Oh, and I hope you'll leave some reviews, or head over to r/rational and leave some comments. Your thoughts keep me going, and for this chapter in particular I'm curious what my readers have to say. In many ways, Cassie is the most interesting and difficult character for me to write, and I'm always nervous about whether or not I did her justice.

Author's Note: I pushed to get this one out *almost* on time, but I'm still in recovery and can't promise that the next update will be in exactly two weeks. I CAN promise that I'm thinking about it, and working on it, and that I don't plan on a long hiatus until the end of this cycle. But I hope you can bear with me in the meantime.

Chapter Text

Chapter 18: Cassie

I could see the exact moment when everyone stopped pretending.

<Holy shit,> whispered Marco, as the ten or so people closest to the YMCA staggered to a halt, clutching their heads or screaming or just falling over twitching. There was one car on the road within the bubble, and it swerved crazily, careening into the steep, narrow ditch and belching black smoke. A second car passed right through, drifting ominously to one side before straightening out, screeching to a halt a hundred yards down the road. In the parking lot, a truck that was just pulling out of its space lurched forward and smashed into a post, its airbags expanding to hide the driver from view.

We were silent, the three of us, except for Marco’s one whispered curse. Silent, as a pair of pedestrians rushed forward to help those who’d already collapsed, only to stumble and fall themselves as they passed into the affected area. Silent, as a teenager pulled his phone out of his pocket and held it up as if to take a video, and silent as an elderly woman hobbled up from behind him and clubbed him with her cane, her expression hunted and desperate. Silent, as a siren began to wail in the distance, followed quickly by another, and another, and another, until it seemed like the whole city was screaming.

What was there to say?

We knew what we were doing.

Above me, Jake wheeled and dove, his peregrine falcon body slicing through the air like a missile, with Marco’s osprey close on his tail. I folded my wings and followed them both, angling toward the treetops on the far side of the park—close enough to see, with bird-of-prey vision, but far enough away that the Bug fighters hopefully wouldn’t bother trying to gun us down.

We waited for an endless minute, watching from afar as the Yeerk hologram continued to loop, showing the same laughs, the same splashes, the same set of people walking and swimming and diving and chatting. I wondered whether they’d recorded normal humans, or whether the whole thing had been a charade, a nightmare puppet show of slaves forced to act happy and carefree. I tried to summon anger, indignation, fury.

But all I felt was sick.

<Look,> said a voice. Jake. Marco. It didn’t seem to matter.

I was already looking. There were streams of jet-black smoke coming off of the building, appearing out of thin air as they cleared the holograms a few feet above the roof. Down below, a chubby boy stepped out onto the diving board—leapt out into space—flailed—landed on his belly with a smack I imagined I could hear even half a mile away. I watched the water from the splash sparkle in midair, the artificial droplets catching artificial light as reality burned invisibly behind them.

<They did it,> said a voice.

It might have been the same voice. I couldn’t tell.

The streams of smoke were growing thicker, braiding together into a single column that billowed and rose, drifting lazily in the morning breeze. A fire truck screeched into view, rocking to a halt beside the hydrant, disgorging half a dozen Controllers dressed in bright yellow gear. There were two more engines already in sight, along with four ambulances and more police cars than I could count.

Eventually, the holograms around the windows began to fail—first one, then another—bits and pieces of the underlying truth showing through until finally the entire scene was laid bare. That’s when they turned on the hoses—figuring, I guess, that if the holograms were down, the shield might be, too. But no—the water simply spread out in midair, streaming down the invisible surface of the stolen Andalite force field. A handful of EMTs were clustered around each of the Controllers who’d collapsed from Garrett’s thought-scream, and as far as I could see, none of them had gotten back up yet.

There was frustration written on every face—helplessness, despair, rage, shock. Slowly, the Controllers gathered—first a few, then dozens, more of them streaming in from all sides, coming in cars or on bikes or on foot. We watched as some of them ran past beneath us, not bothering to look up, their eyes fixed on the ultimate horror, the unthinkable disaster.

And then—

They could have noticed. They should have noticed—would almost certainly have put two and two together, if it hadn’t been for the water. One moment it was a fountain, flowing down the sides of the bubble, and the next it was mist, the streams falling directly onto the building as the barrier disappeared. With a wordless cry, the crowd rushed forward, firefighters and police and EMTs and random people off of the street, all of them moved by courage or loyalty or heroism or whatever the Yeerk equivalent was—all of them trying to help.

None of them saw that the smoke had stopped rising. That it was flattening, darkening, the space above the rooftop becoming more and more defined as soot and ash piled up with nowhere to go.

Ax had inverted the shield.

<Okay. Let’s gear up,> said the voice. Half-nauseated, half-numb, I dropped toward the ground like a stone, plummeting into the brush at the base of the tree, shielded from view. Holding my wings out for balance, I focused on my human form, and began to demorph.

Cassie, I thought to myself.

It almost felt like becoming a different person—like morphing, instead of demorphing, like I’d changed so much that my own body no longer fit, no longer seemed familiar. I didn’t know whether the old me was a lie or the new me was a mistake or the whole thing was just layers with nothing at the core. Somewhere deep beneath the surface, I still cared about people, about right and wrong—or at least, I believed that I cared—or at least, I believed I believed, or believed I should believe—

Stop pretending, girl.

I’d never been very good at lying to myself. At ignoring my own thoughts, at shutting out the parts of me that were judgmental—cowardly—selfish—sarcastic—vengeful—petty—cruel. That’s why I’d always leaned so hard on my morals, my upbringing, my code.

You see, it doesn’t matter if you’re a bad person on the inside, as long as you don’t do anything about it. A bad person who acts good her entire life is a good person.

Only now, it wasn’t so easy. I couldn’t just ask my teachers what to do, when my friends started plotting mass murders and war crimes. There weren’t any relevant lessons from Buddha or Jesus or Mister Rogers. There was no Chicken Soup for the Guerilla Soul. And my parents—

I flinched.

We never talked about it—about what had happened to us, about our parents and Jake’s brother Tom and Rachel’s little sisters, Jordan and Sara. You’d think it would’ve come up, in the time we’d spent up in the valley—that on one of those long, cold nights, we would have acknowledged it, tried to support one another through the fear and loss and pain. That maybe we would have cried, or told stories, or made rescue plans. Something, you know? Anything.

But we hadn’t. Not one word, as far as I could tell—not from anyone. Just like we hadn’t talked about Jake’s weird resurrection, or about Rachel murdering a kid to get to Visser Three. It was like we were all pretending it wasn’t happening—like if we didn’t think about it, it would somehow not be real. Like little kids, trying to act grown up, blustering about how we don’t need to look under the bed, there’s nothing there, don’t be stupid. Afraid that if we let the cracks show, we’d fall apart, and then there would be no hope left at all.

At least, that’s what I was afraid of. I had taken the weight of the world on my shoulders—we all had—and there was no one to tell me whether the deaths of twenty thousand Yeerks should make that burden lighter, or heavier.

<They’re still going inside,> breathed one of the boys.

<What?> said the other. <Why?>

<Dunno. But look—there’s, like, not even twenty people still standing aro—>

The voices cut off as their owners passed out of morph. I was halfway through myself, the feathers on my chest melting and running together as I grew upward, the prickly leaves of the bushes scratching my back as my palms and knees emerged and pressed into the loamy mulch. The waxy substance covering my body darkened, the whites and grays shading into brown striped with black and green. The green thickened and became clothes, while the black ballooned outward, swelling into cold steel and dense rubber and materials of unknown and alien origin. An arsenal emerged from my body, laser guns and shock sticks and some kind of pellet launcher whose ammunition contained—according to Ax—one ten millionth of a gram of antimatter each.

