Preface/notes

Last year, I released The Hunt here. The idea behind it was to branch off from the original series after book 22, the end of the David arc, in such a way that the stories, writing style, and tacky book titles stay true to the originals. People seemed to like it, some even asking for a sequel (this is a little late, but thanks so much for the feedback and reddit gold!) so I decided to continue and make a bit of a series. It took way longer than I wanted it to, but better late than never, right?

Like all Animorphs books, you could start from here. Chapter 1 reads a bit like a "Previously, on Animorphs…" segment for that reason. But I would recommend that you read them in sequence. In that case, you can safely skip chapter 1 without missing anything if it bores you.

The series so far:

1: The Hunt (Rachel)

2: The Anomaly (Cassie)

3: The Rescue (Jake)

Font test: ≺This sentence should be surrounded in thought-speak quotes.≻ If it isn't, try changing your browser's character encoding or font until it does. Unfortunately, fanfiction blocks regular less-than/greater-than symbols.

Chapter 1

My name is Cassie.

It was a Wednesday, just after class. The first Wednesday after my best friend Rachel's and her younger sister Jordan's funeral. The second Wednesday after they ran away.

I live in a farmhouse just outside the city, at the edge of a national forest. It's about a one and a half hour's walk away from school, so I used to take the bus or cycle home. Or at least, I'd pretend to. I have some… unconventional ways of getting around. But ever since what happened to Rachel and Jordan, my dad had insisted on dropping me off and picking me up.

See, the official story is that Rachel was dealing cocaine, and when the police started suspecting her, she was killed by whoever was in charge of the operation. And because I'd been friends with her for so long, the police suspected I was also involved somehow. The night before Rachel died, they raided my home with a battering ram and automatic weapons, and my parents and I had to spend half the night in an interrogation room while they searched our house for anything suspicious.

It was almost like they made a point of trashing the place, too. By the time we were up and out of bed, our front door was already lying flat on the floor. And while we were gone, they literally turned every drawer in the house upside down, tore all our pillows open with knives, broke fragile things like vases and picture frames… and so on. They even left the fridge open.

They didn't find any drugs, of course. But that's not really what they were after. They were actually looking for Rachel and Jordan. And, mind you, not to save them from their imaginary drug dealers. They only made it seem like they were after drugs because it gave them a good excuse to search every nook of my house. Good enough for everyone to believe it.

So, for as far as my parents knew, my best friend was involved with drug dealing and was killed because she knew too much. They were worried sick that I would be next.

They tried their best to hide it from me. After all, I'd just lost my best friend. They didn't want to upset me further by scaring me. But it was obvious.

Dad was already waiting for me when I left the school building. He waved me over.

"Hey, Dad," I said as I threw my backpack in the back and then sat in the passenger seat.

"Hey, Cass," he responded. "How was school?"

"Fine, I guess." I didn't really mean it.

School was weird without Rachel. Jake was still there, but we never hung out together all that much in school. Jake and I are… well, we like each other. As in like. But we're both embarrassed about it. Or at least I am, so we kept it hidden. Although that wasn't our only reason for not wanting to be seen in public together too often.

Worse than feeling lonely, everyone kept reminding me of what happened. Looking at me pityingly, or coming up to me to give me their condolences or ask if I wanted to talk.

I didn't. I just wanted to forget.

"How about we go… see Rachel before going home?" Dad asked me after a couple of seconds.

See what I mean?

It wasn't fair to say no, though. Rachel had spent so much time at my place over the years that my parents had bonded with her as well. And it's not like Dad knew that I watched her get trampled to death.

He stroked my hair. He always does that when he's trying to comfort me.

I sighed, and nodded weakly.

Dad tried to make conversation with me a couple times on the way to the cemetery, but I only gave automatic, single-word responses. He'd given up by the time we sat down in front of Rachel and Jordan's graves. I was completely zoned out, thinking about what had actually happened.

It all started about half a year ago. Rachel and I were just going home after having been to the mall. I hate shopping, but it was Rachel's favorite pastime, so I'd gone along with her. We ran into Jake and his friends Marco and Tobias, and together we all stupidly decided to cut through the shady, abandoned construction site near the mall on our way home.

