*Author's note: ridiculously long gaps between updates are bullshit, and I'm sorry for being a bullshitter. I am committing to AT LEAST seven updates with AT MOST two weeks between each update (a complete cycle, in other words). If I can maintain momentum after that, great. If not, I will hold off until I have another decent chunk planned. In my mind, Ch. 1-6 are "book one," and this next batch is "book two." There probably won't be THAT many books—certainly more than five, certainly fewer than fifteen. Also, apropos of nothing in particular: sometimes a continuity error is a continuity error, but sometimes, it's plot.

Chapter 07: Jake

—I watched, helpless, as Tom smiled, his eyes like chips of ice. He lifted the knife and drew it across his own throat, and I screamed as blood spurted out, as the laughter of the Yeerk inside his head became a hideous gurgle—

—I watched, helpless, as my mother's foot pressed down on the accelerator, as the car surged forward, faster and faster, as she looked into my eyes and yanked the wheel. The car shrieked, twisted, tumbled over and over again, and my mother's body flew out of the windshield and dragged along the highway, still laughing—

—I watched, helpless, as my father opened the door to the hospital roof, as he pocketed the keys and strode across the gravel, whistling a happy tune. He stepped up onto the low wall around the edge and paused, grinning, his eyes finding mine as he took the final step out into the open air—

—I watched, helpless, as Rachel—

—as Marco—

—as Cassie—

I awoke to the vibration of my phone, buried inside my pillowcase, followed a second later by the soft chime of bells in the one earbud that hadn't fallen out. My sheets were twisted and knotted around my body, musty and wet with the sweat that was still pouring out of me. Holding back a groan, I rolled over and looked at the clock.

3:45AM.

I could feel adrenaline tracing lines through my body, feel the pounding of my heart in my temples, my jaw, my fists. The nightmares were no surprise—I'd woken up to them twice tonight already. If anything, I was grateful that I'd slept long enough to have them. It was the fifth night since the construction site, and I had yet to stay asleep for more than two hours in a row.

Reaching out, I reset both alarms—the phone to 5:45, the clock to 5:50—then woke up my computer, squinting against the sudden, searing light. I switched the final backup alarm from 3:51 to 5:51 and killed the monitor, trying to recover my night vision so that I could make my way through the maze of hazards on my floor in silence.

The world outside my bedroom window was quiet and empty—no lights sliding across the clear night sky, no monstrous figures lurching through the darkness, no mysterious cars parked down the street. Tiptoeing carefully across the room, I double-checked the locks on my door and tumbled back into bed. Wearily, I pulled out my phone, swiped my passcode, and opened up our shared thread.

night guys (9:48PM)

can't sleep lol (Marco • 10:36PM)

no news (Rachel • 11:12PM)

alls well (11:48PM)

can't sleep lol (Marco • 12:34AM)

still working on hw (Rachel • 1:16AM)

np (1:49AM)

can't sleep lol (Marco • 2:33AM)

stfu marco (Rachel • 3:15AM)

I tapped np again, pushing send just as the time ticked over to 3:47. It was an empty, meaningless gesture—if the Yeerks managed to take one of us in the night, they would almost certainly also be capable of sending a fake all-clear, and smart enough to do so—but we'd unanimously agreed that it was better to wake up to something.

Setting the phone aside, I stared up at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling and began to demorph.

In the days since we'd met Elfangor, I had undergone over a dozen transformations. I had been a dog, a falcon, an alien—four times!—and a squirrel, and the DNA of a handful of other animals, hastily acquired from Cassie, floated somewhere in my blood or my brain or wherever the morphing technology stored its templates.

But this transformation was the strangest by far, precisely because it wasn't. I could feel the process working, feel the subtle shift and tingle as it filtered every cell and molecule, calling my true body back from hyperspace as it disassembled the construct particle by particle. And yet, as I lay there, the only noticeable change was the gradual shrinking of my fingernails.

