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Chapter Text

Chapter 37 (part II): Marco'

—4294967296—

I could see them in the bat’s sonic vision—billions of them, teeming and clicking and writhing, surging upward from the ground, from hidden cracks beneath the layer of mulch. The mass of them flowed like lava, grasping and smothering, indifferent to his animal screams, his swatting limbs, his frantic slide down the slope. They were in his mouth, his eyes—

‹What’s happening?›

‹Marco, what’s going on!?›

‹Get in there, get him out—›

‹No,› I said, unable to look away.

‹But—›

‹No,› I repeated. ‹It—it’s too late.›

‹Tell me where he is, I’ll—›

‹NO,› I shouted, my voice cracking. I hadn’t even known that your voice could crack in thought-speak. But it could.

‹Stay put,› I ordered, the words coming out like ice. ‹Don’t move, not one step. Not until I figure out how far this—this—›

I couldn’t finish the sentence. In the background of my thoughts, the other Marco continued to scream—screamed for far longer than it seemed like he should have been able to.

‹It’s not your fault. There was nothing you could have—›

A hand touched my shoulder, and I snapped awake.

“Hey,” said a voice—my own voice, the way it sounded from the outside. “It’s been six. Powwow in five.”

My brain tried to drag itself into motion.

Six hours. Five minutes.

I nodded, rolling over onto hands and knees, my body stiff where it had pressed against the rocky, uneven ground.

After an embarrassingly quick twenty-minute flight, we had passed out of the forest and into a kind of low, desert scrubland, spotted with strange, gnarled bushes, utterly devoid of visible animal life. We’d spent an extra hour making sure, circling and searching, mapping the landscape by sight and sound and smell, but there was nothing. No bugs, no reptiles, no rodents or avians—just dirt and rocks and the ever-present mist.

And then, exhausted, we’d collapsed. Helium, who didn’t need sleep in his natural body, had volunteered to keep watch, and the rest of us had leaned into the slope and given ourselves over to the nightmares.

Still on my hands and knees, I looked up. Jake was there, a few feet above me, his eyes dull and sleep-heavy. Behind him, the mist was darkening again, was already sapphire instead of the bright baby blue of full daylight.

Jake himself was orange, though—lit up by the otherworldly, underworldly glow emanating from the distant, unseen river of lava. It had been faint, that glow, when we first arrived—had been mostly washed out by the sunlight filtering down through the mist. But it was stronger now, like the light of a forest fire seen through thick smoke.

And it was hot, too—maybe ninety degrees, maybe more. My clothes were soaked through with sweat, and my mouth was dry as dust despite the humidity.

We’re going to need to find water soon, I thought. Either that, or we were going to end up drinking blood out of our morphs just to survive.

Letting out a sigh, I fell over onto my side, slouching against the slope. Around me, the others were yawning, stretching, scrubbing their eyes. One was standing at the very edge of visibility, apparently peeing into the mist. Downslope, Helium had demorphed from his sentry body and was halfway through assuming human form.

“Circle up,” Jake said softly.

Everyone turned inward.

“First order of business—”

One of the Marcos raised his hand.

Jake gave a brittle sigh. “All right, fine. Zeroth order of business. What?”

Around the circle, I exchanged glances with myself. Looks like someone woke up on the wrong side of the alien murder valley.

“New callsigns,” the other Marco said. “I figure now that there are exactly five Marclones in the party—”

“I swear to God, if you’re about to make a Power Rangers reference—”

“Top kek, but no. I was actually going to say, uh—”

He faltered, looking suddenly uncertain in the face of Jake’s uncharacteristic harshness. “Maybe—uh—maybe it would be kind of, I dunno, appropriate, or something? Good medicine? If we, uh.”

“Spit it out.”

“Well. Maybe it’s dumb. But I was thinking, since there’s five of me. Maybe we could use the other Animorphs as callsigns. Kind of keep them with us, in spirit.”

He looked down, his face flushed.

Jake’s eyes narrowed. “There better not be a punch line waiting somewhere at the end of this,” he warned.

“I’m not,” the other Marco said hastily. “I mean, there isn’t. I swear. It just—”

His voice fell to a mutter. “Seemed like a good idea, is all.”

Jake turned his head to look at each of us, a shadow of something like suspicion still darkening his expression. “Well?” he asked.

“Well what?”

“Any of you feeling particularly Rachel-ish today?”

There was a long pause.

We looked at each other.

One of us raised a hand.

Jake’s expression twisted a little. I couldn’t say exactly what it meant, but the monkey part of my brain relaxed a tiny bit in response.

“How about Tobias?”

Another hand.

“Cassie?”

I almost raised my hand. Almost, but at the last second I felt something snag, felt some slight-but-crucial sense of discord.

One of the other Marcos volunteered.

“Garrett?”

I looked across the circle at the last remaining Marco, his expression mirroring my own. It was like there was a true answer to the question of which of us should take on Garrett’s name, and neither of us wanted to just guess.

I tilted my head—

The other Marco raised his hand.

“Fine,” Jake said. “Rachel, Tobias, Cassie, Garrett, and Marco.”

There was a moment of not-quite silence, as if we’d all just happened to take a breath at the exact same time, a bunch of different pendulums all lining up for a single swing before falling back out of synch. Hearing Jake say those names, in that order—it felt—

Correct. Like there were right moves and wrong ones, and we’d just made a right one.

“Fine,” Jake repeated, and I could tell from his voice that he’d felt it, too—could hear something steady and steadfast underneath the exhaustion, as if the utterly spontaneous ritual we’d just completed had bolstered something, something that had previously been on the verge of collapse. “First order of business. We have to assume—for lack of a better word—that we’re about to run into some plot down there. That the Ellimist brought us here for a reason.”

Or Crayak, I thought, knowing as I did so that the other four Marcos were thinking it too, waiting for one of us to—

“Or Crayak,” said Garrett-Marco.

Jake grimaced, nodded. “Or Crayak.”

“Speaking of which,” said Cassie-Marco. “Has it occurred to everyone that we might not be the only guest stars in this little side quest? I mean, whoever sent that avatar guy to pick us up, the other guy might have sent him to get somebody else, too.”

“Cage match?” mused Tobias-Marco. “Mortal Kombat test-of-champions kind of thing?”

“Or there could already be plenty of bad guys down there, and that’s why we were brought in,” pointed out Garrett-Marco. “To balance things out. I mean, this is a Yeerk stronghold, right?”

“And Visser Three’s own little Stark Tower, to boot.”

“More like Dr. Moreau’s island, I think?”

“Cough, cough,” said Jake, sounding impatient. “The point is, we don’t know what we’re in for, except that it’s probably going to be worse than what we already went through.”

That brought us up short.

“Hey, um,” I said, looking around the circle again. “Is everything—”

No, dumbass.

“I mean, are you feeling o—”

“I am extremely not doing this five-on-one,” Jake said sharply. “Drop it.”

I felt my mouth snap shut.

“If there are any pages we all want to be on,” he continued, “now’s the time to make that happen. We might not get another chance.”

I studiously avoided looking at the other Marcos this time, knowing that they were doing the same. What’s up with Jake? was the page we wanted to be on, hopefully followed immediately by can we do something about it?

But I had a sneaking suspicion that we were the problem, or at least tied up in it, and that trying to help—

Well, wouldn’t.

“Hostages?” ventured Rachel-Marco, after another tense ten seconds. “Rescues? Do we try to save each other, if we get split up?”

Helium raised a hand. “We would appreciate rescue attempts, all else being equal.”

“Marcos save Jakes and Heliums,” suggested Tobias-Marco. “Jakes and Heliums don’t risk themselves to save Marcos?”

Jake’s expression darkened.

“What if it comes down to saving Jake or Helium?” asked Cassie-Marco.

It darkened further. “Stop,” he said.

We stopped.

“There’s only one of us that can’t be brought back with the morphing tech, and that’s Helium. We prioritize keeping him—keeping them alive. As a fallback, we save Temrash—”

“Perdão.”

“Perdão, right. We don’t prioritize me—”

None of us moved, as far as I could tell—none of us even twitched.

But somehow Jake noticed anyway.

“All right, fine, do whatever you want, but I’m not agreeing to let you die if there’s anything I can do about it, so keep that in mind before you go taking any dumb fucking risks.”

