Author's note: The delay in this update was partially due to the Thanksgiving holiday, but MOSTLY due to my participation as a speaker in the Effective Altruism Global conference held in Oxford last weekend. I was there representing the Center for Applied Rationality, where I work as the curriculum director and one of several instructors.

If you're not familiar with either CFAR or EA, and you enjoy this story and stories like it, you may want to check out both online. EA in particular is a wide umbrella under which a growing number of smart and well-meaning people are doing a lot of high-impact work.

Chapter 24: Rachel

It didn't hurt that they were surprised, when I told them no.

I mean, I get it. After the high school, and the truck, and the pool—both times—and after I came clean about the Chapmans, and I'm pretty sure Marco told them all about the fire, or at least he told Jake—

I know what they think of me. That I—that I'm aggressive. Violent. Bloodthirsty, even. That I like it too much, that I'm leaning into it instead of dealing with stuff—that I'm starting to lose track of where the line is. That maybe down the road this is going to be a problem for me.

And who knows—maybe they're right. I can't see the future. And if I have to pick between denial, bargaining, acceptance, or anger, after what they did to Mom, and Jordan and Sara, and Melissa and Mr. and Mrs. Chapman and Tom and Uncle Steve and Aunt Jean and Grandpa G and Coach Aikin—

So yeah, I can see how they would've expected me to be basically one hundred percent down for Jake's proposed factory-demolishing mission. I can understand them having to do a double-take, when I voted against it. That wasn't the part that hurt.

What hurt was how surprised they were when I had good reasons.

‹I'm not saying it's a bad idea overall,› I clarified. ‹Just that it's—I mean, it's stupid to rush into it, isn't it? Weren't we just saying this morning that Visser Three is obviously trying to put us under time pressure? And that we shouldn't let him?›

The four of us were in a circle for what felt like the hundredth time, sitting off to one side of the clearing where we'd camped out—me, Jake, Marco, and Garrett, all in morph armor, no longer bothering to keep our private conversation a secret. On the other side of the fire pit, Tom and Mr. Levy were digging through the groceries while Ax used his tail to cut firewood. Erek was nowhere to be seen, though I doubted he'd gone far.

‹For once, we have the element of surprise,› I continued. ‹They don't know we're coming. We shouldn't waste it—›

—not again.

We didn't have weapons—I'd pointed out—and we didn't have backup. It was more than halfway across the country, which meant that if we tried to get it done within the next forty-eight hours, we'd have to either convince the Chee to take us there, or show up already tired. We still didn't know for sure if there even were Yeerks at the place, and while I bought that it was plausible, we didn't have a strategy for dealing with them, other than just punch-and-pray. At the very least, it seemed like we should try to get some army guys or journalists or some kind of trustworthy witnesses on the scene, and that would take time, not to mention that both Tobias and Cassie were still AWOL and that Tobias had the cube—

Jake had flushed—choked—had clearly wanted to argue and had visibly stopped himself, looking simultaneously angry, embarrassed, and torn. And Marco—

Marco had flushed, too, because he knew everything I was saying was true, would've thought of it all himself if he'd even bothered to try, but he hadn't tried, he'd just been going along with it—had known that Jake's plan was full of holes and was still going to let him get away with it, just because—

And then that reminded me that Jake didn't know, that we still hadn't done the morph-swapping thing yet, and that if we wanted to vet Temr-Ax then we needed at least a day of lead-time for the memories to encode, and whether Ax was trustworthy or not we probably wanted to know before we started making complicated plans.

And that was when they'd made that face one too many times, and I just—

Well. I didn't anything, because I don't do the going-off-half-cocked thing anymore.

But it hurt. It was like—like they'd been thinking of me as some stupid tool the whole time—like I hadn't been the reason we'd learned about the school and the hospital and the breeding program, like I hadn't been the one to save the cube, like it didn't matter that I'd pulled off the deception that got Illim to let us into the pool—

Like I wasn't competent. Like it was surprising, in a moment when they knew they were being dumb, that I was any smarter.

It was one thing coming from Marco. It was another thing entirely to get it from Jake.

Whatever. Let it go.

And I did. I was getting pretty good at that, apparently. Except that I couldn't quite stop myself from wondering whether they would bother to notice that, either—

Whatever. I could be the bigger person.

‹Getting some kind of outside observers makes sense,› Marco said slowly. ‹If we're still going through with it. And yeah, firepower wouldn't hurt. But the obvious move there would be to go through Tobias, right? Since he's already made contact with the President?›

‹Washington still seems about as bad as going after that cache Visser Three left in Alaska,› I countered. ‹It's where he expects us to go—where he's trying to get us to go, based on what he told Tobias—›

‹Based on what Erek claims Rictic claims Tobias claims Visser Three said—›

‹Yeah, whatever, that, and also it's not exactly on the way to Iowa in any case.›

‹It's where Cassie will be headed, though,› Jake said softly. ‹If she made it out. If she's heard the news. It's the only obvious place to go, under the circumstances—the place where she's most likely to expect to be able to find us.›

I bit my lip.

Cassie's dead, a part of me wanted to say, even as another part shouted you don't know that, and a third felt like lashing out at Jake for dancing around the issue and a fourth felt a sinking feeling as we drifted back toward the same black hole of uncertainty we'd spent half the morning circling. There were arguments for and against every possible course of action, if that's what you were looking for…

‹Look, we can talk ourselves into anything,› I pointed out. ‹What we should be doing is looking at what could go wrong. Cassie—›

—can take care of herself, I'd meant to say. But I couldn't quite bring myself to finish the thought. Because she couldn't, none of us could, as far as we knew she was already dead, we were all pretty much dead already and the only question was how much we could accomplish on the way out—how many of them we could take with us.

‹Starting with the fact that if we do nothing, Visser Three just wins,› Marco said, filling the silence. ‹I mean—right? We've got to assume that the default here is Visser Three outsmarts everybody, and his plan just works.›

‹Garrett here. Tobias got through, though, didn't he? I mean, isn't the U.S. military probably on alert now? Especially after Ventura? Over.›

‹Doesn't mean our job is done,› Jake said firmly.

‹But what is our job?› I half-shouted, letting my frustration show through as my hands curled into fists where they rested on my knees. ‹Now that the Yeerks have gone sort-of-public—now that the President's been filled in—I mean, what's our role now? Especially given the whole secret god-alien puppetmaster thing.›

There was an only-a-little-bit-awkward silence.

