Author's Note: Breaking the chapter order, probably for good (though I'll endeavor not to give any one character more than two chapters per arc, as I like the story to remain balanced). One benefit is that storylines can progress more naturally even with a "split party;" another is that various spoilers will be harder to spot simply by looking at the lineup.

That being said, there's some chance that the right move for two weeks from now is Tobias, Part II. Either that or Jake. Vote now on your phones!

Chapter 22: Tobias

Not in control, never in control.

I rose on borrowed wings, fighting for altitude as I flapped upward through the dust and haze toward the clear, blue sky. The wreckage was close and tight around me, and I felt a tug as I came too close to a snarl of twisted metal and lost several russet tail feathers.

I reached open air just as the squad cars and fire engines pulled up. There were maybe twenty people scattered in a wide circle around Jeremiah's house, with more making their way closer across lawns and down the street. Two men were already inside, climbing gingerly over the wreckage and debris—if they had been thirty seconds faster, they would have caught me mid-morph.

How long has it been?

Three minutes? Four? I had finished demorphing, the ship had crashed, I had dealt with my wound and the remaining Controllers, I had stunned the kid, I had killed maybe another minute trying to decide what to do, I had remorphed—

Five minutes. At least.

How quickly would the Yeerks respond? They were almost certainly already on their way—how long would it take for them to get here from California?

Or from orbit. Or from somewhere else in D.C.

I had seconds. Maybe—maybe—minutes.

Okay, options.

I looked down at the scene below. The police and firefighters had fanned out, establishing a perimeter with cones and yellow tape, but it wasn't like that stopped anyone from looking. The situation was undeniable, obvious—it was, unmistakably, a spaceship crashed into a house. I saw at least fifteen phones held up, taking pictures and video, and in the distance I could see a news van, maybe a mile and a half away.

Would Visser Three try to blow everything up? Could he, at this point, without giving the game away?

Might be worth it anyway, if the alternative is letting the U.S. government get their hands on Bug fighter technology—

I shook my head, scanning the horizon as I continued to spiral upward. Actions, not speculation. Thirty seconds.

Visser Three. He would glass the neighborhood, or kill the internet, or try some kind of coverup, or just open up with all-out warfare. And he knew I was here, or would guess that somebody was here—it would be too much of a coincidence for a Bug fighter to crash, on accident, at Jeremiah Poznanski's house, one day after the destruction of the Yeerk pool.

He would expect me to—what?

I could—

I could—

Get away and hide, said Garrett's voice in my head. Save the kid and the cube, wait and see how he reacts. Or go public right now, tell everyone to take as many photos as they can and put them all on the internet in case Visser Three tries something. Or try to stop everybody down there, distract them or knock them out or something, so that it doesn't blow up into something the Yeerks HAVE to respond to. Or go straight back to Washington and try to find Paul Evans. Or—

Ten seconds. Decide.

Visser Three knew I was here, which meant he would predict what I was going to do, and use that to do something else, except that I knew that, which meant I should—what?

I didn't know.

I didn't know, and the clock was ticking, and any second now they might just blow everything up, taking me and the kid and the cube along with it, and I was out in the open, alone, exposed—

I froze, stalling in the air for a heart-stopping moment before I resumed flapping.

Alone.

I wasn't alone.

Wheeling, I scanned the nearby houses, searching desperately through the windows with the hawk's piercing, phenomenal vision. This looked like a quiet neighborhood, with lots of retirees. Maybe, just maybe—

Yes.

There.

I folded my wings and dove, mentally bracing myself. My head—above all, I would need to protect my head. As long as I didn't die on impact, I would be able to heal any other injuries by demorphing—

At the last second, I reversed in midair, bringing my talons forward as if striking at a mouse or a squirrel, covering my face with my wings.

Crash.

I almost passed out from the pain—shocking, all-consuming pain. Despite its four-foot wingspan, the hawk body barely weighed two and a half pounds, all hollow bones and delicate muscle, and I had hit the glass of the second-story window hard. I was bleeding in at least a dozen places, and it felt like there wasn't a single unbroken bone left in my legs, wings, or chest.

Seven minutes, give or take.

I began to demorph, not bothering to wait to see if anyone would come running from inside the house. Slowly—agonizingly—my bones knitted themselves back together, the pain fading as my feathers melted and became skin, as my left wing swelled and thickened into the body of Jeremiah's son.

Ignoring the fragments of wood and glass, I straightened and stood before the morph was complete, dragging the still-attached kid with me as I staggered toward the cordless phone on the nightstand. With each step, pain radiated up my right forearm, and I felt a wave of horror and nausea as I caught sight of the charred stump.

At least it's not gushing blood.

Looking away, I waited until my left hand solidified, differentiated, my skin separating from the shirt of the unconscious boy. Lifting the phone out of its cradle, I dialed with my thumb and held it up to my mostly-human ear.

"Hello?"

