that dragged its prey right into its giant gullet. Most of us had been in morphs too large to swallow, but the Marco on surveillance duty had been hit by the very first blast, and we hadn’t heard from him since.

You could demorph from a corpse, if your animal body was killed. But if you’d already been eaten—

‹Helium,› said another voice, sounding every bit as tired as my own. ‹How far have we gone?›

‹We have passed three hundred and thirty-seven trees, plus or minus thirty,› came the answer. ‹Assuming approximately thirteen trees per mile on any given straight line through the forest, that puts us roughly twenty-six miles in. A little less than half of the total distance.›

Jesus Christ.

‹Jesus ain’t gon’ help ya now,› one of the other Marcos intoned.

‹We need somebody new on eyes,› Jake cut in. ‹Does anybody hear anything?›

We listened. The woods were alive with the sound of monsters hunting and dying, but none of it seemed particularly close.

‹Fine. I’ll—›

‹NO,› I cut in. And then, embarrassed—‹Sorry, too loud. I just mean—I’ll do it. I need to morph out, anyway.›

There was a brief silence, a sense of words being weighed.

‹This is the first time there’s been a threat that the bat couldn’t handle,› Jake said. ‹I don’t think it makes sense to—›

‹Still,› I said.

A longer silence.

‹Fine. Whatever. Does anyone else need to demorph?›

‹I probably should. That thing ripped a good chunk out of my back.›

‹Fine. Everybody circle up.›

We clustered together, groping and jostling our way through the mist until we were—

Well, not exactly shoulder to shoulder. But flank to flank, at least.

It was strange—though we’d acquired bodies with echolocation, or heat detection, or incredibly precise senses of smell, we hadn’t found any that could literally see through the dense blue mist. So even now, huddled together wearing bodies the size of small houses, none of us could actually see any of the others. At best, you might occasionally catch sight of a dim shadow in the middle distance, wreathed in wisping blue. And as I shrank, leaving behind a thirty-foot-wide hole in the circle, the feeling of isolation grew. With the others standing almost perfectly still, there was nothing to hear, either. For all my senses could tell me directly, I was alone in an infinite, empty, alien wasteland.

‹Losing thought-speak,› I broadcast. ‹Will ping again in two minutes.›

Down, down, down I shrank, with only a brief pause at human scales before refocusing on the bat. Around me, the chunks of bark that made up the forest floor swelled, growing until they towered over me.

‹I’m good,› I said, letting out a handful of chirps as I took to the air. ‹We’re clear, nothing nearby.›

‹Roger. Demorphing now.›

Three minutes later, and we were on the move again, five hulking kaiju following my lead as I guided them ever downward through the mist.

We’d traded up twice during the long, bloody night. First from the bus-sized churner to a slightly-smaller-but-much-more-agile creature like a six-limbed Allosaurus that had dropped down onto us from fifty feet up in one of the trees. Then from that to our current weapon-of-choice, a low-to-the-ground, armored scorpion-thing that didn’t seem to have a right-side-up.

So far, our theory was working—the larger, more dangerous animals tended to be solitary, which meant that we’d been able to surround them and bring them down by working together. But it hadn’t been without cost. We’d lost another Marco in the middle of the night, and now there were only four of us left.

‹Bear to the left,› I called out. ‹There’s another nest of those giant wasps on the right side of the next tree.›

I still hadn’t been able to work out what it meant to me, each time another copy of me died. What it should mean to me, since the feelings weren’t making themselves known on their own.

‹We’ve got incoming, from uphill at seven o’clock, distance—no, wait, never mind. It chickened out.›

I was one of the youngest Marcos. One of the last to be made, at least out of the ones who’d woken up, the ones the avatar had brought. And that meant that I remembered having the conversation with terminal patients—remembered talking to over two dozen of them, in fact. I couldn’t remember my own—

What, predecessor? Benefactor? Surrogate parent?

—but I remembered what they were like in general. Remembered the smell of the hospice homes, the smothering atmosphere of dull hopelessness. Remembered the promises I had made to those people, as they lay there dying.

I can’t save you, that other version of me had said. I’m sorry. If I could save you, I would. But the morphing tech doesn’t do that. What it can do is give you a chance to make a difference. Like donating your organs, except instead of organs, you’re donating a whole person. And that person will fight—for you, for your family, for everyone you’re leaving behind. As long as there’s an Earth to fight for, he’ll fight for it.

Those words seemed hollow, now. Cheap. Almost manipulative. After all, here I was, on an alien planet whose name I didn’t even know, and already three of me had died—and they hadn’t died saving the world, either.

That’s not exactly your fault. You didn’t ask to be dragged all the way out here.