It had taken us an embarrassingly long time to stumble upon the idea of a marker, a trigger—some tangible difference that could separate the morph, in our minds, from the original. But in the end, it had proven to be that simple. Marco acquired me, Marco morphed me, I trimmed my fingernails, I acquired myself. A little over a minute and a half later, and the fingernails were back.

It was an exhilarating hack, the first unconditionally good news we'd had since Elfangor's death, and it would have been cause for celebration if we hadn't already been dead on our feet from exhaustion. Access to thought-speak alone would have been worth the hassle of demorphing and remorphing every two hours, and on top of that, we would be able to heal any non-lethal injury in minutes, and to morph out from under a Yeerk stunner without giving ourselves away.

"Of course, if they infest us in between, we might still be screwed," Marco had pointed out. "Elfangor's little earplugs probably aren't staying put." But in that case, Rachel had argued, what was to stop us from simply demorphing, and scattering the Yeerk's atoms into nothingness?

We'd done a little test, each within a carbon copy of our own bodies, downing Doritos and Pop Tarts until we couldn't eat any more, then demorphing to find ourselves hungry again. It wasn't conclusive, by any means, but the chill we'd all felt when we remorphed a moment later and were still hungry…

Rachel had seemed almost eager, after that.

Running a thumb along my fingertips, I stifled a yawn and refocused. It was Tuesday night—technically Wednesday morning—and school would be cancelled for two more days. We'd been on alert for three nights already, and I could feel the beginnings of a headache behind the bridge of my nose, and that little pain you get in your neck when it hasn't rested long enough. I kicked and tugged at my sheets, trying to find a comfortable position as my body slowly disappeared and was replaced by a copy of itself.

Four more hours, I thought to myself. Four more hours, and then it would be time to get up, and then—

Well. One way or another, the next night would be different.

My armor in place, I closed my eyes and rolled over, slowly sinking back into my nightmares.

My name is Jake Berenson.

It's weird, to think that that's now a secret. Like one of those fairy tales, where people who know your true name have ultimate power over you. If the Yeerks find out who I am…

Well, they won't quite have ultimate power over me. Cassie had gone through hell, but at least the implants had worked.

They can take my parents, though, and my brother Tom.

Take my friends, the ones who aren't a part of our little resistance movement.

They can take my neighbors, my teachers, my coach, my troop leader.

In the end, they're going to try to take everybody.

How much does it take, to break a person? How hard would it be for the Yeerks to push me over the edge, if they had everyone I loved, and knew me like they'd raised me, like they'd grown up beside me?

In my dreams, Tom had killed himself, over and over, a hundred different ways, and laughed each time as he died.

The Yeerks didn't need ultimate power. Regular power was more than enough.

I'm a younger brother, you know. I think that makes a difference. Marco and Cassie and Tobias—sort of—they're all only children. Rachel's got two younger sisters, but she was almost six by the time Jordan was born. She remembers what it was like to be the only kid in the family—she became an older sister.

I've always been a younger brother. As long as I've lived, there's always been somebody bigger and stronger, somebody with more knowledge, more power, more respect. Not that Tom's a bad guy—we get along just fine, most of the time. But that gap, that difference—it's real, and it matters. Tom is three years older than me. He was already in high school by the time I got to middle school. He got his license just before Christmas last year, and inherited Dad's old Nissan.

I got a PS4. At the time, I was thrilled.

When I was maybe nine years old, our parents decided they were tired of the way Tom and I were constantly bickering with one another, and ordered us to find another way to settle our differences. After some spirited debate, we settled on rock-paper-scissors, best two out of three.

It seemed fair, at the time. I mean, you've got exactly three options, right? You win, you lose, or you draw. No gray areas. Simple. Straightforward.

Except, as it happened, I was a lot better at rock-paper-scissors than my older brother. Turns out if you understand how someone thinks—I mean really understand, on a deep, intuitive level—you can cut those three options down to one without much trouble. For a few short weeks, I won every argument. One day, I even wrote down scissors scissors rock paper rock rock rock paper in advance, put it in my back pocket, and proceeded to win all eight tosses. Tom locked me in a closet, Dad made him do all the yardwork, and we switched to flipping coins after that.