Eyes widened around the circle.

Gee whiz, buddy, I didn’t even know you knew that word—

There wasn’t a chance in hell any of us were going to say that one out loud.

Garrett-Marco raised a hand. “Uh,” he said. “Speaking of pages. What’s our actual mission statement?”

Heads tilted.

“Like, sure, we’re here to ‘do what we do,’ whatever that means. And none of us is going to pass up a chance to throw a wrench into whatever V3 is planning. But what’s the real ultimate priority?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, say we do see a way to stop him, but it means—I dunno—sacrificing the Earth, or something.”

Silence.

“Or just North America, then, fine. I’m just saying, under the circumstances, it seems like the sort of thing that might actually come up. Like maybe we should talk about the possibility a little.”

More silence, this time expectant.

“Why are you all looking at me?” Jake protested.

“Uh. Fearless leader? Moral compass? Only human present who’s not a part of the echo chamber? Helium calls you ‘prince’?”

“You mean you want this to be on me,” Jake shot back. “So it’s my fault.”

“The opposite,” I cut in hastily, before the rest of me could rise to the bait. “We already have our default answer, and we want somebody else to sanity check it. Talk us out of it, if we’re wrong.”

I shot the other four Marcos a warning look. There was too much tension in the circle—too many hair-triggers, too much sarcasm and petty sniping. I understood it—I mean, we were all exhausted, we’d all just come through hell, there were at least three or four unacknowledged elephants in the room. But we couldn’t afford it.

Not now.

“And that default answer is?” Jake asked, his voice still edged with challenge.

I glanced around the circle again, but it looked like this one was on me.

You are callsign Marco, after all.

I sucked in a breath.

“We end the threat,” I said, making my voice as firm as I could. “Whatever it takes. If it takes losing all of humanity—well, if we don’t end the threat, we lose all of humanity anyway. If it comes down to it—if it really comes down to it—that’s why we’re here. Everything else comes second.”

There were no nods. Just grim, silent faces, waiting.

After a long, long moment, Jake spoke.

“I’m not going to try to veto that,” he said. “You’re going to do what you’re going to do no matter what I say. But I will say this.”

He looked around the circle, locking eyes with each of us in turn. “If we are being jerked around,” he said. “By the Ellimist, or Crayak, or whoever—if you’re trying to trick somebody into blowing up the world, it’s a lot easier to get them to flip the switch if they’re already willing. If they’ve already made up their mind what would get them to do it.”

“You’re saying we shouldn’t think about it ahead of time?” said Tobias-Marco, sounding incredulous.

“I’m saying it might be the wrong question,” Jake shot back. “In the first place. I’m saying it’s a lot harder to trick you into blowing up the planet if you’re not the kind of person who goes around blowing up planets. If you’re—if you’re humble. Or scared. If you’re not willing to do anything that drastic in the first place, because you’ve been wrong before.”

No one seemed to know what to say to that, and after another long moment, Jake shrugged. “Maybe just keep that in mind, is all.”

* * *

It would have been a relief, being able to see again—

‹Marco here,› I broadcast. ‹Helium was right. The air’s hot enough that it’s just holding the moisture. No more mist.›

It would have been a relief, if the view wasn’t so terrifying.

Ahead of me, the ground continued its reckless downward slope for maybe another five hundred yards before terminating in a sharp, perfectly straight line. And beyond that line—

It was like an ocean of magma. Ax had said it was five kilometers wide, and I was starting to realize that I’d never had a visceral sense of just how vast of a distance that was, at least when it was magma we were talking about. You could drop the entire island of Manhattan into it and still have half a mile of molten rock on either side.

Even among the giant trees, I hadn’t felt quite this small.

‹I can see the river,› I relayed. ‹There’s a dropoff. I’m going to go over and take a look. Should be back in touch in ten minutes, tops.›

‹Roger. Good luck.›

I could see the cliff face on the far side of the river already; if the one on my side matched, then there were probably four or five hundred vertical feet between the bottom of the slope and the molten river below. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I could see faint patterns through the quivering air, lines and curves and dark spots carved into the vertical face of the rock.

Here goes nothing, I thought.

The first thing I noticed as I crossed the threshold was the heat. It had already been hot over the slope, but once I was directly over the river of magma it was like standing in front of an open oven door. I was maybe eight hundred feet up, with the mist rolling in below me, and it was still at least a hundred and thirty degrees.

The second thing I noticed was the city built into the rock face.

I didn’t have a great angle, so I spiraled lower, cutting through the updraft, wincing as the temperature rose and rose. It was maybe a hundred and eighty by the time I dropped below the edge of the cliff, and I knew that the bat body would only be able to handle a few minutes before it succumbed to exhaustion and heat stroke.

But I had to look closer. The walls of the chasm were covered in an amazing, intricate filigree—windows, doors, walkways, arches, open spaces cut back into the cliff. They stretched on in both directions, as far as the eye could see, an endless mosaic of rooms and plazas, all connected by open, stone stairways and breezeways. They began the instant the slope turned to vertical, and stretched all the way down to the very edge of the molten river, where the deep red glow was almost painfully bright.

And they were—as far as I could tell—completely empty.

Not a sound. Not a whisper. Not a flicker of motion. I glided along the cliff face, peering in through columns and archways, glimpsing caverns and caves and corridors that stretched back into utter darkness. I flew for almost a mile in one direction before turning back.

Nothing. Silent as a tomb.

Veering back out over the magma, I spread my wings wide, letting the rising air carry me higher and higher until I was once again level with the lower border of the mist. I winged my way back to shore, breathing a sigh of relief as I left the sauna of the canyon and returned to the cool, wet air of the valley.

‹Marco here. In range?›

‹Roger, Marco, this is Cassie. I see you. Bear left a little for the rendezvous.›

Three minutes later, we were back in the circle, and I relayed everything I had seen.

“Helium?” Jake asked. “That sound right to you?”

“We—don’t know, Prince Jake,” the alien answered. “Elfangor visited this world, but he never entered the dominion of the Arn itself. We do know that the Arn are said to prefer solitude—the flowers above the forest are divided into parcels of land, each of which is many kilometers wide and owned by a single individual. Perhaps the territory below is similarly divided.”

“How many stories?” asked one of the other Marcos.

“Thirty or forty,” I said. “The whole cliff face, top to bottom.”

“And they cut back into the rock?”

“In at least some places? A lot of it looked like it was only one layer thick, but maybe, I don’t know, five or ten percent of it went deeper?”

“That’s a lot of territory for one person to maintain.”

“Lot of territory to search,” said Jake.

“And that’s assuming we’re on the right side of the river—”

Jake held up a finger. “Okay, new plan,” he said. “Before we go down, we’re going to scout the rim of the canyon. Both directions. Look for landmarks, signs of battle—anything distinctive, anything that gives us a hint as to where we should start—”

* * *

‹Garrett here. I found a trio of Bug fighters, parked on the slope. There’s a stairwell leading down about fifty yards away. Go tell Jake, get the others. I’m going back for a closer look.›

* * *

One of the biggest problems with having woken up three weeks ago with all of my memories intact is that I knew what morphs I wanted, but I didn’t actually have them.

The six-lined racerunner was a lizard about eight inches long. It had decent eyesight and a great sense of smell. Its skin would blend in with the shadowy rock of the cliff city. It could run up to eighteen miles per hour when threatened. And—most importantly—it was cold blooded, i.e. it liked it when things were hot.

‹We’re going to have to demorph every half hour if it doesn’t get any cooler,› I warned, switching the gun to my other hand so I could wipe the sweat off my palm. ‹Seriously.›

I was in my morph armor, as was Tobias-Marco, each of us armed with one of the handguns. Helium was once again in Hork-Bajir morph, carrying the Dracon beam, and seemed to be, if anything, in even worse shape than we were.

‹At least when you remorph you’ll be hydrated again,› some asshole said, their voice helpfully and not-at-all-annoyingly chipper. ‹Silver linings.›

Lined your mom with fucking—fuck you, fucker. Silver ass bitch.

It was interesting how I could watch the useless frustration, and know where it was coming from, and still not be able to do anything about it.

‹Left,› said Jake.

