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Author's Note: This is a (small) double update; note that there's an interlude immediately following. Also note that there will be a moderately large revision to the previous interlude coming with the NEXT update, which might be a couple weeks or more out.

Chapter Text

Chapter 30: Tobias

‹Look, I’m not arguing with that, okay? I mean, obviously there’s going to be stuff it isn’t safe or smart to tell me, especially while we’re still in the whole getting-to-know-each-other phase. But the more you can tell me, the better I’ll be able to say things that are actually useful, and the better I’ll be able to analyze the Serenity data for you.›

I cocked my head as the two of us drifted past each other yet again, rising in opposite lazy spirals on the invisible geyser of hot air billowing up from the tarmac. Thàn was in the barn owl morph he’d hastily borrowed from Garrett, looking strange in the daylight, and I felt a tiny, irrepressible twinge of reflexive worry every time I caught sight of him.

‹It’s not my call,› I repeated. ‹If you get caught, or it turns out you’re not trustworthy—›

I broke off. We were nearly three miles up by this point, high enough that we ought to be able to make it to the spot Jake had described with one long, straight glide. ‹Come on,› I said, banking out of the curve and angling my wings as I pointed my beak toward the line of broken, crumpled hills in the distance.

‹It shouldn’t be anyone’s call,› Thàn argued as he fell in beside me, his barn owl wings making no sound at all. ‹What I’m saying is, let’s talk on the meta level for a minute and figure out which things it’s safe to tell me about. Things the Yeerks already know, for instance.›

‹Just because the Yeerks already know it doesn’t mean we want you knowing that the Yeerks already know it,› I countered. ‹And the Yeerks aren’t the only ones we have to worry about information leaking to.›

‹Yes! Exactly. Plus one—that’s the sort of thing I want to talk through. And there are entanglements in the other direction, too—like, obviously you don’t want to only keep quiet when there’s an interesting secret, or the mere fact that you’re shutting up will give it away. What I’m hoping for us to find is the stuff that’s in the intersection of high impact for getting me up to speed and making me useful, and low impact in terms of information security.›

‹You know, you’re starting to sound a lot like somebody who’s looking to weasel as much info out of me as he can,› I grumbled.

‹I’ve already admitted that. It’s not weaseling, it’s—gah. Look. Forget what I sound like. Just listen to the actual advice I’m giving you, separate from your stereotypes, and decide whether they make sense on their own, and then take action accordingly.›

You and Marco are either going to love each other or have some kind of Highlander fight.

But he had a point.

‹Fine,› I said. ‹Give me a minute.›

We flew onward as I thought, gliding gently downward, the air cool and empty, the wind whispering softly through my feathers and silently through Thàn’s.

It had been a while since I’d lined up all of the secrets we were keeping. There were things that we knew, and things that the Yeerks knew, and things that the Chee knew, and things that Paul Evans and President Tyagi knew, and things that everyone knew—

Start from the beginning.

Elfangor. The Yeerks knew we’d made contact with him, but might not realize we had access to his morph or to his memories and personality. Paul would know that, thanks to having morphed me—which meant Tyagi knew it, too—but there was a chance it hadn’t gone any farther than that.

The Chapmans, Cassie’s parents, Jake’s family—all of the people close to us who’d been taken before Ventura. That was mostly irrelevant, now. But the fact that Marco’s Dad and Jake’s brother Tom had been Controllers—and that Marco’s dad still was, along with Ax—

That, plus the overall makeup of the team. Who we were, what our relationships were like. Paul would know most of it, but the Yeerks shouldn’t—

What about when Visser Three pegged you as Tobias in D.C.? And name-dropped Cassie, Rachel, Jake, and Marco?

Okay, fine, the Yeerks knew about most of us. But they probably didn’t know about the new kid, or Tom, or Garrett—

—and we’re going to keep it that way.

What else? There was the Ellimist, or Crayak, or whatever-the-hell it had been, in the Yeerk pool. Paul Evans didn’t know about that; the memory wouldn’t have encoded by the time he’d acquired me, and even though they’d let Tyagi acquire Ax, he hadn’t really been a part of it, so even if Tyagi checked she’d only know that we’d told Ax that something weird had happened—

Unless the god-thing is appearing to other people, too.

I sighed wordlessly.

Moving on—there was all of the stuff we’d put into the broadcast, all the people we’d given the morphing power to, the weird bracelet weapon that Rachel had lifted off Visser Three’s host at the high school, Ax’s little escape pod, the alleged cache of supplies Visser Three had stashed in Alaska—if they were still there, and if they weren’t just a bomb in the first place—the velociraptor morph that Cassie had managed to squeeze out of a cassowary somehow, and the couple of tons of oatmeal that the Chee had purchased and squirreled away—

—oh, right, let’s not forget the ancient invincible pacifist dog robots—

—and self-morphing and using morphs to scan people’s memories and hiding objects in morph—

—well, Thàn already knows about that, he’s been carrying all his own stuff with him all day long—

I sighed again. ‹Okay,› I said, thinking slowly. Definitely don’t tell him about the Chee, definitely don’t tell him about the Ellimist, hold off on telling him about Tyagi or the deadline until you can check with Jake. ‹Um. Let’s see. Without saying anything that gives away too much—›

—but try not to look too stingy, either—

‹—Visser Three claimed he’d left a cache of supplies on an island in Alaska, back around the time of the Ventura impact. Saint Matthews cove, or something like that. We still haven’t checked that out, and Serenity might shed some light on whether it’s worth bothering to. Also, Jake said they were shipping oatmeal to China for a while before we managed to take out the factory, so it might be worth looking there, too. And—›

I hesitated.

Don’t try to be Marco. Just make a decision.

‹—and there was some weird shit going on in Ventura just before the asteroid hit. Uh. About half an hour before. At the YMCA on Huffman Mill, where the Yeerk pool was, and also around Hines Peak outside L.A., and also maybe in the Homeland Security office in D.C.›

‹First off, thanks,› Thàn said. ‹And second—any clues about what kind of weirdness? For when I look at the data?›

‹Uh. Something anomalous. Like, not a transmission, not a morph, not ships moving around. Anything weird would be good to know about, especially if it’s the kind of weird that also shows up somewhere else.›

‹Got it.›

There was a long silence, and then—

‹Tradesies,› said Thàn.