‹Assassins?› Marco suggested. ‹Spies? Guerillas?›

I shifted uncomfortably on my patch of grass. That wasn't the point, it was the wrong type of answer, but I couldn't think of a way to phrase the question better…

‹More like recruiters,› I ventured. ‹Can we do any better than just getting the cube back and using it on people twenty-four hours a day?›

‹Garrett here. Giving it to the military to reverse-engineer? Over.›

‹That could take years, though, and in the meantime—›

‹The problem is,› Jake cut in wearily, ‹we don't know what Visser Three is up to. He could've been a lot less honest in his little speech and still gotten away with it—›

‹Except then he would've run the risk of one of us exposing him.›

‹Still. He's doing things that don't make sense, and I'm willing to bet that means we're wrong rather than he's wrong. We don't know where he's putting his attention, or why, and we can't count on being able to figure it out in time to do anything about it. We need a strategy that doesn't really interact with him—something that's going to be useful no matter what.›

‹Which brings us back to recruitment. Right?›

‹Maybe, but we don't have the cube. Tobias has it—the Chee have it, really, and we don't know if getting it back is going to be easy or not. And in the meantime, we've got to do something—›

‹No,› I snapped, throwing up my hands. ‹No, Jake—we don't. That's what I'm trying to say. You want to do something. You want to hit back. But that's exactly the kind of thing that I—that's what got us here in the first place.›

‹The oatmeal factory—›

‹—is a maybe. It's a good maybe. But it's not a sure thing, no matter how much you try to talk yourself into thinking that it is. And in the meantime, it puts us out in the open, puts us at risk, lets Visser Three know that we're not buying his whole olive branch thing. And we—›

I broke off. I wasn't sure how to say the thing I wanted to say, wasn't quite able to put it into words. But I'd walked into this trap before, and I wasn't about to walk into it again.

‹We can't take on missions just because they feel good. Especially not the kind that could end up getting us killed. We've got five months before the rest of the Yeerks show up, and in the meantime he has at least one whole pool left, and we—›

I broke off again, as the words I was saying caught up to me, and I realized how they sounded from the outside. Just because they feel good. The kind that could end up getting us killed. I looked over at Jake, and saw a dark cloud settle over his expression, and felt a wave of frustration and impatience—

No. This can't be about Cassie, either. We have to be pointed at something. It has to add up to something real, in the end.

‹It's a chess game,› I said. ‹You guys play chess, right? It's like—like a blind chess game, and we don't know where the pieces are going to end up, what the plays are going to be. The best we can do is set ourselves up to be as strong and flexible as possible, get as many pieces out onto the board as we can. The factory isn't a goal, it's just another mission. One chess piece. Maybe just a pawn. Maybe not even.›

I locked eyes with Jake, willing him to understand. Come on, cuz. Figure me out. Help me put the words together.

It wasn't that hitting the factory was a bad idea. It was more about the way we would end up hitting it—about the way we'd pick missions, going forward. It was about making a decision about how we planned to make decisions, about getting to a place where we were acting instead of just reacting.

I could see it clearly, because it was a lesson I'd only just learned, over the past month—learned the hard way. But Jake—

‹The way the Yeerks win is by getting ahead in the resource game,› Marco said, his words hijacking my brain mid-thought. ‹More people, more intelligence, more territory, more stuff.›

‹Right,› I said, feeling something shift in the back of my mind as Marco's words clicked into place. ‹Right. Exactly—right now, Visser Three's set up to win because the Yeerks are the only ones trying. The human race isn't doing anything, because it doesn't know it needs to try.›

‹So what's the mission statement, then?› Jake asked. ‹'Wake up, sheeple'?›

‹Yes,› I shot back. ‹Yes. That's what Visser Three is doing—don't you see? He's trying to put everybody back to sleep. After Ventura, after Washington—he knew people were going to ask questions, start poking around, so he—he just—just cut it all off. Cut off the whole process. Satisfied everyone's curiosity, gave them all the answers—shoved them off in a totally new direction, this whole convincing story all nicely tied up in a neat little package, complete with a Bug fighter and a bunch of alien bodies as proof, and now everybody's asking the wrong questions, and—and—at some point, the government's going to come out and make a statement, they have to, they can't keep quiet forever, and then everybody will be like, oh, okay, not my problem, the experts are on it, and then they won't feel like it's their job to do anything, and then Visser Three wins because he takes the right people and meanwhile everybody's waiting for somebody else to solve the problem—›

I could feel my heart beating faster in my chest, something deep and ancient and powerful waking up inside my soul. Every now and then, there would be a glimmer in the lump of memories that I'd picked up at the high school, some hint or thread that let me draw out truths I didn't have any right to know—

—and this fit. It wasn't a complete explanation, but it was Visser Three to a T.

And our response—

A memory floated up, unbidden—of the cages, that first time, when I'd gone in after Jake and Marco had gotten out. The man who'd sworn he was going to fill up the pool with salt, the woman who'd been shouting out to everyone that they could take back control—that if enough of them fought, and fought hard enough, they could blow the Yeerks' cover. The people who'd lined up as human shields when I made my request, to give the ones with tactical information a little more time to get it out.

The ones who weren't sitting around waiting for someone else to save them.

‹We're not going to win this thing on our own,› I said. ‹We never were, not once it got past one pool, one city. But we can—we can pay it forward, what Elfangor did for us. We can give people what they need to win it for themselves.›

‹Okay, sure, fine—yes to all of that,› Marco interjected. ‹But hitting the factory is actually a good step on that path. If it's actually being run by Yeerks, and if we can get some proof to show everybody.›

‹I didn't say we shouldn't do it,› I growled. ‹It's worth getting the oatmeal out of the picture even if the place isn't run by Yeerks. I just said we shouldn't do it with zero prep, and only because we're pissed off. We should be pointed at something.›

Jake flushed again, but his face didn't soften. ‹Right,› he said tightly. ‹So this is the new plan, then? Going public?›

‹Arming the human race,› I corrected. ‹Maybe that means going all the way public, and maybe it just means spreading the news around in the right circles. But that's where we should start. It's better than just punching whatever looks punchable, and it's better than sitting back while Visser Three—and that thing you guys met in the pool—do whatever the hell they want.›

We should've done it weeks ago, to be honest—should've gotten started on the first day, or the day after I'd seen the resistance in the cages, or the instant we figured out that we could use morphs to vet people. As soon as it became clear that, one way or another, the war wasn't going to stay secret, and there was going to be blood.

But we just—

—hadn't.