We turned left, following a corridor deeper into the rock, away from the glow of the molten river. After a moment, we emerged into a chamber about the size of a large living room, lit by phosphorescent algae clinging to the walls and ventilated by a pair of dark openings that, from the noticeably cooler air oozing out of them, led all the way back to the forest. There were three more doors in the far wall, and Jake padded over to the center one without hesitation.

‹This way,› he said, and we followed.

We’d been in the tunnels and walkways of the Arn ghost city for only maybe twenty minutes, though it felt a lot longer. We’d entered as close to the Bug fighters as we dared—maybe half a mile away—and had been slowly making our way toward them through the three-dimensional maze, hoping to pick up some kind of trail.

It was eerily like walking through someone’s house while they weren’t home. When I was nine, my mom gave me The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to read, and I remember there was a scene early on where the Pevensie kids were exploring a giant, empty mansion with hundreds of rooms—the sort of house you never seem to come to the end of, full of unexpected places.

This was exactly like that. Room after room, each one different from the last, each one a disorienting mix of the weirdly familiar and the utterly alien. The one we were currently in, for instance, had a weird, angular structure in the middle of it, like a dentist’s chair designed by Tim Burton and then assembled by Picasso using nothing but broken LEGO. And yet the walls were covered with cabinets—completely normal cabinets, presumably made of wood from one of the giant trees, with little handles on the doors and everything.

‹Down,› Jake said, vanishing through a doorway into a narrow stairwell. We followed.

Jake was in wolf morph, keeping us on track as we trailed after “Cassie,” who was wearing another copy of the same body, and “Rachel,” who was in owl morph. The hope was that with the combination of super scent and super hearing, we’d be able to detect the enemy before they could detect us. The rest of us were hanging back, both for the sake of quiet and in case the vanguard ran into something too big to handle.

‹Right,› Jake said, and we followed him out onto a roofed balcony supported by arches and columns, with a wide, open view of the molten river.

Once again, the heat hit me like a hammer, instantly vaporizing the layer of sweat that my body had managed to produce in the only-a-hundred-degrees interior. We were much lower than we had been when we had started—maybe twenty stories below the edge of the canyon. At this height, you could hear the magma flowing, a low rumble like the sound of a jet engine heard from inside the plane.

‹How is it even going anywhere, if it circles around the entire planet?›

Even as I asked the question, my brain provided an answer, and I squashed a flash of annoyance as someone else said it.

‹The planet’s rotation, probably. Either that, or tides—are there any moons?›

No one else picked up the thread, and we plodded onward in sullen silence.

‹Jake,› I said, after we’d ducked into and out of the interior three more times, and had descended seven more floors. ‹Jake, I really think we need to de—›

‹—hear us? Repeat, this is Rachel, are you there? Can you guys hear us?›

‹We’re here,› Jake said. ‹What’s up?›

‹We found them. No sound yet, but we’ve got a definite scent trail, human and Hork-Bajir.›

‹Which way is it going?›

‹Well, it’s hard to tell without following it for a bit, seeing where it gets weaker. But it’s either up or down, and since the Bug fighters are up—›

It made sense. If you were going to power a lab with geothermal energy, you might as well put it right next to the source. We certainly hadn’t seen any high technology so far.

‹Roger,› Jake said. ‹Stay put, we’re coming to you.›

‹Cassie’s gone ahead, actually. But—uh, fuck, pronouns? He? He’s being careful. Said he’d stop the second he even thought he heard something.›

I don’t know if it was my imagination, but I swear I could feel Jake’s tightly-leashed anger, like a heat radiating through thought-speak. ‹You were supposed to stick together,› he said flatly.

‹Uh.›

‹Unless there was a reason not to.›

Silence.

The awkward kind.

I felt the need to say something, to intervene—to soothe the ruffled feathers, remind us that we were all on the same team, remind us not to let the heat get to us.

But I couldn’t figure out how. Every sentence I tried out was critically flawed. My heat-addled brain couldn’t think of any way to say hey, maybe we should all calm down that didn’t also include a hidden message of and for some reason I think you don’t already know this, and need me to tell you.

‹Whatever,› Jake said. ‹Stay put. We’ll be there soon.›

On we trudged, toward whatever.

* * *

—8796093022208—

I could hear them in the distance, the sound muffled and distorted by the twists and turns of the narrow stone passageways. There was a woman’s voice, cold and commanding—a man’s, quiet and appeasing—a Hork-Bajir’s gruff rumble—a high, avian trilling.

There were no other sounds. No footsteps, no gunfire, no technological hums. I listened for a full minute, and the voices neither faded nor grew clearer, though I thought they might have risen.

They were staying put.

I fought back against the urge to get closer, to reconnoiter. I’d already gone further than I should have, further than I’d agreed.

But I was so close. After being yanked out of Timbuktu, dragged through a Stephen King novel, and dropped into a ghost town on the outskirts of what was only barely metaphorically hell itself—

Those were the answers. Right there, just a few rooms away. Not just the answers to the little mess we were currently in, but precious hints about what lay ahead, too. The blue dwarf-thing had said that what happened on this planet would “directly impact” the situation on Earth, and honestly, it didn’t seem like any of us had given that dire pronouncement the attention it deserved over the past twenty-four hours.

Well, what would Cassie do?

Even in my owl body, I managed to sigh. There was something kind of cool about bringing all of the other Animorphs along with us in spirit, but there was also such a thing as taking it too far.

Turning, I took to the air, my wings utterly silent as I threaded my way back toward the others.

They were surprisingly quiet—it wasn’t until I was just two rooms away that I began to pick up on their heartbeats, and their breathing, and an unnerving grinding/squelching sound that had to be someone morphing.

‹Cassie here,› I broadcast. ‹Incoming.›

‹—just saying, maybe now is not the time to do this, given that we’re about to jump into who-knows-what and possibly all get killed?›

Apparently, someone had expanded their thought-speak to include me mid-sentence.

I winged into the room, braking softly and fluttering down to perch on what seemed to be a decorative sculpture, surrounded by what I thought might have been chairs of some kind.

‹Sure, yeah, let’s sort it out after we’re dead.›

It was obvious from the body language that the voice belonged to Jake—Jake, who looked as angry as I’d ever seen him, who was standing with his arms crossed, his hair soaked with sweat, glaring at Rachel-Marco while Tobias-Marco and Garrett-Marco looked back and forth between them both. Helium was in the background, giving off youngest-kid-trying-to-hide vibes as he demorphed from Hork-Bajir to Andalite.

‹Um,› I said. ‹Hi?›

Jake didn’t turn his head. ‹You said you were going to stick with Rachel.›

I—wha—

Oh.

‹It seemed safe,› I said. ‹I can hear heartbeats inside this thing—›

‹Not the point.›

If I had been in my own body, I would have blinked. As it was, I felt the feathers around my neck stand up, like hackles on a dog.

‹Uh. What is?›

It was the only innocuous response I could come up with.

‹I’m not in charge anymore. I’m seceding. Abdicating. Whatever the right word is.›

My brain tried out several sentences in rapid succession, rejecting What? and Why? and What? and What happened? before settling on ‹I don’t understand.›

‹That’s fine. You don’t have to.›

The words were cold as ice—

No. Not ice.

The words were like laser fire—white-hot and just pretending to be cold. Compressed, contained, radiating no heat.

I looked around the room. Clearly some kind of acknowledgement was needed, some kind of forward movement, the conversation was stalled, was in free-fall, felt like it was going to hit the ground at any second—

None of the other Marcos seemed to know what to say, either.

‹What,› I began, and then broke off, cursing myself, because some deep intuition told me that was the wrong word, that there was nowhere to go from there—

What do you want?

What’s wrong?

What can we do?

Oh. Right.

You want this to be on me, Jake had said, earlier. So it’s my fault. Back when we were talking about making sacrifices—when we’d all looked to him to tell us where the line was. Or at least, that’s what he’d thought we were doing.

And now—all of those what questions—

The one thing they had in common was that every sentence starting with what required him to put forth all of the effort. To explain, to guide, to decide.

‹Right,› I said, just to fill the silence. I didn’t know what to say, didn’t know how to get us out of this—a part of me was with the other Marco, was thinking that it was absolutely insane to be doing this now, out of the blue, right before a battle—

But another part of me—

The part that looked backwards, at the dominos—

That part of me could see that Jake wasn’t doing anything at all, that this was happening to him, just as much as it was happening to the rest of us, that of course it was coming to a head now, it wasn’t out of the blue at all—

Jake, screaming my name as he demorphed, clawing his way across the hillside to where a broken human body lay twitching, bleeding, dying.