It's not that my brother is stupid, or unimaginative, or especially predictable. It's just that growing up with him forced me to pay attention—to perfect a kind of awareness that Tom never had any incentive to develop. It wasn't a conscious thing. It's not like I was thinking hmmm, he threw rock last time and lost, so he'd stick with rock to surprise me, except he knows I'd predict that, so he's actually going to switch to paper! No, I just looked at him, and some part of my brain spat out paper or scissors or rock, and if I listened to it, I won, nine times out of ten.

Against Marco and Rachel, it was more like seven or eight.

Against random kids in the cafeteria, it was closer to six—not great, but still enough to win more often than I lost.

It's not hard, when there are only three choices, and there's always a right answer. When you can look the other person in the eye and get a sense of how they think, even if you don't know them all that well. When there's nothing real at stake, and you can just keep playing until even the tiniest edge starts to make a difference in your favor.

But that's not the game we're playing now.

I'd lucked out, with Tobias. It had felt right, waiting by the cube for him to come back, but I didn't have that same sense of certainty that I had with Tom. Tobias was still just too much of a stranger, even after almost a year of hanging out with him in the halls at school. I'd been completely thrown when he said he was going after Elfangor's brother, and I still didn't know whether I'd been right to trust him about the kid, Garrett.

And if I couldn't even predict Tobias—

We have no idea who the Yeerks really are, deep down inside. No idea what they are. How they think, or what they want, or how far they'll go to get it, or even how they define 'far.'

They executed the Chapmans for no apparent reason, in the middle of the night, when the three of them had no plausible excuse for being out in a car together.

They took Cassie's mother in a preemptive move, allegedly as part of a larger strategy to keep rogue Andalites from acquiring powerful Earth morphs.

They had infested a number of cops, firefighters, and EMTs, and were using those hosts to respond to Controller distress signals, and maybe just to infest anybody who called 911.

They had set up shop in a medium-sized city on the Pacific coast, instead of in Washington or New York or Beijing—where they'd have had easy access to power—or the middle of some quiet, backwater village—where they wouldn't have had to worry about being discovered.

They were traveling in pairs, converting whole families, carrying stunners and communicators and spare Yeerks apparently just in case, but they'd also somehow missed the five of us cowering pretty much out in the open in the middle of a construction site.

The scattered facts made no sense together, formed no recognizable pattern. It was an opaque mixture of smart and stupid, capable and incompetent. And my little black box needed a pattern—needed something to latch on to, before it was willing to offer up predictions, to throw its support behind one plan or another.

I could have recruited Tom, gone back for the cube after Tobias and Garrett left—could have brought him immediately into our circle, into the fight.

Would that have been good, bad, or neutral?

I could use Elfangor's body—morph into an Andalite in the middle of the mall or the stadium or downtown, pretend to be an alien coming out of disguise and just start yelling ‹Take me to your leader.›

Win, lose, or draw?

We could hijack a plane—or better yet, a Bug fighter—and crash it into the center of town, try to take out the Yeerk pool. Or fly it up into orbit, to whatever mothership the Yeerks had hidden up there. We could kidnap the president—or try, anyway—hold her for three days, and then give her the morphing power. We could start building an army, or give the morphing cube to the Army.

The problem was, none of those ideas were good or bad, on their own. Rock, by itself, isn't a winning throw. It isn't anything, except in relation to scissors or paper or another rock. And we had no way of knowing what the Yeerks were thinking, what they were planning, what they were going to do next.

The solution, Marco had said, was to try to find a move which was good under any circumstances—something the Yeerks couldn't anticipate or twist to their advantage.

No, Rachel had argued, the solution was not to play. To get clear, regroup, gather more information. We'd almost lost Cassie, she'd pointed out. It would only take one mistake to lose everything.