Why not?

Because—

Because—

Because we thought it would end up getting a lot of people killed. Because we didn't want to take risks. Because we weren't willing to give up control while our own families were in the line of fire.

Because it hadn't fit with our picture of how things work—that we couldn't really change things, on a global scale. That we weren't allowed to, somehow, that that's what governments and militaries—grownups, in other words—were for.

We'd taken on the mantle of heroes, but not superheroes. We'd fought for Ventura, but we hadn't fought for Earth.

And now Ventura was gone, along with practically everyone I'd ever cared about. Only Jake was left—and Cassie, if I was being optimistic.

Something tickled at the back of my mind, then—half a sentence that was trying to finish itself. If we fight for the Earth—

But Jake interrupted the thought, speaking aloud. "All right," he said, looking around at the three of us. "So that's our mission statement, then. Our guiding star."

"Polaris," Garrett blurted, his fingers twitching where they gripped his jeans.

Across the clearing, Tom and Mr. Levy were watching, open curiosity written across their faces.

Jake nodded tightly. "Sure. Our Polaris." He swept his gaze around the circle, locking eyes with each of us in turn. ‹This is a big deal,› he said, switching back to thought-speak. ‹A big change. It'd mean—it's going to put a lot of chaos into the mix. If we do this, we're—›

He paused, and gave a sickly, twisted grimace. ‹Well. I was going to say, we're not going to be in control anymore. But what else is new, right?›

He looked over at Ax—or maybe at Tom, I couldn't tell—and the grimace disappeared, melting into slack-jawed weariness.

I felt a wash of thick, complex emotion—

—impatience—

—frustration—

—bitterness—

—a lack of sympathy for his exhaustion, his disappointment, his pessimism. As if something had been stolen from him, when I refused to go along with his stupid, self-gratifying plan.

Not my fault you were hoping for a rubber stamp, I thought, even as a more honest part of me noted that I wasn't being fair, that I was jumping to conclusions—that once again, I was looking for reasons to be angry—

Whatever.

I just wanted him to skip ahead. To skip to the end, get whatever emotional processing he needed to do out of the way, so we could get back to work.

You need to grieve too, you know, said a wrong voice in the back of my head.

I ignored it.

‹All right,› Jake repeated, sounding empty and beaten. ‹Yea or nay—we wait a day, make sure we can trust Ax, take a look at this plan again after we've slept on it. And in the meantime, we assume—what—factory next week, and Tobias after that?›

‹We don't have to decide that yet,› Marco pointed out. ‹One thing at a time.›

‹Fine. Morph-swap tomorrow, then planning, hopefully with Ax. Agreed?›

‹Yea.›

‹Garrett here. Yea. Over.›

‹Yea,› I said firmly.

‹Done.›

And then, feeling anticlimactic, we stood, and stretched, and went nowhere.

Marco had insisted that he be first.

"You don't understand," he'd growled—a day before, so that the memory would be preserved, would be a part of our morphs. "You don't know what it's like to kill somebody by demorphing them away. You start with me, and at least I won't fight it. I've done this enough times."

He'd shot me a warning look, which I'd interpreted to mean something like shut up, don't make this complicated. He knew that I'd dipped into his head before, and that I'd flipped through the memories of Tidwell and Morales—that I, at least, did know what it was like.

But it was irrelevant to the point he was trying to make, so I'd kept my mouth shut.

We had left the green-brown hills of southern California the following morning and headed east, Erek pacing us down below as we flew side-by-side in identical snipe morphs—free from interference, thanks to Cassie's absence. We'd covered something like seven hundred miles over the course of the day, an hour at a time, with Jake and Garrett carrying Tom and Mr. Levy inside their morphs and Marco and I splitting the supplies, the constant morphing keeping exhaustion at bay as our real bodies aged only three or four minutes per hour.

It was maybe midnight by the time the moon rose, backlighting the dust that filled the sky over northern New Mexico, and we settled by silent, mutual agreement on top of a shattered sandstone mesa in the middle of the wide, cold nothingness.

No one spoke as we demorphed, our bodies rising shivering from the uneven rock. There was a kind of supernatural seriousness in the air—a ritual silence, dark and heavy, the sort of thing I'd imagine feeling at Stonehenge or the pyramids or those sacred catacombs in India. Words just—didn't fit. Weren't appropriate.

There was a soft crunch as something invisible landed at the edge of the pillar, and suddenly the air around us grew warm as Erek dropped his holographic camouflage and expanded his force field to include us all. I looked at Jake, who looked at Marco, who looked at Garrett—who for once kept his eyes up and looked back—and slowly we mingled and drifted, acquiring one another, dipping in and out of the strange alien trance as the technology did its work.

"Me, too," whispered Tom, and as one we turned to Jake, who nodded grimly. Five fingers reached out to rest gently on my cousin's outstretched arm, and then it was done, and we found ourselves in yet another circle, this one including all eight of us—the alien, the robot, and the Controller; the survivor and the orphan; the general, the strategist, and—

Go ahead. Might as well think it, as long as you're being poetic.

Gritting my teeth, I buried the thought.

For a moment, all was still, an edge of anticipation forming beneath the somber ambience. I shot a glance at Marco, saw his expression in the otherworldly glow—flat and controlled, letting nothing show—and I wondered whether he was afraid, whether it made any difference that he'd probably already had this conversation with each of us in his own head, whether his insistence on going first had been courage or just a desire to get it over with.

Marco didn't look at me, of course. He was too busy not looking at Jake.

Jake, who didn't look scared at all, only alert and determined.

And what about you, Rachel? How's the warrior feeling?

I felt my face tighten. I didn't think I was nervous, or scared. I had just as many embarrassing secrets as the rest of them, but—

—well—

—I had just as many, probably. Probably not more. And nothing that I was ashamed of, nothing that would bother me to have the others know about. If Cassie had been there, maybe—

But she wasn't. She wasn't, and she wasn't going to be, maybe Jake was still willing to dump energy into hope and optimism, but I wasn't about to waste any more—

"Now," Jake said, the word like a twig snapping in the darkness.

Shoving aside my other thoughts, I focused on Marco—on this Marco, on the version of Marco I'd acquired just seconds before, the one that had memories stretching all the way up to yesterday evening. Around the circle, half of us were changing—Jake and Garrett and I morphing inside of our clothes, Ax pulling a towel over himself—while Tom and Erek and Mr. Levy and the real Marco looked on in silence.

Ninety seconds later, it was done.