Jake, repeating over and over again that we could go slow while we insisted that losses were inevitable, that we would die shielding him.

Jake, emerging out of thin air, having thrown everything else aside to make sure that his people weren’t alone, that Helium and the mainline Marco had backup, only to discover that I/we had been making my/our own backup the whole time, without telling him.

And all the way back, all the way back to the very beginning—to Elfangor, who’d turned to Jake first, said Jake’s name first. Press your hand against the cube, Jake Berenson, he’d said, and we shall see what fate thinks of a human child’s resolve.

‹Right,› I repeated, as the fog cleared away. I still felt off-balance, disoriented, startled by the suddenness of what was happening, the sudden intensity of it. But I thought I saw where to go next, at least—

‹So, um. About the whole you-being-in-charge-thing—›

How to say it, how to phrase it so that it was clear that I was making an acknowledgement, rather than trying to give him permission—that I wasn’t trying to act like I had the authority to give him permission—

‹We’re sorry.›

It took almost a full second for me to be sure that the thought was someone else’s, that it hadn’t just been my own voice in my own head.

Slowly, hesitantly, Tobias-Marco was raising a hand.

Jake’s head turned.

‹We’re sorry,› he repeated. ‹And not, like, just to get you to change your mind.›

Jake said nothing.

‹We get it.›

The nothing radiated skepticism.

‹We should have—›

The skepticism reared like a cobra threatening to strike.

‹We should have a lot of things,› I cut in, raising a wing so they’d know it was me. Something told me it wasn’t the right moment to start a sentence with Cassie here. ‹It’s not—don’t—we’re not saying we get all of it. Just, like. It makes sense that you’re mad.›

I was babbling, trying to fill the air with innocuous reassurances, hoping not to accidentally step on a land mine.

‹And we—we’re sorry. And obviously you have the right to—to resign, that’s not—even if we wanted to object, we couldn’t—›

‹Couldn’t?› Jake snapped, and for a moment the laser lost focus, swelling to fill the room with fire. Just for a moment, a single frame of the video, and then the icy control was back. ‹Please. Tell me more about what you couldn’t do, Marco Number Twelve out of Thirty.›

I counted to ten, hoping and praying that the rest of me was doing the same, trying to wrangle the fear and anger and impatience that were threatening to overwhelm me. Jake was in a—a mood, and that was fine, it was fine for him to have his knives out, it wouldn’t be a knife fight unless I took out my knives, too—

‹Is there, like, some kind of trap here that you’re wanting me to walk into, buddy?› I said.

Oof. Maybe you should have counted to eleven?

Jake’s eyes glittered. ‹No trap,› he said. ‹I just think it’s time to stop pretending.›

Pretending—

Couldn’t do—

You said you were going to stick with Rachel.

‹Right,› I said, my own voice going sour. ‹Right. Well. It’s a hundred and fifteen degrees, we all just came through hell, and whatever’s going on here, it’s going on about nineteen rooms over. Can we just—say sorry, and deal with the rest of this afterward?›

C’mon, man, meet me in the middle, here—

‹How about we vote on it?›

Motherfucker.

A part of me wanted to just say sure, why not, five to two in favor of you shutting the fuck up.

But that wouldn’t do any good, because it wasn’t a bluff. Calling him on it wouldn’t change anything. And also—

I clicked my beak, my wings rustling irritably.

He was right.

I wasn’t thrilled to admit it, but the part of me that was silently screaming at Jake to grow the fuck up and have a little self-control also had a few choice things to say about my own—our own—actions, both recent and not-so.

Jake was right that I—that we, not just Marco-plural but all of the Animorphs—had never really accepted his authority, authority that the rest of us had forced upon him, for the most part. We’d put him in charge, all the way back in Ventura, and then—

Well. Then, we’d done pretty much whatever we wanted. Rachel, warning the Yeerks. Tobias, running off to rescue Ax. Ax, letting himself get infested. Cassie—

It was easy to say we did what we had to do or we did the right thing, under the circumstances. But those words didn’t excuse anything. People pretty much always did what they thought was best, given the circumstances.

And in the meantime, there was Jake, doing his best to hold it all together. Picking up the pieces of the various messes we made.

And because of me—

—and the fucking blue Yoda thing—

—no, that wasn’t fair, the blue Yoda thing had pulled some genie bullshit, but it was my choices that had enabled that bullshit, my decision to create clones of myself in the first place that had opened the door to the rest of it—

Because of me, he’d had to watch his best friend die three times in one night, and was maybe about to go through it all again.

‹All right, fine,› I said, breaking the silence. ‹All in favor of admitting Jake has a point, and I—we—Marco has been kind of an asshole.›

Hands went up.

‹All in favor of—›

I broke off, changing direction mid-sentence as I caught Jake’s expression, one last puzzle piece falling into place—

Jake didn’t want to settle this issue. Not completely. He was perfectly happy to go into battle angry—to have us going into battle angry with him.

That was the point, really, judging by the way he was acting.

It was me who wanted us to make up and make nice.

Me, times five.

And if the five of us insisted on having it out, if we all ganged up on him and dragged him back to a state of calm, just to make ourselves feel better—

All right, buddy. Take your time.

‹Fuck it,› I said. ‹That was the only vote that mattered. Put your hands down.›

I could see the line stretching out in front of me, clear and bright and tempting.

But it wasn’t the right point B.

‹Bids open.›

The other four Marcos looked at me.

Looked at each other.

Looked back at me.

‹Seriously?› I grumbled. ‹What is this, ‘you touched it last’?›

Touched your MOM last. Last night, that is.

‹Twice,› whispered four voices.

I squeezed my eyes shut.

Tick tock, motherfucker.

There was no point in arguing, so I didn’t.

‹All right,› I said. ‹Let’s make a plan.›

* * *

—2199023255552 —

The thing about owls is, they don’t have a sense of smell.

‹Holy fucking shit.›

That’s how they can hunt skunks. Bears, wolves, foxes, even hawks and eagles—all the other large predators stay away, out of fear of getting sprayed. But owls don’t care.

‹Careful—quiet—›

That’s part of why we sent Cassie-Marco and Rachel-Marco out hunting together. Owl and wolf. Sight and smell. Cover all the bases, you know?

‹Is that—is that an Andalite?›

And hearing, of course. Both of them had been able to hear.

But then, nothing in this room was making any sound at all.

I tried not to breathe through my nose as I stepped carefully across the threshold, gun held low but ready. Around me, the others fanned out—gorilla, wolf, human, Andalite, Hork-Bajir—each picking their way silently through the mass of battered, mutilated corpses.

‹I’ve got—at least thirteen Hork-Bajir, so far.›

We were only maybe two or three turns away from our target. I could hear the voices echoing through the narrow stone corridors—hear them with my own, regular human ears. We’d been planning to get close before figuring out the next step.

We hadn’t expected to come across a charnel house.

‹Laser marks on the walls,› said a voice. ‹Look—you can see where the algae is burned away.›

The room was dark, the glow already dimmer than candlelight. But it was enough.

‹Ax—sorry, Helium—come and take a look at this?›

The looming Hork-Bajir shuffled past me, heading for the center of the room.

‹I’ve got fragments of metal, too. Looks like maybe a hand grenade or something?›

I knelt down, placing my fingers on the forehead of one of the bodies. After a moment, I slid the gun into my pocket and placed my other hand on the stone floor.

‹Still warm,› I called out. ‹Warmer than the rest of the room, I mean.›

The dead alien was holding a Dracon beam, a handheld model identical to the one that I’d brought with me from Brazil, the one Helium was currently holding. Prying back the claws one by one, I lifted it carefully out and checked the power pack.

‹Some of the weapons are still charged,› I said. ‹We might want to rethink the gorilla and wolf morphs.›

‹Hey, is anybody watching the door?›

‹I’ll cover it.›

I straightened, turning to look at the bodies closest to me. Some of them were burned, others cut, others crushed or dismembered. One of them had something sticking out of its chest. I stepped forward for a closer look.