One by one, the objects fell away from me, thudding heavily onto the ground or clattering loudly against each other. A hundred pounds of gear—enough to shrink my time limit down to a mere eighty-one minutes.

There’s no way to make this mission safe, Marco had said. Prime target or no prime target, we can’t, absolutely can not put the whole team in danger.

Taking in a deep breath, I refocused—on skin the color of evergreens, porous and cracked like pumice. On a dozen blades of dull ivory, each as long and as lethal as Ax’s tail blade. On horns like a rhinoceros, claws like a dragon, a spiked tail like a Stegosaurus’s. On thick, muscled arms and wide, flat teeth; on legs that bowed inward, with dewclaws that came all the way down to dig into the ground behind their heels.

We’re not just sending them in with no support, Jake had insisted. We can cover their retreat, at least—even from the sidelines.

I’d had my suspicions about the Hork-Bajir, suspicions which Elfangor’s memories and Ax’s half-remembered academy lessons had confirmed. They were arboreal, herbivorous, perfectly adapted for a life of climbing and grazing in the gigantic trees of their low-gravity homeworld. They’d barely evolved to the level of tribal civilization, with a language of fewer than a thousand words. They’d known absolutely nothing of violence or war, despite their fearsome appearance—their world had no large predators, and the blades were for digging into bark, cutting through branches, and slicing off leaves. It was the Yeerks who’d turned those blades to mutilation and murder, conscripting them into their armies, converting them into shock troops.

The morph mostly complete, I stood, my thick skin and whipcord muscles easily shrugging aside the thorns and brambles. Wielding my wrist blades like twin machetes, I carved out a circular space around myself, tossing the detritus aside as Jake and Marco rose nearby.

Nobody’s going to mess with a trio of Hork-Bajir in the middle of all the chaos, especially not if they’re all geared up and clearly not causing any problems. We settle in, make like Controllers, and stay out of trouble for as long as we can. If they manage to get out on their own, nobody will ever even know we were there.

Marco hadn’t liked it. They’d come close to shouting over it, and Jake’s alternative—that he was perfectly welcome to stay behind himself, if he was so worried about maintaining a reserve—hadn’t helped. In the end, Marco had agreed to come along simply because—he’d muttered—none of the rest of us were competent to strategize on the fly when the whole thing inevitably fell apart.

We do nothing. Nothing, you understand? Not one god damned thing. Not until they’re clear of the building—not unless our own lives are at stake.

Jake had nodded. And so Rachel, Garrett, and Ax had gone inside—the footsoldiers, the expendables, the ones who could stand their ground in the face of horror and death. And Jake and Marco had stayed outside—the plotters, the manipulators, the masterminds. The ones who—along with Tobias—would form the nucleus of a new resistance, if everything went wrong.

And then there was me. Too soft for combat and too stupid for strategy—an in-the-way sort-of pacifist who had neither the courage to stand up for her principles nor the integrity to admit she’d abandoned them. For what felt like the hundredth time, my job was to do nothing, absolutely nothing—just wait, and watch, and try to find a middle ground between relief and shame.

It wasn’t the violence—not exactly. I didn’t like it, but I wasn’t an idiot, either. I could do the math. I knew that if you could sacrifice one life to save ten, or a hundred to save a thousand, or a million to save a billion—

I knew the Yeerk pool had to go.

But there’s more to it than math. A thousand lives lost plus two thousand lives saved just isn’t the same thing as a thousand lives saved, period. Jake and Marco could add and subtract and walk away feeling—

Not happy, I guess. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen either of them truly happy. But satisfied. Confident. Guilt-free. They were sure of themselves, sure in their decisions, able to sleep at night because they knew they’d found the—what was the phrase Marco had used?

Most efficient intervention.

As if that was it—that was that. As if the fact that as few people as possible had died meant there was no reason to grieve over the loss. As if the only deaths that were tragic were the unnecessary ones.

I wanted to stop it. I wanted to do something. But every action I could think of was empty and meaningless—symbolic gestures that would end up costing more lives, in the end. There was nothing I could do to make it better, nothing that Jake and Marco hadn’t already thought of.

Girl, I thought you weren’t going to lie to yourself.

I winced again, the reptilian double-lids of my alien eyes snicking shut.

So far, I had managed to avoid the fighting. Avoid the killing, except for the bear I had slaughtered—the bear I could conveniently blame on temporary insanity, even though I knew it hadn’t been. I had bowed out of every plan that called for lethal force, and managed to make a few possibly lethal ones less likely to cross the line, like when I insisted on using the tarantula hawk morph during Rachel’s midnight Controller-acquiring mission, instead of letting Ax’s sniper rifle be the primary backup the way Marco wanted.

But it was clear that seven full soldiers would be better than six and a half. That we could do more, move faster, make more progress, if I wasn’t holding everybody back. I’d been keeping my hands clean, but at a cost. A cost that could probably be measured in lives, if I weren’t such a coward—if I were willing to force myself to look straight at it.

Marco had only brought me along on this mission because he wanted the extra weapons I could carry. Now that I’d delivered them, I could morph into a bird, or just walk away, and neither he nor Jake would lift a finger to stop me. I was a liability, after all—unwilling to pull my weight, a nagging conscience for a group that didn’t want or need one.

But leaving wouldn’t solve my central problem. It’d just be swapping out one moral defect for another. I didn’t want any more killing, and I didn’t want the Yeerks to win—no matter what, I was going to end up compromising on something.

<Heads up.>

I turned to look just in time, the four-pointed stars of my pupils narrowing at the sudden flash of light. Above the black bubble, plasma-purple beams were emerging out of thin air, crisscrossing as they lanced down into the hidden building below.

<What—>

There was a crack like a lightning bolt, frighteningly loud even all the way across the park, and suddenly the edges of the dome softened, the smoke rising and expanding as the shield abruptly vanished.

<The Bug fighters,> someone said, grim and desperate. <They took out the shield generator. They knew it was right in the exact center of the field.>

<But—Ax—>

<Yeah. Ax.>

As the horror sank in, a scattering of figures came into view, an expanding ring of bodies that must have been pressed up against the inverted shield. They staggered unevenly forward, most falling before they made it ten steps. There were humans, and Hork-Bajir, and some kind of orange eight-legged spider thing with an upright body like a giant bacteriophage. The few Controllers who’d remained outside rushed forward to help as the firefighters began targeting the streams of water, no longer blinded by trapped smoke.

<Not many,> said a brittle voice. <Maybe—what—a hundred?>

Maybe not even that many—as the first wave slowed and stopped, no second wave followed. The doors and windows of the building gaped open, half of them rimmed with fire, and only a trickle of Controllers emerged from within.

<That was over three minutes of smoke buildup, plus greenhouse effects. I’d be surprised if anybody on the higher floors is alive.>

The two boys continued talking in my head, their words hollow and meaningless. A part of me wanted to scream at them, to point out that Ax might have just died and that we should care about that, that we should grieve for him or at least talk about it for more than two seconds. But the rest of me wouldn’t allow it—wouldn’t condone grief for the Andalite warrior when his death was just a drop in the bucket. We’d estimated that there were at least ten thousand human Controllers by this point—over five percent of the city population—plus however many alien hosts the Yeerks had living and working in their command center. Over three thousand Controllers coming in and out every day—over three hundred humans inside, at any given time.

Plus the aliens.

Plus the people who’d showed up and rushed in—many, many more than those who’d staggered out.

No, if Ax was dead—if Ax and Rachel and Garrett were all dead—if Jake and Marco and I died with them—it would be nothing more than a blip, a trifle, a small change to a single digit. We’d taken out somewhere between ten and twenty thousand Yeerks, and we’d knowingly sacrificed at least five hundred innocents to do it.

Or the rest of them had, anyway. I’d been on the sidelines, pretending it wasn’t my fault.