To which Marco had countered that all the Yeerks needed to win was for us to do nothing.

And that's when my phone had buzzed, and Rachel's just after.

Apparently, the Yeerks had bought Cassie's off-the-cuff cover story. Bought it so completely that they'd written off Cassie entirely, and thrown in both of her parents for good measure. They'd put a fifteen-second slot on the morning news, announcing the tragic deaths of Walter, Michelle, and Cassie Withers, in an accident on Thistledown Road involving a deer, a tree, and no other vehicles.

We'd sort of stopped arguing for a few minutes, after that.

"Loose ends," Marco had growled, once Rachel and I managed to get ourselves mostly under control. "They're getting rid of any host whose identity has been compromised. Which means there are Andalite bandits out there—they must have figured out that Mr. Chapman was a Controller, so the Yeerks took him out of the picture before they could expose him or follow him to the pool or whatever."

"We have to—somebody has to—to tell Cassie," Rachel had said, her voice still catching on silent sobs.

I hadn't responded to either of them. On the surface, I was still reeling. My brain kept replaying a memory of Cassie's parents from a week before, the last time I'd had dinner at her house. It was somehow impossible to imagine that kitchen being dark and silent and empty.

But on a deeper level, everything else was falling into place. Like a marble in a game of Mouse Trap, Marco's theory had clicked, rolled, and tumbled through my little black box, setting in motion half a dozen tiny chain reactions, leaving me with a sudden feeling of clarity.

The Yeerks were afraid.

Not careful, not prudent, not cautiously circumspect, but actively and aggressively paranoid. They were jumping at shadows. They were genuinely worried about the threat of exposure, so much so that they'd staged two car accidents in as many days, just to keep their operation hidden from Andalite eyes.

They were vulnerable.

They were vulnerable, and I was angry.

"New plan," I'd said, my voice coming out brittle and sharp. "Marco, you can get your dad out if you want, but you need to stick around. Rachel—we don't know where Cassie is, and there's no point wasting time tracking her down."

I didn't think—not exactly. There wasn't really time to think. I just knew, as if a switch had been flipped—as if I'd known all along, and had only just remembered.

I still had no idea who the Yeerks really were. I didn't understand all of the choices they were making, wouldn't have dared to predict where the war would go in two weeks or two months or two years. But I thought I knew what they were going to do next.

And scissors beat paper.

"We're going after the pool."

‹Run it by me one more time, and this time listen to yourself.›

I sighed, fiddling absentmindedly with the controls of the racing game as the clock ticked down to zero and the words YOU LOSE flashed across the screen. Around me, the arcade echoed with the sounds of lasers and laughter, packed with kids enjoying the impromptu vacation.

‹They're trying to keep a low profile,› I said, holding the beam of my thoughts narrow so that only Marco could hear them. He was a hundred yards away, shadowing our target as she ate dinner in the food court. ‹It's already a stretch that two families with kids in the same grade both died in car wrecks one after the other. They're going to want to wait until all of this settles down before they make any new moves.›

‹Yeah, I'm with you on that part. Fits with what Cassie said about free spread being on pause, or whatever. And sure, yeah, that makes this a good time to try to make our first move. But this chick hasn't done anything weird or suspicious at all.›

‹We haven't been watching her the whole time.›

Reaching into my pocket, I dug out another four quarters and dropped them into the machine, double-taking as I had every time at the unexpected shade of my skin. I was incognito, wearing the body of a random teenager from the far side of town. We'd biked over to the other mall on Monday evening, and Marco had done some incredibly stupid patter about practicing hypnosis, somehow convincing a bunch of people to let us hold their hands long enough to acquire them.