‹This is not an Andalite,› said Helium. ‹But it is similar. Like the creature Visser Three used in Washington, D.C. I think—I think this might be a Visser Three host. A clone host, for one of his cloned Yeerks, or a puppet body like the one Rachel encountered at the high school.›

‹That would explain the twenty-three dead Hork-Bajir.›

‹Would we be able to tell, if we cut open the head?› someone asked.

‹No. The difference between a cloned Yeerk and a Z-space control mechanism derived from Yeerk flesh—no. Not without equipment that we don’t have, and which I do not know how to operate in any case.›

‹Somebody acquire it.›

I tuned them out, crouching next to the body of the dead Controller. The object sticking out of its chest was one of the head-horns of another Hork-Bajir, shattered and charred at the base. It must have been blown off, blown off and blasted backward into the soldier behind him—

I looked around the room again. We had been in some pretty bad situations, had managed to weasel our way out of some pretty tight spots. But if we’d been here, while all of this was happening—

I tried to imagine it. The dark room, full of surging bodies—the sound of Dracon fire—the smell of blood and ozone—flashes of light in the darkness—

I shivered. In all likelihood, we would have—

‹Guys. This—this is a Marco.›

My head twisted around so fast my neck cracked.

‹Here.›

A hand, waving in the darkness.

‹He’s dead.›

The rest of us converged on the spot, picking our way across the room as quickly as we could.

The Marco was lying flat on his back, a look of surprise frozen on his face. There was a gun on the floor not far from his hand—a regular human handgun, like the one in my own pocket. He’d been shot in the chest with laser fire, and there were long, deep cuts across his shoulder and arms, dried blood darkening the fabric of one pant leg.

‹Is this—›

We were silent, each of us trying to remember.

Is this one of the ones that ran away? Back at the top of the valley? Or is this—

—the original—

‹It doesn’t matter,› I said forcefully.

And it didn’t. Not really.

But I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that it sort of did anyway.

‹Guys, what—what do we—›

I didn’t know whose voice it was, but that didn’t matter, either.

‹Acquire him,› I said. ‹Somebody acquire him.›

‹He won’t have any memories of this—›

‹Just do it anyway.›

A long, scuffling silence.

‹We’re still on track,› said probably-Cassie-Marco-given-the-tone-of-command. ‹They’re right around the corner.›

‹Yeah, but—›

But we’re not prepared for this level of violence.

‹Helium,› I said. ‹How many Hork-Bajir can fit inside of a Bug fighter?›

‹Normal crew is four. Normal troop complement is seven more. For short flights, for important missions—you could fit as many as sixteen, perhaps eighteen.›

‹Who’s been counting?› I asked. ‹Is twenty-three still the—›

‹No. I make twenty-six heads, possibly two or three more depending on how all the loose parts fit together.›

Call it twenty-nine. With at least one Hork-Bajir in the room up ahead, and with the three that had stayed behind to guard the Bug fighters, that made thirty-three exactly—

‹Risky,› said another Marco, thinking the same thoughts at the same time. ‹You’re assuming they all came out of the fighters—that none of these were already stationed here.›

‹Look,› said probably-Cassie-Marco-again. ‹It’s not like we’re gonna not go take a look, right?›

‹Split the party?› someone suggested. ‹Vanguard and reserve?›

‹No.›

We all turned. Somehow, it was clear that the voice had been Jake’s.

‹No splitting,› he said. And then, after a pause—‹That’s my vote, anyway.›

We talked back and forth for another two minutes, but all of us knew that the decision had already been made.

‹It’s not like this was ever safe to begin with,› someone muttered, as we demorphed and remorphed.

‹Anybody else disturbed by how much ‘fuck it’ has become our primary operating procedure?› someone else said, as we lined up.

Five Hork-Bajir, holding five Dracon beams, with five more strapped to our backs. Helium, in tarantula hawk morph, his Andalite body holding the two human guns in Z-space. And Jake, wearing Ax’s old body, carrying no weapons—our diplomat, if we turned out to need one.

‹Here we go,› whispered a quiet voice.

‹Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,› whispered another.

‹Like there’s anything you wouldn’t do,› whispered a third.

It was surreal, stepping out of the charnel house and into the quiet, softly glowing corridor—all of us stepping into the corridor, leaving the death and carnage behind us just as suddenly as we’d come across it, without a word, without even pausing for a moment of silence, of ceremony. The whole thing felt like a dream, a nightmare—had the same quality of rapidly-shifting madness, absolute unpredictability. From Brazil, to the valley, to the vast, empty city on the edge of the river of fire, to—to that—and now, up ahead, ordinary human voices arguing in ordinary human tones, a man and a woman—

I felt like I was ten steps behind. I felt like I wasn’t even on my feet—like I was inert, free falling—a marble in a game of Mouse Trap—

A domino waiting to fall.

We turned a corner. The voices were louder now, the individual words almost comprehensible. Somebody held up a hand, slipped forward as the rest of us waited, crouched down and peered around the corner at knee-height.

Maybe you’ve just reached your limit, is all. Maybe you just can’t take in any more.

The dark shape waved us forward, and the rest of us followed, around the corner and into a large, cavernous room with a domed roof. On the far side were three round doorways—two of them dark, and one of them bright with light from the room beyond.

Better hope not, because this isn’t over. It kind of hasn’t even really started yet.

As we stepped out into the dim, echoing space, the voices finally snapped into focus, the curved roof reflecting the sound straight to our ears.

“—you, it’s not an option. Period.”

“Then we need to leave. There’s no way they failed to send a signal—without proof, what do you think this looks like? Treason, plain and simple—”

“We have proof. He is the proof.”

“Not if we can’t get it out of him. Not if we can’t demonstrate it to the council—”

The woman let out a long, ragged half-scream of frustration.

Five of us froze.

“—just get out of here before they get here, take him with us, we can find—”

Jake took two more steps and then stopped, his stalk eyes swiveling back and forth between us. ‹What—›

‹Shh.›

We stood as still as statues, riveted, listening. In the background, the man’s words continued to flow, inconsequential, meaningless.

“—maybe to Eldra? Or Isk?”

The five of us waited, transfixed—pinned to the moment, struggling to hold on to the impossible thought long enough to acquire proof, to keep our own reason and sanity from slamming the door shut prematurely, solely on the grounds that there was no fucking way, it literally could not be—

The woman spoke.

“We have barely enough fuel to get past Leera, let alone all the way to Isk—”

She spoke, and we heard, and we were sure, all five of us, and suddenly nothing else seemed to matter anymore.

We moved forward as one, one mind with five bodies, fixated on one singular purpose.

‹Marco, what are you doing?›

We passed through the round opening on the far side of the room, our footsteps utterly silent. There was a turn to the left, a short corridor, a doorway on the right that opened into a room glowing with bright, golden light.

‹Jesus—Helium, stay here, stay out of sight—›

The doorway was wide enough to let two of us pass through together, shoulder to shoulder. Without a word, without the loss of even a tenth of a second, we split ourselves, lining up like schoolchildren, two and two and one. I was in the second row, on the left.

‹Marco, stop!›

There’s a certain kind of thinking that most people never quite manage to master. It starts when you ask yourself, without any kind of self-deception or wishful thinking, what you would have decided, if you’d thought about it earlier. Like, say you and a friend agreed to meet up on a certain day, but you forgot to lock down where or when or what for.

If you can figure out what you would have said—not what you wish you would have said but what you really actually would have said—and if you can figure out what your friend would have said back—and furthermore if your friend can do the same move—if you can both count on each other to think it through properly—

Then sometimes—not always, but sometimes—you can both show up at the same place, at the same time, like magic. The right place, at the right time, just as if you’d planned it all out in advance.

It’s not easy even under the best of circumstances. To know yourself and another person that well—to be able to predict, not just what each of you would think, but what each of you would think the other would think, knowing that the other was doing the same thing. Even Jake and I couldn’t really count on it, could only do it once in a while, and more than half by luck.

But the five of us—

—the five of me—

—we had an obvious advantage in that department.

The two Marcos in front rounded the corner in unison, guns already raised, as if they’d rehearsed it a thousand times. By the time I stepped into the room behind them, they had already fired their first two shots, and two bodies were already falling. I raised my own gun along with the Marco beside me, and we each sighted down our barrels, knowing that we were aiming at different targets, knowing without the need for explicit, conscious thought—just doing what made sense, and counting on the others to do the same.