Not for the first time, I wished my parents were there—mine, or Jake’s, or even Rachel’s or Marco’s. Not just because of how badly I missed them, or how frightened or lonely I was, or because I still had nightmares every night about those last few minutes with my mom in the car.

No, just so that there would be somebody to take the responsibility off of my shoulders—to tell me what to do, make the hard choices for me, take the blame. To tell me that everything was going to be all right.

But they weren’t, and it wasn’t. This was only the beginning.

<You start the clock?> one of them said.

<Yeah,> the other answered. <Fifty-four minutes left, assuming we’re still giving them the full hour—>

And then everything stopped.

* * *

“Do you think we should we move?”

“How the hell should I know? You two have just as much experience with this shit as I do.”

Reaching up to a dangling branch, Marco seized a leaf and tugged. It came off in his hand—his human hand—the branch bobbing gently, the other leaves rustling softly for a moment before falling still once more. Holding up the leaf, he tore it in half, then in half again, then held the pieces up in his palm and blew them away with a breath. They fluttered silently down to the ground, where he kicked at them, scattering mulch in the process.

“Gravity still works. We can hear each other, so sound waves are still propagating. Also, we’re not frozen to death like we should be if the air around us had completely stopped moving, and we’re not suffocating like we should be if the air around us had completely stopped moving, and we’re not trapped in place like we should be if the air around us had completely stopped moving.”

I looked up at the branch Marco had grabbed. It was perfectly still, but I couldn’t tell whether it was any stiller than normal.

All around us, as far as we could see, time had stopped. The trees were frozen in place, the clouds in the sky like paintings on a domed ceiling, the smoke from the burning building a thick, black, still-life smear. There was no sound except the three of us, a silence as deep and unnerving as being in an underground tomb.

“That, plus we can see, so photons are still moving, which either means that time hasn’t stopped as far as the Sun is concerned, or that all of this just makes no fucking sense.”

We were standing there in our clothes, having somehow been instantaneously returned to human form, the weapons teleporting themselves to the ground a few feet away.

“Cassie,” said Jake, his voice taut. “Can you morph?”

I closed my eyes, focusing on the memory of Elfangor—we could use his help, and this certainly seemed to qualify as dire need—but nothing happened. To be sure, I tried again with Peppermint, the first morph I’d ever done, but still—nothing.

“No,” I answered. “Stuck.”

“Me, too.” He frowned and turned back to Marco. “This isn’t the Yeerks,” he said. “No way they have this level of technology, unless it’s some crazy thing Visser Three’s been developing on the side, and if it was, we’d already be dead. The Chee, maybe?”

“Don’t bet on it,” Marco muttered darkly. “My money’s on one of those two Big Bads that Elfangor wouldn’t tell us about. Crayak or Ellimist. Or both of them, who knows.”

He bent over to retrieve one of the laser rifles, pointed it at a nearby tree, and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened. With a wordless noise of disgust, Marco tossed it back onto the pile.

“I think we should move,” Jake said, sounding uncertain-and-trying-to-hide-it.

“Oh yeah?” Marco shot back. “Where?”

“Only one obvious place—”

“—yeah, of course, and it’s exactly where we want to be, in human form, with no weapons, when whatever the hell this is wears off.”

“If this was about killing us, we’d be dead already.”

“Doesn’t mean we make it easy for them, if they’ve got some kind of James Bond sadism planned.”

“Rachel and Garrett and Ax are in there.”

“And they’re either unfrozen like us, or they’re stuck. Either way, we don’t do them any good by getting ourselves killed.”

“Marco—”

“No, Jake. No, okay? Listen, I—”

He broke off, chewing at his lip, seeming to struggle with himself. I glanced over at the YMCA, at the motionless flames like carved glass. Part of the building had begun to collapse, the brick and rebar buckling in the heat, all three stories sagging like a tent held up with twigs. From the look of it, the pool itself was already half buried. I could see a lone Controller standing exactly on the line between us and the building, his back to us, his arms down at his sides. It was completely impossible to tell, from half a mile away, but for some reason I was sure his fists were clenched.

“Look,” Marco said finally, his expression settling into one of grim determination. “I broke into Elfangor’s head, okay?” He nodded toward Jake. “The night after you woke up. Dug through his memories, through all kinds of crazy shit. This war, it—it’s insane. Unless Elfangor was legitimately psychotic, there’ve been all kinds of impossible things happening. Like, time travel and prophecies and parallel universes level impossible.”

He broke off again as Jake and I stared, shaking his head. “I know, okay? I know. But you can check for yourself, if whatever this is doesn’t end with all of us dying. But there’s one thing—it—I don’t even know what to do with it—”

He broke off for a third time, and sighed. “Look. Remember the stuff Elfangor said, back before we even went into his ship? That thing about how we all had to get along, or all hope was lost?” He seemed to brace himself, his jaw muscles bunched and tight. “Elfangor got this—message, once. Like a burning bush kind of message. You ever see any of those time-reversed videos? Like eggs unscrambling and jumping back into their shells? The kind of stuff that’s only possible if physics is—well—”

He gestured helplessly at the unmoving trees. “Anyway, long story short, somebody knew that he was going to meet us. Us, in particular. They knew, and they told him. And not some vague fortune cookie bullshit like ‘you will find allies,’ but ‘you’re going to die, and before you die, you’re going to run into four human kids, and you’d better help them or everything is fucked.’”

Jake’s shoulders visibly tensed as I felt my heart try to climb into my throat. “Four?” he asked, his voice taut.

“Four,” Marco confirmed. “By name. Jake Berenson, Marco Levy, Tobias Yastek—”

He paused, his eyes flickering in my direction.

Of course, it’s obvious, you knew it all along, you really don’t belong—

“—and Cassie Withers. Rachel was never supposed to be there.”

But—

I—

Oh.

I made a connection in my head, felt my eyes narrow. “So that’s why you sent the three of them into the pool?” I asked pointedly. “Her and Ax and Garrett, instead of you and me and Jake? Because they’re—they’re spares?”

Awful lot of accusation in your voice for someone who called them “expendables” five minutes ago, a part of me thought.

“Yep,” Marco said, meeting my gaze head-on, his own eyes wide and unashamed. “Absolutely. You got a better way to divvy things up, given that particular nugget of information?”

I opened my mouth, realized I didn’t know how to put my thoughts and feelings into words, and closed it again, a sick, twisting sensation growing in my stomach.

“What—” Jake began. He faltered and began to pace, scrubbing at his eyes with one hand, the crunch of his footsteps eerily loud in the utter silence of the frozen moment. “What else did the message say?”

Marco shrugged. “Nothing that Elfangor remembered in any kind of clear detail. This was like ten years ago, for him. But he definitely got the sense that the four of us were absolutely crucial to the fight against the Yeerks. Like, cannot-possibly-win-without-us crucial.”

“According to some—prophecy?”

“According to the Andalite equivalent of Jesus appearing in a slice of toast, except that this Jesus also came along with the solution to some math problem they’ve been trying to crack for over fifty years. Elfangor’s not an idiot—he checked the thing backwards and forwards for tricks, hoaxes, pranks—interference of any kind. As far as they could tell, though, it was just a slice of toast. Metaphorically speaking, I mean. No force fields, no energy disruptions, no radiation, no sign of any kind of tampering. The heat just randomly happened to line up, just right, and voilà—a Nobel Prize-winning math proof and the names of four human kids.”

“That’s—”

“Bullshit? No duh. Nobody actually bought that it was chance. Point is, though, if some rando says something and calls it a prophecy, that’s one thing. If somebody has enough control over, like, individual molecules to make their prophecy just appear out of thin air—”

They kept talking as I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to disentangle my emotions.

Marco was right, of course—absolutely right. If you bought that there was a prophecy and that prophecy said the four of us were somehow important, then you should definitely send someone else on the suicide mission. We weren’t invincible, as Jake’s accident had already demonstrated.

