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Chapter 14: Jake

I was asleep.

I knew that I was asleep, because I was beginning to wake up. Before that, I hadn't been asleep at all. I had been—

Gone.

Slowly—slowly—the fog and darkness receded, giving way to shattered chaos. It was as if I were seeing through things, into things—like I could see the front and back and top and bottom and inside of every thing, all at once. There was light, and pain, and confusion, as if a hundred dreams were each competing for my attention.

And then—

I felt a twist—

A spasm—

The vision changed. The thousand fragments shifted, turned, flashes of the deepest black showing in the spaces between. One by one, the colors dissolved, leaving only emptiness.

And then I saw it.

A creature. Or a machine. Some combination of both. It had no arms. It sat still, as if unable to move, on a throne that was miles high. Its head was a single eye, monstrously large, shot through with bloody veins.

It turned, slowly—left, then right.

Watching.

Watching.

I trembled. No body, no mind, no sense of time or space, and still I trembled, praying that it wouldn't notice me, wouldn't look my way.

But that's not how nightmares work.

It saw me.

It saw me.

It saw me, and—somehow—it laughed.

"Wait—did that work?"

"Jake! Can you hear us?"

"Garrett—go get Marco! Run!"

I opened my eyes easily, like I'd gotten exactly the right amount of sleep. I was lying flat on my back on warm ground, pine needles poking through my shirt. Around me were familiar faces—Rachel, Tobias, a boy I recognized from school named Ethan or Eric or something—all looking down at me with concerned expressions. I heard a rustling above my head and craned my neck, squinting as Cassie moved in front of the sun, casting me into shadow. She was smiling, her jaw trembling, her eyes bright with tears.

"Hi, Jake," she said softly.

"Hi," I answered back, and a look of relief washed across her face, spreading to Rachel and Tobias in turn. "Why—um. Why am I on the ground?"

"You were—asleep," Rachel said, her tone a sort of hospital calm.

"A coma, actually," said the boy from school. "For eight days."

I felt my eyes go wide with shock. "I see," I said slowly, my thoughts churning into overdrive. "Is—um—is this one of those times where I shouldn't try to sit up?"

"No, you should be fine," said the boy. Eric, I was pretty sure. "We've been keeping your muscles stimulated. You may have some pins and needles, but otherwise—"

"Jake!"

I heard a staccato crashing, the sound of feet tearing through leaves, and propped myself up just in time to see Marco come barreling out of the woods a few dozen yards away.

For a moment, I thought he was going to run right into me, but he skidded to a stop just outside the circle, as if held back by a force field. His face was scratched and dirty, a dingy rag wrapped around his right hand. He looked down at me, then around at the others, his jaw tight. His eyes lingered on Tobias for an extra heartbeat, and Tobias shrugged microscopically.

What's going—

Shut up. Wait.

"Jake," Marco said suddenly. "Your name is Jake?"

My jaw dropped open for a moment before my brain caught up. Coma. Makes sense to check. "Jake Berenson," I answered, trying to sound nonchalant. "I live at 88E South Church Street. I'm in ninth grade. And you're Marco. And—um—Z, Y, X, W, V, U, T?"

That should have produced a smile, but Marco's jaw remained tight. "Where's the Yeerk pool?" he asked.

I blinked. "What?"

The tightness became a twist as Marco's lip curled, a shadow of something dark falling across his expression. "What's an Andalite, Jake?"

I opened my mouth, and the words caught in my throat.

You know how sometimes you'll have something rough going on—problems at school, or a family member who's sick, or some big mistake you just made that's got all your friends mad at you—and for a few minutes after you wake up, it's like everything's fine?

"Alien," I said, my voice suddenly hoarse. "Blue fur, looks like a centaur scorpion. Elfangor. He gave us the morphing power, told us about th—"

I broke off as Marco dropped to his knees and pulled me up and into a hug, squeezing me so tightly I thought my ribs might crack. He was crying, silently, his tears hot as they dropped onto the back of my neck. I hugged him back reflexively, bewildered, looking back and forth between the faces of the other kids standing around me.

"It's been a long week," Tobias murmured, as Marco's body continued to shake. "We've got a lot to talk about."

"So you don't remember any of it?"

I shook my head. "Nothing at all after Tobias left."

"That settles it," Marco said flatly. "There's no other explanation."