‹Did you just say tradesies?›

‹Yeah. So what? I was looking back over my summaries while we were on the plane, and I realized I forgot to mention something.›

‹Forgot.›

‹Yes. Actually. I had a lot on my mind, if you’ll recall, not least of which was the grenade that your buddy Garrett insisted on holding the entire time. But I remember now. You want to hear it, or not?›

‹Yeah. Sorry.›

‹That ship—the one on Mars, the one we think belongs to the Visser? It flitters all over the place, mostly at random, like he’s trying to make sure his movements aren’t predictable. But there are two places it’s visited over and over again—while not sending any kind of signal—places that aren’t obvious the way that Mars and the back side of the Moon are obvious. One of them looks like it’s an object in orbit around the sun—it’s about as far out as the asteroid belt, and every time the ship visits that region it stops in a spot that’s a little further along, with the delta corresponding to how long it’s been since the previous visit.›

‹You know where that spot is now? You can predict it?›

‹Yeah. It doesn’t give off any signs that Serenity can detect, but I could give you a range for any given date in the future. A probability cone, really, but for anything in the next few months the cone would be fairly tight. And if the military can get some time on the James Webb telescope, we should be able to see that spot with a resolution of about one pixel per hundred kilometers. Not enough to see what it is, but enough to detect that there’s something in there at all, as long as it’s not perfectly black.›

‹Or cloaked. Which it will be.›

‹They have clo—›

I heard an audible screech of frustration as Thàn cut himself off mid-thought. ‹Of course they do. That explains—gah.›

He broke off again, and I glanced over to see that he was flying with his eyes closed in an oddly human-looking sort of way. ‹Anyway,› he continued, his mental voice terse. ‹The other spot isn’t moving in the same way. I mean, it’s moving in an absolute sense—as much as there is an ‘absolute sense,’ anyway—but it’s pegged to the reference frame of the sun, so if you had a coordinate system where the sun was still and the Earth was returning to the same spot every three hundred and sixty—›

‹I get it. Where?›

‹It’s almost exactly where the Earth will be in another hundred and fifty days. About five weeks after the Europa appointment and/or the arrival of Yeerk reinforcements to the system.›

I felt a tingle pass through my hawk body, as if the shadow of a larger predator had just passed over me. ‹That—does not sound good,› I said.

‹No, it does not.›

I was quiet for another hundred yards. ‹And he’s visited this spot how often?›

‹A dozen times at least.›

‹Starting when?›

‹I’ll have to double-check, but I think the first visit was right around Ventura.›

Not good.

But what kind of not good? A trap? A superweapon? Some kind of—of—

My thoughts stuttered, shuddered to a halt. I had no idea. Given what we knew of the Visser, it could be almost anything.

Then again, it’s not going to matter if we’re all dead three weeks from now.

I looked over at Thàn, at the owl body I had come to associate with Garrett. Garrett, who was yet again off on his own, facing unknown dangers without me there to help him, because the greater good called for us to split up.

Oh, come on. It’s just the Chee. They literally can’t hurt a fly.

Unless Visser Three’s dog bribes were enough to get them to bend the rules. If their programming didn’t mind Yeerks, then it might not mind imprisonment-without-trial—

Tobias—

It wasn’t Garrett’s real voice—was just my memory, my stereotype—but it was no less stern for that, and no less effective, either. Okay, okay, I thought. Focus.

‹Thàn,› I said, breaking the silence.

‹Mmm?›

‹How would you defend the Earth against another Ventura?› I asked.

‹Convince whoever’s launching it not to,› he answered promptly.

‹If you couldn’t.›

‹Evacuate. Build an ark, if you have to.›

‹If you couldn’t.›

‹Steal an ark.›

‹If you couldn’t.›

There was a heavy pause as we continued our long, slow descent, moving a hundred feet forward for every fifteen feet of drop.

‹I guess I’d start by asking your Andalite buddy for ideas,› Thàn said softly. ‹Otherwise, I’d have to say there’s not really any defense. Even assuming you could throw up nukes like nobody’s business, it takes a lot of force to move something that big, and if Visser Three was telling the truth about the Ventura rock only getting launched after you guys blew up their pool—well, he got it from wherever it was up to a two hundred and forty thousand k-m-h targeted impact in less than an hour. There’s nothing we have that can stop that. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s nothing they have that can stop that—it’s easier to get a boulder moving than to stop it once it’s rolling downhill.›

There was another long, expectant pause. ‹This wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with one of those things you’re not cleared to tell me, would it?› Thàn asked, his voice quiet and hesitant.

I said nothing—only looked out at the horizon, at the brilliant splash of sunset color, orange and purple and red stretching almost halfway around the sky. One of the people we’d recruited had said that the sunsets were prettier all over the country these days, thanks to the lingering dust from the Ventura impact. It was blood, that color—blood and bone and ash, families and friends and houses and neighborhoods, lives and bodies vaporized in a flash, still haunting the skies weeks later. Jake’s dad was up there, somewhere—Jake’s dad, and Rachel’s mom, and every one of the kids I’d left behind at Oak Landing, and every foster family I’d ever stayed with—

‹Something like that,› I said finally. ‹Let’s just get to the others, and then we’ll talk more.›

We flew on in pensive silence.

* * *

I hadn’t really had a chance to savor it, what with the constant stress and impending doom and mission after mission after mission—

But I really loved flying.

Garrett still hated it, so we usually didn’t linger, between cities. And half the time we were just flying to an airport anyway, since sneaking aboard a plane was still the fastest way to cover any distance larger than maybe fifty miles.

But as Thàn and I spotted the final landmark, and banked, and dove—as the world expanded at a hundred miles an hour—as the horizon shrank and the wind howled over my outstretched wings—

It was exhilarating. The freest I had ever felt, a sense of power and potency stronger than anything else—stronger even than being in Elfangor’s body, or the dinosaur’s, or the whale’s. To be able to move that fast, and yet still be so totally in control—capable of snatching a running mouse out of tall grass, of going from a full dive to a complete stop in seconds—

Under different circumstances, it might have been addictive. If—by some miracle—we actually won this war, I might spend the rest of my life doing nothing else. Just living as a hawk, two hours at a time, watching the world from above, beholden to nothing and no one. Even just in bursts here and there, between harrowing missions, it was almost enough all by itself—almost enough to make it all worth it.

Not really, of course. I mean, I’m not a monster. I know how to count to six hundred thousand.

But enough to cover my suffering, at least. Enough to pay the costs that had landed on me, in particular, given that I hadn’t really lost all that much to begin with. It was an incredible technology, an incredible gift—the sort of thing that might make you believe in God, if it weren’t for all the rest of it.