No, that's not when we made our first drug deal. Or did anything illegal for that matter, aside from trespassing on the construction site I guess. I wish it'd been that simple.

It was when we met our first alien. And by that I don't mean someone from another country. He was an Andalite.

It was immediately obvious that he was an alien. Andalites look like a cross between a deer, a horse, a scorpion, a human, and a crab. They have four hooved legs, two arms that are a little shorter than human arms but are much the same otherwise, and a scorpion's tail with a very sharp blade at the end. Their head is almost human, except they don't have a mouth, and they have two eyes on stalks like a crab in addition to two human-like eyes. Also, they're blue.

Instead of talking, they use what we call thought-speak to communicate. Telepathy. It can be directed to anyone, humans included, and because it's based on thoughts there's no language barrier. Or at least, I think that's why we could talk to him. I don't actually know. But he spoke English.

His name was Elfangor. His ship had been damaged in battle near Earth, forcing him to land. The battle had been to determine the future of Earth and humankind.

Fortunately, the Andalites were the good guys in that battle. We wouldn't have lasted long if we'd run into the bad guys first.

Unfortunately, he was hurt. Dying. All other Andalite warriors in the general vicinity of Earth were already dead.

The good guys had lost.

In a last-ditch effort, he tried to give us a fighting chance. Five scared teenagers. He told us everything he could about what was going on, and then gave us a very neat little ability using some Andalite tech. Or at least, it would've been neat, if we wouldn't have to use it to fight all the time.

He told us that Earth is being invaded by the Yeerk Empire. That it'd been going on for years already. Humanity as a whole doesn't know about it because the Yeerks don't want us to, and they're very good at hiding.

Yeerks aren't very scary on their own. They look almost exactly like regular Earth slugs, although they're a bit bigger. They're blind, deaf, and can't move very quickly.

But what they can do is very scary. They can take control of most lifeforms big enough for a Yeerk to fit between their brain and skull, turning them into what we call Controllers. Humans qualify.

And when I say control, I mean control. A Yeerk completely takes over its host's body, to the point where the host can't even control what their senses focus on. They can also access all of their host's memories and sense what they're thinking, so they can do a very good job pretending to be their host. That's how they can be invading us without anyone knowing it's even going on.

Worst of all, hosts remain conscious. They're forced to sense everything that their Yeerk makes them sense, and live through everything that their Yeerk makes them do. Hosts can communicate with their Yeerk and kind of sense its emotions, but that's about all they can do.

It isn't all great for the Yeerk either, though. Yeerks have a hard time ignoring what their host is thinking, so they constantly get to live through their host's fantasies of killing them in the most horrible and painful ways they can imagine.

My enemy or not, I guess I've come to sympathize with the Yeerks a little. A couple of weeks ago, I got stuck in the middle of the national forest that borders our city with a young girl, Karen, who'd been taken host by the Yeerk Aftran nine-four-two. She found out that I was one of the people fighting the Yeerks, by following me home after a… particularly bad battle, and spied on me for a while. Then she ran into an angry black bear, I somehow saved her life, we both ended up unconscious in a fast-flowing river for a while, Aftran saved my life…

Never mind, it's complicated.

The point is, we had to survive together in the middle of nowhere for a day or two. Aftran didn't want to kill me because she kind of needed my experience and morphing ability to survive out there, and although I kind of had to kill Aftran because she knew too much, the only way in which I could've done that was to kill Karen… Well, would you be able to kill an innocent young girl?

So Aftran and I had a lot of time to get to know each other. It changed both of us.

I learned that humans and Yeerks aren't actually all that different. Yeerks taking hosts is kind of like people eating meat. Neither is necessary for our survival, and both cause suffering for other lifeforms. We just tell ourselves that it doesn't matter because those lifeforms are somehow less important than we are. It's all just a matter of perspective.

At the same time, Aftran learned that humans are more than just mindless shells. That we're capable of seeing the big picture and sympathizing with them. Because of that, she told me she'd become the Yeerk equivalent of a vegetarian and let Karen go free. But in return, I'd have to prove to her that I'd be willing to give up the same things she'd have to give up.