I looked around the circle, at the six of them sitting in the middle of the forest clearing. My best friend, my cousin, my crush. Tobias, and his orphan buddy Garrett. Erek—the ancient, six-limbed, pacifist android who'd woken me up—had already left, saying something about nonviolence and councils of war.

And then there was Ax. Elfangor's younger brother—a cadet in the Andalite military, practically the same age as us—whom Tobias and Garrett had rescued from the bottom of the Pacific ocean. He was in human morph—a strange combination of the two boys and a man he'd acquired elsewhere—and had said almost nothing in the hour we'd been talking.

They were dirty, sweaty, and tired, all of them—their voices hollow, their expressions bleak. They'd filled me in on the past few days with curt, emotionless summaries—the disaster at the pool, the takeover of the high school, the frantic scramble to escape after the Visser's unexplained psychic probe blew everyone's cover. All of our families had been taken, all of our obvious avenues of escape cut off—if it hadn't been for the Chee's holograms and the fact that neither Rachel nor Erek had known about Cassie's secret valley, they would never have made it.

And it hadn't helped that they'd had to carry my useless body every step of the way. I wasn't certain, but it felt like none of them would look me in the eye.

"It is—unsettling," said Ax, a very human agitation visible on his face. "Ing. Ling. This will cause problems among my people. It is—taboo. Is this the right word? Taboo?"

I had no memory of anything since the previous Monday, ten days earlier—a full day before we'd discovered self-morphing. Cassie's theory was that the gap was due to the difference between short- and long-term memory—that I couldn't remember anything that hadn't already been permanently encoded into my neural structure when I acquired my own genetic template.

"How could they not already know?" Marco demanded, his tone one of barely restrained hostility. "It's—obvious."

I had gone into the Yeerk pool with Marco. I had stayed too long in morph, and the pocket dimension that had held my body in stasis had collapsed, taking me along with it. I had died, disappeared, leaving behind nothing but a construct.

Me.

"It is unthinkable," Ax countered. "Un. Think. Kah. Like the place at the base of one's stalks—place base—very easy to not-see. And the norphing techolo—technology is new. Recent. It is used only by the nilitary, and even then only lee lee lee by sip spesh suh-pesh-al operatives. The new class of cadets, ink ink including myself, have been given the ability but are forbidden to use it excet excep except during closely supervised training—ing—or in high emergencies."

I wasn't real. I was a duplicate, a copy, a throwaway clone. I existed because the real Jake Berenson, in his panic, had wished for a body that wasn't broken and dying, wasn't half-eaten by alien monsters, and had frantically, desperately, blindly morphed into a backup version of himself, wishing only to be whole again. I was the product of stupidity, cowardice, and sheer, dumb luck.

It was all a little much to take in. It felt like I'd gone to sleep on Monday night, and woken up in the middle of a nightmare.

"Any other helpful shit you people just never bothered to think of?" Marco snapped. "'Cause as far as I can tell, it's you assholes not thinking that got the rest of us into this mess in the first place."

"Easy, Marco," Rachel warned, her voice low and heavy. "Same side."

Marco rolled his eyes, his lip twisting into a sneer, but he said nothing further. Across the circle, Ax shifted uncomfortably.

It turned out that Elfangor's brief history lesson had left out a few important points—points which Cassie had filled the rest of us in on, and Ax had reluctantly confirmed. Like the fact that it had been Seerow, the brilliant Andalite scientist, who first gave the Yeerks access to high technology, making it possible for them to kidnap Alloran and launch their war. Or the fact that it had been that same Seerow who had developed the morphing technology, a slow and painstaking process that had taken him decades of work.

Or the fact that that work had hit a dead-end and been stalled for years, until the discovery—and subsequent study—of the Yeerk species.

Tobias had been the first one to put the pieces together, and Erek had confirmed it, using some kind of X-ray vision to scan the inside of my skull while I was still comatose. There was extra tissue there—a lot of it. Interspersed with my neurons, interfering with the normal functioning of my cerebrum even as it slowly decayed and died. Tissue that responded to signals at very particular Z-space frequencies, until Erek burned it away.

Yeerk tissue.

It made sense, really. You could stash a body in hyperspace, and you could build a new one in its place, but you needed something to link the two—to allow one to control the other. And lo and behold, there was one species that did exactly that—that had evolved over millennia to be able to integrate with and control any bioelectric neural tissue, regardless of size, species, or complexity. Yeerk biology was the key, the last link in the chain, the source of Seerow's final breakthrough. With artificial Yeerk tissue integrated into every morph, control was as easy as thought itself.