Four more bodies fell, and there were only six left. I shifted my aim—

A volley of bolts came flashing back toward us. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw one of us fall. I ignored it, squeezing the trigger—

It was all over in another second or so. Three of us were down, and nine of them, leaving only the two human Controllers and a large, feathered avian shackled to the wall. The man had been hit in both the arm and the leg, and was screaming in pain where he lay on the floor.

The woman was just screaming.

Jake came around the corner, his head low, his tail blade at the ready.

‹It’s over,› I said, as the three fallen Marcos began to melt their way out of their dead and dying Hork-Bajir bodies, as the other Marco still standing moved back to cover the room, leaving me alone in the center of the floor.

‹Marco, what—›

And then Jake stopped—broke off mid-thought and jerked to a halt like he’d hit an invisible force field, because he saw it, too.

The woman was my mother.

My mother, Elena Louisa Roja Levy.

My mother, who had died—

—vanished—

—more than two years earlier, in a boating accident off the coast.

My mother.

‹What—›

“What are you waiting for, Andalite?” my mother snarled, the words so full of fury and contempt that there was no room for even a drop of fear.

‹Marco, don’t—›

‹Shut up,› I said.

I stepped forward, raised the gun, pointed it straight at my mother’s—

My mother’s!

—head.

‹Yeerk,› I said, my own fury a perfect mirror of hers. ‹You are trespassing in this human’s mind. You will remove yourself, or you will die.›

The Yeerk puppetmaster pulled my mother’s—

My mother’s!

—lips into a sneer, forced her throat to shape a bitter laugh. “You’ll have to do better than that, Andalite.”

Without taking my eyes off of my mother—

My mother!

—I swung the gun around, pointed it at the head of the writhing, screaming man, and pulled the trigger.

Blood mist washed over us both.

I swung the gun back.

The Yeerk behind my mother’s eyes flinched—not with fear, but with rage, barely checked by survival instinct. “You bastard!” she shrieked, her face darkening, fingers twisted into claws. “He was an unarmed—”

‹You will remove yourself,› I repeated, ‹or you will die.›

There was a moment of wild, flickering uncertainty—one single, bright moment where it seemed like that might do it, like it might have been enough—

And then my mother’s face hardened again.

“No,” said the Yeerk. “You’ll just—”

If at first you don’t succeed, try doing the exact same thing at least one more time.

I swung the gun to point at the shackled avian prisoner.

‹Chest,› a silent voice reminded me.

I lowered the gun a few degrees.

“No!” the Yeerk controlling my mother shouted, raising her hands, her voice suddenly frightened and vulnerable. “No, wait, you don’t underst—”

I pulled the trigger.

“Do you have any idea what you’ve just done?” my mother’s rapist shrieked. “Do you have any idea who—”

She broke off with shocking abruptness, and then began to laugh—an empty, reckless laughter, the laughter of a damned soul.

“Ah,” she said. “Of course. I see. Not Andalites at all.”

Beside me, the three human Marcos were rising to their feet, the last traces of Hork-Bajir fading as they finished demorphing.

“A clever ploy, parading his body in front of the council,” she snarled, as one of the Marcos bent over the body of the avian, putting a hand to the side of its head. “Though it seems excessively sadistic—even for you—to clone him for further use, afterward. Couldn’t find anyone taller for your little puppet show?”

The gun wavered as my mind raced—as I tried to put it together, from her perspective, see things as she saw them, make sense out of the disconnected words.

“You may as well kill us both. Try to drag me from this woman’s brain and I will wreck it on my way out. I’ll leave you no easy library to poke through.”

A strange hypothesis, rising in credibility—

Dead doombot outside, surrounded by Hork-Bajir.

Imprisoned Arn inside.

Three Bug fighters.

I lowered the gun an inch.

‹Who are you?› I asked.

The alien slug inside my mother scoffed.

A flash of blue moved in the corner of my eye, and I twitched. I had almost completely forgotten about Jake.

‹Yeerk,› he said, as he reared, bringing his main eyes to head height. ‹I am no tool of Esplin, nor friend, nor ally. I am the brother of Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul, who you feared as the Beast, the Vanarx, the blade that falls without warning—›

“Lies,” she spat. “Aximili is on Earth, trapped there by the rift. You think I haven’t done my homework? I’m here, aren’t I? Have some respect.”

A Controller coming after Visser Three—a Controller with intel about the Earth, about the Yeerk council—who speaks like she’s used to being obeyed—

Ax had said something about a plot to depose—

‹Visser One?› I whispered.

But how—Mom died over two years ago—Seerow hadn’t even discovered the Yeerks yet—had he?

Some tiny, distant part of my brain noted that we’d never asked Ax how many human years there were in an Andalite one.

“Are we dropping the pretense, then?”

I refocused.

‹Mom,› I said, lowering the gun the rest of the way. ‹Mom, it’s me. It’s Marco. I mean, it’s really Marco, not a trick or anything. Don’t—don’t try to answer, don’t fight, I know how it is. But I’m here. I’m here, and I’m going to get you out. Look—Jake’s here, too—›

I gestured, and Jake began to demorph.

‹Hi, Mrs. Levy,› he said, and it sounded like Jake—even though it was still in my own mental voice, the way thought-speak always was, there was something about the quality of the words that could only have come from my best friend—

Or from a Yeerk, pulling the strings.

My mother’s eyes narrowed as they tracked rapidly back and forth between the two of us. “What’s your game here, Esplin?” the Yeerk seethed.

‹Not Esplin,› I said. ‹I don’t—I know, it doesn’t make any sense. But we’re here for the same reason you are—to stop him, to stop Visser Three.›

“Bullshit,” she said. “You came in here, you kill my guards, you murder Hildy—covering your tracks? I’m surprised your pet was even still alive for us to find.”

‹Jake,› I whispered, as the gun grew heavier in my hands. ‹Jake, help.›

‹Visser—sorry, Mrs. Levy, I don’t mean to ignore you but I’ve got to talk to this—this—›

Jake broke off as his morph passed the halfway mark, as a gash split open in his Andalite face and began to grow lips and teeth. There was an uncertain silence, long enough for my thoughts to begin to wobble dangerously once again—

What the fuck.

What the fuck.

What the FUCK—

—even as another, deeper part of me was whispering that it all made sense, it all made perfect sense, this was why the meddler god had brought us here, why he’d brought spares—to make certain that at least one of us made it this far, it didn’t matter who as long as at least one of us was there to recognize her—

“Sorry,” Jake said again, as the fur shrank into his skin and the bones of his spine rearranged themselves with an unsettling crackle. “Visser. Visser One. My name is Jake Berenson. I’m the leader of the human resistance—”

“Bullshit,” my mother’s voice spat. “I saw that body, too. What are you playing at?”

‹You did not see my body, Yeerk.›

Helium stepped forward on my other side, the last traces of tarantula hawk slowly vanishing. ‹I am Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill, brother of Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul. And as you can see, I am not on Earth.›

“Are they holograms?” the Yeerk sneered. “Or have you perhaps found a race of natural shape-shifters? I somehow doubt you’d bother toying with me, if you’d really cracked the morphing tech. Maybe your pet engineered you some changelings, in addition to your clones?”

‹Marco,› spoke a low voice in the back of my mind. ‹Marco, we are going to take a risk. Please be understanding. If your mother behaves in a threatening manner, we will respond with violence, but we will not kill her. This we swear.›

I turned my head as Helium raised a hand toward the opening of his ear, watched along with everyone else as a wet, gray proboscis poked out and began to wave around.

Fifteen seconds later, there was a Yeerk in his hand.

‹This is no hologram, Visser. And I am no slave, either. Here. Hold out your hand and feel.›

There was a look of shock—tightly controlled—on my mother’s face, as the Yeerk pulling her strings reached out a hand—a finger—stroked gently along the length of the Yeerk, as gently as you might touch a baby’s face.

‹That is Perdão of Terra that you see,› Helium declared, drawing his hand back and lifting the Yeerk up to his ear. ‹Together we resist the forces of conquest on Earth. The forces of Visser Three.›

My mother’s eyes narrowed again, her head turning from face to face to face, her confusion now plainly evident. She said nothing.