‹Look,› I continued. ‹There was no wreck, right? And they have Cassie's parents' bodies, but no Cassie. So fine, they tell everybody it's got to be a closed-casket thing, but there's always some family member that has to take a look. To identify them and stuff. And Cassie's aunt Mikayla is the only one in town.›

‹So they bring her in Sunday night, infest her on the spot, and she fields the questions for anybody else who's being nosy—›

‹—and now it's Wednesday, and she's due for a visit to the Yeerk pool.›

On the screen, my car slammed into a railing and spun out, dropping me from fourth place down to eleventh.

‹This is so thin I can't use it for toilet paper, man. Like, I can't even count how many ways this whole thing falls apart. Maybe they didn't make her a Controller in the first place. Maybe they did, but not until Monday, or maybe she just went to the pool yesterday while we were all stuck at the Chapman memorial thing. I mean, just because Elfangor said every three days doesn't mean it's three days exactly, right? And even if she is a Controller and she does lead us to the pool, what's stopping them from having some kind of crazy force field bio-filter in place? It's what I'd do, if I was worried about Andalite bandits. Or worse, this whole thing could be one giant trap.›

‹It's not a trap,› I said flatly.

Yanking the wheel, I skidded out again, this time falling completely off the map. I'd already poured eight dollars into the game over the past ten minutes. If I didn't pull it together soon, I was going to run out of money.

The problem was, everything that Marco was saying was true. It was full of holes, and I was making a ton of assumptions. But every time I tried to lay out a good argument, I just couldn't find the right words. Like how the Yeerks' fear meant that the pool wasn't secure yet, which meant there weren't any crazy force fields, and we would be able to infiltrate it. Or how the Yeerks would know humans well enough by now to grab Cassie's aunt and use her, but how Andalites wouldn't know humans well enough to anticipate it, and how the Yeerks knew that, so they'd see it as a safe move and wouldn't guard against it the way they were probably guarding against us tracking down one of the cops or EMTs…

Somewhere inside my little black box, it all added up. But there were too many layers, too many ifs. I couldn't keep up with Marco when it came to logic-chopping, and so I was leaning on my "authority" pretty hard.

‹We can always bail,› I reminded him. ‹If things start looking dicey. And it's not like we've wasted a ton of time trailing Mikayla. If she doesn't lead us anywhere tonight, we call it off and switch to plan B.›

Marco was silent for a moment. ‹Just make me one promise,› he said finally. ‹If it turns out you are right, don't go nuts and start thinking you have some kind of spider sense, okay? Because right for the wrong reasons is only a tiny bit better than flat-out wrong.›

I hesitated, trying to come up with a good response, and then another voice broke into my thoughts.

‹She's on the move. Marco, you on us?›

‹Yeah, I've got you. She's getting up to dump her tray—safe bet she's headed back to her car. I'll follow and let you know when to bail out. Jake, time to roll.›

It was tough, trying to tail a possible Controller with only three people, especially when we had no idea where the Yeerk pool might be, or what its entrance might be like. For all we knew, Mikayla would just duck into a bathroom somewhere and never come back out.

So we'd settled on a rotation. One of us would stick to her—literally—in fly morph, one of us would tail her from a distance in a human disguise, and the third person would be on standby, watching the clock and moving the bags of extra clothes we'd brought into position for emergency demorphs. Tagging out was tricky—the fly couldn't really see anything further than two or three feet away, so we either had to know exactly where Mikayla would be in advance, or we had to coordinate a drop-off at close range.

I got up and left the arcade at a brisk walk, demorphing inside my clothes as I went, keeping the process slow enough that none of the other mall patrons would notice. Mikayla's car was in the outdoor parking lot, just a short walk from the closest entrance.

‹Yep, she's leaving. Jake, ETA is maybe three minutes, maybe less. Want me to slow her down?›

I pushed my way through the double doors and out into the sunlight. ‹No, I've got it,› I said, just as my ability to thought-speak disappeared.

Walking over to her car, I did a quick spin to confirm that no one else was nearby or paying attention, and then dropped to the ground and rolled underneath. I would have to leave my shirt, shorts, and flip-flops behind; fortunately, they were Tom's old beach clothes, and probably wouldn't be missed.