But one of me had. Which meant that if it had been me in his place—if that avatar creature had come to ask me the same question, offer me the same opportunity—the result would have been the same.

And then I would have been directly responsible for the deaths of three—

—six?

Four?

—at least three people. People whose names I barely remembered, people who’d left behind nothing—not a body, not a note, no explanation of any kind. People who’d just vanished, leaving their families to wonder—

‹There’s another pack of those tentacle cats up ahead,› I called out. ‹Not sure if they’re going to move or if we’re going to have to clear them out.›

‹Should we go around?›

‹Nah, not worth it. You can take ‘em if you have to.›

I knew it was silly to try to feel something. To try to make myself feel something, just because it seemed like I was supposed to.

But the alternative seemed even worse, somehow.

For a moment, I found myself wishing Cassie was with us. Cassie, or Tobias, or even Rachel. Someone who wasn’t me, someone who had this stuff down in their bones—

—and didn’t already have too much on their plate, like Jake.

—someone who was better at it, who could track it all without making themselves do it, top-down and clumsy.

Someone you can yell at, for being naïve?

Okay, that was fair. But yes, in a sense—that was part of what made us a team, each one of us doing our jobs, holding down our poles. A balanced mix, or at least more balanced than Jake, Marco, Helium, Marco, Marco, and also Marco.

Well, it’s already more balanced than it was. Just give it a few more hours. Hey-o!

‹Helium, what was the name of that vine Sarlacc thing? Ludo-whatever?›

‹Lerdethak. It’s a Hork-Bajir word, meaning—›

‹Yeah, yeah, yeah. How far out of our way should we go to avoid one of those?›

‹Very.›

‹All right. Sorry guys. We need to go back up and come down on the other side of that tree we just passed.›

On and on we crawled, sometimes perpendicular to the slope and sometimes parallel, sometimes doubling back on ourselves to avoid webs or pits or other headaches, sometimes just barreling through. Every now and again, something would challenge us, and we’d spend a few minutes fighting; more often, the smaller monsters turned tail and ran once they realized there was more than one of us.

I steered us clear of most of the larger threats—the ones that would put up more of a fight than we wanted to deal with, or that traveled in pairs or packs, or that were unlikely to make a useful morph for one reason or another.

But about an hour or so in, after we’d passed another thirty-nine trees—

‹Everybody hold up a sec. There’s a big one up ahead, might be worth trying to acquire. I’m going to go get a closer look.›

‹Roger. Stay safe.›

I left the others behind me, flying straight ahead, gaining altitude as the slope fell away beneath me. The mist was well over a hundred feet deep at this point, and I stayed as high as I could within it, wary of acid spit and poisoned spines and all the other nonsense we’d faced in the past thirty miles.

The monster was alone, cutting sideways across the slope, moving maybe ten or twelve miles per hour. It was huge, easily twice as tall and twice as long as our current best morph, making the trees around it seem almost normal-sized. Its armor was like the result of a genetic experiment crossing an Ankylosaurus with a Stegosaurus, all thick bone with various knobs and spikes sticking out, some as big as Christmas trees. It had four massive, muscled limbs, splayed out to the side like a lizard, each ending in a giant, five-clawed foot the size of a backyard pool. And its head—

Its head was like something out of a nightmare, all exposed bone and pulsing flesh. The whole thing was split down the center, with teeth lining the gap, as if the entire skull could yawn open like a Venus flytrap. There was also a normal set of jaws, like those you’d expect on an Earth animal, but inside of those were more jaws—an entire second set of teeth, the absolute smallest of which was at least three feet long. And there were eyes everywhere—eyes like a spider’s, black and round and utterly soulless.

I’d seen a lot of monsters over the past twelve hours. But this was the first one that looked like it might honestly have a chance against Godzilla.

I flew back to the others.

‹I think we want it,› I said. ‹But I don’t think the five of you can take it down. It’d be like five Corgis versus a full-grown Husky.›

‹So, what, then? Demorph on its back, like with the dinosaur thing?›

‹That’s the plan. But it could get sketchy. Could get extremely sketchy, to be perfectly honest. You guys might want to just hang back.›

‹No.›

It was Jake’s voice—unmistakably so, the voice of command.

‹No,› he repeated. ‹Not happening. Not without backup. We’re going in together, or we’re not going at all.›

I sighed mentally, knowing that the other three of me were, too. ‹You’re the boss,› I said, and told them where to go.

* * *

—134217728—

They came into view as I lumbered around the tree—five large, low-to-the-ground blurs glowing in my body’s heat vision. They were standing in a semicircle, motionless, as if waiting for me.

‹Hedwig here,› I said, flexing my claws, digging deep furrows into the forest floor. ‹I really, really hope that’s you guys.›