But Marco was also wrong—wasn’t he? Wrong to put someone else in mortal danger, wrong to consider himself—and us—more worthy of saving, wrong to make the choice for everyone, manipulating the rest of us into it while keeping us in the dark. It tugged against my sense of ethics, set off alarm bells in my moral code.

Rachel shouldn’t die, so that I could live.

Neither should Garrett or Ax.

Right?

Little late to start drawing a hard line, girl. You’ve been letting other people die for you for weeks, now. Or do you think it’s somehow different when it happens to be people you know and like, instead of strangers?

That wasn’t what—

Besides, it’s not like you would’ve done anything differently if you’d known. You’d have just sat there, wringing your hands, and in the end you would’ve gone along with whatever Jake and Marco—

“Stop,” I said aloud, cutting off the thought. Jake broke off mid-sentence as he and Marco turned to look at me.

Nothing, that’s what you’ll do, that’s what you’ve been doing this whole time—

“I’m going into the building,” I said, the sick feeling in my stomach easing slightly. “You guys can come or not, if you want.”

“Did you not hear anything I just said?” Marco hissed. “We shouldn’t even be here, let alone walking into the middle of a literal firestorm. If some godlike being wants to drag us into that shithole, they can just—”

* * *

“God dammit!” Marco shouted, his voice ragged with frustration.

We had been plunged into shadow, the air around us thick and heavy with the smell of smoke and chemicals. As my eyes adjusted to the sudden darkness, I saw that the floor beneath my feet was tile, covered in dust and soot.

Around us was a scene of motionless madness, the world’s most terrifying wax museum. There were bodies everywhere—some untouched, some burned, some still burning, the flames like crystals growing off of blackened flesh. A handful of figures were still standing, frozen in mid-step, mostly yellow-clad firefighters but also a few Hork-Bajir and a couple of humans in plain clothes. Chunks of brick and metal hung in the air, arrested mid-fall, and through the haze I could see a pair of bright, angled bars that had to be laser beams.

To my right, dim sunlight struggled to illuminate the smoke, streaming in through the partially collapsed outer wall. To my left, a curtain of fire licked across every square inch from floor to ceiling, outlining doors and windows like black caves, seeming to move even in the utter stillness. In front of me lay the cracked ruins of the Yeerk pool, drained and empty, clumps of glistening Yeerk-flesh still clinging to the walls and floor. The two piers were melted and broken, the far side an uneven, gaping hole, opening up onto some enormous underground cavern lit by an unearthly green light.

“Marco?” came a voice, and we all jumped.

“Tobias?” Marco called back. “What—where are you?”

“Over here—in the corner.”

There was a strained, strangled quality to his voice, like glass rubbing on glass. Slowly, we began to pick our way through the rubble, occasionally blinded by immobile clouds of soot, taking care to stay well back from the edges of the hole. At one point, we passed a man who had just stumbled over the lip, his eyes wide and terrified, his arms flailing.

“Should we—” I began, but I didn’t bother finishing the sentence. Even if we’d wanted to save him—even if we’d been able to, if whatever lunatic rules were in place allowed us to pull him back—he was just one of what seemed like a hundred people on the brink of disaster. On the far side of the pool, there was a little boy clinging to the twisted bars of what had been one of the cages, his feet dangling over the abyss. Over by the wall of fire, there were two women trying to lift a third to her feet, unaware that a slab of ceiling had broken loose and was hovering twenty feet overhead. Through one of the doors that led deeper into the building, I could see an entire room full of flame, and a pair of aliens standing on the far side, looking out toward the open sky, despair and helplessness written in their body language in a way that transcended the need for translation.

You did this, whispered the quiet, merciless voice in my head. Clean hands or no clean hands. You let this happen—made this happen.

Feeling sick once more, I lowered my eyes to the ground, keeping them locked onto the heels of Marco’s sneakers as they stepped over melted lumps that might not have been bodies.

That’s right—look away. If you can’t see it, it didn’t happen, right?

The sneakers stopped, and I looked up, taking in the scene just as Marco let loose a low, defeated moan.

Tobias was standing in front of us, his face streaked with tears, his hands curled into fists. He was glaring daggers at Jake, whose own face had gone slack with horror.

Behind him, a trio of figures were frozen in mid-run—a grizzly bear with an Andalite thrown over its shoulder, both with half their fur burned away, and a shape midway between human and gorilla, its thick fingers clutching a Yeerk Dracon beam.

Rachel, Ax, and Garrett.

Behind them was a hole in the wall, through which were climbing half a dozen Hork-Bajir and a pair of the strange orange spider things. Two of the Hork-Bajir were already through, had stopped and had raised their weapons, their fingers tight on the triggers. That was the source of the two bright laser beams I had spotted earlier, both discharges hanging halfway between the aliens and their targets. One was lined up with the back of Rachel’s knee, and the other—

The other was aimed directly at the base of Garrett’s neck.

“You said you would keep him safe,” Tobias said softly, his voice cracking. He took a step toward Jake, who continued to look past him, unable to tear his eyes away. “You promised me you would keep him safe.”

Wordlessly, Marco stepped past both of them—reached out to touch Garrett—tugged on the boy’s arm, tried to drag him out of the way. Garrett might have been carved out of stone for all the difference it made.

“Where were you, Jake? Why are you standing there while he’s in here dodging blaster bolts?”

“I—”

“You promised,” Tobias repeated, and he planted both hands on Jake’s chest and shoved. Jake staggered, falling back several steps before regaining his balance, and Tobias followed immediately, fury etched in every line of his face. “Look at him, Jake.”

“Tobias—” Marco began, his tone somewhere between a warning and a plea.

“Shut up, Marco,” Tobias snarled. He stepped forward and gave Jake another shove, pushing the heavier boy back toward the edge of the pool. Jake made no move to defend himself, his arms hanging limply by his sides, his expression stricken. “You sent him in here to die.”

“Tobias, stop!” Marco called out.

“No.” The word was quiet, almost calm, as cold and dark as obsidian. Cocking his arm back, Tobias swung, the punch catching Jake full in the face, sending a spray of blood through the frozen smoke.

Jake fell without making a sound as Marco lunged forward, reaching out to grab Tobias’s shoulder. I felt a flash of déjà vu as the taller boy whirled, sinking his fist directly into Marco’s stomach, folding him in half. Marco dropped like a stone, a horrible wheezing noise clawing its way from his throat.

I didn’t know what to do. What to say. How to react, other than by standing there, horrified. I was transfixed, paralyzed, frozen with indecision.

Useless—as usual.

On the ground, Jake was rolling over, was already up on hands and knees. Tobias waited as he slowly climbed back to his feet, then punched him again, this time catching him on the temple. I let out a wordless shout as Jake fell again, more unevenly this time, skidding backwards until he was just a few feet away from the gaping, open hole.

“I swear to God,” Tobias bit out. “If he dies—if you don’t find a way to fix this—”

He broke off mid-sentence, grabbing the front of Jake’s shirt and hauling him to his feet, holding their faces inches apart.

Do something!

Jake’s head lolled, his eyelids opening and closing in slow motion. “I will take you down,” Tobias pronounced. “If I never do anything else—if I have to go to Visser fucking Three for help—if my best friend dies because you weren’t there to save him—”

“Tobias, wait!” I blurted, starting forward—

“One more step, Cassie. Go ahead—see what happens if you take one more step.”