"So the Andalite people literally don't know," Tobias mused. "Gonna be one hell of a PR shitstorm once it gets out."

Rachel shrugged. "Fighting fire with fire," she said. "Doesn't sound so bad to me."

"No," Ax broke in, his fingers anxiously clenching and unclenching, sweat beading on his brow. "It is far more sigit sigif sig-nif-i-cant than that. It is our highest rule, our most sacred tradition. For every—you do not have an adequate word—mind, pattern, spirit, crystal—for every thing-that-knows-itself, there is exactly one—one place, one role, one equal opportunity to sway the course of history. Ree. To make two is to—to—"

He fell silent, his eyes darting around the circle. "We—Andalites—we share the eib," he said. "It is a common resource, a space for all. If one voice becomes twice as loud—do you see? It cannot stand. It is the end of—of balance."

"This from the guy who's carrying around a carbon copy of his brother in his brain," Marco grumbled.

"No," Ax repeated. "A picture is a rep repreez rep-re-sen-ta-tion. Like your stick-speak mouth sounds. A word is not a thing. The dain is a tribute, an honoring. It is precious—private. It does not and could not ever replace the true being. Beeng. Bing."

Replace. Like the way I had somehow replaced myself, with myself. I looked down at my hands—which were exactly the same as they'd always been, down to the scar from the time I'd slammed my fingers in the car door when I was eleven—and shivered.

I felt like me. That either made it better, or much, much worse.

"Do we care?" Tobias wondered aloud. "I mean—not to shit on your religion, Ax, but we are in the middle of a war, here."

"You are not list—"

"The interference!" Garrett blurted out, cutting the alien off mid-sentence.

We all turned to look at him, and he visibly blanched, dropping his eyes to the dirt and pulling up the neck of his shirt to cover his mouth. Tobias leaned over and murmured something, and he seemed to brace himself, taking in a deep breath before continuing half-masked.

"Tobias and I thought there was a problem with morphing the same animal at the same time," he said. "But we both morphed the whale and the squid with no problem. It was only the hawk."

"What about it?" Cassie asked.

"I acquired the hawk from Tobias."

There was a long silence as we all digested this. "Holy shit," Marco breathed.

"Wait," Rachel said. "What—"

"Recursion," Marco explained. "Whatever scanning is going on when we acquire something, it's exact, down to the cellular level. Maybe even molecular. It has to be, otherwise Jake and Elfangor wouldn't have complete personalities, with memories and everything. Which means that if there's Yeerk tissue inside every morph—"

"—then when you acquire from a morph, the scan's going to pick that up, too," Rachel finished, her eyes going wide as she caught on.

"And that tissue is—what, attuned?—to whatever signal is coming from Tobias's brain, off in hyperspace," Marco continued. "So when Tobias and Garrett are both morphed into the same hawk, and Tobias goes to flap his wings—"

"It's not like that," Tobias cut in. "It's more like—like static. I wasn't in control of Garrett's body; it just screwed up the signal and made him all twitchy and spastic."

"Controls on top of controls," Marco said. "But all operating on the same principles, so they interfere with one another."

"Does this mean if we acquire a Controller, we get the Yeerk inside?" Rachel asked.

"No," Ax answered impatiently, still fidgeting. "Unlikely. Like lee. The Iscafil process—is-kuh-fill—distinishes between native and foreign tissue. Shoe. It would ignore a true Yeerk. The tissue inside a construct, though, is built from the organism's own zown pattern—it needs to be genetic etic etically compatible, to prevent the body's immune system from attacking it tack tack tack tack tack. It would naturally blend in more thoroughly, making it harder for the morphing technology to dis-sting-guish-shit."

"Still, though," Rachel said. "It means that we can mine memories from any person we acquire. Skills. Intel. We can copy people's personalities exactly—"

"No, we can't," Cassie said hotly. "Aren't you listening? Just look at Jake! It's not some kind of fake program under there, it's a real person. When we morph into Elfangor, he's really under there—trapped—screaming—enslaved."

There was another long, uncomfortable silence, during which it seemed that Ax was too distressed to form actual words.