"Now," Jake said again, this time speaking with Marco's voice, the words emerging from Marco's face. Together, we took in one last breath—

Click.

It was different than it had been the first time, when he'd checked his hand for rocks, counted doubles, tried to move his feet. This time, the Marco in my head was ready—took in the scene at a glance and spoke without hesitation.

‹Who's there?› he asked, and by the faces of the others I could see that they were hearing the same question.

‹Rachel,› I said.

There was the sensation of a sigh, somewhere in between relief and disappointment. ‹Would you mind…?› he asked.

‹That one,› I answered, directing my eyes at the Marco who was Jake.

‹Thanks.›

There was a long silence as we went our separate ways inside our shared skull, Marco turning his attention outward while I looked within.

At the real Marco's recommendation, we'd each prepared a list of five things we wanted to draw everyone's attention to—five important thoughts or memories that would be a starting point during our sort-of mind-meld sort-of ritual. Slowly, carefully, I dipped into Marco's memory, skimming over the list while he remained laser-focused on the emotions flickering across the face of his fellow clone.

‹It's going to be okay, you know,› I said softly, as I skipped the familiar first item and sank into the second—his frantic escape from the tunnels under the YMCA, carrying Jake over his shoulder. ‹It's not going to matter to him one way or another.›

‹That—doesn't help,› Marco said, and with his whole mind unfolded before me, I was able to fill in the meaning behind the words—to see that apathy would hurt just as much as rejection, revulsion—would be worse, actually, because at least if Jake was repulsed it would mean something, would mean that Marco mattered—

‹Okay, fine, you're right, that came out wrong,› I said, cutting off the flow of words. Elsewhere in my head, I felt the memory of pain as a Dracon beam cut into my shoulder, drank in the raw power of the gorilla as I ripped the door off a cage and hurled it across the room. ‹But he's not going to stop being your friend or anything like that—›

‹It's not about that,› Marco shot back, and beneath his rigidly enforced calm, his tension and anxiety were like twin currents pulsing through razor wire. ‹It's—›

He didn't explain in words, but instead surfaced a swirl of images, memories and emotions and chains of reasoning all jumbled together into a tangled mess.

Jake could reject him outright.

Jake could pretend it didn't matter, but be lying—either to Marco, or to himself.

Jake could try to make it okay—could force himself not to mind, and not realize until months or years later that he'd just been playing the part of an accepting, understanding, open-minded friend.

Or worse, the whole thing could devolve into pity, patronage, condescension—could easily, accidentally, irrevocably turn into a story about Marco being fragile, being needy, being somehow less than an equal in their friendship. It could end up displacing everything else, become the thing their friendship was about, and things might never be the same again.

All of this and more was there, just beneath the surface—fear and shame and pride and stubbornness, resolution corroded by secret hope and then scoured clean by self-loathing, the whole thing held back by a wall of pure, unyielding willpower—an iron determination that this not matter, that he would not allow the universe to drag him under over something so stupid, so pointless, so trivial, so pathetic.

So small.

‹Um—› I began.

‹Don't say it,› he bit out. ‹Don't you fucking say it, Rachel, I swear to god.›

So I didn't.

But that didn't stop me from thinking it.

It's not just me, right? There's something deeply sad about—about—

About Marco being so scared of my cousin's reaction that he'd rather erase his own emotions—that if there was a button he could push to not feel so strongly—to not care—that he would push it, and call it an improvement. That he thought it made him small, and weak, and pathetic—that it was a lessening of who he was. That he'd already given up—not just on Jake returning the sentiment, but on Jake feeling anything good in return—on Jake even being capable of taking it in a way that was healthy, that let them stay friends.

He was just that sure that the universe was broken. It wasn't optimism, that had led him to select that as his first thought, the first thing to draw Jake's attention to. It was fuck it, why not. It was a desire to just go ahead and get the worst part over with.

Maybe he's right.

The thought hit me like a splash of cold water, interrupting the flow of sympathy and yanking me back out into the real world. For a few minutes, I'd been so absorbed in the experience of being Marco that I'd let go of the larger picture—of the Yeerks, and the Visser, and the war Elfangor had dumped in our laps. Of the ashes behind us, the crater that had once been my home and everything I'd ever cared about. Of what had happened to Melissa, and maybe Cassie too—of what would happen to everybody, unless we managed to pull off a miracle.

‹There's just—there's more important shit to worry about, in the end,› Marco said offhandedly, even as he continued to drink in every detail of Jake-Marco's expression. ‹For you guys, anyway. For me—›

He gave a bitter, humorless laugh, leaving the sentence unfinished for me to complete.

For me, I'm going to die in like half an hour, so I might as well worry about whatever the fuck I want.

I had expected the morph-swapping experience to be surprising. I mean, I'd done it before—more than once—but this was different. These weren't random Controllers, they were my friends. My allies. The closest people I had left. And unlike when I'd used Marco's morph in the past, this time there was no specific question to be answered, no deadline to meet. We were going into it just to get to know one another better—to understand each other on the deepest possible level, to literally see through one another's eyes.

Yet even going into it with that context, it was—

Profound.

Startling. Unexpected. Moving. It sort of snuck up on me, with Marco—the way we eased into it, given our past experiences, given those first few minutes.

But his other memories—

They'd been like—like shards of crystal, fragments of rainbow, lit up with a vibrant trueness that had been even brighter than my own anger, drawing me closer and closer until I was fully outside of myself.

There had been the day of his tenth birthday, when his mother had taken him and Jake out on the open water, and he'd taken the tiller and sailed them out of sight of land entirely without help, tacking against the wind.

There'd been the time he had gotten in a tussle with a girl during P.E.—she had tried to trip him twice as they passed each other on the track, going in opposite directions, and on the third pass he'd stuck out an elbow, and she'd stumbled and claimed he'd punched her in the chest unprovoked, and his father hadn't believed him, had screamed and shouted, and he'd spent two afternoons in detention in a burning mix of shame and rage.

There'd been the book his dad had given him, not long after—Labyrinths of Reason, which he'd read in a week and then reread in an afternoon, curled up in the back of his family's station wagon on the way to his aunt's wedding. It had a puzzle in it that he'd tried to solve for days, that he'd been sure was impossible, and then the book had shown him a solution that turned his brain inside out and he'd seen the world differently ever since.