I froze. “He volunteered, Tobias,” I pleaded. “It wasn’t what you—Jake tried to talk him out of it—”

“Tried.” Tobias threw me a withering glare, turned back to Jake. “Did you try, Jake? Was it just too hard for you to tell the eleven year old with the diagnosis no, you can’t go on any suicide missions this week? You couldn’t send Marco or Cassie instead? I see you managed to keep them out of trouble.” He took a step forward, putting both of them on the very edge of the abyss. “Where were you, Jake? ‘Cause I looked all around, and I didn’t see you here—”

He broke off as Jake mumbled something, a trickle of blood appearing at the corner of his mouth and running down his chin, dripping onto Tobias’s hands where they still gripped Jake’s shirt. “What was that, Jake?” he spat.

“My fault,” Jake repeated, the words crystal clear in the stillness of the tableau vivant. “Knew he might die. Took the risk.”

Tobias’s face whitened as he shook the heavier boy, still holding him inches from the lip. “You took—”

“Said it was the right thing,” Jake continued, his voice hollow but steady. “Said he wasn’t going to give up just because it was hard. Said the world was in trouble, and he wasn’t the kind of person who backs down.”

The words had an immediate and dramatic effect on Tobias, falling like hammer blows, his grip on Jake’s shirt loosening with each one as his expression morphed swiftly from one of rage to one of utter despair. “I—” he stammered. “That’s not—you—”

“Wanted me to tell you, if he died—that he wasn’t afraid.”

It was as if Tobias were a puppet, and Jake had cut the strings. He let go, and both of them sagged, Jake dropping to brace his hands on his knees, Tobias sinking all the way to the ground. Without another word, the orphan boy began to cry, giant sobs wracking his body.

Good thing nobody’s relying on you to think fast in a crisis, said the voice in my head, useless and savage and post hoc as usual. At least Marco tried, even if all he managed to do was get the wind knocked out of him.

For a long moment, I just stood there, watching as Jake and Marco slowly recovered, as Tobias cried himself out. Around us, the nightmare waited, smoke and fire and horror and death all frozen in a timeless moment.

And what are you waiting for, girl?

For Jake and Marco, I realized. For one of them to straighten up, and tell me what to do.

I felt a lot of things over the next couple of seconds—a complicated whirl of doubts and recriminations, guilt and anxiety and resentment and resolve all swirling around a single word, outlined in fire in my thoughts:

Enough.

“Crayak!” I shouted, causing Jake and Marco to jump and Tobias’s sobs to falter. “Ellimist! Whoever you are—we’re all waiting on you, now!”

THEN WAIT NO LONGER.

The response was immediate, the voice coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. It was bigger than sound, bigger than thought-speak, bigger than language itself. It simply was, like the force of gravity—irresistible and inevitable.

The air directly in front of me—no not in front, behind. Beside. Around—

I couldn’t explain it. Couldn’t comprehend it. The air just opened up. As if there were a door in nothingness. As if air were solid, and—

It was just impossible to explain. The air opened up. A creature appeared.

It was humanoid. Two arms, two legs, a head in the same place that a human’s head would be. Its skin was blue, glowing faintly like a lightbulb that had been painted over. It looked old, but not frail—like my grandfather, who’d worked fifty years on a farm and could put the lid on a jar so tight that none of the rest of us could get it off again. Its hair was long and white, covering ears that were swept up into points, parting over pitch-black eyes that seemed to be full of stars.

“Are you—” Marco began, his voice still breathy and hoarse. He was standing upright, though he had one hand pressed over his stomach, and there were tears sparkling at the corners of his eyes. “Is that your real body?”

The creature smiled, its ears sliding upwards until they were almost touching. “No,” it answered, its voice like wind chimes. “I have a lot of faces. This one—”

It paused, and shrugged. “I dunno. Seemed like the right one to use.”

“What are you?” Jake asked, peering through eyes that were beginning to swell shut.

The creature shrugged again. “Got a lot of names, too. Call me whatever you like.”

“You did this?” Jake gestured to the sculpted figures around us.

“Well, not really. Most of it was your friends over there. But the whole thing being on pause—that was me, yeah.”

“Why?”

“So you’d have a chance to take a good look,” it said. “And to give us time to talk.”

Raising its hands, the creature traced out a complicated pattern in midair, and suddenly a chair appeared—first an outline, then a solid object as the sides faded in from nothingness. It spun gently and settled silently to the floor, scooting forward just as the creature sat back.

Tobias pushed himself to his feet, his face streaked and sooty, his clothes covered in ash and dust. “You’re the one Elfangor told us about,” he said. “The one we might call God. You can do magic.”

“Science,” the creature corrected softly. “Engineering.”

“You stopped time. Brought me all the way here from D.C. Brought me out of morph and teleported me three thousand miles.”

“Yes.”

Tobias pointed at the pair of blaster bolts hovering behind Rachel and Garrett. “Change it,” he said flatly.

“I will,” the creature said solemnly. “Or at least, I can. But first, you need some context. You see, they’re not the only ones in danger. A lot of people are about to die, and you have some decisions to make.”

“No shit,” Marco said. “The whole building’s ready to collapse.”

The creature shook its head. “I’m not talking about the people in the building,” it said, and I felt my blood run cold. “I think you forgot about Visser Three.”

* * *

We were floating in space, somehow—a hundred miles up, or maybe a thousand, floating without spacesuits, breathing without air. It wasn’t cold or uncomfortable—just quiet, as it had been back in the pool. For a long, long minute, the creature let us stare at the Earth, huge and impossibly beautiful, filling half the sky. We could see all of California—Oregon—Nevada. The snow-dusted wrinkles of mountain ranges, the flat browns of deserts, the patchy greens of forests and fields. The coastlines were as clear and sharp as if they’d been carved out by a razor blade, with light, fluffy clouds drifting glacially over the ocean, casting dark blue shadows.

LOVELY, the omnipresent voice said, the creature’s body having failed to follow us. LOVELY.

We said nothing—only stared, drinking it in, until some unseen force moved us, swung us around, turned us outward to face the darkness.

There, some immeasurable distance away, glistening faintly in the starlight, was an enormous, misshapen sphere, almost as black as the sky around it. A small cluster of silver boxes were embedded in the surface at one end, each with a cone of frozen light emerging from it, pointing exactly away from the blue sphere of the Earth.

“What is this?” Marco asked, not even bothering to complain about the impossibilities anymore.

IT’S VISSER THREE’S BACKUP PLAN, said the voice. HE SENT TEAMS OUT TO FIND IT WEEKS AGO, AS SOON AS YOU STARTED CAUSING TROUBLE—DRAGGED IT BEHIND THE MOON AND SLAPPED A CLOAKING DEVICE ON IT. NOW IT’S HEADING FOR EARTH AT A HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND MILES PER HOUR.

“What?” Jake spluttered.

WHEN IT HITS, IT WILL MAKE A FIREBALL EIGHT MILES WIDE, AND LEAVE A CRATER ALMOST TEN MILES ACROSS. THE SHOCKWAVE WILL SHATTER WINDOWS AS FAR AS FIFTY MILES AWAY, AND THAT PLUS THE HEAT WILL KILL EVERYTHING FROM SOMERTON TO GRANITE HEIGHTS. THE YEERK POOL WILL BE COMPLETELY DISINTEGRATED, ALL EVIDENCE ERASED, AND THE CITY AND THE SURROUNDING AREA—INCLUDING YOUR LITTLE HIDDEN VALLEY—WILL BE WIPED OFF THE MAP.

I felt my throat constrict, felt my fingers and toes begin to tingle as my blood pooled in my chest and adrenaline began to slice its way through my veins.

VISSER THREE KNOWS YOU’VE DESTROYED THE POOL. IN A FEW HOURS, THE FIRST YEERKS WILL BEGIN STARVING, AND SOON THERE WILL BE AN EPIDEMIC. IT’S TOO RISKY TO RELY ON A CONTAINMENT STRATEGY. ONE MISTAKE—ONE PIECE OF CREDIBLE EVIDENCE SLIPPING PAST THE NET, AND THE SECRET WILL BE OUT. THIS WAY IS QUICKER—CLEANER—SIMPLER.