"I don't think so," I said, speaking up for the first time in minutes. They didn't flinch. You're imagining things. "Not quite. I mean—I don't have any memories of the tunnel, of the—"

The real Jake.

"—of the mission. I'd still have those, right? Like, if I'd been conscious, underneath. I'd remember it."

"Elfangor was plenty conscious," Cassie countered, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Ax wince as though he'd been punched. "He almost killed himself—me—when I first let him loose. He thought he'd been captured—thought I was a Yeerk." She shot a baleful glare at Rachel. "I didn't realize he was right."

"Yeah, but you—I dunno—woke him up?" Tobias cut in, drawing Cassie's attention away as Rachel squared her shoulders, her face flushing red. "I mean, maybe whatever's muting the person underneath isn't just keeping them quiet. Maybe it's keeping them off."

"Oh, great," Cassie said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. "Much better. We're not enslaving sapient beings, we're just keeping them drugged and sedated while we dig through their memories and steal their identities." She looked around the circle. "Am I seriously the only one here who's bothered by this?"

"No," Ax said immediately, his own voice cold and hard with resolve. He stood up. "It is forbidden. The entire technology is not of the Path. It will be unmade, when the knowledge reaches my people. I do not wish to interfere with your battle, but I must ask that you no longer use my brother's body. Zmy. Zbody. I must ask it, and you must agree and obey."

"Obey?" Rachel hissed, even as Cassie nodded in satisfaction. "Who do you think—"

She broke off midsentence as Ax raised his hand, revealing a small, dark device that was unmistakably a weapon.

Instantly, the mood changed, a sort of bristling tension sweeping around the circle. Marco went very still, and Tobias shifted half a step, putting himself ever so slightly in front of Garrett. Rachel's jaw clicked shut, and Cassie's gaped open.

"Jake," whispered Marco, so quietly that I almost couldn't hear it over the sudden roar of blood in my ears.

Time slowed. I felt the part of my brain that knew how to deal with this sort of thing rev up—felt it lose traction—watched, helpless, as it skidded uselessly into confusion. Another part of me began to shout, demanding that I do something, anything.

Come on Jake this is your job you're supposed to save them you're supposed to be good at this fearless leader—

"Ax," Tobias began, his voice soft and calm. "What—"

"No, Tobias," the alien said, raising the weapon an inch. It remained trained on Rachel, whose lips were white and bloodless, her nostrils flaring with each breath.

—what's the matter Jake don't you know what to do Jake are you choking Jake did you freeze are you scared where'd you go Jake just a clone Jake you're dead and you're a fake Jake—

"You do not know the eib," Ax said, every syllable careful and crisp. "You do not hear, and you can not understand. It is—I do not know this word, rape, but it is the word the translator is telling me to say, that you rape the memory of my brother and you must not continue."

—fake Jake fake—

"Jake," Marco whispered again, quiet and desperate, and just like that, the skidding stopped and my brain suddenly found purchase, opening up Marco's single word and unpacking the complete entreaty within. Jake, man, I don't know what's going on inside your head, but if you've got any of that Professor X magic up your sleeve, now's the time to pull it out.

In front of me, Ax shifted his stance, the weapon slowly tracing its way around the circle as he pointed it at each of us in turn. Inside my head, the black box was on maximum overdrive, assembling data faster than my conscious mind could follow.

Taboo cadet forbidden sacred tradition balance eib path obey—

"I do not wish to—"

"Cadet," I called out, the rest of the circle flinching as the alien's finger twitched. "You will point that weapon at me."

—little and less of war, seven billion human Controllers—

—purchase a small victory with my death—

I rose to my feet, acting on intuition, feeling the slightest, the very smallest possible amount of relief as the weapon turned away from Rachel, swinging around to track me.

—spent several years in human form—

—much knowledge, and yet little wisdom—

"I know little of Andalite custom," I said, allowing my voice to drop into the more formal register that Elfangor had seemed to favor. "But somehow I suspect that junior warriors waving weapons at war councils is not a part of your 'path.' Am I wrong?"

The alien's eyes narrowed, and he cocked his head a fraction of a degree, saying nothing.