If only it worked past two hours. If only you could morph indefinitely—

Would that have been enough, for the Yeerks? Would it have given them the freedom they needed, the variety of experience they craved? In that other, happier world, could that have been the solution to all of the problems?

Probably not, unless the individual shards could all morph on their own. What would be the point of being able to become one animal for a few hours, when a pool can already become thousands of animals for days at a time?

But then again, who was to say that the technology couldn’t be improved? Seerow—the inventor—Ax had told us he was dead, murdered during the Yeerk’s wild and bloody escape from their homeworld. But there were other brilliant Andalites, and other brilliant engineers in the galaxy. What could Thàn do, given an Iscafil device and the time to tinker?

While you’re at it, why not ask for a million dollars and a pony?

Okay, fine—it was wishful thinking. We were at war, after all. All of the competent engineers were—or soon would be—hard at work either fueling or fending off an interstellar invasion. And it was probably the same among the Andalites, and every other race in this part of the galaxy—

For a second, I felt a rush of anger at the sheer impatience of the Yeerks—at the way they’d rushed headlong into a war, without exploring any of the other options that—I imagined—they’d had available to them. At the loss of all the clever solutions that would never have time to mature, thanks to the time pressure that Visser Three had put us under.

But then I spotted Jake, and the anger passed. There was no point in wishing for a better world—this was the world we had, and we’d either make do or we wouldn’t.

‹Jake,› I said, flaring my wings and dropping down onto the sparse, scrubby forest floor. ‹This is Thàn Suoros, the guy I told you about.›

Still eerily silent, Thàn settled to the ground next to me. Jake nodded to him, and I noticed that he looked more tired than I’d ever seen him, his eyes flat and empty with dark circles underneath.

‹Garrett?› Jake asked privately, as Thàn and I began to demorph.

‹Stashing the cube,› I said, as my feathers began to lighten and run together like melted wax. Beside me, Thàn was growing, his human skeleton stretching inside of his bird skin. ‹He should be here before morning, unless there’s a snag with the Chee.›

‹How about this guy?› Jake said, shifting his gaze to Thàn. ‹You check him out?›

‹Morph check last night, seemed solid. He’s got a hell of a lot of intel, plus a couple of new weapons. Takes initiative.›

‹What’s he know?›

‹Basically nothing yet. Wanted to check with you, first.›

Jake’s lip twisted a little bit, and his eyes flickered toward the horizon. ‹I don’t have much to say,› he said, the exhaustion plain in his voice. ‹You trust him, or not?›

I hesitated.

‹It’s fine either way,› Jake continued. ‹But I’m about to have to say a lot of things in a very small amount of time, and I need to know whether to loop him in or send him to go sit in a corner.›

A whisper tickled at the back of my mind, something Garrett had said yesterday.

He wasn’t waiting for anyone else to save him.

‹We need him,› I said. ‹Loop him in.›

“Thàn,” Jake said aloud.

Thàn gave a garbled, inhuman reply.

“I’m going to talk to Tobias. You should eavesdrop. You’re going to be surprised by some of the things I say. Hold your questions until you’re sure they’re not stupid.”

Another garble, accompanied by a nod of his nightmarish, half-human head. Meanwhile, the parts of me that were human started to thrum with adrenaline. Jake wasn’t normally this brusque, even with people he knew—the last time I’d seen him like this was in the construction site, when I’d recruited Garrett without asking—

“The situation with Tyagi has gone off the rails,” he said bluntly. “First off, somebody figured out that David killed his dad—”

What, I wanted to say, but Jake had told Thàn to hold questions and anyway I didn’t exactly have a mouth yet—

“—or at least, he didn’t show up for his shift and they found a lot of blood and smashed furniture in his apartment. Rachel was first on scene, she got David out before anyone else showed up, took care of the body. When they found out, the base commander went to lock everything down, Ax and Marco’s dad went to leave, Tyagi didn’t let them, Marco threatened to go public about Paul Evans—”

WHAT—

“—eventually, Rachel got everybody calmed down, but basically the stalemate was between Tyagi saying that Marco’s dad was critical and we were clearly out of control, and Marco insisting that we couldn’t trust the system and she’d better not try to constrain our movements. Ax broke the stalemate by agreeing to stay, alone—they’ve got him in a tight-sealed room under active surveillance—and Marco got his dad out.”

“What—”

“Tom’s with Ax—on the outside, in thought-speak range, keeping in touch. That’s how we know—”

Jake broke off to scrub his fingers through his hair, the motion dull and mechanical, like a zombie. Beside me, Thàn finished demorphing and shrugged off his power pack. I did the same, the two clunky backpacks holding themselves upright on the forest floor.

“Ax did something when he set up his comm device,” Jake continued wearily. “Linked it to his escape pod’s computer somehow. He’s able to track all the communications that route through it. And at some point—”

He broke off again, seeming to hold back—what, fear? Anger? Fatigue? Some kind of strong emotion, anyway—

“Tyagi must have morphed Ax. Morphed him and flipped the switch. Somebody contacted the Andalite homeworld, anyway, and Ax says they couldn’t’ve done it just by watching him or mimicking what he’d done. We don’t know what was said, because it was all private thought-speak and encrypted, but—according to Ax, they used the exact same procedure he’d followed a few hours earlier, and then they spent another hour and a half trying to break into the Andalite civilian channels and failing.”

“So she knows—”

“That’s right.” Jake shifted his gaze from me to Thàn. “Thàn. Just so you’re on the same page. This guy Ax talked to, Lirem-Ar-something, he’s the bigwig in the Andalite military. Like, the Petraeus of the Yeerk-Andalite war. And yesterday he told Ax to bring him Visser Three’s head in three weeks or he’d hit the earth with a chunk of rock moving at about point nine five C.”

Thàn said nothing, his eyes widening a bit.

“Anyway, either she didn’t think to check the machine for Ax’s wiretap, or she doesn’t care if we listen in, because Ax was able to hear her follow-up call to Telor. They did, in fact, set up a rendezvous, and it’s only about seventy miles from here. Forty, from the base.”

“When?”

“In about eight hours. We’re not sure what the deal is—the call was short, and all she agreed to was that she would be there, with Ax and Marco’s dad and Temrash and Essak.” His eyes flickered toward Thàn. “Those’re the Yeerks in Ax and Marco’s dad's heads,” he added.

“What—have you—”

“We haven’t heard anything. Tyagi has got a burner phone she can use to call us, but she hasn’t yet. Hasn’t said anything to Ax directly. Hasn’t said anything where Tom could hear. Radio silence, since this morning.”