I turned to look at Jake, took in the dull hopelessness that seemed to wrap his entire body, felt my own shoulders slump in response. Beyond him, Marco’s face was twisted and grim, his jaw working silently, his knuckles white.

AN IMPACT OF THIS MAGNITUDE OCCURS EVERY FIFTY THOUSAND YEARS OR SO, the voice continued. IT WILL BE SURPRISING, BUT NOT SHOCKING. YOUR SCIENTISTS WILL CONFIRM THAT IT WAS A METEOR STRIKE AND NOTHING MORE. THEY’LL TESTIFY THAT THE ROCK WAS SMALL ENOUGH THAT CURRENT NORMAL SCANNING WOULD NEVER HAVE DETECTED IT. THERE WILL BE A PUSH FOR INCREASED MONITORING OF THE SKY, AND VISSER THREE’S PLANS WILL BE SLIGHTLY HAMPERED BY THIS, BUT IT WILL BE A SMALL PRICE TO PAY FOR THE KNOWLEDGE THAT HE HAS ERADICATED THE GUERILLA THREAT.

I blinked, and suddenly we were back at the pool, surrounded by rubble and smoke and cold, crystallized fire. The creature was unmoved, still sitting in its conjured chair, its expression drawn and sympathetic.

“He knows that you aren’t particularly mobile, see,” the creature said, speaking with its physical voice. “And he knows that you’re at the pool, right now. There’s zero chance that you’d survive the impact.”

“But—the shield—the tardigrades—”

“The shield was destroyed, on Visser Three’s orders, but it wouldn’t have saved you anyway. The word ‘indestructible’ is a little misleading—Seerow’s engineering is impressive, but it can’t compete with an explosion the size of a million atomic bombs. Even the Chee will be killed, if they don’t realize what’s happening in time to run.”

I felt my jaw tremble, felt my knees go weak. It was hard to breathe, hard to speak—hard to think. I looked at the three boys, saw their faces reflecting my own as the meaning of the creature’s words sank in.

We were all going to die.

“How—” I began, my voice thick and rasping. “How long?”

“About thirty more minutes,” the creature said. “The Visser fired the rockets as soon as the explosion in the pool was confirmed.”

Thirty minutes. Our fastest morph over long distances was the snipe, which could make it maybe thirty two miles in thirty minutes, if we could push the body to the absolute limit. Call it twenty-five miles, with morphing time—would that be enough? If we found a lake to dive into, or a mountain to hide behind?

I looked at Jake. He didn’t have the snipe morph. He would have to acquire it from me, losing an extra minute and a half in the process. Meanwhile, Marco and Tobias would have to take off before me, or else the interference would keep them from being able to fly at all. They could leave immediately, while I stayed behind for a few extra seconds with Jake—

Tobias shifted, raising a hand to wipe at his eyes. “You said you would save Garrett,” he said, his tone somewhere between entreaty and accusation.

“I said I could,” the creature corrected mildly. “I can save all of you, in fact. But it’s not quite as simple as snapping my fingers.”

Tobias tilted his head, his eyes narrowing. There was a long, tense moment as we all weighed the creature’s words, absorbed the sudden, subtle shift in mood. I didn’t have Jake’s razor-keen sense for implication and nuance, but even I could hear the threat implied by the oh-so-casual words—the bait and switch, the clever trap, the offer we couldn’t refuse. Sure, the creature seemed to be saying. I can do it—but it’s gonna cost you.

“What do you mean?” Tobias asked, his words slow and careful. “Just unfreeze them, and we all walk away.”

“Like I said, not that simple.”

“What? Why?”

“The game,” Marco said darkly.

“Yes,” the creature confirmed. “There are rules. Penalties. Restrictions.”

“What game?”

“There are two of them,” Marco explained. “Don’t you remem—never mind, that’s right, you were off babysitting Ax.” He chewed at his lip, looking back and forth between the creature and the ruins of the Yeerk pool. “Crayak and Ellimist. God and Satan, black and white—or at least red and blue, Elfangor wasn’t really sure. Two extremely powerful beings with very different ideas of how the universe ought to look.”

“Order and chaos,” said the creature. “Unity and harmony. Silence and noise. A fundamental conflict of values.” It gestured toward the nightmare scene around us. “One of us would like more of—this. The other, less. We almost came to blows, once—a fight that would have thrown the resources of whole galaxies against one another, laying waste to infinity. But we realized that we were headed toward mutual annihilation—that by the time we’d finished hacking at each other, the winner would be left with almost nothing—a shadow of its former self, an emperor of dust.”

“So why didn’t you just stop?” I blurted.

The four of them turned to look at me, Jake and Marco and Tobias and the strange, ancient alien. I felt my face flush with heat, a mixture of self-consciousness and anger fighting for control of my voice, my thoughts. Anger won, and I crossed my arms, glaring at the ancient alien.

“Elfangor said we were like chess pieces to you,” I bit out. “Like you’re manipulating us, or—or gambling with us. That this is all some kind of huge game, and you’re waiting to see how it all plays out. Why? Why not just—leave one another alone?”

Even before I finished the sentence, I knew it was stupid—I knew about the US and the Soviet Union, and about wars that started because of genocide and human rights violations, about people cheating on each other in prisoner’s dilemmas. I knew that two was an unstable equilibrium, and that one way or another there would always be a race to the bottom.

But deep down, in the core of my soul, it just seemed wrong. Like it shouldn’t have to be that way, like people should be able to just stop. That there ought to be a way to solve things that wasn’t terrible, and that obvious answers should work, no matter how many kinks and flaws and loopholes there might be.

I didn’t know if the creature in front of me had sent the Yeerks. But it could obviously stop them—stop them without bloodshed, stop them fully and finally and save everyone the trouble. It could, and it wasn’t going to, and it just wasn’t fair.

The creature didn’t mock my flawed argument, though—didn’t point out my naïveté. It simply shrugged. “Who can say? I can speak only for myself. I didn’t want to leave half the universe—half of everything that lives and breathes and thinks—under the control of my enemy. I didn’t want to live the rest of my life on alert, always waiting for the moment of betrayal. I didn’t want to spend ninety nine percent of my time and energy building weapons and stockpiling resources and setting up counter-counter-counter-counter-counter surveillance, lest I fall behind.”

“So, what—you play some giant cosmic chess game, and the loser just agrees to die?” Tobias asked, incredulous. “I mean, that’s what you’re talking about, right? If you can’t trust each other no matter what, then that’s what happens at the end—isn’t it?”

The creature nodded.

“But that’s insane!” Tobias shouted. “It doesn’t make any sense! You’re going to finish the game, and then the loser’s just going to flip the table and start shooting anyway!”

The creature shook its head. “The game is binding, on every level. Bit by bit, molecule by molecule, we each fed our resources into a shared structure which cannot be coopted or corrupted, leaving only the most rudimentary backups behind. The arbiter is more powerful than either of us at this point, and a sufficient infraction means immediate forfeiture and death. Together, we ratified the initial conditions, and now—”

It shrugged again. “Now, we simply play.”

“But why agree to the game in the first place?” Jake said, speaking up for the first time in minutes. “I mean, if you’re going to win anyway, why bother? And if you’re going to lose, why would the other one agree? You can’t possibly be perfectly matched—somebody’s got to have the advantage.”

“Your definitions are narrow,” the creature said. “One may be smarter, where the other is stronger. One may have vision, where the other has patience.”

“But there’s still got to be a total, right? Some kind of—summary? Taking all of that into account?”

“Something can be knowable, but still not known. I could ask you to tell me how many pennies your country has minted in its entire history—that’s a question with a real, specific answer, but it’s expensive to find out.”

“But still—if you both agreed to the game, it’s because you both thought it was better for you than just fighting it out.”