And the rest—I hadn't meant to pry, had not at first held any intention of going beyond his original list of five, but the thirty minutes we'd settled on hadn't been up yet, and he'd pointed out that this was why we were doing this, after all—

Memories of times when everyone else around him had been crazy, had been stupid, and he was the only one who saw but they wouldn't listen—

Memories of the times when he was the one who was wrong—when he'd missed something, gotten it backwards, jumped to conclusions and was arrogant and condescending right up until the moment when it all came crashing down—

Memories of his mother, and the day she disappeared, and the week of wondering—not knowing—hoping—and then they'd found the shattered wreck of her boat and that had been that, only his father couldn't let go, the nightmare was just beginning—

And then it had been time to demorph, and Jake had said nothing, not a single word, had only stood up and pulled the real Marco into a hug and said "Me next," and we'd sat back down and for the first time I'd really seen my cousin, how alike we were—the pain and rage he couldn't really feel, didn't even notice, because it didn't feel like a part of you—just felt like it was a part of the universe, the same way that gravity pulled down—

And I'd felt something weakening inside of me, some barrier crumbling, so that when I got to his memories of Cassie, I'd almost thought they were mine, had almost thought that Marco wasn't the only one, because the awe and admiration were all so familiar, so immediate and present, and the budding love that went with them felt so natural that at first I didn't notice it was coming from Jake and not from me.

And then I saw myself from the outside—saw all of us from the outside, as I relived Jake's resurrection, felt his confusion and horror as the truth of what had happened sank in, and then his frantic desperation as Ax went off the rails and he tried to stop him from shooting anybody, tried to hold us all together. I felt the weight of responsibility, the strange intermittent magic of what he called his little black box, the fear that it would all go wrong and it would all be his fault. I watched myself through his eyes—thumbed through memories where he considered me, weighed me, sent me out on missions and then worried about me.

And then it was on to Ax, whose head was an incomprehensible, alien place, containing not only him but also—I had forgotten—a complete and independent copy of Elfangor. I had followed the path Ax had laid out for me, from his time on the Andalite homeworld to his training in the orbital battle school to the moment when he chose to defy his orders and stow away on his brother's ship, and as I looked around the circle, I could see that the others were just as horrified as I was by the unraveling he had experienced—that yes, joining with Temrash had been his only option, and the correct choice, and as far as we could tell, seeing things from only Ax's point of view, their fragile alliance was genuine, and the pair of them were trustworthy.

After that, it was time to become Garrett, whose mind was almost as strange, whose life—I discovered—was like one of those movies where everything is black and white except for one color. Only for Garrett everything was black and white except for all the colors, which doesn't quite make sense but was as close as I could come to summing up the experience. In memory after memory, everything was bright, everything was urgent, everything was deeply and immediately attention-grabbing regardless of whether it was actually important. I had to close my eyes just to stay focused—otherwise I'd get sidetracked by the pattern of shadows in the pockmarked stone, or the sound of an owl in the darkness, or the subtle differences in the expressions of the other four Garretts—and even then it was still like being thrown overboard in the middle of a hurricane—

—a comparison I could actually make, because of what Garrett and Tobias had gone through when they went to rescue Ax, why hadn't they told us it was like that—

—and it made perfect sense that Garrett fixated on certain NAMES and OBJECTS, because without some kind of anchor, I would have been surprised if he ever managed to finish a single thought.

And yet, whether it was because by that point my defenses had all been washed away, or just because it was true—

I found it incredibly easy to see myself in Garrett, and to see Garrett in me. To understand what it was like to be him, why he did the things he did—to imagine myself doing the same, in his place. He was no more alien than Jake or Marco had been—in fact, all of them, even Ax, had been—

—had been—

Normal?

No, not normal. Fascinating.

Brilliant, riveting, beautiful. I didn't want to admit it, because of what it implied about before, about the past, about my whole life up until an hour and a half ago. That I'd basically been writing off the people around me, even the ones that I liked, even the ones that I trusted—that I'd been summing them up, flattening them out, storing them in my mind as cartoon characters rather than as full, three-dimensional people. I could feel myself shifting into a new sort of reality where other people actually existed, as players instead of as background characters, people whose incomprehensible behavior wasn't the product of broken or mysterious thinking processes, but of brains that were only a little bit different from mine. I wondered if Marco was experiencing the same thing—the same shift in perspective, the same sense of connection, of kinship. I wondered if this was what Jake's life was always like, if this was the thing that powered his little black box. And then I thought of Cassie, who'd probably felt this way all along—

—and then it hit me, really hit me, what it would mean if Cassie hadn't made it, if she were dead and gone and somebody that special, as special as Marco and Jake and Ax and Garrett, more special, maybe—

—and my mom, and my sisters, and Melissa—

—all of the people in Ventura—

—it cut right to the heart of me, right past all of my anger and determination, the armor I'd been using to hold myself together, keep myself from falling apart—hit me right in the gut without anything to slow it down or soften the blow and I almost lost it right there, would've fallen over or started crying if it hadn't been for the fact that Garrett was in control of our shared body, that I'd unlocked him and turned over the keys while I poked through his soul—

Dead. Half a million of them, dead, when even one death was a tragedy of near-infinite proportions, there was a person inside me named Greg Morales who was gone, who'd lived alone in a house that was too big for him, I didn't know who he'd really been or what he'd wanted out of life but it was irrelevant now, everything he might have done, everything he might have stood for was over, gone, vaporized—

I felt a part of me trying to shrug it off—to regain perspective, take the bird's-eye view, the defensive distance in which a couple of people died every second and you didn't notice, shouldn't notice, because that was normal, paying attention didn't help, there wasn't really anything to be done about it—

But even if that's true, this is different. This wasn't old age or sickness, it wasn't a car accident or a falling tree branch, this was murder—

—like the seven Controllers you killed that first time at the pool? Or that kid Controller you cut to pieces? Or everyone at the pool the second time?

—and it was clear, the moral argument was clear, we were doing what we had to do to end a war that somebody else had started, it wasn't the same thing at all, but still—all of a sudden the cost was visible to me, meant something in a way that I deliberately hadn't let it, up until now, and suddenly I realized why the characters in comic books and action movies never had parents or siblings, had at most one person that they really, truly cared about, because once you had something other than the fight to focus on, it became that much harder to do what had to be done, to follow through—

‹Rachel?›

—I thought about the five memories I'd chosen, the things I wanted the others to see and understand about me, from my first loss at my first gymnastics competition all the way up to what had happened after the high school, I'd known that Visser Three was going to come for my family, for all of our families, but I hadn't let it get in the way because what mattered was the cube, the cube was our number-one route to victory and Elfangor had said that it had to be kept out of the Yeerks' hands at all costs—

‹Rachel—›

—at all costs, that meant no matter what, no matter how much it hurt, no matter how much you lost, no matter if it meant that they were going to take both of your little sisters and turn them into slaves and you could have stopped it, it didn't make any difference, you did what you had to do and whining about it wasn't going to change anything, that was what I believed all the way down in my core, and it was like being stabbed with a hot knife because it was one thing to say at all costs and it was another thing to stare straight at just how big the cost actually was, half a million people and counting and I was on my own now, both of my best friends were gone and my family was gone and the others all thought I was stupid or dangerous—

‹Rachel!›

I snapped out of it, looked around the circle and saw that the others were all demorphing, were already halfway demorphed.