—this body will be one of your primary weapons—

—use it to hide your identity from the Yeerks—

"No answer?" I blustered. "Then perhaps you'll—"

—hand over that weapon—

—no, too soon, he'll double down—

"—answer another question instead: is it customary for young Andalites to override the dying wishes of their elder brothers? Is it yours to say what should be done with Elfangor's—"

—pattern—

"—pattern?" I took a step forward, entering the circle. Ax's knuckles whitened on the grip of his weapon, but again he said nothing. "For it is his will that we use his body, as a weapon against the Yeerks. Those were his—"

—last words—

—no, wait, orders—

"—final orders, to us, when he—"

—recruited—

—deputized—

"—mobilized us as the primary arm of resistance on Earth." Authority. Legitimacy. I'm your superior officer, and you have Made A Mistake, Cadet.

"He did not know that—"

"He would not care," I snapped, cutting across the alien's slow, deliberate speech. "He was ready to sacrifice seven billion minds to stem the Yeerk tide. Do you think he would hold himself to any less a standard?"

I took another step, pressing my advantage. It was bullshit—pure, frantic, Shakespearean bullshit, but it was working, or at least not-not-working. I wasn't sure how far I could trust my read of Ax's human body language, but he seemed to be radiating uncertainty, indecision. I could see it in his jaw, his eyebrows, the set of his shoulders—a dozen tiny signs that told the black box inside my brain to keep going.

"You do not understand," Ax said, his tone softer but still with steel at its core. "Your minds are not—"

"By all means, dismiss us," I interrupted, changing directions as I tried to keep him off-balance. "I'm sure that our inferiority will be a great comfort to your people as they face down seven billion human Controllers."

I took yet another step, pausing just outside of arm's reach, the alien gun mere inches away from where my heart was trying to beat its way out of my chest. I was out of my depth, free-falling, making it up as I went along and hoping the house of cards would hold together.

"You doom him to the very fate we fight to prevent—"

"And would he not go to that fate willingly, if it meant victory for the rest of your people?" I demanded. "Would you not go to that fate willingly, cadet? Do you think you can win a war without sacrifices?"

—sacrifices—

The word echoed in my head, setting off a subtle ping in the back of my mind, a reminder that Ax was not the only skeptic I needed to satisfy. Hoisting an expression of disdain onto my face, I turned away from him, ignoring the gun at my back as I locked eyes with Cassie—Cassie, whose parents had been murdered by the Yeerks, who the real Jake Berenson had decided to keep in the dark while he focused on infiltrating the pool, whose face was a trembling mixture of fear, fury, and confusion.

Don't say anything yet Cassie please just trust me wait please wait one thing at a time—

"We would not do this lightly," I said, trying to convey a wordless plea even as I kept my tone level and firm. "Were it not the whole wo—the whole galaxy at stake. But we're already on the path to defeat. We can't afford to lay aside any weapon."

—come on Cassie please I know this isn't right just play along don't say anything about Nazis or waterboarding or slippery slopes—

She bit her lip, glaring, her eyes cold and full of threat. But she nodded.

‹This is not over, Jake.›

I covered my surprise—barely—remembering just in time that self-morphing was a thing—fake Jake fake Jake—that of course the others would have started shifting into their armor the second Ax pulled out a gun. Marco and Rachel had probably already been wearing theirs, secret valley or no secret valley.

Sending a silent thanks to Cassie, I turned back toward the Andalite, saw the arm holding the weapon tremble slightly—where was he hiding that thing, anyway?—saw him swallow visibly.

"Which weighs heavier, cadet?" I asked, my instincts still pushing me toward stiff, formal sentences. "Tradition, or your brother's will? Already he broke with your people when he gave us the morphing power, armed us with the knowledge of the Yeerk invasion. Elfangor's Trust, he said—he feared your people might someday call it the third great mistake of the war. But he did it anyway. How much do you trust his wisdom? What is he saying to you right now, in your own head—in the dain?"

"It is not for the dain to make decisions on behalf of true minds," Ax growled, his frown deepening.

"Then ask the real Elfangor," suggested Garrett.

There followed a long, long silence. I stayed with it, keeping my eyes locked on the Andalite's, watching the play of emotions on his human face. He looked at me—at Cassie—at Rachel—all the while keeping the weapon pointed squarely at my chest. He looked at Tobias, and down at the ground, and up at the sky.

Think about it, I urged him silently, wishing I still had access to thought-speak. He's still in there, somehow, preserved by the morphing tech. He's still real, still alive.

You have a chance to say goodbye.

"Like the wind in thought and deed," Ax murmured cryptically, his attention still turned inward.