"Rictic," I said, my voice a gravelly croak as my throat finished rearranging itself. "Tobias. Where are you? Can you get away?"

"Still shadowing Poznanski. He's in the next room, with President Tyagi."

President Paul Evans, actually—

Later. "How fast can you get to Poznanski's house?"

A tiny pause, just barely long enough to be chilling. "Four minutes, if I'm careful," the android said levelly. "Ninety seconds, if I'm not."

"I shot down a Bug fighter. Almost ten minutes ago. It's out in the open, maybe a hundred witnesses. Visser Three—"

"On my way."

The line went dead, and I sucked in a breath.

Now the cube.

I looked over at the kid—David—lying motionless by the window.

No time.

Down the stairs, out the door, down the street, moaning through gritted teeth with every jarring step as I counted in my head—seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty. Rounding a corner, I sprinted for the house where I had left the bag—tore open the crawlspace door—scrambled inside awkwardly on three limbs.

Thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven—

Crawling back out, I retraced my steps, my lungs burning as the bookbag bounced up and down on my back. The sirens had faded, giving way to the rhythmic drone of approaching helicopters, and as I headed back toward David I caught a glimpse of a black plastic at the end of the street, some kind of privacy barrier that the police were erecting.

One minute twelve, one minute thirteen—

Calling in Rictic was probably a good move. The doglike android was incredibly powerful—faster than a bullet, with force fields and holograms and the ability to communicate directly with the rest of the Chee. If the Yeerks tried anything violent—

—anything short of another asteroid, that is—

—he would make a huge difference. But he'd intervene just as readily if I tried anything violent, too. Which meant that—for better or worse—I'd just committed us to a containment strategy.

Would Visser Three anticipate that? And if he did, what would he do in response?

One minute twenty-four, one minute twenty-five—

I burst back in through the front door and was halfway up the stairs when exhaustion and blood loss finally caught up to me, my vision narrowing and darkening as my body tried to faint. I stumbled—staggered—slammed one knee into the corner of a stair and barely managed to forestall the reflex to catch myself with the right hand I no longer had.

No—

I felt my grip on reality turn soft and slippery, the bookbag slipping from my shoulder as my muscles turned to water. I was flattening, collapsing, sliding—

NO—

My vision shrank down to a pinhole as the darkness closed in, all the blood draining out of my brain and into my torso. With my last shred of consciousness, I raised my right arm above my head and swung it down onto the nearest step.

It wasn't even that hard—barely more than the force of gravity—but the throbbing pain that had been lurking in the background tripled—quadrupled—flared into brilliance like a lightning strike, burning away the fog and lethargy. Turning my head, I threw up, the liquid trickling down beside me as I slid another couple of steps.

Get.

UP.

Weak and shaking, my heart still pounding, I began crawling up the staircase, not bothering to try to stand upright. I had to get to the top of the stairs because—

—because—

I threw up again, this time unable to avoid getting it all over myself. I was fading fast, needed to get into morph—

Not yet!

—because—

Right. The kid. David.

Reaching the top of the stairs, I rose up to my knees, skidding across the carpet while I braced myself against the wall with my left hand. I felt a trickling, dripping sensation on my right side, and decided not to look.

Twelve minutes. Maybe thirteen.

Stay, or go?

With Rictic coming, it was a lot less dangerous to stay. Even if Visser Three did have another asteroid, it would take at least another thirty minutes for it to get here. And here was where all the attention was—if the Yeerks were going to make any effort at all to maintain the charade, then they were more constrained here than anywhere else.

Not the hawk, then, I thought, as I rolled over onto my back next to David's prone figure. Probably not any animal—most of my morphs were good for fighting and escaping, not infiltrating crowds.

Human, then. I had upwards of a hundred different options to choose from, thanks to the past few weeks. I glanced down at my clothes—sweaty, bloodstained, caked with dust and vomit.

Closet.

Fighting the dizziness, I rose up to my knees once more, waddling over to the sliding, mirrored door. Pushing it aside, I breathed a sigh of relief at the rack of entirely-normal-sized shirts and pants.

Paul Evans.

Physically fit, nondescript, and possessed of a large amount of training and expertise. Shucking the bag—I wanted the shredder both readily available and readily hidden—I grabbed the cube in my left hand and rested my forearm across David's calf.

Here goes, I thought.

Hawk to human, human to human—Poznanski—then back to my own body, back to hawk, and back to my own body yet again, all within the past half hour. There was a good chance this would be my last morph any time soon, which meant I had a little over two hours—

—no, make that like an hour and ten minutes, once you add in David's weight—

—to get somewhere where I could rest and recover and get treatment for my arm.

You know, you actually might not make it out of this one, a voice in my head began, but it was quickly drowned out by another:

We'll just do the next thing, and the next, and the next. We'll keep on trying until we figure out a way. Because we aren't the type of people who back down.

You'd better be alive, Garrett, I thought, as David and the cube and my own battered, broken body all disappeared, consumed by the athletic, thirtyish figure of Paul Evans.