Taking a deep breath, I focused my mind and felt the changes begin.

So far, every morph had been different, and every morph had been horrible in one way or another. Once, while morphing Elfangor, the bones for my extra fingers had simply shot out of the side of my hands, the flesh and skin crawling up them afterward like some kind of creepy time-lapse of vines growing.

This time, the first thing to change was my vision. For a moment, everything went dim and blurry, and then the world sort of shattered as I felt my eyeballs bulge and divide, becoming the compound eyes of an insect.

Fortunately, my human brain wasn't quite equipped to process all the new information, so I couldn't see too much detail as the hairs on my arms began to thicken into razor-like barbs, or as my skin turned black and waxy like burnt brownies.

‹Drop off now, Rachel,› said Marco. ‹Head for the heavenly smell—the dumpster's thirty feet to your left, and the coast is clear. Jake, two minutes, give or take.›

‹I'm not going to be airborne in time to guide you into the car, Jake,› Rachel warned. ‹Hope you can figure it out.›

It was still too early for me to reply by thought-speak. I had started to shrink, the shirt and shorts ballooning around me as my arms and legs shriveled and another pair of limbs started to squirm their way out of my abdomen. I felt a kind of peeling sensation on my back, and suddenly my skin split into sheets and became wings.

I'm pretty sure that whatever Andalite scientist came up with morphing belongs firmly in the "mad" category. I wondered vaguely how they'd gone about testing the technology, and whether they'd thought to include some kind of numbing factor right from the start, or whether they'd figured that out only after some poor test subject lost his mind from the pain.

‹Testing,› I called out. ‹Can you hear me?›

‹Roger,› came the reply. ‹This is Marco; Rachel's demorphing. Mikayla will be at the car in about one minute. You going to be ready?›

The shrinking stopped, and the sloshing and grinding slowed as the last few changes fell into place. ‹Yeah. Coming out from under the car now.›

Ever wondered what it would be like to be the Flash? Not just to zip around at supersonic speeds, but to go from zero to a million in the blink of an eye?

Flies are fast.

One second, I was under the car, surrounded by the smells of sweat, detergent, and motor oil. The next, I was clinging to the door of the car, feeling the heat of the afternoon sun, completely indifferent to the fact that my whole world had turned sideways. In between, I'd traveled what felt like a hundred miles while strapped to the nose of a rocket.

You wouldn't think being a fly would be fun, compared to being a dog or a bird or an alien. But once you got past the all-consuming grossness of the situation, it was like riding the ultimate rollercoaster. Forward, backward, sideways, upside-down—the fly didn't care. It could change direction four or five times in a second.

I counted in my head as I waited, fighting the fly's instinctive desire to move, to hide, to follow the smell of food. If I was interpreting the wild mosaic of my vision correctly, I had managed to plant myself just behind the driver's side door, low enough to the ground to avoid notice against the dark color of the paint.

‹Now,› Marco said, just as I sensed the vibrations and pressure changes of someone approaching the car. A continent moved—the door opening—a giant swept past—Mikayla, slipping into the driver's seat—and in another flash, I was inside the car, hunkering down on the floor in the back. ‹I'm in,› I reported.

‹Roger. Time is 6:48. Your limit was two-oh-four, right? So counting the minute you just spent waiting, you've got until 8:51. Rachel, you up yet?›

‹Almost. I'll be able to catch up—just give me a direction.›

‹North exit. Heading toward midtown. Looks like she's not going home just yet.›

‹Can you stay on her?›

‹Yeah, there's plenty of traffic. Going dark for a minute while I reset my clock.›

For a few minutes, all was quiet. I could feel the rumbling of the car as it rolled down the rough pavement, sense the lurching as Mikayla braked and accelerated. I had a sense that seemed to correspond to hearing, but it was impossible to make out actual sounds—everything was muffled and alien, the fly brain built to mine the data for food and threats and nothing else. ‹Rachel,› I called out tentatively. ‹Any guesses where we're going?›