‹Marco, this is Jake, private channel. What—how do you want to play this?›

Back in your morph armor already, buddy?

I kept my own eyes straight ahead. ‹We get her out,› I said. ‹Whatever it takes.›

‹Are you—›

‹Whatever it takes.›

‹Have you thought about—›

‹Whatever it takes, Jake.›

Jake fell silent.

Inside my own head, my thoughts were boiling. There was no clear line in sight, just an all-encompassing, overwhelming point B, pulling at me like a black hole with no obvious path to get there.

To do what you do.

Yeah, well, there was no option but this one, no chance that any of the five of us could walk away at this point. If the Ellimist or Crayak or whoever had been counting on that, then they were going to get what they paid for.

‹Acquire her,› I said out loud.

My mother’s body straightened, her face darkening again, and I raised the gun, thumbing the power level to stun. ‹Resistance is futile,› I bit out, without a trace of humor or levity.

One of me stepped forward, placed a hand on our mother’s arm, focused briefly. I watched her eyes flutter shut—

‹Now we have all of your secrets,› I said. ‹Anything that my mother would remember, anyway. Staying in her head saves nothing. Hurting her saves nothing.›

“Bullshit you have all of her—”

‹That’s my cue, right?›

Motion in the corner, a bright flash of colors.

‹So, yeah. Uh. Let’s see. Proof that morphing gives us access to all of your secrets. Well, this guy’s name is something like Quatzhinnikon, not really sure how to make it make sense in English sounds. What’s the easiest—oh, well, I guess there’s this.›

The avian body shook, the colors of its feathers changing in hypnotic waves—white to green to orange to deep blue.

‹This guy has a perfect memory. I mean perfect. Apparently, this species encodes its memories instantly, because I’ve got the whole conversation between Mom and dear departed Hildy, here. It doesn’t understand English, but it remembers the sounds, in detail, in order. Hang on.›

I glanced back at my mother’s face. It was twisted with emotion, indecision—

‹Yeah, so. Apparently they came here figuring they’d just pop a Yeerk into whoever they found, get the dirt on Visser Three that way. Didn’t realize that the Arn had reengineered themselves to be immune to infestation, and they don’t know how to speak his language, so they’ve just been sitting here shouting do you speak English and trying to figure out what to do next—›

I glanced at the dead body dangling from the shackles, wondering if I should feel remorse.

‹Speaking of immune to infection, this guy figures he’s probably resistant to being morphed, too. He predicts I’ve got about ten minutes in here before the control Yeerk starts to rot away, so maybe we want to hurry this up?›

‹Were we right about Visser Three?› someone asked. ‹What he’s planning?›

‹Yeah. Or at least—damn, Visser Three had this guy chasing down a lot of different threads—›

‹Maybe don’t say them all out loud where Visser One can hear them, just yet,› Jake interrupted, his voice dry.

In spite of everything, I felt my lips twitch. They had played that perfectly—tone, timing, all of it.

‹That’s what you were arguing about, right before we came in, wasn’t it?› I asked, lowering the gun again. ‹You were saying that Quatazh—that this creature was all the evidence you needed. Who do you need evidence for, Visser? What have you been accused of?›

The Yeerk inside my mother’s head said nothing, only glared.

‹Let me guess,› I said, closing my eyes, letting my brain fill in the pattern.

Parading his body in front of the council—

‹Visser Three blamed you for the problems with the Earth invasion,› I ventured. ‹Said you’d gone native, were colluding with the humans. Showed them your host body’s son’s body, as proof. Marco, poster child for the Animorphs. Am I warm?›

I opened my eyes to find my mother’s staring back at me, looking somehow cracked, uncertainty leaking through the hardness.

‹So you came here, looking for proof that he’s the one who’s turned against the Yeerk empire. Right?›

My mother’s body stiffened—not much, but enough.

‹Well, jackpot,› said the Arn-Marco.

‹We’ve known for a while,› I explained. ‹Visser Three—he’s been doing everything he can to stop humans and Yeerks from sitting down to negotiate. From realizing that there doesn’t have to be a war.›

Her gaze flickered toward Helium—

‹He’s not the only one,› I said. ‹Not the only voluntary host on the team. Dad—›

I squeezed my eyes shut again, overwhelmed by a sudden wave of emotion. Thinking of him, while looking at her—

‹Dad’s one of them. He’s trying to resist—to resist the Visser. But the Yeerks the Visser brought with him—the ones already in the system—he’s got them mostly under his thumb. Half of them are his, and the other half have a knife at their throat.›

I glanced to the side as the other two Marcos acquired the avian, as Jake stepped forward and gently touched my mother’s elbow, as the Marco still in Hork-Bajir morph began transforming back into his real body.

‹So,› I said. ‹Are you goi—›

“How are there five of you?” she asked abruptly, cutting me off.

I turned to look at Jake.

“Seems safe enough,” he murmured.

‹We have a morphing cube,› I answered. ‹Elfangor left it with us.›

“That doesn’t exp—”

‹If you stay past the time limit, the controlling consciousness goes away, and the body just permanently becomes the body. Stay past morph as a bird, you die and there’s just a bird. Stay past morph as Marco…›

The Yeerk laughed again—that same cold, reckless laugh. “I must say, I’m impressed. You really are your mother’s son.”

I felt my finger twitch on the trigger.

“She tried to kill me once, you know. Well, more than once, but once she almost succeeded. Such a tiny little hole in my control—the ability to close one eye. I had to look back, afterward, to try to figure out what had happened. She never thought about it. Never planned. Never let herself notice it, somehow—hid the knowledge even from herself until exactly the right moment—”

Enough of this.

‹Time to decide, Yeerk,› I broke in. ‹Leave my mother’s body, and live, or stay inside of her and we’ll starve you out.›

“Did you not hear me before? I’ll wreck this woman’s brain long before the fugue takes me.”

‹Try it and I’ll kill you both. Don’t think I won’t do it just to spare my mother the pain.›

Hard the words, hard the resolve underneath them.

I love you, Mom.

“Who’s to say I’m not doing it already, right this very second?”

‹Marco,› Jake warned, as my finger twitched on the trigger again.

I waved him back. ‹You,› I said. ‹You’re to say. Her life is your only bargaining chip. You wouldn’t give it up that quickly.›

“Far from my only bargaining chip.”

I tilted my head.

“Visser One, remember?”

I was silent for a moment as my brain churned through the implications.

‹Even better, then,› I said. ‹You want to live, we want to keep you alive. We’re all on the same page. All you have to do to make it happen is get out of her head.›

“And go where?”

I gestured toward the Arn-Marco. ‹This Arn has been doing all kinds of experiments with Yeerk biology,› I said. ‹There must be a supply of kandrona somewhere. Maybe even stasis tubes. And if not, you’ve got to have some on the Bug fighters, right?›

‹There are some down here,› the other Marco confirmed. ‹Actually, not just that—›

I lifted a finger. ‹So, Yeerk? Do we have a deal?›

The Yeerk behind my mother’s eyes scoffed. “This woman’s son?” she said, putting on an air of disbelief. “The boy who killed five other people to make copies of himself? I’m supposed to take his word?”

‹What about the word of an Andalite warrior?› Helium asked. ‹Your fellow host?›

“Brother of Elfangor? Bearer of a shard that could be a copy of Esplin himself, for all that I know?” The Yeerk shook my mother’s head. “None of you are worth trusting on your word alone.”

I looked at Jake.

‹Marco, no,› he whispered. ‹I know what you’re thinking, but—›

‹It’s my mother, Jake.›

‹It’s too high a price. You can’t possibly—the morphing power, Marco. Visser One, with the morphing power? And—and the location of Terra, and everything you know about Tyagi and Telor—shoot, about the Ellimist—›

‹What if you kill me after?› I said. ‹As soon as it’s out of her?›

Jake gave no answer for a long moment—glanced nervously back and forth between me and my mother, chewing his lip.

‹No,› he said finally. ‹Look—the Ellimist bringing us here—I gotta figure, it’s more about getting us in touch with Visser One than about giving you a chance to save your mother.›

I managed to keep my temper, barely. ‹You really want to keep that thing alive?› I asked.

‹Visser One, Marco. Listen to yourself.›

I let out a breath.

‹Fuck you,› I growled.