And then—

"Tobias! There you are."

I jerked violently on the floor, the changes sputtering to a halt as I lost concentration. Behind me, the air rippled and split, and Rictic's human form appeared, standing in the doorway of the bedroom.

"What—" I began, but the android cut me off.

"Morph signature," he said. "Couldn't locate you until a few seconds ago."

Gritting my teeth, I refocused, feeling the morph slowly grind into motion again. "What's going on outside?"

"Nothing yet, but there's a Bug fighter on approach. Cloaked, going slow—I wouldn't have noticed it if I hadn't been doing a close scan on the approach vector from the moon. We've got maybe three minutes before it's here, maybe two before it's in firing range."

"Can you—you know—do something about it?"

"Not unless you can prove it's unmanned. I can probably block any shots it makes, until it gets close enough that I can't maneuver in front of them."

I pushed myself up into a sitting position. "Are there any other ones out there? Ones that you wouldn't have noticed because you didn't do a close scan on their attack vector or whatever?"

"Maybe. Nothing in the sky right now, though."

"I heard helicopters earlier."

"Cleared out. I left a note for Poznanski and Tyagi before I split. They got on the phone to the Air Force right before the Air Force was about to call them. And Homeland Security is on their way to take over from the local PD."

My morph complete, I stood and strode over to the closet, quickly pulling on a loose-fitting tracksuit. "It's been—what—fifteen minutes, since the thing crashed?"

"Maybe more. Some of us are tracking this on the internet, and the first images and descriptions went up fourteen minutes and thirty six seconds ago."

"So it's out?"

"Kind of. There are pictures on Twitter and Reddit and Facebook. Major news has only reported 'damage to houses in a local neighborhood, possibly from a crashed aircraft.'"

I took in another deep breath as I pulled on some socks and grabbed a pair of loafers out of the shoe rack. So the Yeerks hadn't killed communication—hadn't shot down any satellites or cut any internet cables.

Was that good? Or bad?

I straightened up, slipping the shredder into the bookbag and slinging it over my shoulder. "Can you get us out to the perimeter? Whichever side the Bug fighter's coming in on?"

"Yeah. Brace yourself."

I felt the same tightening of the air that I had that first night, so long ago, when Elfangor had pinned me and Marco with a force field. Rictic's true form became visible as it stretched its hologram to include me, and then we were moving.

Maybe three seconds later, the air softened, and the world around me stopped spinning. "Don't go anywhere," Rictic said. "You're inside the hologram, but you won't be if you take two steps."

I nodded. "ETA?"

"Eighty seconds, at current speed. Twenty, for firing range."

"If they fire—"

"If they fire, the fact that you suddenly appeared out of thin air is going to be the last thing anybody pays attention to."

I nodded again, feeling my heart start to race. Ten seconds.

Nine.

Eight.

Around us, the crowd milled and murmured, a press of people all craning their necks, lifting their phones and cameras, struggling to see past the tall, black curtain of plastic the police had erected.

Five.

Four.

I felt a sudden urge to draw the shredder—to feel it in my hand, to not stand there with a resource untapped, to maybe get gunned down like—like a sheep, after everything that had already happened—

One.

Zero.

I waited.

One.

Two.

Three.

Nothing, you're doing nothing, Tobias, you're just sitting here while Visser Three moves his pieces into position, you're playing right into his hands—

"Rictic—" I began.

"Within range. Weapons aren't drawing any power."

"What—"

And then, with an anticlimactic suddenness, the Bug fighter's cloaking field dropped, and it was visible in the sky, a brown shape about as large as a pea held out at arm's length.

"Reading radio chatter," Rictic murmured. "Air traffic control's picked up on it, relaying to Air Force and the White House." It paused. "They're calling for identification and statement of purpose on a wide range of channels."

"Rictic," I breathed. "Can you—could you take it down? Could you bring it down now, without hurting anyone inside?"

The android turned, various parts near its top sliding and rotating and whirring around. "No," it said finally. "I could damage its weaponry, but—no, that doesn't work either, since if they intend to fire on a particular target, damaging the guns could cause them to decide to use the ship itself as a weapon. I can block most or all of the shots, if they fire—better to leave them thinking that's their best option."

Around us, the people had begun to notice, a rustle of apprehension sweeping across the crowd as fingers pointed and phones and cameras turned toward a new subject. The ship was coming in smoothly, stately, at a speed that practically screamed diplomatic parade. A high drone swelled and cut through the babble of conversation, the sound of helicopters approaching at high speed—two of them stopped almost directly above us, side by side, while six others spread out on either side of the Bug fighter's line of approach.

Move.

"Rictic—"

"Yeah. What about that house over there?"

It pointed. It was one of those brick McMansions, three stories high and with way more glass than any suburban house needed. It was three lots down from Poznanski's, forward and off to one side.

"Yeah," I said, and the air tightened around me once again.