‹Doesn't look like she's headed for the school,› Rachel answered back. ‹She's driving down Church Street. There's the YMCA, city park, a bunch of strip malls and small stores and stuff. Maybe the courthouse? Tough to say.›

The car lurched again, and a cheese ball rolled out from under one of the seats. I resisted the sudden urge to vomit on it, and tried not to think about the fact that I had a proboscis. ‹Okay,› I said. ‹I guess I'll settle in.›

‹Um. Jake. Anything weird just happen on your end?›

I felt a little spike of fear and took stock of my surroundings. I was somewhere near Mikayla's right ankle, riding along as she walked through the hallways of the YMCA. Marco and Rachel were both outside—Marco in osprey morph, Rachel in human disguise, wearing one of the sets of spare clothes.

I could hear/feel the sound of impacts in the distance, the low variable murmur that I was beginning to associate with speech, the buffeting wind that came and went with each step Mikayla took. What little I could see of the hallway seemed completely normal—fluorescent lights, dingy tile, pale blue walls with peeling paint.

‹Nothing, why?›

‹Because you just disappeared.›

I felt another spike, larger this time, and almost lost control to the fly body, which was extremely unhappy about remaining so still for so long. ‹What?› I demanded.

‹I'm looking at the hallway you should be walking down, and Mikayla's not there. I can see it through the windows, and it's completely empty. That guy at the desk buzzed you through the door, I saw you go through it, but you didn't show up on the other side.›

‹I—what—›

‹Some kind of portal?› Rachel asked, her voice taut. ‹Or a hologram?›

‹Jake, what do you see?›

I looked around again, trying to make sense of the insane swirl of images. ‹Nothing,› I said. ‹I mean, not nothing—it looks like a normal hallway. I think I can hear basketballs. It smells the same as it did thirty seconds ago. I—I don't think I teleported anywhere, or anything like that.›

Mikayla's footsteps slowed, and I felt another rush of air as she pushed open a door and stepped into a stairwell.

‹Safe money's on hologram, then,› Marco said. ‹Looks like you were right after all, Jake.›

‹Should he bail?› Rachel asked. ‹Should we go in after him?›

‹Not yet,› I ordered, clamping down on my own fear. ‹We need information. So far we've still got nothing.›

‹Where are you?›

‹In a stairwell. At the end of the hallway, I think. Feels like we've gone down…two stories?› There was another rush of air, this time bringing with it a barrage of new sounds and smells. ‹Out of the stairwell now. I'm in another hallway, I think—no, wait. A—a bathroom? Locker room?›

I heard an echo of grim laughter in my head. ‹The subterranean pool at the center of the city,› Marco said, his voice bitter. ‹The YMCA pool? The one that's basically the basement of the entire building?›

‹Holy crap,› Rachel breathed. ‹I thought—the way Elfangor said it—›

‹Yeah, me, too. But I guess this is more their style, anyway. I mean, why build something from scratch when you can just steal and repurpose? Plumbing, power, restricted access…›

‹I'm jumping ship,› I broke in. ‹This room sounds like it's empty except for Mikayla. I'm going to try to find a corner and get into a morph with better senses.›

‹Jake, be careful!›

No shit. Launching myself away from Mikayla's ankle, I did a quick aerial tour of the space. It was hard to be sure, but it looked like a locker room. Perching on the ceiling, I peered down at the blurred shape that was Cassie's aunt. She was shuffling around, bending and twisting without going anywhere.

Changing clothes.

I let go of the rough surface of the drop ceiling and headed for the opposite corner of the room, moving at approximately Mach seven. There was a series of quiet, dark cells that might have been showers or changing rooms. I zipped into one of them and paused again, unable to stop myself from rubbing my forelimbs together.

Mikayla's movements were like a thunderstorm, distant and muffled, the pressure waves broken and distorted as they bounced off the walls and ceiling and wormed their way into the enclosed space of the stall. After a couple of minutes, they tapered off, ending with a pair of loud bangs that might have been doors slamming shut. Then there was silence.