Seems only fair, right? So I morphed into a caterpillar.

Morphing is that neat ability that I talked about before, the one Elfangor gave us. It allows us to "acquire" any number of animals by touching them, and then change into them whenever we want. But only for two hours at a time. If you stay in morph longer than that, you lose the ability to change back ever again.

So that's what I did. Aftran waited out the two hours, and I didn't morph back.

What neither of us knew at the time, though, is that the natural morphing of a caterpillar to a butterfly resets the morphing clock. So I could morph back a couple days later.

I saw Karen at the mall a few days after I morphed back. She told me that Aftran had not only upheld her end of the deal and freed her, but that she had tried to get me to demorph just before the time limit. She didn't actually want me to get stuck, she just wanted to test me. But caterpillars are deaf, so I couldn't hear her.

Of course, not all Yeerks are as sympathetic as Aftran. It's just that they aren't pure evil, either.

Unfortunately there are exceptions to that as well. Such as Visser Three.

He's the Yeerk who's currently in charge of the Earth invasion. He's also the only Yeerk who's ever been able to take an Andalite host, and therefore the only one who can morph. That makes him our most dangerous enemy by far.

We got introduced just a few minutes after we met Elfangor. He touched down in his Blade ship along with two Bug fighters, all three ships filled to the brim with Controllers.

We were forced to watch helplessly as Visser Three morphed into one of his huge, terrifying alien morphs and ate Elfangor alive. Just because he could.

So, while I can sympathize with most Yeerks despite them being my enemy, I cannot sympathize with Visser Three.

In the months that followed, my friends and I met a bunch of other aliens.

First of all, there's Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill, or Ax, as we call him. He's Elfangor's younger brother. Ax came to Earth along with him, but he wasn't old enough to fight, so the Yeerks never even knew he was there. We found him in the crashed Andalite Dome Ship and helped him hide. In return, he declared Jake to be his "prince," which is sort of their word for leader, and he's been fighting the Yeerks with us ever since.

We also found out that one of Marco's friends, Erek, is actually an alien android, a Chee, pretending to be a human using some highly advanced hologram technology. The Chee were built by the Pemalites, a pacifist alien race that somewhat resembled dogs. They were designed to be their friends, programmed to protect life and to entertain.

Unfortunately, they can never kill, which is why they weren't much help to the Pemalites when some other alien race came to annihilate them for whatever reason. Some Pemalites and Chee managed to flee to Earth, but the Pemalites died, leaving only a couple Chee behind.

The Chee are our allies. They resist the Yeerks because the Yeerks would exterminate most of Earth's life when they finish enslaving humanity. They can't fight them directly like we do because of their programming, but they can spy on them, and Erek helps us with his hologram tech sometimes.

And then there's the Hork-Bajir and the Taxxons. Aside from humans, they seem to be the Yeerks' preferred hosts.

Hork-Bajir are primarily used as soldiers. They have naturally armored bodies with blades protruding everywhere. They have inverted knees, feet like a tyrannosaurus, and a long neck, like a snake's.

When they're not Controllers, they're actually pretty harmless. I know because I helped free two of them. Their blades only evolved to help them strip bark from trees, which was their primary food source on their homeworld. But it's very rare to come across a free Hork-Bajir nowadays.

The Taxxons, on the other hand, don't need to be freed. They're voluntary hosts. I don't know why, exactly. I just know that they look like giant centipedes, have an extremely good sense of smell, make a hissing sound to communicate, and eat anything and everything they can get a hold of. Including other Taxxons, if they get the chance.

As time went on, we learned to use our morphing abilities to fight the Yeerks. Sure, a couple teens and a young Andalite in animal morphs versus an alien armada isn't exactly fair, but we manage to do some damage from time to time.

Our only defense against them is secrecy. If the Yeerks would find out that we're just a couple of teenagers instead of the Andalite guerilla warriors they think we are, we're not going to last very long. That means we can't tell anyone. Anyone who does find out needs to be protected from the Yeerks or… contained somehow, because if the Yeerks would get to them it'd all be over.