Rictic took its time, this time, presumably to avoid notice from either the crowd, the helicopters, or the Bug fighter's sensors. There was one brief moment of extreme acceleration, and then I was perched on the ridge, the field relaxing around me.

"I need to be in a different position, if I'm going to intercept fire," Rictic said, its simulated voice taking on an urgent tone. "Are you all right here?"

"I'm fine," I said. "Can you—I mean, are you really going to be able to—"

"There are five other Chee on the way," it said. "They should be here within ten minutes. Until then—"

It shrugged, the chrome-and-ivory plates of his robot body shifting smoothly past one another. Then it vanished, the hologram contracting to cover it as it stepped off the roof.

Visser Three knows about the Chee, I remembered suddenly. Enough to at least posit that they might be nearby, might show up under such circumstances.

‹Rictic,› I broadcast, keeping the band of my thoughts narrow. ‹Have you considered the possibility of a trap?›

There was no answer, of course. The android might circle back around to me if it made tactical sense, but in the moment—

The Bug fighter was now enormous in the sky, longer than a school bus and more than twice as thick, its two serrated gun emplacements the size of flagpoles. It had slowed, and came to a full stop as I watched, hovering directly over the center of the street maybe twenty or thirty feet higher than my vantage point on the rooftop. Holding almost unnervingly level, it began to descend, dropping toward the street with graceful slowness.

If the helicopters were attempting to communicate with it, they were doing so via radio rather than any kind of loudspeaker. They swooped in as the police moved to hold back the crowd, two of them dropping neatly onto either side of the fighter's position while the other four continued to circle the scene.

I could feel my heart hammering in my chest, the pent-up tension of inaction, of frustrated helplessness. There were too many unknowns, too many ways for the situation to go sideways. I knew I needed to do something—that in the future I'd look back to this moment and wish I had acted—but I didn't know what.

You shouldn't have called Rictic, a part of me accused. Now you can't even shoot.

But surely Visser Three wouldn't expect that, right? Wouldn't expect his opponents to be unable to cause trouble, in a situation like this? If the goal was to be unpredictable, then maybe I was already disrupting the plan—

Wishful thinking.

I clenched my fist. If I was literally going to do nothing, then I should leave—get the cube out of danger, get to Paul or to Jake or just get out of the line of fire—

A hatch near the front of the Bug fighter slid open with a hiss of compressed air, and an object billowed forth, expanding like an airbag before fluttering down to hang limply over the nose—

A white flag?

Suddenly, a voice filled my thoughts.

‹Human resistance fighter,› the voice said. ‹Friend and ally of Elfangor—I know you are out there. Your name is Tobias, if my guess is correct. Tobias, or perhaps Rachel, or perhaps simply a friend of one of them, or of Jake or Cassie or Marco.›

I froze.

I had heard that voice before, once. It was my own, of course, as thought-speak always was. But the tone. The cadence. The utter, absolute confidence, the only Controller in the galaxy with access to thought-speak—

This was the voice that had laughed as Elfangor died.

‹I wish to emerge from my ship. To speak to the humans gathered before me, and to you as well. I would—appreciate—your clemency. It would be inconvenient to be shot, or mauled, or otherwise abused, as you are no doubt capable of causing or preventing, as you please.›

‹Rictic—›

‹If I must, I will take your silence as answer, though I would prefer a positive affirmation.›

‹Rictic, I think that's Visser Three inside the ship. Whoever it is, they're—they're thought-speaking at me.›

I could feel myself panicking, feel the uncertainty and tension threatening to mutate into a full-blown meltdown. This was it, this was Visser Three's plan, it was unfolding right now and I still didn't know which actions would fulfill his expectations and which would violate them—

And then it clicked. Fell into place like the first shovelful of dirt on a coffin, the realization dark and heavy with despair.

There weren't any actions that would violate his expectations. He'd chosen this battlefield, had come prepared for every eventuality, was ready for me to fight or fly or freeze, had contingency plans for anything I might think to do.

Unless he's bluffing, insisted a quiet, determined voice inside of me. Unless that's exactly the feeling he's trying to get you to feel, exactly the kind of thought he's trying to get you to think.

‹Very well, then. I will emerge in approximately fifty of your seconds. If you are willing—if neither you nor the other humans decide to fire upon me—I would appreciate speaking with you directly, after.›

And even if he has prepared for everything, that doesn't mean you just roll over and let him win. Don't give up the gunfight without at least making him waste some bullets.

‹Rictic,› I said again, my mental voice mercifully steady. ‹He's opening the door in about forty seconds and coming out. If there's gas, or some kind of hidden weapon—›

Rictic would position himself between the ship and the crowd of humans—would wait, invisible, for any sign of violence. Looking down off the roof, I weighed the landscape. I was off to the side, nearly ninety degrees away from the path of any kind of straightforward fire. And it was unlikely that the Bug fighter was about to explode, first because it contained Visser fucking Three, but also because—

What would be the point? If he wanted to nuke the site, he could've done that from orbit.