‹Atta boy.›

‹Turn it back around on you, then,› I said. ‹Why not one of me? If we’re already going to be taking it with us—it’s not like we don’t have spares.›

Jake’s face turned thoughtful again—

‹Hey, it’s me. Marco-of-Paradise. Private channel.›

I turned to look, my eyes lingering for a moment on my mother, who was standing there with arms crossed, a knowing smirk on her face.

‹I’m guessing you and Jake are fighting about letting her take one of us as a host?›

I gave a fractional nod.

‹Well, listen. There’s a ton of stuff we need to sort through, but one thing that might be particularly relevant—›

I felt my heartrate tick up.

‹You remember we were guessing that V3 was trying to figure out Yeerk-to-Yeerk telepathy?›

‹Yeah.›

‹Well, he was. I mean, there’s more to it than that, we can talk about the rest later, but—this guy cracked it.›

‹Define ‘cracked.’›

‹These guys know their shit, man. I’m telling you, he cracked it. Spliced in some genes from some hive-mind species that V3 found somewhere, threw it onto a splicer virus, did some biomagic to deal with the cancer and the side effects—boom. Wireless coalescion.›

‹Just like that?›

‹Just like that. Visser Three’s had this for weeks.›

‹What else has he had for weeks?›

‹None of the big shit—that’s all still in R&D. There’s no way for him to mass transform all the Yeerks into little Esplins—look, I’m literally dying here, can we do this later? That’s all you need, right?›

I turned to look at my mother again.

It was all I needed.

‹Jake,› I said.

‹Eh?›

‹What if we distribute the Yeerk?›

‹What?›

‹We distribute the Yeerk across multiple bodies. That way they’re all too small to take full control. Like Temrash getting inside Ax.›

My brain tried to throw up an objection—such a tiny little hole in my control—but I squashed it, cut it off, threw it aside. I could see the bright line, now, and I had no room left to care about anything else.

‹Isn’t that like the equivalent of cutting your IQ into quarters, though? Why would she go for it?›

I explained what the other Marco had told me.

Jake and I argued for a little while.

I won.

Then Jake and I argued a little about me winning.

‹Look,› I said finally, cutting him off. ‹I get what you’re saying. You’re right. This is all happening super fast. But no joke—you saw how that thing teleported us in here. It could pull us back out any second. And if we blink and find ourselves back on Earth and that thing is still inside my mother, so help me—›

I broke off, took a couple of long, deep breaths. ‹Do you have any actual objections?› I asked. ‹Or is it just, like, you feel like you should have some?›

‹I definitely feel like I should have some, yeah. But—›

‹Is this the part where I mention how you’re not in charge anymore?›

‹Go to hell, Marco.›

‹Atta boy.›

I turned back to my mother, and to the alien slug holding her hostage.

“Finished already?” she goaded.

‹If we keep you alive, what can you do to help the resistance?›

The Yeerk tilted my mother’s head, considering.

“A fair bit,” she said. “My rank is still in effect, for now—the council won’t revoke it without careful deliberation. And even after that changes, there’s a chance it won’t filter all the way down to the Earth fleet. There have been communication issues.”

‹Visser Three manufactured those.›

“Still. I can use that as a point against him, if it comes down to a question of authority. I’m assuming you have a way back into the system?”

Not even a hesitation, really, just a tiny, fractional delay—

‹Yes,› I said.

“What is it?”

‹We’re the ones asking the questions, Yeerk.›

She smiled—my mother’s exact smile, light and mysterious and playful.

Focus.

‹What else?› I asked. ‹If they don’t listen?›

She hesitated, and I saw her eyes flicker toward the gun. “I have backdoor codes to approximately fifteen percent of the ships in the Yeerk fleet,” she said reluctantly. “Including all of the ships in the Earth system or bound for it.”

‹What kind of backdoor codes?›

“Full remote override. Engines, communications, weapons. Life support, even.”

‹Roll to disbelieve,› whispered a Marco.

‹Still,› another replied.

‹How?› I asked.

She smiled again.

‹Assuming we believe you,› I ground out. ‹Assuming we let you live, bring you with us. Would you—›

‹Stop.›

I broke off. There was movement in the corner of my vision, and I turned to see another copy of my mother, dressed in loose shorts and a t-shirt, waving her—his—hands.

‹She’s seen the Ellimist. The avatar, anyway.›

‹What?›

‹She—she was infested four years ago. Infested on Earth. Infested before Seerow—before this Seerow—›

‹WHAT?›

‹I don’t—I don’t know. I’m not sure. There are gaps—places where she wasn’t able to see, or where she forgot—time travel, alternate universes—she’s been a Controller for four years. She knew Elfangor! Knew him in human morph, on Earth!›

‹Helium?›

‹We—we don’t know—our Elfangor doesn’t know this woman—›

‹Jake?›

“Hello?” said the Controller, waving one of my mother’s hands. “Are you still th—”

‹You,› I said, turning back and raising the gun. ‹The Ellimist. Talk. Now.›

“Ellimist?” she said, and the deception was flawless, masterful, exactly the right amount of confusion and surprise, of frustrated nonchalance. “The Andalite fairy ta—”

I flicked the gun from stun to max, fired a bolt into the wall directly beside her head. She shrieked, her hand flying to her face where a droplet of molten stone had splashed onto her cheek—

‹Shut up,› I said. ‹We have all of my mother’s memories. You. Talk. Now.›

My mother’s jaw clicked shut. Her eyes traced around the room, lingering for a moment on the corpse of the man—Henry?

“Give me a sign,” she said quietly.

‹What?›

“A sign,” she repeated. “Give me a sign.”

‹Like a password? Like in the fucking Silver Chair? Like, in the name of Aslan, I—›

I broke off, because my mother had gasped—a true, human-sounding gasp, the kind that’s torn out of you, that’s almost impossible to fake. All of the blood had drained out of her face, and her eyes were as wide as silver dollars.

It was only for a moment, and then she regained control, the mask dropping back down as quickly as it had lifted.

But I’d seen it. I’d seen it, and I believed it.

“I can’t tell you,” she whispered.

‹Bullsh—›

“I can’t,” she insisted. “It’s not a choice. But—”

She faltered, looked around at the seven of us, at the corpses littering the floor. “I accept your terms,” she said.

‹We haven’t even told them to you yet.›

“I accept them.”

‹What—›

‹Marco,› Jake interrupted. ‹Take yes for an answer.›

I was silent for a long, long moment.

Hey, remember when you were thinking to yourself that you felt ten steps behind?

‹Here is the deal, Yeerk,› I said. ‹The Arn have developed a technology which allows your kind to stay in contact while in separate hosts. A telepathic coalescion. You understand the implications?›

My mother’s brow furrowed. Her mouth opened, but no words came out.

‹You will leave my mother’s head. You will divide yourself into—›

I looked around the room myself—at Jake, at Helium, at the other Marcos.

‹Into four pieces,› I said. ‹Each of those shards will enter one of my heads.›

I stopped talking.

“And?” she demanded.

‹And what? That’s it.›

“Kandrona.”

‹We have oatmeal. Besides, somewhere lying around here is a virus that makes human bodies produce their own. You’ll manage.›

“And Elena?”

‹She goes free. You don’t harm her. If you do—if you did—you’re done. You die here, now, in this room, and it doesn’t matter what else we have to do to make it happen.›

The Yeerk clenched my mother’s fists, pointed my mother’s eyes straight at mine.

“This—this treatment,” she said. “Say that it’s safe. Say that you’ll administer it safely, that you won’t sabotage it. That you won’t omit any risks that come from it.”

I looked over at the avian Marco. It nodded, the gesture oddly uncoordinated in the alien body.

‹That’s the deal,› I said. ‹You set my mother free, in exchange for access to four Marcos—access without control. None of us tries anything funny unless you do first.›

‹Marco,› Jake whispered. ‹Your mom—she’s—the Ellimist probably isn’t going to send her back with us—›

‹She knows how to fly a Bug fighter,› I said. ‹She can take care of herself.›

‹What if it doesn’t send the Yeerk back with us, either?›

‹Puh-lease,› I said, sweeping my gaze around the room once more.

To do what you do, the avatar had said. To act as seems appropriate, under the circumstances.

‹This is exactly what that little blue fucker sent us here to do.›