I remained silent. Behind me, I heard Marco shift, and I lifted a finger, hoping that he would understand, and wait—hoping that waiting was, in fact, the right move.

—fake Jake fake Jake fake Jake—

Shut up. Focus.

It occurred to me, as the moment stretched onward, that we didn't just have the power to bring Elfangor back for an hour—we had the power to bring him back forever. That one of us could stay in morph, and trade—could make a deal with Death—

Ax looked at me.

Trusting my instincts, I stretched out a hand, palm up. "The weapon, cadet," I said. Calmly. Quietly. As if obedience were a foregone conclusion.

He handed it over.

"Your oath," I added. "That there will be no more threats of this kind, for any reason." I glanced around the circle, my gaze lingering on Tobias, on Cassie, on Rachel. "We are too few to fight amongst ourselves. We don't have to be allies, but we can not afford to be enemies."

The Andalite nodded.

"We will discuss this," he said, as the tension slowly began draining out of the circle. "My brother and I, together." He began to demorph, fur sprouting across his olive skin. "In the eib, in private."

I nodded as gravely as I could, looked around the circle again. "Cassie?" I asked, cautious. As of yet, no one else had tried deactivating the built-in morph controls. "Are you willing to—um—facilitate?"

She turned to look at Ax, then back to me, her eyes glittering. "I could just lie, you know," she said loudly. "Dig through his mind and say whatever I feel like. You'd never know. Ax would never know. That's the kind of power we're talking about here. When I was—when we were—talking—it was—I was in total control. I had access to anything I wanted. His thoughts. His memories. His emotions. He couldn't even think unless I wanted him to. Absolute power. It is absolutely guaranteed to be corrupting."

Fate of the galaxy, I wanted to say.

But I didn't have to. Cassie already knew. And because she knew, she'd play along. I was sure of it, my black box quietly confident. She would make the argument, say her piece, and then concede, because we were losing, and we did need every advantage we could get, and whatever else she might be, she wasn't blind or stupid.

Which made it all the more terrifying that she was almost definitely right.

When it was all over, Ax stalked out into the forest without saying a word. We heard the dull thunk of bone against wood, the crash of trees falling, the unsettling silence where a human would be shouting, screaming, sobbing.

Cassie—Elfangor—turned to me, all four eyes focused and motionless in a way that I somehow knew was intended as a sign of respect and attention. ‹He does not trust you, Jake Berenson. Not yet.›

I nodded. "I know," I replied. "Can we trust him?"

‹He will not betray you to the Yeerks, nor break his promise and threaten you directly. But beyond that, I cannot say. You have not done either of us any favors today. This discovery—I feel that I should have known it, that I had all of the pieces, and so the pain of it is bearable. But Aximili is young. He is—›

The alien paused as a particularly loud crash echoed out of the forest, a dozen birds screeching skyward as the ground shook underfoot. ‹He is alone,› Elfangor continued. ‹Solitude is—not normal, for an Andalite. The eib—it is a soothing presence. An embrace, of sorts. It bolsters us, guides us, reassures us—it is a stabilizing force, surrounding us from the moment of our birth until the rite of starlight, when we enter adulthood. Aximili—›

He broke off again, dropping to all sixes, his tail drooping as his main eyes turned toward the ground and only his stalk eyes remained fixed on mine. ‹He should not have snuck aboard my ship,› the alien said, a note of despair in his thought-speak. ‹He should not be alone, at this stage of maturity. He is too young, and I do not know what pressures his isolation will create. It is—do you know of the human scientist Harlow? The experiments with rhesus monkeys, some decades ago?›

I shook my head. "Cassie, if any of us—"

‹Yes. Cassie knows. There is danger here.›

Pushing off with his hands, the alien straightened again, lifting his torso and looking at each of us in turn. ‹I would ask that you care for him,› he said. ‹Tobias, I think, in particular, and Garrett as well—he has begun to know and respect you, as he does not yet know and respect the others. But it may be hopeless, and in any event you have more pressing matters to attend to.›

Another crash, another flight of birds. Wordlessly, Tobias stood, pulling Garrett to his feet. Together, the pair of them disappeared into the woods.