Then again, if he wanted to talk to humanity, he could've done that from orbit, too.

So why bother—

I tried to clear my head, to think in terms of actions and consequences, cause and effect—physics, not magic.

There were a couple hundred humans down below.

There were eight helicopters, and higher up and farther out, probably fighter jets and—by now—at least one nuke.

There were cameras—dozens of them, at least some of which were probably streaming directly to the cloud.

There was not any obvious spokesperson for humankind—no Presidents or billionaires, no one visibly high-ranking. Just some cops, some firefighters, some neighbors, and maybe a few Homeland Security agents.

—trying to lure me out? Make me the spokesperson—

And in the middle of it all, next to the ruin of Jeremiah Poznanski's house, was a Bug fighter containing the leader of the Yeerk invasion.

Well, when you put it that way—

It was a publicity stunt. It was PR—we'd dragged the war out into the open, and now Visser Three was here to make some kind of impression on the human race.

He's either going to kill everybody or try to make himself look good. If I just shoot him—shoot him right away, the second he steps out onto the ramp—

It was tempting. But—

No one would understand. It would be like going back in time and killing Hitler in 1920. It would only make him seem more sympathetic, in the long run.

And it wouldn't even kill him. What he just said—about shooting him being inconvenient—this probably isn't even really him, it's one of his decoys, his remote-control bodies, like the boy Rachel killed—

But it had thought-speak, which meant—

Damn!

He'd been in thought-speak range for over a minute and a half by now. Plenty of time to have already started, to have delivered a full telepathic speech already—

‹Rictic, are you picking up any kind of thought-speak broadcast from him? If so—um—give me some kind of sign.›

I squinted down at the crowd. They weren't obviously listening, but neither were they obviously not listening. They were riveted, one and all, on the spaceship in front of them.

You've got about three seconds, a part of me observed.

What could I do—what could I say, that would work equally well regardless of whether he was here to intimidate or impress, whether he'd already been talking or not—

There was another hiss, and a series of cracks appeared in what had seemed to be seamless metal, cold gas escaping as plates shifted and a ramp began to lower.

‹Remember,› I broadcast, holding only a single bubble of silence for the ship and its crew. ‹Sometimes the smooth-talking guy who has an answer for everything turns out to be a mass-murdering sociopath.›

I could see the effect the words had on the crowd, a sort of collective swelling as everyone took in a breath at the same time. Most of them, I imagined, thought they'd generated the words on their own. Only a scattered fraction seemed to be looking around, searching for the source of the telepathic voice.

All right. Some evidence that he wasn't talking to them all along.

Somehow, that helped—eased my sense that Visser Three had thought of everything, that there was nothing I could do.

I can at least make the bastard work for it.

The ramp touched the ground with the same dignified grace that had characterized the whole charade. The crowd seemed to lean forward, craning, and then—with delicate, careful steps—

I couldn't help it. I leaned forward, too, my eyes wide.

It wasn't quite an Andalite. Wasn't really like an Andalite at all, actually—it had the same six limbs, the same four eyes, the same long, lethal tail, but they bore only the loosest, sketchiest resemblance to the real thing, as different as a real human was from a stick figure.

It was shaped like a centaur, only the lower half was a deer instead of a horse—a lithe, blue body with long, tapered legs, muscled like a marble statue. There was no seam where the lower body ended and the upper began, just smooth curves of rippling blue fur. The upper half was somehow more than human—like a stylized drawing, with a bas-relief eight-pack of abs and wide, sweeping pecs. The arms were overlong, each maybe a full meter from shoulder to fingers, and the hands were slender and fragile-looking, with seven fingers but only one thumb.

And the head—

Ax and Elfangor hadn't really had heads so much as places where their bodies simply ended. They ate through their feet, after all, and their stalk eyes pretty much eliminated the need for a neck capable of twisting and bending.

But this—

It was elegant and narrow, like an inverted teardrop, the classic little green man shape. The two stalk eyes were smaller, the cords of muscle almost twice as long as Ax's, and the main eyes were larger and almond-shaped, close-set between a pair of pointed, elfin ears. The nose was a barely noticeable bulge, split by three vertical nostrils, and the mouth was small and thin-lipped, almost invisible above the angular, elegant chin.

It was like an Andalite, if Andalites had been specifically designed to appeal to human sensibilities. Everything about it spoke of dignity, of nobility, a subtle mix of sophistication and strength. It was like something out of Camelot, or an ancient Greek legend—a Centaur with a capital C.

And it knew, I could see. Was doing it on purpose—was moving slowly, softly, like a ballet dancer or a runway model, twisting subtly with each step in a way that made it seem somehow more than three dimensional, that allowed each observer to see more than their fair share of detail.

It was showing off, but quietly—so quietly that I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't been looking for it. Elegance, not flashiness.

You are clumsy, the alien body said. Unrefined. Inferior. Primitive and ugly.