“What—”

“We don’t know. Marco’s off with his dad, he’s a little distracted, but he didn’t have a clue, either. Closest thing to options we came up with were one, you could go try to talk to her directly, since she already knows you—”

I wouldn’t put it that way—

“—and two, we could head to the rendezvous point now and try to settle into some kind of defensible position.”

“Against—”

“Against everybody, I guess.”

That last sentence was said with so much heaviness that almost without thinking I found myself resting a hand on Jake’s shoulder, despite the fact that we’d never been that sort of friends—

—and that the last time you touched him you broke his nose.

“What—” I began, before hastily breaking off. Not ‘what,’ he’d already said he didn’t know, expecting him to have all the answers wasn’t fair—

“Where are the others?” I asked, starting over. “You said Ax and Tom are still at the base, and Marco—”

“Marco and his dad are around somewhere, talking it out. Rachel’s off with David, doing the same—”

Maybe I was imagining it, but I was pretty sure I could hear blame in his voice, and I winced. David had apparently killed his father, what the fuck—

—well, the guy was an abusive drunk asshole, if Rachel’s on his side it was probably self-defense—

—which was Jake’s problem only because Rachel had extracted him, and Marco had vouched for him, and I had brought him on board in the first place.

“—they’re all due back by midnight, or we can text them if we need them.”

And then at midnight…?

I barely stopped myself from asking. “Okay. So. Uh.”

I glanced at Thàn. “Any questions?” I asked. “Or brilliant ideas?”

“I take it one of you is impersonating Tyagi in D.C.? Given that it sounds like she’s really at Edwards Air Force Base?”

“More or less,” I answered. “That was our solution to get her out of Washington after the Bug fighter crashed. We think the Yeerks don’t—”

I stopped short mid-sentence, my throat suddenly dry.

I’m not sure what exactly connected the dots for me. Maybe it was just that I was looking at Thàn, who’d been observing everything and everyone for months—who was going to use his surveillance data to help us pin down the Yeerks. Or maybe it was Jake’s offhand comment about getting to the rendezvous point early. But either way, a chain reaction had gone off in my head, running through a series of thought-fragments like a fuse and ending with a single, explosive hypothesis.

Yeerks—

Washington—

Impostor—

Security—

Surveillance—

Rendezvous—

“Shit,” I said, and then mentally kicked myself.

“What?”

“Nothing,” I said, forcing my voice toward nonchalance as I started morphing into myself as fast as I could. “Never mind. Just—overwhelming, that’s all.”

Shit. Shit. Shit. I tried not to look up at the sky.

“Listen,” I said, trying to cover the awkward silence. “Priority number one has got to be the Andalite threat, right? Like—Ax, the Yeerks, Tyagi, that’s all important, but—we should be focusing on ways to stop them from launching the rock, right?”

Jake nodded tightly. “Marco and I talked about this earlier,” he said. “If we buy what Ax was saying, about that type of attack being unstoppable—”

He paused just long enough to whisper, in thought-speak: ‹Don’t mention the Chee.›

“—then we have to talk them out of it. Way I see it, there are three major lines of attack. First is the propaganda route, but it sounds like Tyagi already tried that and it doesn’t look like it worked—”

“Elfangor might be able to get through where Ax couldn’t,” I pointed out.

“Fair. We should look into that. The other two options are, find some way to end the war now, or convincingly fake Visser Three’s death.”

“What about mad?” Thàn asked.

Jake raised an eyebrow.

“Mutually assured destruction,” Thàn explained. “The Cold War strategy. Are the Yeerks capable of launching a counterattack on the Andalite homeworld?”

Jake nodded slowly. “They should be,” he said. “According to Ax, all it really takes is a hyperdrive and knowledge of where your target’s going to be.”

“So the legitimacy of the threat might hinge on its own secrecy, right? This Lirem character told your Andalite ally, and only your Andalite ally?”

Another nod.

“So, if the Yeerks knew about it—and the Andalites knew that the Yeerks knew, and the Yeerks knew that the Andalites knew that the Yeerks knew—that would be the end of it, right? Otherwise they’re facing an escalating cycle of revenge.”

Jake frowned. “Maybe? If they’re desperate enough, though—they also have the Yeerk homeworld on lockdown, and Elfangor made it sound like the Earth really might be enough to tip the whole balance—”

‹More importantly for right now, though,› I cut in, speaking in thought-speak to both of them, ‹is that I’m pretty sure we’re being watched.›

“Wh—” Jake began, before cutting himself off. ‹What?›

Thàn’s eyes widened again as he looked back and forth between us.

‹I realized about thirty seconds ago,› I said. ‹I was thinking about what you said, about getting over to the rendezvous point early, but then I thought, they definitely have it under surveillance already, humans and Yeerks both, and then I figured—›

‹She knows we can’t be far from the base,› Jake said, horror dawning across his face.

‹And most of this area is open desert, and it’s one of the most high-tech facilities on the planet, plus it’s housing a Bug fighter and the President—›

That was why Tyagi hadn’t contacted us about the rendezvous, even though she would need Marco’s dad—and therefore, presumably, our cooperation—she knew right where Marco’s dad was, and could pick him up any time.

‹—they’ve got to be watching every square inch of the surrounding hundred miles by satellite, right? I mean, if border patrol can pick up illegal immigrants—›

‹All right. You don’t think—crap.›

‹What?› I asked.

‹D’you think the Yeerks have eyes on us? Or on Tyagi?›

“Not…yet,” Thàn said, speaking slowly, as if vetting each word before it came out. “But Edwards—I suppose it’s too much to hope you know the phrase ‘Schelling point’?”

We shook our heads.

“If…rendezvous…there…Edwards…obvious…”

‹Got it,› Jake said. ‹They have no reason to believe Tyagi is here now, but given that she set a rendezvous seventy miles from here, it’s the obvious place to look in, oh, say, about six hours, if you want to spring a trap of some kind. That right?›

Thàn nodded.

‹So what do we do?› I asked. ‹I mean—›

‹Can they read text messages?› Jake asked. ‹Without a wiretap, I mean. Can they just—snatch them out of the air.›

I shrugged, and we both looked at Thàn, who held up his hands. “Don’t look at me,” he said.

‹Can’t be helped,› I said. ‹Worst thing that’ll happen is what’s going to happen in a few hours anyway, right?›

‹If you’re right about this,› Jake said, but he was already pulling out his phone.

‹What’s the rendezvous going to be?› I asked.