“Is that so unrealistic? Instead of taking a chance at an empty, ruined universe, we take a chance at winning everything. Defeat is the same in either case, but victory is vastly different.”

“But defeat’s not the same in either case,” Jake said, his voice rising. “I mean, if you literally couldn’t stand to let the other guy have half of everything, you definitely don’t want to let him walk away with all of it, right? If you’re going to lose, don’t you want to hurt the other guy as much as you can, first? And besides, you’ve got—I mean, Marco said you could control individual molecules. You stopped time. You’ve got to be able to calculate everything, right? I mean, you’ve got to already know whether you’re going to win or lose. And playing the game only makes sense if you think you’re going to win, so—so if you both think that, doesn’t it mean that one of you is just wrong?”

The creature smiled, the sparks of light in its deep, black eyes glittering like the inside of a geode. “Yes, Jake Berenson. One of us is wrong, and only time will tell which. I have my own opinions, of course, which I’ll keep private. But in the meantime—it’s my turn, and events have conspired to give me unusual freedom of movement.”

With a swift, sudden motion, the creature sprang to its feet, the chair vanishing out from underneath it as we each took a reflexive step back. “So!” it boomed, the wind chime quality of its voice swelling into something more like church bells. “Human children—do you wish for me to save you? I won’t stop the meteor—I can’t, not without incurring debts I’m not particularly interested in owing. But I can whisk you off to safety, if you ask it of me.”

“What about Garrett?” Tobias cut in.

“And Rachel and Ax,” Jake added.

“The four of you are my primary concern,” the creature said. “You are the bishops, the knights, the rooks. For the time being, at least, the game revolves around you—your decisions, your fate.”

Tobias’s face reddened, his hands clenching into fists. “You said—”

“I said it wasn’t that simple. I can save more than just the four of you—one more for each, perhaps—but it comes at a price.”

“What price?”

“Conservation,” the creature said. “I take so much matter from here and move it to there—at some point in time, the game will allow my enemy to do the same.”

“What? But that’s—”

“Twenty billion billion billion atoms shifted by fifty miles, or one atom shifted by a thousand billion billion billion. Enough energy to fuel a nuclear blast. It is—not insignificant, in a game such as ours.”

I felt my breath catch in my throat. The math—it didn’t particularly make sense, to me. The numbers were too big. But the other half of the problem—

I locked eyes with Jake, saw in an instant that he understood it, too. He gazed back at me for a timeless moment, his expression close and guarded, and then turned to look at Marco.

Marco, whose face was twisted and pained, his eyes suddenly wide with emotion.

“Garrett,” Tobias said, ignoring the silent conversation going on around him. “Save Garrett. Please.”

“And Rachel,” said Jake, the name sounding like it was being torn out of him. He stared at Marco, and the other boy stared back, the two of them communicating on some level deeper than thought-speak.

I can’t do this, whispered a voice in my head.

You’d better, answered another.

“Ax,” Marco finally muttered, his jaw tight.

They turned to look at me.

Can’t do this can’t do this can not do this.

You HAVE to. No way you’re letting somebody die just because you didn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings.

Tobias was an orphan. So was Garrett. Rachel had family, but there were too many of them to save—her dad, her mom, her two sisters. And my parents were already dead.

“Cassie—” Marco began, but Jake cut him off.

“No, Marco.”

Frowning, Tobias looked back and forth between the three of us, his mouth half-opened in an unspoken question. Suddenly, it clicked, his eyes widening as he figured it out.

Jake had a big family, too—his parents, his grandparents, his cousins on his mom’s side. But the person he cared about the most was his big brother Tom.

And Marco? Marco had nobody—except his father.

“I—” I began, my throat dry and tight. “I can’t—”

“Yes, you can, Cassie,” Jake said, his voice low and heavy. “This is your choice, not ours.” Beside him, Marco grimaced, his eyes glistening, but he nodded.

The thing was, I really couldn’t. They might think they’d be okay with whatever I chose, but I knew them—knew them both. It was one thing to lose a family member because of circumstances outside your control. It was something else to know you might have been able to save them—to know they’d been traded for someone else. If I picked either one, it would be the end of Jake and Marco’s friendship, and if I picked neither, all their resentment and bitterness would fall on me.

I fought for an answer, my thoughts and emotions churning, searching for any possible way out of the decision. My eyes darted around the frozen nightmare, looking anywhere but Jake and Marco—at Tobias, at the creature, at the figures lying on the ground, hovering in the air, clinging to the bars of the broken, twisted cage—

I stopped.

The boy. The boy, holding on to the cage. He was maybe six or seven years old, his clothes and face black with soot, his mouth open in a timeless scream.

I looked at Jake.

I looked at Marco.

I looked at the creature, and I did the math in my head again—ninety seconds to morph, then twenty-eight and a half minutes—twenty-eight and a half miles, at a mile per minute.

I looked back at the boy, at the lines of the tendons in his arm as he held on with all his might. He was close to the outer wall, just a few steps away from a gap where the bricks had buckled and burned, letting sunlight in.

I could make it.

I could make it.

I could make it, and for once, I could do something. Could take action, get my hands dirty, maybe make a difference.

Not for everybody. But for somebody. For one, single person. It wouldn’t change much, if I pulled it off—wouldn’t save the hundreds who’d already died or the thousands who were about to.

But it would be something—and I was tired of doing nothing.

“Marco’s dad,” I said, “and Jake’s brother Tom.” I looked into the creature’s eyes, making sure it understood.

“Wait—what?”

“Cassie, no!”

The creature nodded, and raised its hands as it had when it conjured the chair.

“No!” Jake shouted. “Stop!”

“What’s going—”

“Cassie’s trying to stay behind—”

“What—”

“Shut up,” I said, fighting to keep the quaver out of my voice. “My choice, not yours.”

“Cassie, this is suicide—”

“It isn’t. I can make it out. The snipe, remember?”

“Jake, she’s lost it—”

“Cassie—”

“Wait!” Tobias called out, his voice cutting through Jake and Marco’s objections. “Hang on a second—”

Raising an accusatory finger, he spun, rounding on the ancient creature. “You cheated,” he said. “You said you’d save the four of us and four other people, but I wouldn’t even need saving if you hadn’t brought me here. I shouldn’t count. You can bring Cassie and Tom and Marco’s dad.”

The shadow of a smile flickered across the creature’s face. “You have a—” it began.

“No,” I insisted. “If we get an extra person, save Erek. I’m going after the kid.”

“Cassie, forget the robot, just let HIM save the—”

IT IS DONE.

There was no other warning. Without the slightest transition, I found myself once more in the woods, squinting in the patchy sunlight, wearing a Hork-Bajir’s body with half a dozen weapons strapped to my chest. Jake and Marco were nowhere to be seen.

No!

The creature had dropped me outside, in morph—I was half a mile away from the pool, and the kid was already dangling—

I burst from the undergrowth, tossing guns and ammunition aside as I sprinted forward. The Hork-Bajir body was awkward on flat ground, but it made up for it in sheer power, its massive legs long since adapted to the higher gravity of Earth. Up ahead, smoke continued to pour out of the YMCA, the flames licking up the sides of the building as the firefighters struggled to beat them back.

Go.

I started demorphing as I ran, trying to control the process so that I would end just as I reached the building, keeping my legs as long as possible. There were a hundred Controllers in sight, but none of them were paying any attention to me, their eyes all locked on the wreckage of their city, their temple, their home.

Go.

I could feel my lungs beginning to burn as they emerged from Z-space, feel the throb of blood pressure in my temple. I had never been athletic, but it didn’t matter—a little boy’s life was at stake and I was not about to quit.