‹You okay in there?›

‹I'm fine,› I said evenly, pulling my shirt back down from where it had been covering my nose and mouth. Then I said some other lies as I demorphed, shutting down the Garrett inside my head so he wouldn't be conscious during the process. Then it was my turn, and while the others went digging through yesterday's Rachel, I tried to realign the pieces and put myself back together.

What's our role now?

I looked slowly around the circle, seeing my own face mirrored back at me in the darkness, looking subtly wrong, subtly different, the way a photograph was different from a reflection. I had asked the question the day before, and no one had really had an answer.

But that wasn't the only thing that needed figuring out. And now that I'd seen—really seen—what it was to be Jake, to be Marco, to be Garrett or Ax—

What's my role now?

I wasn't any harder or stronger than the rest of them. Not really, not in the ways I'd thought I was. And I didn't see things any more clearly—I just saw different things. It was easy to see that a group of just-Rachels wouldn't have done any better, and would almost certainly have done a lot worse.

But what about a group of just-Jakes? Just-Marcos?

No, that wasn't the question, either. It wasn't about which one of us was best, it was about how we fit together.

What was it that I could do that they couldn't?

Hold together, my brain offered up.

That wasn't quite it, but it was close. It was more like—

Like—

Like I didn't stop moving when I fell apart. Like the cracks never made it all the way to my core, to my motivation—like it never hit me hard enough to keep me from finishing the job. Even when it looked like Jake wasn't going to make it, even after our families had been taken, even when they'd blown up the shield generator and knocked out Ax and it was just me and Garrett against a hundred Hork-Bajir with Dracon beams—

Even yesterday, when Jake and Marco had been giving each other permission to go off the rails. I made mistakes, sure—more than either of them—but I didn't make the same mistake twice. I had—

Follow-through.

Yeah. That was it.

Follow-through.

It was a more comfortable word than warrior—less pretentious, less likely to make my inner Marco start smirking. And with that as my superpower—next to Marco's raw intelligence, or Jake's weird ability to understand people—that made me—

The reliable one.

The one who wasn't afraid of getting her hands dirty. Who wasn't going to back down just because it was hopeless. The one who was willing to do whatever it took.

The type of person who does the right thing, even if it's hard.

Yeah, that fit. That was another thing I had seen in Garrett, even before our little brain-swap—that he, too, was somebody with follow-through.

And suddenly it all made sense—the feeling of aliveness I got during battle, the way in which I—more than any of the others—had taken to our new life like a duck to water. The way in which I would have been happy, now, if the cost hadn't been so high—happier than I ever would have been normally.

It wasn't that I liked violence, or that I had anger issues, or anything like that.

It wasn't that I was broken.

It was that, if your superpower was follow-through, then your life was only as meaningful as the problem in front of you.

I'd been a damn good gymnast, even after it was clear I was too tall. I'd pushed and fought and worked and sweated for years, until I was as good as anybody in Southern California, to the point that Dad had started talking about sending me to Massachusetts to work with Belnikoff.

But in the end—

What did it matter?

Gymnastics wasn't going to change the world.

The part of me that's excited—the part of me that loves this—

That was the part of me that knew that I had finally found something worth trying my absolute hardest. Finally found something worth sacrificing for. Worth dying for, if it came to that. Through fate or luck or divine intervention, I'd ended up in a position where not giving up might actually mean something. Might make the difference between a saved world and a doomed one.

That was my role—that was how I fit in. Especially now that I had nothing to lose, now that I was more alone than all of them. Jake had Tom, Marco had his dad, Garrett and Tobias had each other, Ax had Temrash and the imaginary Elfangor in his head. Even Cassie, if she'd made it—Cassie had her parents, Visser Three had said they were alive and it didn't really make sense for him to be lying in this case.

But me—

The only thing I really had to fight for was victory. That would be my prize, in the end—knowing that it had mattered, that I had mattered, that the world was different because of the choices I'd made. That if there ever came a time when we needed one person to stay behind to buy everybody else enough time to escape, I was ready. Not because I was worth less than the others, but because if one Rachel could buy a Jake, a Marco, a Garrett, and an Ax—not to mention a Tobias and a Cassie—

Well. We were trying to win a war. What were the odds I could make a better trade than that?

If it weren't for the fact that Temrash was keeping Ax from losing his mind—if it weren't for the fact that Aftran had eventually learned, and started to soften—

‹Cube first,› I broadcast privately, breaking the silence.

Across the circle, the Tom-that-was-Jake nodded tightly, streaks of soft light on his cheeks where his tears reflected the dim glow of the moon.

It was thin—thin in the same way that Jake's plan to hit the oatmeal factory had been thin. It was emotion rather than reason, reaction rather than strategy, and my inner Marco was making a skeptical face.

But this had nothing to do with winning or losing, was on an entirely different axis. It would only cost us a day or two, we needed to reconnect with Tobias anyway, and Tom—

Gritting my teeth, I turned inward again, and continued to learn about my enemy.

Tom would follow through, too.

‹Let us know if you think you're going to go out of thought-speak range.›

‹Roger,› I answered.

We were walking up the driveway of a perfectly normal-looking house in the middle of a perfectly normal-looking suburb, maybe six or seven miles west of Washington, D.C.—me, Garrett, and Erek. None of us were wearing our true faces; Erek had donned a hologram of a twenty-something college girl, and Garrett and I were in human morphs.

Jake and Marco were nearby, somewhere, with Marco keeping watch in osprey morph and Jake ready to switch into any number of appropriate bodies, from rhino to tiger to tarantula hawk. We'd left Tom and Mr. Levy on the outskirts of town, supervised by another Chee who'd appeared as soon as we crossed the state line into Virginia.

Marco hadn't been particularly happy about that.