‹McDonald’s on Mojave,› he said. ‹That was our fallback from earlier. Actually, no, wait—cameras. The Mojave elementary school.›

‹How far is that?›

‹About twenty-five miles from Edwards. Still time to get to the rendezvous if we decide to go.›

I pulled out my own phone to send an update to Garrett, then hesitated. ‹Thàn doesn’t have any morphs that are small and fast enough,› I said. ‹Neither does David, I don’t think. And Marco’s dad can’t morph at all—›

‹On it. We’ll pull people in.› He held up his phone. ‹‘Urgent,’› he read. ‹’Being watched by sat. Morph small/fast, take those with no small/fast along, demorph/remorph under cover, head to Mojave elementary 25mi WNW of EFB. Stay low, wait for signal. Go NOW.’› Lowering the phone, he looked me straight in the eye. ‹Demorphing now. Once I send this, we’re on the clock, too. Ninety seconds. You sure we’re not overreacting here?›

‹You’re the people person,› I said. ‹Tell me I’m wrong?›

He bit his lip, then shook his head.

‹Okay. I’ll take these two backpack looking things, and Tobias, you can take Thàn. I’ll go northeast, you go southwest—›

‹Hang on,› I said, halting my demorph. ‹Other way around. Jake take Thàn, leave both proton packs with me.›

‹What—›

‹I’ve got a hunch. I’m going to stick around for a couple of extra minutes, and then I’ll follow.›

‹You—›

His thought-speak cut out as he crossed the invisible border between his morph armor and his real body. “Sure?” he asked aloud.

‹No,› I said. ‹But better me than you. I just realized—what if it’s not satellites? What if Nickerson’s out here watching us, or even just some regular Marines? Plus, it’s less suspicious if we’re not all vanishing at once.›

I watched as Jake’s eyes refused to dart around, as he kept them focused on me. “Fine,” he said tightly. Stepping forward, he grabbed Thàn’s arm, and closed his eyes.

‹He’s taking you into his morph,› I explained. ‹It’s weird, but it’s not dangerous. You’ll go unconscious once your head disappears.›

“So, this is just what it’s like around here, huh?” Thàn murmured, as Jake began to shrink and melt and Thàn’s shoulder began to go with him.

‹Not always,› I answered silently. ‹Sometimes, we can actually see the people we’re fighting against.›

* * *

‹Sergeant Nickerson?› I called out, once Jake and Thàn were gone. I was sitting on the forest floor, leaning back against the two proton packs and resisting the urge to keep looking over my shoulder.

‹Sergeant Nickerson, it’s Tobias. I’d love to talk, if that’s okay with you.›

No answer.

‹Anyone, then?› I said, broadening my thought-speak band. ‹Anyone out there with Edwards Air Force Base?›

Silence.

‹Look, I’m going to stick around for another minute or two, but then I plan to disappear, and I don’t plan to make it easy for you to find me again. So unless you want to shoot me with a tranquilizer after I turn into a bird—›

“Sir.”

I didn’t jump, but only barely. The voice had come from behind me, and I stood—slowly—keeping my hands in plain sight.

“Hi,” I said, as I turned around to see two soldiers dressed in desert fatigues, helmets pulled low, M16s held ready but not quite pointed at me. “My name’s—”

“Tobias. Sir. We know.”

I waited, but the soldier didn’t say anything else. “Uh. Take me to your leader?”

The two soldiers exchanged glances. “What are those devices, sir?”

“Weapons. Light weapons—anti-personnel only. Like a wide-angle laser.”

“Please step away.”

I stepped.

The soldier reached for a walkie-talkie attached to his collar. “López,” he said. “Williams. Stay here, stay in touch—we’ll get a tech squad out ASAP.” There was a click of acknowledgement, and he released the walkie-talkie and turned back to me. “Sir. You wanted to talk?”

“To T—”

I paused. I wasn’t sure how tightly controlled Tyagi’s secret was, but it seemed at least possible that these soldiers didn’t know, and there was no reason to change that. “To your commanding officer, if you don’t mind.”

“Concerning?”

“These weapons, for one. Also, a new source of intel about Yeerk movements.”

There was the sound of soft footsteps off to the side, and I turned to see another pair of soldiers emerging from the sparse trees. “Confirmed, the others are all gone,” one of them said. “Horus attempting to reacquire.”

The first soldier—I couldn’t quite make out his name badge, but it looked like it probably said Smith—nodded, then turned back toward me. “Sir. If you’ll come with us, please, and—ah—please don’t turn into anything else.”

* * *

“Tobias Yastek.”

“Madam President.”

“You wanted to speak with me?”

It had only taken forty-five minutes to make it through eight layers of authority. Clearly I wasn’t the only one who wanted to talk.

“Yes, Madam President.”

“About?”

“Three things. Well, four, if you count the two weapons your soldiers picked up, but those are mostly a gift and they’re pretty straightforward. I’m betting it’ll be about thirty minutes before your engineers understand them better than I do.”

“What are they?”

“Early proto versions of alien beam weapons, built by—a scientist.”

“This Tom person you arrived with?”

I hesitated for the tiniest fraction of a second. “Yes.”

“Sit.”

I settled back into my chair, looking nervously around the room. It was a standard sort of interrogation chamber, just like the ones I’d seen in hundreds of movies. There was the gray concrete, the metal table, the harsh blue light, the giant two-way mirror on the wall. They hadn’t handcuffed me or chained me down or anything, but the four drones hovering quietly in the corners by the ceiling each had a menacing-looking cylinder pointed straight at my head—a cylinder that tracked me when I moved as little as an inch.

My last interrogator had left only a few minutes before President Tyagi arrived. She stayed standing as I scooted my chair forward with a metallic shriek, her arms crossed, her eyes sharp and bright.

“Three things,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What’s the third one?”

I blinked. “Uh,” I stammered. “They’re not exactly in order.”

“Which one are you most scared about bringing up?”

I swallowed.

It was funny. I had pretty much zero respect for authority, and had faced down teachers and doctors and cops and judges and bullies all my life. And in the past couple of months, I had faced death at least a dozen times—death by laser beam, by spaceship crash, by bullet, by alien claw, by suffocation, by frigging giant squid. I’d been transformed, and teleported, and seen an alien god freeze time.

And still I had the jitters.

The last time we’d met, she’d been almost completely focused on Paul Evans—on him, and on the bigger picture, on making a plan. But now, I was the subject of one hundred percent of the attention of the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, and I could feel every single one of the years she had on me, and every single scrap of authority I lacked. For the first time, I was starting to understand why even the people who’d absolutely hated Obama and Trump had nevertheless been polite and respectful when they met face-to-face.