‹There is much assistance I could offer you,› Elfangor continued. ‹Intelligence. History. Tactics. Certain technologies you may be able to assemble using human components. And yet—›

He hesitated, glancing once more at Rachel and Marco before focusing on me. ‹I cannot prosecute this war for you,› he said bluntly. ‹There are forces at work which I cannot oppose and cannot explain—forces which prevented me from remaining with you in the first place, and which may forbid or punish my continued presence or influence. I think that you must consider me a resource in only the direst need, and call upon me only as a last resort.›

"No," Marco cut in. "No, no, no. This is the second time you've pulled this 'mysterious deeper game' crap on us, Mr. Fangor. Last time, you didn't have a chance to explain, but this time—"

He broke off, looking at his old, plastic Mickey Mouse watch. They'd all thrown out their phones days ago, on the far side of town, to keep the Yeerks off their trail.

"—this time, you've got like forty minutes before Cassie needs to demorph. Explain."

‹I cannot,› Elfangor repeated. ‹The rules of this game are unclear to me, and the consequences of violating them graver than you can imagine. You will have to piece together what you can from what I have already told you—any more, and Crayak will have leave to—›

He faltered, stiffening in what appeared to be surprise. ‹Crayak,› he said again, slowly and deliberately. ‹Crayak. Crayak.› He paused, seeming to gather his resolve, and I felt a tingle of dread crawl its way up my spine. ‹Ellimist.›

"What—"

‹The game has already changed,› Elfangor said grimly. ‹It was not possible, when last we met, for me to say those names to you. I do not know if this was a stricture that was tied to my true body alone, or if the reasons for withholding them no longer apply, or if one side has acted unilaterally to loosen my restraints, or if we are baited into a trap of some kind, or—›

He trailed off again, turning his stalk eyes to Marco while his main eyes remained on me. ‹I will say only this: that we are each of us here by design, moved into place as surely as a pawn upon a chessboard. That I did not tell you this before—that I find myself moved to tell you now—that the true nature of the morphing technology has given us the chance to have a second conversation at all—each of these events were plotted, predicted. They are steps in a calculation, branches on the tree of possibility, and it takes a greater mind than mine to see the final outcome.›

"God dammit," Marco bit out. "What are we supposed to do with that?"

‹Your best,› said the alien, giving an eerily human shrug. ‹As you would have done anyway.›

"Should we even have a fire going?" I asked. "The Yeerks have got to be using some kind of satellite surveillance to look for us, at this point."

It was almost night, the sky a deep blue broken by a scattering of bright stars. Rachel, Tobias, and Garrett had gone to sleep—Rachel in her hammock, and Tobias and Garrett in one of the three tiny lean-tos. Ax had disappeared hours earlier, after promising to rejoin us in the morning. Only Cassie, Marco, and I were still up, sitting on logs around the firepit in the middle of the clearing.

"Erek set up a web of holograms around the entire valley," Cassie said. "He wouldn't tell us where they were, or how they worked, but he says that nothing in the valley can be seen from the outside, and that the holograms themselves can't be detected by the Yeerks."

"That's—convenient," I said, watching the column of smoke as it trailed off into the heavens. Would the smoke itself be enough to give us away? Would Erek have thought of that?

Marco muttered something under his breath. "What?" I asked.

"I said, it doesn't make any sense. The Chee."

"What do you mean?"

"Erek told us they have some kind of block against violence," he said. "Can't do anything to harm another sapient being, can't allow violence to happen. But he's sheltering us even though he knows we're going to be taking the fight to the Yeerks. And he's letting the Yeerks go around bodysnatching people left and right. And he said they've been on Earth for thousands of years, but obviously they've never intervened in any large-scale war, since it would take all of about six of them to completely shut down any battlefield in history. I can't figure out any kind of coherent set of rules that makes all that fit together."

He fell silent, staring into the fire, the orange light shining in his eyes, off his hair. He was in his real body, his right hand swollen beneath the dirty fabric of a t-shirt torn into strips.

I looked over at Cassie. She was staring into the fire, too—elbows on her knees, her chin resting in her hands, wearing the same closed, thoughtful expression she'd had on ever since she came out of Andalite morph.

I sighed, feeling the dull throb of a headache beginning to blossom between my eyes, and added figure out what to do about the Chee to the long and growing list of things-to-do-tomorrow. Standing up, I grabbed another of the logs Rachel had cut—how?—and dropped it into the pit, shielding my eyes from the resulting fountain of sparks.