It stopped at the bottom of the ramp, just beyond the shadow cast by the Bug fighter's nose, its blue fur shimmering in the afternoon light. It raised its hands slowly, palms up and fingers wide in an open, expansive gesture.

"Humans," it said gravely, its voice deep and sonorant and undeniably male. "My name is Esplin."

There was a collective sigh, the release of the breath they'd all taken in together a moment earlier, and I could tell my words had failed—that more than half of them were already entranced.

"You have questions," it said, its voice somehow carrying even out to the rooftop where I was standing, seeming measured and soft even as it competed with the sound of the helicopters overhead. "And you will receive answers. But they will have to wait, for I am here to confess, and apologize, and atone, and it is important that all of humanity has a chance to hear what I have to say."

Shoot him. Shoot him NOW, said the part of my brain that understood patterns, that ignored costs, that made me spit in bullies' faces. I looked down at my hands, noticed that they had pulled the shredder out of the bag without my conscious approval.

But I was too far away, and also there was Rictic, and also the damage had already been done, he was already someone they wanted to listen to—

Yeah, but it's gonna get a whole lot worse if he gets to just say whatever he wants—

‹Okay, this is already sounding pretty manipulative,› I broadcast, hoping desperately to weaken the spell, to mar the performance, like a cell phone going off during a movie. ‹Like, campaign-speech level smarmy.›

I couldn't tell if it made any difference.

"Yesterday," he continued, "a meteor struck Ventura county, killing some six hundred thousand people. Fathers, mothers, children. Citizens. An entire city wiped off the map—the largest single disaster in recorded human history."

He paused, and once again the entire crowd seemed to breathe as one.

"It was no accident. It was a war crime, executed on my orders and carried out by my subordinates."

The silence was deafening, absolute, shocked.

What—

Why—

"You see, we came not in peace, but in war—as conquerors, thinking to take from you your land, your resources, your very bodies. In foolish, arrogant ignorance, we imagined that your lives were meaningless, your wants and dreams irrelevant—that because we had the might to rule over you, we also had the right."

He lowered his hands, his shoulders and tail slumping gently. "We were wrong," he said flatly. "I say this too late, knowing it to be too little. I say it, not as an excuse, but as an explanation, so that you may understand what has happened, and decide what happens next. We learned of your personhood—your humanity—only after we had already grievously violated it."

He paused, burying his face in his hands for a moment, his stalk eyes peering out over his fourteen slender fingers. "We came to your planet three months ago," he explained. "Landed, in secret, in Ventura—seized a building in the center of town—began to spread quietly, inch by inch. My species is symbiotic, you see—the body before you is an animal, no more intelligent than a cow. These words are coming to you from a Yeerk, living inside this body's skull. In my natural state, I am deaf, blind, and mute—a helpless slug, swimming in stagnant water. In order to see and experience the world, we must take a host—crawl into its ear and share its thoughts, its senses, its experience."

He lowered his hands. "We took the city of Ventura," he said bluntly. "Enslaved its people, and used their bodies to capture others. It was the first step in a larger campaign to enslave your entire species, along with the lesser species beneath you—to take your planet as our own. On my world, this is the right and natural way of things—there are no other intelligent species, and by grabbing the reins of control, we do not cost anyone anything. Indeed, the creatures we bond with often live longer, healthier, happier lives, thanks to our care."

I watched, my jaw hanging loose and open, as the crowd shifted uncertainly, as the men and women in uniform looked uncertainly at one another, no one daring to take the initiative.

Shoot. Him.

But I couldn't. I was just as hooked as the rest of them, had to understand why—why he was telling this story, what could possibly be in it for him—

"Only once had we ever encountered another truly sapient race—the Andalites, who came to our world with miraculous technology and infinite knowledge, and then denied us the right to learn, to share, to grow. They chained us to our mud puddles while they roamed freely through the stars, and when we finally broke free of their control, we stole from them everything we could."

On a cross street on the opposite side of the scene, a black SUV pulled up, came screeching to a halt. A man dressed in a formal suit leapt out, began to push through the crowd—

"And so we learned that there are only two kinds of creatures—those lesser than us, whom we would rule, and those greater than us, whom we must fight lest they rule us. I beg, not for your forgiveness, but for your understanding—not ten years have passed since we first realized we were not alone in the universe, and as we spread from star to star, the pattern held true. Everywhere we went, we found either conquest or conflict, and it never occurred to us that this was a choice—that there could be a path to peace that did not require subjugation."

—the man broke through the cordon, flashed a badge at the assembled cops, strode out into the open space between the Visser and the crowd—

—and froze in mid-step as the alien lifted a finger. Actually froze, his eyes wide, his mouth half-open, every muscle taut and thrumming.