‹Demorphing,› I broadcast, unable to keep the tension out of my tone. ‹If you don't hear from me in three minutes, something's gone wrong.›

If I'd had a heart, it would have been pounding. Every instinct I had was crying for me to stay hidden, to stay small, to find my way out of the locker room and out of the building. I wanted nothing less than to find myself naked and alone in a women's locker room in the middle of a bodysnatcher stronghold.

But alongside the fear was an icy, uncompromising resolve. They had taken Cassie's family. They were going to try to take mine. And Marco and Rachel were waiting, would take either inspiration or discouragement from my example.

How far would you go, if the fate of your species hung in the balance?

No, that was the wrong question. As I hesitated, I saw once more the image from my nightmares, my brother Tom laughing as the Yeerk inside his head dragged a knife across his throat.

Never.

Focusing, I began to change, my mind already leaping ahead to the next phase of the operation. I had over a dozen options to choose from—dog, squirrel, falcon, various humans. Most of them I hadn't actually morphed yet—tiger, wolf, bat, spider, lizard.

The lizard.

Cassie had called it a six-lined something-or-other. It was small, only a little over six inches, and not particularly brightly colored. It could see and hear well enough to catch bugs, which meant I should be able to get a sense of my environment. It could climb. Most importantly, it was fast—Cassie had said they could sprint up to eighteen miles per hour, and were almost impossible to catch.

The decision made, I wasted no time in starting my next morph. Ninety seconds later, I was skittering across the empty locker room, hugging the grime-coated corner as I headed for the door.

‹Rachel,› I called out. ‹What time is it?›

‹7:11. You've got until 9:15.›

‹Marco. Can you see the pool from the outside? Through the windows?›

‹Yeah. Looks totally normal. Maybe twenty people swimming, ten people around the edges, couple of lifeguards.›

‹Rachel. Can you get into the lobby? Start asking about memberships, maybe get a sense of what people have to do to get past the door guard?›

‹On it. Where are you?›

‹I'm in lizard morph, leaving the locker room. I think I can make it down the hall without anybody seeing me.›

Roughly a thousand Controllers, visiting the Yeerk pool every three days. Call it three hundred and fifty per day, probably sticking to business hours. Thirty five or so per hour. One arriving every two minutes, on average, probably with some big spikes in the morning before school and in the evening after work.

There would be someone in the hallway.

Reaching the door, I flattened myself out and stuck my head under the crack. I tasted the air, my eyes swiveling to take in the scene. Sure enough, there were two men just emerging from the stairwell. I waited until they disappeared around the corner, and then darted after them, still sticking close to the wall.

They were disappearing into the men's locker room, the door swinging shut behind them. Ahead of me ran another long hallway, this one ending in a pair of double doors with a large blue sign reading POOL.

‹Found the pool,› I said. I darted forward again, the lizard's powerful legs churning underneath me, and stopped a few feet short of the entrance. This one was tightly sealed, with a kind of brush or comb at the bottom of each door, as if to keep out dust. I would have to wait for someone else to come through.

‹Has it occurred to you that maybe now is the time to bail?›

I could tell by the intonation that it was Marco, and that the question was private, audible only to me. ‹We still don't have any real information,› I pointed out. ‹We don't know what the pool looks like, or what goes on inside, or how to disrupt it. We don't even really know that this is the place—not for sure.›

‹It's the place,› Marco said darkly. ‹The people in the pool just looped. Like a gif. It's another hologram, a recording—maybe five minutes long.›

‹All the more reason to get inside and take a look.›

‹You're alone in there, man. You run into trouble, it's going to be a long ten minutes before Rachel and I can get close enough to help.›

In front of me, there was a click, and then the door swung open. A woman emerged, followed by the sound of screaming. ‹Too late,› I said, rushing forward as the door began to close.

And before Marco could object, I stepped across the threshold, and into hell on earth.