The hovering death robots probably have a little to do with it, too.

“If—ah—if the stuff I have to say is pretty secret—”

‹Then don’t say it out loud.›

I jerked. I hadn’t expected her to have morph armor.

“I’m not—uh—”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Just a minute,” I said, and focused, my cheeks burning.

I had demorphed once they’d stashed me in the room, thinking that if I did need to take any sort of drastic action, it would be better to be ninety seconds away from a Cape buffalo than to be three minutes away. There was also the fact that acquiring—and the acquiring trance—only worked in your real body.

‹The part I’m most scared of bringing up, Madam President, is the death threat that the Andalites made.›

‹The death threat that your compatriot Aximili chose not to tell us about,› she said sharply.

‹He told us,› I countered. ‹As adapted to the circumstances, I think that’s entirely fair. It’s not like he kept it from the human race—he just told his teammates instead of a stranger.›

‹Same criticism, then, only this time of human children who ought to know better.›

I frowned, some unspoken objection tickling at the back of my mind. ‹I’m sorry, Madam President—aren’t we all on the same side, here?›

She took in a long breath through her nose, her nostrils flaring. ‹Your teammates entered this base and murdered one of my top advisors!› she said, just one notch shy of shouting.

I winced. ‹I—Madam President, I don’t know much about that. I just got in from—from the east coast, and I only got the quick version before showing up here. But—ma’am—I’ve been Jeremiah Poznanski. I’ve been inside his head. I don’t know if you know the sorts of things bad parents do to their children, but—›

I hesitated. ‹Madam President, imagine it was you. Imagine being young, and helpless, and they keep getting drunk, and they hit you, and they hit you, and they hit you, and then suddenly you—somebody hands you a loaded gun, and you’re twelve, and they come at you again, and you just—›

I broke off again. ‹If it were you, Madam President—can’t you see that you might run? That you might not trust, that—that if you turned yourself in, that everything would be okay?›

‹The rest of you should know better. You’re colluding to keep this minor out of the hands of the authorities. And as for the wrongs Jeremiah may or may not have done to him, it was you who paraded him on stage during your broadcast—›

‹We had to starve the Yeerk out of him one way or another—›

‹The broadcast was irresponsible, not to mention unilateral—›

‹You knew about it! Sergeant Nickerson came from Paul!›

‹—an act of overt terrorism on United States soil—›

‹—we didn’t hurt anybody at that factory—›

‹—not to mention that you have unleashed hundreds of superpowered individuals into the general population—›

‹Madam President.›

She paused, looking down at me, her face carved from stone.

‹Madam President—›

I had to swallow three times before I could force the words out, even in thought-speak. ‹Madam President, I’m not here to be lectured. And—I bet you’re not here to lecture me, either.›

For a split second, her eyes were Dracon beams. But then—

‹Yes. You’re right. But you have to understand that your actions are not without consequences. You are a child, Tobias. Your friends are children. Your actions—they have been reckless, and they have cost the lives of hundreds of thousands—›

‹That isn’t f—›

‹—and they may cost the lives of seven billion if you do not come into the fold.›

I blinked. ‹The—fold?›

‹Yes. Give up your sources, give up your technology, rejoin the larger human race. Stop fighting this fight alone and unaccountable.›

‹Madam President—›

I took in a deep breath. ‹Madam President, am I to understand that you would allow us to keep fighting? That you would fold us into the existing command structure?›

‹Yes. Absolutely. You have perspective, you have experience—we would be fools not to take advantage of it.›

I paused, suddenly feeling like I was stumbling through a pitch-dark room where the walls were made of razors. ‹I—um—sorry. Give me a minute?›

She said nothing, made no movement—just looked at me.

Okay. So—

She could just be outright lying, for one. Probably was lying, actually—from her perspective, she was justified in saying just about anything to get access to Ax, the cube, Essak, and everything we knew or suspected about the bigger picture, and once she had us she had basically no reason not to keep us under lock and key while the grownups took care of business.

Would that be so bad?

I mean, it wasn’t bad for grownups to be taking care of business too—that was the whole point behind the broadcast, and behind me and Garrett doing our recruiting runs.

But if we were taken out of the picture...if there was no more reason for them to listen to us, except when they happened to feel like it…

I do not know the future, Elfangor had said, the words burned into my memory like a brand. But I have seen its broader strokes, and can rank possibility far more finely than you would credit. This meeting was not by chance, and if there are few paths to victory, at least be assured that you walk upon the widest.

The problem was, everything Elfangor had said was just as compatible with us teaming up with the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES as it was with us continuing to strike out on our own. Even if he was right, and we did have some kind of actual, important destiny—what was to stop this from being it?

The Ellimist? The Chee?

Tyagi cleared her throat.

‹I’m sorry, Madam President,› I said. ‹I’m not authorized to make a decision like that, and even if I were, I’m pretty sure it would have to be ‘no.’ The U.S. military is just too big and too easy of a target. It’s going to be the first thing that the Yeerks compromise or destroy once they start moving again.›

‹Unless we convince them not to start moving again,› Tyagi snapped. ‹Unless we sue for peace—a suit that you so-called ‘Animorphs’ might scuttle before it ever has a chance!›

‹Sue for peace?› I repeated. ‹Why would they accept any kind of settlement when they have the upper hand in—in—everything?›

‹Not just a settlement,› she said. ‹An alliance.›

I felt my jaw drop open.

‹The Andalite threat,› she continued, her mental voice hot and tightly controlled. ‹My science advisors confirmed what Aximili had to say—it is plausible, it is real, there is nothing we can do to stop it. Even if we were to successfully assassinate the Visser, what’s to stop them from saying ‘thanks’ and then wiping us out anyway? If Paul’s account of what happened in the construction site is accurate, they’ve already threatened to do it once before.›

She leaned forward, placing both of her fists knuckle-down on the table, looming over me. ‹There is no guarantee that we can turn the tide through propaganda,› she said. ‹Even if we could access their civilian communications, they are pressed on all sides and frightened. They might flip the switch out of sheer panic. The only possible safeguard is mutually assured destruction, and the only way to secure that is through the Yeerks.

‹You’re going to tell them,› I said, the words as much for my own benefit as for hers.