The rest of the crowd sucked in a breath. The Visser raised his head, his body ramrod straight, all four eyes looking past the petrified agent and into the center of the mass of humanity. "Until Earth," he said softly. "Until Ventura. We were slow to learn, these past three months, but we did learn. We came as we had come to a dozen other worlds, thinking of you as tools, as mere animals—thinking that your culture was only make-work, emergent behavior, like the dancing of bees and the hives of termites. We took thousands of you, in secret, and we would have taken thousands more, but you proved yourself to us—proved that you had souls, and that what we had done was an abomination."

Still holding one hand up to the agent, he gestured vaguely into the crowd with the other. "We had discovered our mistake, and were preparing to rectify it—to begin an orderly retreat, opening negotiations with your leadership and returning Ventura to its rightful owners. But then—"

He hesitated, his shoulders visibly rising as he took in a breath, then slumping again as he released it. "You had defenders," he said softly. "They were teenagers—children, really, not even halfway through high school, but they shouldered the burden of resistance, battling with brilliance and tenacity. We do not know how they came to be aware of our invasion, but they fought tirelessly on your behalf, and yesterday—unaware of our decision, unaware that we had realized our crime—they penetrated our stronghold, and destroyed it, triggering a dead-man's switch."

Turning his whole head, he looked directly at the frozen agent, seeming to take in every inch of him. Slowly, smoothly, he lowered his hand, and the man's body relaxed, collapsing like a puppet on the asphalt, where it stayed and did not move.

"The Andalites continue to hound us, you see. They pursue us everywhere we go, and so we have made it a law that we never leave resources behind. If a colony is destroyed for any reason, an automatic process triggers a—"

He broke off. "A cleansing," he said carefully, pronouncing the word as if it had edges capable of cutting. "To ensure that our enemies do not profit from what we have built. That they do not learn from our discoveries, as they refused to let us learn from theirs. The vengeance intended for our Andalite persecutors fell upon Ventura, called down by accident—by the very same humans whose bravery had helped to open our eyes to the truth."

I was astonished. Dumbfounded. Speechless. I felt my thoughts spinning, skidding, felt myself veering between outrage and doubt.

Lies!

But—

Lies! He dropped the asteroid himself—dropped it on purpose.

Except—

The only evidence I had for that was the word of a strange god-creature who had put my little brother in mortal danger just to set a mood—

That, and the word of Elfangor, who had come prepared to slaughter every living thing on the surface of the planet.

"It is a tragedy of unthinkable proportions," the Visser continued, as the rest of the crowd looked on in horrified silence. "A loss that cannot be forgiven, a debt that cannot be repaid, a crime for which we cannot atone. It is a shame my people will bear until the last star burns out—that we carelessly enslaved you, and afterward carelessly murdered you, and all in secrecy and silence, with no defiance given."

He stepped forward, moving further into the light. "It is in recognition of our debt that I have come, as the former commanding officer of the invasion force, to surrender myself to your justice and retribution. The plan was to land in your capital, but the malfunction of one of our ships—if a malfunction it was, and not the clever doing of yet another daring freedom fighter—has brought me here, instead."

His stalk eyes swiveled, taking in the crowd, the wreckage, the quivering agent and the hovering helicopters. "I will not live long, myself," he said, his tone suddenly flat. "A Yeerk must leave its host to feed every three days, swimming in the waters of its pool, and we have fully withdrawn all of our resources from the Earth. I will answer your questions, and then I will starve to death, and humans will once again be the only sapient species on the surface of your planet. My hope is that, in the next three days, I may purchase some small absolution with my suffering.

"The two ships my people leave to you as gifts, along with the technical information you will need both to pilot them and to build more. We are not Andalites, hoarding our knowledge, refusing to share. Should you desire it, you may meet with us again—in five months' time, in orbit around the moon of Europa. A representative of my people will be waiting there, to negotiate with you the terms of a federation. If you demur, we shall leave you in peace and regret, and hope to meet you someday among the stars, as equals."

Taking one last sweeping look, he bowed his head, raising his arms in front of him as if to allow himself to be shackled—

—and with that, he pushed me just a little too far, stretched my credulity just a little too thin, and the spell—which had begun to work even on me—broke, the fog disappearing like breath on a cold day.

It was too neat. Too clean, the moral lines drawn with the stark, narrative precision of a con man. And to figure out what a con man wanted, you only had to look at what would happen as a result—

If the Bug fighter really did work—if the plans really were sufficient to make more, using only human-level technology—

Then five months from now, we'd either have a hundred factories cranking them out, or we'd be on our way to having them. Maybe they'd all explode if given the right command, or maybe they all had a secret backdoor that would let the Yeerks take control of them, or maybe they just worked and the Earth would be that much farther along, that much more valuable once the inevitable betrayal finally happened—

I'd been thinking that the Visser would come down to stop us from getting access to Yeerk technology. But I'd had it backwards all along. He didn't just want us—he wanted our whole goddamn world, the infrastructure necessary to keep seven billion bodies alive and happy, the machinery that had brought us from the Renaissance to the internet and could easily keep us on an upward trajectory for the next thousand years. He was confident that he could take us either way, and so he was putting us on the fast track now—

And let's be honest—if they do work, and then a peaceful meeting happens in five months—how long before the voluntary infestation programs begin? How many people will line up to get themselves a friendly live-in personal assistant—someone to help them lose weight and learn new skills and stay on track? And once all of those people start pulling ahead, thanks to their turbocharged social network, how long before parents start signing their kids up for Yeerk preschool? Before the military starts requiring Yeerk symbiosis for coordination purposes?