"Look," Erek said, as we stepped up onto the small porch. "I get that you guys are nervous. I can tell you don't trust us yet. But really—we're on your side. I don't know what else we can do to prove it to you."

‹Don't answer that.›

I shared a glance with Garrett, who was currently occupying the body of a grizzled-looking middle-aged man, and we both grimaced.

"It's not you," I said softly, trying to ease the tension. "It's just the general idea of going somewhere where somebody else has complete and total power over you. I'd be nervous if it was Andalites, too."

Erek opened his mouth as if to respond, but before he could, the front door swept open, revealing a woman with dark brown hair and a flowery skirt whose whole appearance just screamed soccer mom.

"Well, all the more reason for us to get to know each other better," she said, smiling widely as she stepped back and gestured us inside.

I shivered, even as Marco whispered ‹Okay, that's creepy,› from his hidden perch in the nearby trees. But I didn't hesitate.

One way or another, we had to know.

The house looked completely normal inside. Normal furniture, normal lights, normal dishes in a normal sink in the kitchen around the corner. There was a living room on the opposite side, with a normal TV on mute, showing CNN's latest updates on "the diplomatic situation"—

—the leaders of Russia, China, India, Japan, Germany, the U.K., France, Israel, Canada, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia—plus the President, the Pope, and the Dalai Lama—had all made simultaneous statements around the time that we were crossing the Mississippi, essentially confirming everything that had happened in Washington, and the whole world had gone into a tailspin of panic and speculation—

—it still felt weird to be completely disconnected from all of that, weird and wrong on a fundamental level, and I couldn't quite shake the feeling that we were making a mistake, that we should be trying to infiltrate the major governments, get a sense of what was happening in the geopolitical sphere. But as Ax had pointed out, we couldn't be unpredictable unless we were willing to pass on the most predictable targets, no matter how tempting and reasonable they seemed—

—and in the hallway there were two dogs, a Labrador mix and a fat little terrier. The Lab rolled over on its back and Garrett crouched to rub its belly while the terrier scampered forward to sniff at my shoes.

"You like dogs?" the woman asked, directing her question at Garrett. Behind us, Erek stepped inside and shut the door with a click.

"I like most animals," Garrett said matter-of-factly, reaching up to scratch the Lab under its collar.

"But dogs, do you like dogs?"

"Yes," Garrett answered. "Dogs make sense."

The woman smiled again, nodding as if Garrett had just said something profound, and gestured further into the house. "Would you like anything to eat or drink?" she asked.

"No, thanks," I said. "We'd mostly like to talk to Tobias, if that's okay."

Still smiling, she turned and led us through the kitchen, Erek bringing up the rear. Once again, the total normalcy of the scenery was slightly off-putting—I don't know what, exactly, I'd been expecting from a hidden robot lair, but it wasn't shopping lists on the refrigerator and an open box of Wheaties on the counter top. There was a giant double trough of dog food and water in the corner, and the terrier abandoned my shoes to go get a drink as we turned the corner into another hallway.

"This way," the woman said, opening what seemed like a closet door to reveal narrow, wooden stairs leading down into a dimly lit basement.

‹Marco,› I broadcast. ‹We're heading underground.›

‹Roger.›

The woman paused when she reached the bottom of the stairs, moving slightly out of the way and gesturing for us to pass her. We stepped out into the middle of the concrete floor, and then—

"Don't be alarmed."

—the floor began to drop, the entire slab of concrete slowly sinking as the walls and ceiling rose above us, revealing slick, featureless metal.

‹Way underground,› I added. ‹The basement is some kind of elevator shaft. I can't tell if we're going to stay in range or—›

"Excuse me," Garrett said. "How far down are we going?"

"About seventy feet," Erek answered. "Little over five stories."

‹Never mind,› I grumbled. ‹Looks like we should easily stay in range.›

‹Roger,› Marco said again. There was a pause. ‹Jake says same rule anyway.›

If we lost contact for any unexplained reason, one of them would leave immediately, and the other would wait for half an hour and then bail. It wasn't really security—at this point, we were basically committed, and the Chee could probably round us all up in about eight seconds anyway—but it felt better to have some kind of plan.

With a slight lurch, the floor stopped, and almost immediately, one of the empty gray walls began to glow with a kind of golden light. The light brightened until it was almost too bright to look at, and then—

MY basement doesn't do that, quipped my shoulder Marco.

I couldn't help it. A part of me tried to hang on to combat readiness, but the rest of me just sort of stared in amazement.

"Is—is this a hologram?" I stammered.

Erek projected a wide, delighted smile. "Nope," he said. "Only the sky."

The wall had disappeared, revealing a vast, vast chamber beyond it, lit with the same warm, golden glow. The far wall was maybe two hundred yards away, only partially visible through low, rolling hills and wide, feathery trees. The whole space was like a park, with grass and streams and flowers and bees and butterflies under a sky of deep turquoise and cotton candy clouds. Walking here and there were Chee—Chee in their natural forms, six-limbed machines of shining chrome and polished ivory.

But it wasn't the presence of robots that was the real shock.

It was the dogs.

Hundreds of dogs, maybe even a thousand—normal, everyday Earth dogs, every breed and half-breed you could imagine, running in packs, yipping, yapping, bow-wowing, howling, growling, ruff-ruffing dogs. They were chasing squirrels, digging holes, running around with sticks, smelling each other, and generally having a grand ol' dog time.

"What—how—" I asked, as Garrett stepped forward and knelt in front of a passel of Corgis and Shibas that had tumbled to a stop just beyond the concrete.

"Welcome," said Erek, as he gently nudged me forward. "I imagine you have some questions."

In the end, it didn't take long to explain.

"Once we realized that the Howlers couldn't be stopped," Erek said, "we loaded as many survivors as we could into the New Day's Dawn and made for orbit. One of us—the first Chee—did something, we don't know what, and—"

Erek's voice hitched, a pause almost too short to be noticeable.

"—it died, went offline and never came back, but one of the Howler ships blocking the way veered off course, smashed into another one, made a hole big enough for us to escape. When the other Howlers didn't follow, we thought that we were free, that we'd made it to safety, but—"

Another hitch, another microscopic hesitation.

"—it was only a few days later that the first Pemalites started to get sick."

"Biological weapons," I said softly.

"Yes. It had been the Howlers' first move, as it turned out—they'd seeded the atmosphere with a plague that took weeks to incubate. The rest of it—the burning, the killing, the torture—that was just because they liked it."