You should have let the creature save the kid, the voice in my head snarled. Let him save the kid, and just flown away yourself. If he dies now, it’s your fault—

But he wasn’t going to die. I knew it in my heart, in my bones. It wouldn’t happen, not now—not when I had finally, finally found a way to do something pure and unequivocal and good. It was one tiny bright spot, in all the death and horror—just one insignificant, inadequate gesture—but it was my bright spot, and I wasn’t about to let it go.

I blew past the Controllers in the parking lot, my sneakers slapping against the asphalt as I made a beeline for the hole in the wall. I felt the last traces of Hork-Bajir physiology disappear as I neared the building, felt myself become fully human just before I crossed over into the darkness and smoke.

Almost immediately, I began to hack and wheeze, my eyes watering as my aching lungs pulled in what felt like an entire roomful of smoke. Blind, coughing, I stumbled and dropped to my knees, crawling forward as I felt my way toward the cage.

“Are you there?” I screamed. The air was full of noise—the cries of the wounded, the roar of the fire, the hissing of water as the firefighters rained down a hundred gallons a second.

“Help!” came a voice, a few feet to my left. “Help—I can’t—”

I was already there, forcing my burning eyes to open, reaching out to grab the boy’s wrist. “Gotcha!” I shouted. “Climb!”

Leaning back, I hauled him up and over the lip, rolled him past me onto level ground, both of us gasping and coughing. “Mom!” he cried out. “Where’s mom—”

Not a Controller, then.

“I don’t know,” I said, struggling to keep my voice calm and reassuring. “But I’m going to get you out of here, okay? I’m going to get you out, and we’ll find her—she’s outside, we’ll find her once we’re safe—”

“Mom!” the boy shouted again, and he lunged toward the light, toward the hole in the wall, the outside world.

“No!” I called out, grabbing his ankle and dragging him back. He screamed and kicked, and I pulled him closer, catching his wrists. “Wait! Listen! There’s a—a bomb coming, it’s coming down from space, the bad guys sent it to blow everybody up because we broke the Yeerk pool—”

The boy stopped struggling at the word bomb—stopped struggling and turned to look at me, his eyes wide with fear—

“—and I can get you out but you have to trust me, you have to hold on and I’m going to—I’m going to change, okay?”

“What about my mom?” he pleaded, his eyes darting left and right.

“I’ve got—my friends are here,” I lied, desperate to get moving, to get the boy inside my morph and get out. It must have been at least three minutes since time had restarted—three minutes, maybe more. “They’re here, they’ll find her and get her out, but you’ve got to hold on to me now, okay? Hold on and don’t let go, I’m going to transform, and you’re going to transform too, we’re going to turn into a bird and fly away.”

It sounded like nonsense—was nonsense, for all that it was completely true—but the little boy didn’t move as I pulled him close, stayed still as I kept babbling. All across my skin, the hairs began to swell, fanning out and becoming feathers, turning black all over except for the patch below my chin.

“Just hang on, we’re going to get out of here, and we’re going to go find your mom—”

Lies, but lies in the service of a greater good—they rolled off my tongue without guilt or hesitation. Pressing his head to my chest, I forced my will onto the morphing routine, and sent his mind into stasis, slowly stuffing the rest of him into myself like a blanket going into a pillowcase. It was horrible and strange, not at all like any other morph I’d done, and if I’d had a normal human stomach I think I would have thrown up.

—saving him you’re saving him you’re going to save his life that’s all that matters he can be as sad as he wants about his mom but he’ll be alive because of you—

I took off while the morph was still partially incomplete, my body heavy, my wings awkward and slow. I fought for altitude, angling through the gap and out into the sunlight, growing lighter with each passing second. Fifty wingbeats, and the transformation was complete; a hundred, and I was flying as fast as I ever had—as fast as I’d flown on the night I’d failed to save my dad.

How much time had I spent in the Yeerk pool? I wanted to get as far away as I could, but I also wanted to be out of the air when the meteor hit—under water, or behind something sturdy—

TSEEEWWWWWWWW!

<AHHHHHHH!>

I rolled in midair, banking and plummeting like a stone as another Dracon beam passed through the space I’d just been occupying.

Bug fighter!

I couldn’t see the craft—it was cloaked, and I didn’t dare slow down long enough to tease out the telltale distortion that was visible to the snipe’s eye. Shedding another twenty feet of altitude, I changed direction and began pumping for speed again.

TSEEEWWWWWWWW!

TSEEEWWWWWWWW!

That time, the beams came close enough to singe the feathers on one of my wings. <No!> I shouted, changing direction yet again, this time climbing for height. If the craft was close by, I should be able to shake it, but if it was firing from a distance—

TSEEEWWWWWWWW!

Hit.

Pain.

Fall.

I was only a second or so from the ground by the time my head cleared, and the best I could do was flare my remaining wing and brace for impact. I landed with a dull thud, feeling the snipe’s legs snap like twigs.

No.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no—

The ground was covered in rocks and bushes, and I quickly rolled under cover, ignoring the screaming pain of my broken bones and the unnerving emptiness where my wing was supposed to be. Above me, I felt rather than heard the Bug fighter pass overhead—a thick, buzzing vibration, a sense of something vast and ponderous. It couldn’t have been more than twenty or thirty feet above the ground, moving slower than a car.

Searching.

Demorph—demorph, and remorph, you won’t be able to get all the way out of the blast zone but you can find a cave a lake a rock—

Except that if I demorphed now, with nothing but a scrubby bush to hide under, they would absolutely see me. And I’d have to keep the boy quiet, explain what had happened, get him back into the morph a second time—

I stayed put, feeling the snipe body growing weaker by the second, counting the seconds in my head as my heartbeat became more and more sluggish.

Fifty.

One hundred.

One fifty.

Two hundred.

There wasn’t really a moment—one moment when I knew that it was too late, that no matter what happened, I wasn’t going to make it out of the blast zone. It was more of a gradual thing, a slow settling of despair as the last shreds of hope slipped out of my grasp.

I had failed.

I had failed, and I was going to die. In twenty minutes, the asteroid would hit, not even a mile away, and the blast was going to kill me.

It was less distressing than I’d thought it would be. I wasn’t sure why—maybe it had something to do with all of the other people who’d be going with me, or with my parents, or with the fact that I knew the others had all made it out alive. Maybe I was just tired—delirious, as the snipe began to lose consciousness and drift into the darkness.

But either way, it was almost peaceful. I was free. There was nothing left to do—nothing left to prove—nobody to impress. It didn’t matter whether I was a good person or a bad one, whether Jake was proud of me or not, whether the real Cassie was the girl I tried to be or the girl I was when I wasn’t trying.

Beating my one wing against the ground, I tried to roll over, to turn one eye toward the sky, but I couldn’t do it. Giving up, I stayed face down, my beak pressing into the dirt, the sun warming the feathers on my back.

I’m sorry, Dad.

I listened to the chirping of the crickets, the whispering of the grass and the breeze, the distant sound of the burning building. I thought about Peppermint, and what it had been like to live inside her body for a while—the grace, the power, the freedom. I thought about third grade, and I thought about college, and I thought about the Gardens—about the otters, who were my favorite, who knew me when I went to visit them.

I thought about Jake.

He would blame himself, I knew. For letting me go, for not stopping me. For making it, when I didn’t. It would be hard for him, but he would have Tom there to help him through it. And besides, he was tough—tougher than he gave himself credit for.

What’s the last thing you want to think about, girl?

I closed my eyes, each breath a little shallower than the last. I wanted to think about a book—Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak. My favorite book, when I was just learning how to read, when I thought the monsters in it were real, that I could meet them someday. I thought about Max, in his animal suit, sailing across the wild sea. I thought about the wild things—how they turned out to be friendly, and made him their king. I thought about the end of the story, when he sailed back home, and his supper was still hot.

I let out one last breath, and I thought about nothing.

There was light.

And heat.

And noise.

And silence.