They weren't going to conquer us the way Cortés had conquered the Aztecs. They were going to conquer us the way we'd conquered East Germany—by making us want to be conquered.

And maybe a little Cortés on the side, too, to speed things along. He said they've withdrawn fully from the Earth, but they were pulling information out of the White House two hours ago.

Who's to say they weren't just lying? That they didn't just have another pool in Africa somewhere, or that they hadn't just gone ahead and nabbed, like, the entire government of China? Even if they didn't, the fact that they'd left alien tech in the hands of the U.S. government—and not the U.N. or China or Russia or India—might just be enough of a spark to ignite a world war.

Okay, fine. Working theory.

Now what?

The answer came almost immediately, once again whispered in Garrett's voice:

Destroy the ships.

I bit my lip, looking down at the crowd below. The beautiful figure still stood motionless, head down and hands out, waiting for some enterprising human to step forward, to take responsibility. None did, though the agent was stirring, slowly pushing himself up to hands and feet as a trio of cops approached him from the side.

It was a wildcard move, but it might be possible if Rictic cooperated, and it fit with the general principle of don't let Visser Three get what he wants. It avoided the martyrdom problem of killing him directly, and would definitely throw off whatever scheme he was trying to pull.

Can we afford it, though? I mean, if he is telling the truth, and that's a perfectly good starfighter down there—

‹Rictic,› I began. ‹I need you up—›

‹Human resistance fighter,› came the Visser's voice in my head.

My attention snapped back to the blue uber-Andalite, who was still standing motionless, waiting as the man in the suit drew closer, holding out a pair of handcuffs.

‹You have every reason to be skeptical of my intentions,› the voice said soberly. ‹Not least because you know that this is not my true body. I will suffer, yes, but I will not die.›

There was a soft sound beside me, and I turned to see Rictic standing on the sloped roof, its face-parts giving the impression of an expectant look. I held up a finger.

‹But you will note that I did not betray your secrets,› the Visser continued. ‹I did not give your names, nor divulge the fact that you possess the morphing power, nor expose the existence of your android allies.›

"What—"

‹Shhh. Visser Three is thought-speaking at me.›

Down below, the man in the suit was now shackling the Visser's tail to his wrists, having first instructed him to tuck it in between his legs. The alien looked strangely diminished, as if the loss of his dignity had taken inches off of his height.

‹There are higher forces at work in this system,› he said, keeping all four of his eyes down as the agent led him past a cordon and back toward the black SUV. ‹Manipulative forces. They seem to be trying to engineer a conflict—to pit us against one another—and in my opinion they have already had far too much influence over recent events.›

I watched, paralyzed, as the man opened the rear door of the SUV and the alien stepped inside without hesitating.

‹No doubt you are already thinking of ways to undermine me, to undo what I have just done. You could disable my ship, for instance—or steal it, or broadcast your own version of events to these kind conduits.›

Two armored police officers crawled into the back with him, and a third shut the door before getting into the passenger's seat.

‹But if we are to slip the noose that fate has prepared for us—to step outside of the roles our manipulators intend for us to play—then we must start somewhere. I see no fundamental reason for us to be enemies—my people think they want control, but that is only because true symbiosis has never occurred to them as an option.›

The van shuddered to life and began to move.

‹Ventura was a tragedy on both sides. It need not set the pattern for all time, and the Andalites have done your people no favor worthy of enduring allegiance.›

"Tobias—"

‹Shhhh!›

‹I offer three tokens of my goodwill. First, I will tell my human keepers that any petitioner with the password Elfangor is one I wish to speak with, though I cannot promise they will let you through. Second, I have hidden a cache of useful supplies in the water between the larger and smaller landmasses of St. Matthew island, in the state of Alaska.›

The van began to recede, two of the helicopters peeling off to follow it while the other two continued to circle the crash, the crowd, and the remaining Bug fighter.

‹And third—I believe one among your number is named Cassie Withers. Her parents were in orbit when the asteroid struck. If she wishes to be reunited with them, they will be set free in Washington in two days' time, along with the remaining twenty-four human Controllers.›

And with that, the van passed out of range, turning and disappearing in the thickly wooded suburban streets.

I sank weakly to my knees, one hand out to keep me from falling and sliding down the dark, sloped roof.

"Tobias, what—"

"Visser Three," I said, my voice hoarse. "He just—"

I swallowed.

Not in control, never in control.

"He just offered us a truce."