‹Yes.›

‹What’s to stop them from—from strip mining us? From taking as many humans as they can, and just leaving?›

‹Nothing at all,› Tyagi replied grimly. ‹But then at least the maximum possible number of humans will have been saved. And better for us to enter into a partnership willingly, and gain as many concessions as we can, than to simply be slaves forever.›

She straightened and began pacing, her eyes flitting back and forth between nothing and nowhere. ‹The tide was turning in Ventura,› she said. ‹The Visser may have spun that up out of sheer cynical manipulation, but it was true. We have evidence to support it. They were learning from us—they were becoming more like us.›

She turned back to me. ‹But that process takes time. And it has to happen now—before a generation of slaves grows up not knowing any better—perhaps literally incapable of thinking it should be any other way.›

‹I—›

I didn’t know what to say.

‹I’m going to offer them an exchange,› she said. ‹If they promise to publicly commit to mutually assured destruction with the Andalites, then I will publicly push for the freedom to voluntarily incorporate. A voluntary infestation program—if not in the United States itself, then at least with U.S. backing and U.S. support.›

She fixed me with a glare. ‹But in order to take that step, we need to establish credibility first. Begin a true dialogue, open reliable channels. That means we need to follow through on the promise to return Essak, and possibly Temrash—›

‹Temrash is all that’s keeping Ax from losing his mind,› I interjected. ‹You can’t just—›

‹If I don’t have Peter Levy, I very much will,› Tyagi said. ‹In fact, I might simply give them Aximili, if that’s what it takes to save the entire planet from destruction. Since, I assume, you still aren’t interested in turning over the morphing cube so that we can get to work on duplicating it.›

The objection that had been growing in the back of my mind finally snapped into focus, found words to express itself. ‹You’re acting as if the entire Yeerk species is like Temrash and Essak and Aftran,› I bit out. ‹You’re acting like—like they’re reasonable, like we understand them, like we’ve figured out how their morality works. And you’re forgetting the Visser.›

‹I am not,› she snapped, and for a moment my objection wanted to run and hide. ‹But sometimes you must make compromises, and a credible threat to the entire planet is one of those times. I am aware that the Visser killed six hundred thousand of my citizens. But your Andalites are threatening to kill us all. Between that and the Visser, I’ll take the Visser.›

This time, it was my own memory that floated up, unbidden—my own words I heard echoing in my head.

Maybe a few billion dead humans is exactly what the galaxy needs.

I could see it—the path forward, one forced move after another, first this concession, then the next, then the next, always with the threat of extinction held up against the cost of cooperation. And I could see where it would end—the same place it always ended, unless some greater, outside force intervened—with the tyrant getting everything he wanted, and the victim losing everything he had.

Some greater, outside force—

No. Now was not the time to start trusting in the gods that had been willing to let Garrett die for nothing.

Jake. I needed Jake, and Marco—needed to talk this through with them, formulate a plan—a response. We needed to be at this rendezvous, and we needed to be ready.

For—

For—

‹You said you had two other things to say?› Tyagi asked. ‹We’re under a bit of time pressure, here, if you hadn’t noticed.›

‹We—you already—sort of covered one of them, Madam President,› I said weakly. ‹Ah—the last one—I mean, the first one—›

I trailed off, shaking my head to clear away some of the shock and confusion. ‹We’ve encountered a new source of intel,› I said. ‹It provides data on the location and movements of every Yeerk force in the system.›

‹What?›

‹Every ship, every communication, with a record stretching back to January. You could know where the Bug fighters are at all times, send nukes up to the mothership—anything you wanted. Advance warning of how many ships are showing up to this rendezvous, for instance.›

Tyagi blinked, and behind her eyes I could see her thoughts churning at a hundred miles per hour.

‹Also—this intel tells us they have a base camp on Mars, and—›

—gamble—

‹—a cache of useful supplies in the water between the larger and smaller islands of Saint Matthews, in Alaska.›

Tyagi’s eyes narrowed.

‹It’s the same source of intel that built the weapons,› I added. ‹In case you want—I dunno—proof of quality, or whatever. Madam President.›

There was a long and pregnant silence, broken only by the quiet hum of the death drones in the corners of the room.

‹Control over this source of intel,› Tyagi said abruptly. ‹And Peter Levy comes to the rendezvous. In exchange, Aximili is free to go, and we don’t pursue David Poznanski.›

I’m not authorized to agree to that, either.

—was what I was supposed to say. But then again—

The sort of person who does the right thing, even if it’s hard.

Thàn Suoros wasn’t a part of our team. Not yet. And he wasn’t trying to be, either—not like David. If he could do the most good here, as a part of the U.S. machine—

He would want to.

And Jake would agree to it—if I told him it was the best option.

But can you trust her?

I looked up into her eyes again—the eyes of a general, or a warlord, or an oracle.

‹Okay, Madam President. It’s a deal.›

* * *

‹You’re sure none of them followed you?›

‹I mean, no—I’m not certain. But we went under sky cover like four different times, and I don’t see any random birds around.›

Or random anything, really. It was fully dark out, and the lizard morph I was wearing didn’t see so well at night. But it was cold-blooded, which meant if anyone was trying to track me with heat-seeking technology, they had their work cut out for them.

The others were similarly invisible, scattered around the area in God-knows-what morphs, all undercover, all in thought-speak range. The only exception was Marco’s dad, who had donned a wig and an unlit cigarette and was circling the block, guarded by Marco in some unknown form that, he said, was perfectly capable of firing a shredder accurately.

‹All right. What happened?›

I filled them in in broad strokes as quickly as I could.

‹Marco here. Did they say anything about security at this rendezvous?›

‹I wasn’t exactly in a position to ask. Once she agreed to let Ax out, we just booked it.›

‹Should I even be here for this?›

‹Who’s that?›

‹Oh, sorry—it’s Thàn. I just—I mean, if you guys are about to make a whole bunch of secret plans, should I just—go?›

‹Jake here. Are you down with heading in? You don’t have to go, if you don’t want to.›

‹No, Tobias made the right call. I’ll just—before I go, I’ll demorph and give you guys the Marauder’s Map. I’ll—uh—I’ll leave it under one of the picnic tables.›

‹The what?›

‹Oh, come on,› said a voice, and even in thought-speak I could tell it was Rachel. ‹It’s obviously going to be a tablet or something that lets us look at the Serenity data.›

‹Bingo.›

‹Was that—›

‹Thàn again, sorry. You know, you guys should really use radio norms—›

‹We know. Says Marco. Back to business—are we excluding Thàn from this conversation or not? Over.›

Silence.