I clenched my jaw, clamping down on the question I wanted to ask—

Why didn't you fight BACK?

From what Erek had told us, sitting on the grass next to Tobias's hospital bed, the Howlers hadn't been more technologically advanced than the Pemalites. They hadn't been smarter, or faster, or better equipped. They'd just been more brutal, more relentless, the Pemalites unwilling to do anything but fall back, defend, and fall back again as each layer of their defenses was breached. If the Pemalites had just unlocked their army of invincible robots—

This, too, is a lesson.

But as I looked around the park, at the hundreds of dogs barking and gamboling in the golden light, I could sort of see it. The way in which that wouldn't have been an answer, would have just been defeat of a different form. It wasn't something I would have been able to notice, before the morph-swap, except maybe in the vague sense of this is a Cassie thing, I guess. But now—

They'd built the Chee because they wanted friends. Not to handle menial or repetitive tasks, not to make manufacturing more efficient, not to solve intractable problems or answer deep questions about the nature of the universe or any of the reasons humans might someday have to invent robots.

They'd done it just for the joy of it. To have someone to talk to, to share with—to bring more total happiness into the universe.

They'd been doomed from the start. But maybe—

—maybe—

—it was better than giving up on what they'd stood for.

"There were only six of them left, by the time we arrived here, and only one of them was conscious. The Pemalites had visited this planet before, in the time before the Chee, and knew that it was good—full of life and promise. The last surviving Pemalite commanded us to stay—to try to find an existence that would satisfy us."

"And the dogs—"

"They're reminders," Tobias said.

I turned just as Garrett lurched forward, seizing him in a tight, awkward hug, his adult body melting away as he returned to his true, eleven-year-old self. Tobias was awake—must have woken up at some point during Erek's story, because he was alert and upright in the bed they'd made for his recuperation, looking incongruous and strange under the open sky.

"Their programming doesn't let them interfere with Earth life very much," he continued, the fingers of his remaining hand dancing in a complex pattern across Garrett's back. "The Pemalites had run into other intelligent species, so they knew to program the Chee to prevent deliberate violence, but most of the violence in nature isn't deliberate, it's instinctive. And they can foster growth and flourishing, but they can't guide or direct it. For a while, they looked after the ancestors of modern wolves and foxes, because those were the animals that looked the most like the Pemalites had. But once humans domesticated dogs—"

"They are our joy," Erek said solemnly, "because they remind us of a world without evil. The world we lost. Whenever you see a dog playing, chasing a stick, running around barking for the sheer thrill of life, you see an echo of the Pemalite race."

Which is the real reason they give a shit about humans, my inner Marco guessed. Because we're the only other species that gives a shit about dogs. I locked eyes with Tobias over Garrett's still-shrinking form, put forth the theory in thought-speak, got a quick, grim nod in return.

Note to self—don't tell Erek you like Chinese food.

I pushed my inappropriate inner Marco aside, turned back to the android. "Why are you telling us all of this?" I asked.

Erek shrugged. "We want you to trust us," he said. "We know that you're suspicious. You have to be. And we know all of your secrets. We wanted the situation to be a little more—even."

"We appreciate it," I said dryly. "But really all you have to do is give us our stuff back and let us leave."

Erek nodded. "Fair enough," he said, and stood. In the distance, a second Chee turned and began jogging toward us, the motion oddly smooth as its head stayed a constant distance from the ground. As it approached, it reached inside of a compartment in its torso, its hologram flickering to life just in time to turn its metal arm into a human hand, awkwardly holding the blue box and an Andalite shredder.

"Thanks," I said, reaching out and taking both. I turned to Tobias—

Time seemed to slow. Tobias's face had gone masklike, his eyes bright with tension and everything else frozen in place, his fingers still on Garrett's back. I felt a wash of sympathetic adrenaline, like a dog reacting to another dog's whine—felt myself trying to react and clamped down on it—follow his lead, don't give anything away—

I had no idea why he was suddenly on edge, but I wasn't about to do anything to call attention to it.

‹What's going on?› I asked privately.

"The kid," he said tightly, ignoring my question and resuming the sort-of massage he'd been giving Garrett.

"What?"

"The Controller kid. David—"

Right—Erek had said something about that. I looked at Erek, then back at Tobias, who gave a tiny, fractional nod in Erek's direction.

Wh—does he want me to—

"We'd like to take David with us, too," I said.

Another fractional nod.

Erek frowned. "The Yeerk inside his head—"

I glanced back at Tobias. "We've got oatmeal," I said, feeling my way forward, watching his face for the slightest reaction, for any subtle hint. "And two other Controllers in our group. We're not going to starve it or anything."

Another nod.

There was a pause of maybe half a second, and then Erek nodded, too. "All right," he said, and in the distance, one of the trees dissolved and vanished, revealing—

I swallowed, my throat suddenly dry. "Thanks," I said again.

With a hissss of compressed gas, the tube lowered to the ground and opened, revealing the frozen body of a twelve-year-old boy. As I watched, a blue light began to scan slowly over him, starting at his feet and rising upward a few inches per second, dissolving away the icy crystals covering his skin and clothes and leaving him normal and alive-looking.

"Controller," Tobias said, his voice still tight.

"Oh, right," I acknowledged. "Erek—is he going to be awake?"

"In about five minutes, maybe."

"Garrett, can you pull him into your morph?" I hadn't demorphed, myself, both so that I could stay in thought-speak contact with Marco and because I was carrying Ax in wasp morph as a slow-but-secret weapon.

Slowly, reluctantly, Garrett peeled himself off of Tobias and nodded.

"All right, then," I said, still uncertain. "I guess that's—that's it for now?"

Tobias refused to explain for another forty-five minutes—not until we had gotten out, morphed birds, and were miles away from the safe house, thousands of feet in the air.

‹That should not have worked,› he said finally, speaking only to me, as the six of us flew back toward the forest where we'd left Tom and Mr. Levy.

‹What do you mean?›

‹I mean I tried to get the cube and the shredder back like five different times. I spent two hours trying to talk Erek into it yesterday.›

‹But—›

‹He said their violence protocols wouldn't let them. That they could theoretically give the stuff to a human, but not to one they'd seen commit violence with them. Not to one that they knew was going to use them for violence in the future.›

If I'd been human, my mouth would have opened and closed half a dozen times before I was able to form words. But—but—but—

‹But Erek saw me take out Visser Three, at the high school,› I said.

‹I know,› Tobias answered grimly.

We flew on in silence and confusion.