The Yeerks also have to keep themselves secret, though. They may be more technologically advanced than humans, but I think there are only about ten thousand Yeerks on or near Earth, and there are six billion humans. If humanity as a whole figures out what's going on, they wouldn't stand a chance. Or things would at least be a lot harder for them.

Their other major weakness is that every Yeerk has to swim around in what's known as a Yeerk pool at least once every three days. It's their equivalent of eating. If they don't, they die a slow, painful death.

The Yeerks built such a Yeerk pool underneath the city, in a large cave that they hollowed out over the years. There are several secret entrances leading into it, to let Controllers go to the pool without anyone noticing.

While a Yeerk is in the pool, its host is in control of its body again. Therefore, it has to be restrained and imprisoned by other Controllers until the Yeerk is ready to return. The Yeerks have gotten pretty good at that, but still, sometimes a host manages to make a run for it.

Which brings me to the real reason why everyone thinks Rachel and Jordan are dead.

One and a half weeks ago, Rachel and I ran into an escaping Hork-Bajir at the mall. Since Hork-Bajir don't exactly blend into a crowd, the Yeerks not only had to recapture him, but also had to infest everyone who saw him, to keep their existence a secret.

We managed to escape from the mall by pretending to be Controllers, but in doing so we kind of drew attention to ourselves. Worse, when Rachel, Jake, and Marco tried to stop the Yeerks from enslaving everyone at the mall half an hour later, the Yeerks stunned and captured Rachel while she was in human form. Jake and Marco managed to pull her out before she could be infested, but Visser Three and a large number of other Controllers had already seen her by then.

Even worse, Rachel's mom and her youngest sister Sarah had been at the mall, and we'd been too late for them. Even though they hadn't seen Rachel at the mall in person, they suspected her based on her description. They also wrongly figured that it had been Jordan who was with her instead of me. So Rachel and Jordan were in big trouble. They had to run away.

That didn't work out so well. Rachel had been a bit careless in her attempt to escape quietly, so their mom heard them and went after them. While they were fleeing on their bicycles, she just ran them over with her car.

Rachel somehow didn't get hurt too badly, and managed to get into the car and drive away with Jordan while Tobias was distracting her mom. But Jordan was hurt bad enough that she was slowly dying. I'm not even sure whether the hospital would have been able to save her, even if it hadn't been crawling with Yeerks.

The only thing Rachel could do was give her the power to morph. Fortunately, we'd recently recovered the Andalite device that Elfangor had used to give us our abilities.

See, when you morph back and forth, your whole body gets reconstructed from your DNA. So as long as you're still conscious enough to finish morphing, it will heal any and all of your wounds.

Of course, driving off in her mom's car didn't stop the Yeerks from looking for them. There was no way they'd ever stop. So we had to stage their deaths.

Faking Jordan's death was easy. Rachel had made it look like she'd died from blood loss in the car, and that her body was then taken by a grizzly bear. In reality, Jordan was still alive when she was taken, and the grizzly bear was actually Rachel in morph.

Rachel's death had been a bit more complicated. We got some help with that from Erek. He projected a completely lifelike image of Rachel, controlled by Rachel herself. She let her projection get captured by her mom, who then took her to Visser Three. She'd pretended to have gone completely insane from watching Jordan die, so they had no reason to suspect that Jordan wasn't actually dead. Finally, with all of them still watching, the rest of us marched up in battle morphs and killed the projection, making it look like the Yeerks were right about Rachel knowing something, but that she was still only some unimportant human who got in the way.

We had to make it look completely real. Otherwise it wouldn't have worked. So I ended up having to watch my best friend get trampled to death by Jake's rhinoceros morph, kicking and screaming until he finally managed to step on her head. Now, whenever someone mentions Rachel's supposed death, I get to relive that moment in my mind.

Dad put his arm on my back and stroked me. I'd been staring at the ground in front of Rachel's grave, but looked up at him with tears in my eyes as he broke my trance. He was also silently crying. I hugged him.