Or maybe a private exchange between Marco and Jake—

‹Thàn. Head out. Thanks for everything, and if this doesn’t blow up in everyone’s faces, we’ll try to be in touch. Over.›

‹Roger that.›

I skittered to the edge of the rooftop, hoping to see a bird take flight or a dog go running or something, but nothing caught my eye.

‹All right. Who’s got stuff to say?›

‹Chee,› I put in.

‹What about them?›

‹What are we doing with regards to telling them or not?›

‹They’ll find out soon enough, won’t they?›

‹Do we think it’ll matter to them that we didn’t tell them ourselves?›

‹Can we even trust them right now? What with Visser Three’s dog bullshit?›

‹We don’t know if that’ll have any kind of effect on them. We don’t even know if they know about it yet.›

‹Come on, we noticed and they didn’t? Puh-lease.›

‹What’s a Chee?›

‹Indestructible non-violent dog robots from the year ten thousand B.C.›

‹What—›

‹That’s a legit summary, we’ll explain the rest later.›

‹You know, I just sent Garrett to them this morning,› I said, trying to control my rising swell of anxiety. ‹If we were having reservations that were this strong, I like to think somebody would’ve said something sooner. Also, can we please say who’s talking? I have no idea what’s going on, over.›

‹Jake here. Do it. Over.›

‹Rachel. Are we telling the Chee what’s going on, or not? I vote yes, if the Yeerks are about to find out anyway. Over.›

‹Marco. I agree. At the very least, it gives us a chance to ask if they can do anything to shield the Earth, which they probably can’t but we’d sure feel dumb for not even checking. Over.›

There was a long pause.

‹David here. Um. Hi. If—uh—if this—plan—doesn’t work. If the Andalites go through with it. What—um—what are we going to do?›

Another pause.

‹Over. Sorry.›

‹Marco here. We spend our last few days having fun, and then we die. Over.›

‹Tom. What about getting off planet?›

Another silence, this time one that didn’t just feel like someone had forgotten to say over.

‹I mean, there are ships—right?› Tom continued. ‹There’s a whole galaxy out there. Do we—I mean, would we want to—to try to—you know.›

Tom’s thoughts faltered and gave out. ‹Over,› he said at last, in barely more than a whisper.

‹Tobias here—› I began, before someone cut me off.

‹No. I mean—sorry, Tobias. This is Jake. Just—um—wait a bit, okay? Let everybody think for themselves first.›

I felt a quick snap of frustration, but it faded almost immediately, replaced by the realization that I hadn’t actually thought it through myself—that I’d been about to answer out of reflex rather than reflection.

What’s the right answer? I wondered.

What would Garrett do?

You mean, what would Garrett do as he tried to figure out how to live up to the fake version of you that he idolizes?

Sure, whatever, if I wanted to be cynical as fuck about it. More like, what would Garrett do if he’d grown up in a world where right and wrong actually mattered—actually existed?

Phrased like that, the answer was immediately clear:

You don’t save yourself until you’ve saved everyone else.

Even at the cost of the survival of the human species?

But it’s not the survival of the human species. Like Tyagi said, the Yeerks will save as many humans as they can, with or without our help. They’ve probably already exported a bunch of humans without us even noticing—there’s a colony on Mars, remember?

But those humans would all be trapped. Slaves. Unable to free themselves—

Sure, talk yourself into it. But are you really going to pretend that there’s no better, more effective way to set up emancipation than that? Is your direct, personal involvement really the most likely path to a better future, given a bunch of Controllers fleeing an exploding Earth?

Well, there had been a prophecy—

No. What there was was a dickhead alien pushing everybody else around like pawns. There’s no such thing as prophecies, just people making shit happen or not.

I squeezed my eyes shut.

All right, fine.

When you put it that way…

There was no reason for us in particular to be the ones getting saved. There was maybe an argument for Ax, as the first ever voluntary, cooperative Andalite-Yeerk alliance. But the rest of us were not special—we weren’t even the only morphers, anymore.

‹Tobias here,› I said, and then paused in case anyone had an objection.

No one spoke. ‹I vote no. If the ship goes down, we go down with it. Over.›

‹Tom. I’ll stay if everyone else is staying. Over.›

‹Rachel. I think—if we have an exit strategy—if we can tell ourselves, it’s okay, we’re safe, no matter what—I think that we won’t—won’t try as hard. We’ll want to, we’ll think we are, but we won’t quite. Over.›

‹David here,› said David, sounding slightly panicked. ‹Hang on, is this turning into a voting thing? Over.›

‹Jake here. Not a vote. A discussion. Over.›

‹A discussion about whether we should all have a suicide pact? Over.›

‹David—›

‹I didn’t sign up for this!›

‹Neither did the seven billion other people who’re going to die if we can’t stop this,› I broke in. ‹We’re trying to save everyone. We’re trying to make it so no one has to die. Over.›

‹But in the meantime, if we can’t stop it, we’re just going to—what, not escape?›

‹Rachel here. David, it’s not like we have ships just lying around. Over.›

‹They have ships! The Yeerks, and those military guys, too! Why don’t we steal one?›

‹Where would you even go?›

‹I don’t know. Somewhere where they aren’t throwing frigging planets around?›

‹David, this is Jake. Calm down, okay? We don’t have to decide this right now, and we’re not going to make a final call without giving you a chance to say your piece—›

‹I don’t have a piece, I just don’t want to die—›

‹Jake’s right. Uh, says Marco. We’ve got more important stuff to talk about, like the interstellar parlay that’s happening in—what—a little under six hours? Over.›

‹Tom here. Are we going? Over.›

‹Marco. My dad says he’s definitely going, over. Or—crap, sorry—that means I’m going, too. Over for real.›

‹Aximili. I, too, would like to go. And it may be that I can be of some value in the conversation. Over.›

‹Jake here. I’ll be present. Over.›

‹Rachel. I’m going to hang back, talk with—I’m going to sit this one out. Over.›

‹Jake again. Rachel’s in the reserves. Tom? Tobias? In or out? Over.›

‹Tom. I’ll go reserves, if you guys don’t mind. It sounds like—with Essak—I don’t want to get anywhere near another infestation site. Over.›

‹Jake. Roger that. Rachel, you can handle the map thing that Thàn left, and keep us up to date if anything looks funny? Over.›

‹Roger.›

If I’d been in human form, I would have bitten my lip. I wanted to hang back—to be there when Garrett finally got in, to make sure he made it back. But after talking with Tyagi earlier, and Thàn before that—

‹Tobias here. I’m in, over.›

God dammit, Garrett. You’d better fucking be okay.