We had food, water, and shelter, thanks to Cassie's original efforts and occasional supply runs supplemented by deliveries from Erek. We had weapons—the laser beam Marco had stolen from the Yeerk pool, a few guns Tobias had "scavenged" from the pawn shops on the north side of the tracks, the gun Ax had pulled on me and the strange metal bracelet Rachel had stolen from Visser Three's body. We didn't have internet or phones, but we had thought-speak, and it wasn't too hard to get news from Somerton, Rosita, or Granite Heights, none of which showed any signs of infestation yet.

We had everything we needed to survive. What we didn't have—yet—was a way to win.

I turned and sat back down, gazing into the flickering light. The last time I'd sat in front of a campfire had been almost two years ago, backpacking with Marco and my parents and my brother Tom. We'd cooked steaks on sticks, made s'mores, thrown copper sulfate on the flames to turn them green. It had been pretty much the only time I'd gotten to hang out with Tom that summer, since he'd been spending every day getting ready for JV basketball tryouts…

Tom was out there somewhere, right at that very moment. Trapped. Scared. Alone. Controlled. Tom, and my parents, and my cousins Jordan and Sara and my aunt and uncle—Rachel's parents—and Marco's dad, and everyone I knew from school, and probably a quarter of the people in the city, by this point. Twenty thousand host-ready Yeerks, Elfangor had said.

I hadn't thought about any of them all day. In days, really—even before my memory went fuzzy, I'd been avoiding looking straight at the problem. At what had happened to the Withers and the Chapmans, the utter, horrifying darkness of it. It was so much easier to focus on what was right in front of me, on asking questions and making plans. To distract myself from the fact that I was lost, homesick, and terrified, and that I didn't know what to do next.

—fake Jake fake Jake fake Jake—

Except that wasn't it. Not really. The problem wasn't that I was a fake Jake, it was that I was exactly the same as the real Jake. The Jake who'd screwed up and gotten himself killed—who hadn't been able to save Cassie's parents—who was barely holding the group together. I had every one of his flaws, every one of his weaknesses. I wasn't a superhero, I was a kid, and not even a particularly smart one at that. I had no business carrying the fate of the world on my shoulders.

So give it up. Turn yourself in to the military, give the blue box to the scientists, alert the media. Like you should have done last week.

Insanity was doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting something different. Or was that despair talking? The part of me that was afraid to be in charge, because then it was all my fault?

I sighed again. There was no point going around in circles inside my own head, in trying to make decisions by myself in the dark. The universe had waited eight days while I was stuck in a coma; it could wait eight more hours.

I rose to my feet, my eyes still on the flames. "I think I'm going to b—" I began, then faltered as I looked up.

Marco and Cassie were staring at one another across the campfire, each looking quietly determined. "What—" I said, and then broke off again. "Are you guys thought-speaking at each other?"

Marco held up his broken hand in answer. "Gotta spend some time in my real body, or this will never heal."

Cassie said nothing.

"What's going—I mean, what are you—" I asked, for once unable to guess.

"Isn't it obvious?" Marco drawled. "We're both waiting up to be the last one to talk to you. Alone." His lip twisted into a smirk, his eyes still locked onto Cassie's. "Though I guess at this point, it's pretty obvious which one of us is more stubborn."

Suddenly, he stood, kicking a splash of dust into the fire as he shoved his hands into his pockets, breaking eye contact with Cassie as he threw me a plastic grin. "'Night, buddy. Glad you're not dead, and all that." He turned and began walking off into the darkness.

"Marco?"

"Later," he called over his shoulder.

And then he was gone. I stared after him for a long moment, trying to figure out what had just happened. Behind me, there was a slight scrape, a quiet rustle, and I turned to see Cassie looking down at the ground, scratching random lines in the dirt with her shoe.

"He didn't take it very well," she said simply, her voice calm and conversational. "When you—went under. He was—"

She pursed her lips. "Well. It's been hard. Let's just leave it at that."

I swallowed, my throat suddenly dry. "Cassie, I'm sorry about your—"

"It wasn't your fault," she said, cutting me off. Her eyes were incredibly bright in the firelight, set into the dark skin of her face. They shone like stars, looking brilliant and distant.

"Yeah, but we should've—"

"Should you?" she asked. She looked up at me, her expression mild. "Because now you're looking at it from the outside, and I'm curious. What do you really think, Jake?"

I swallowed again, turning to look at the dark space where Marco had disappeared.

Should I have left Cassie in the dark about her parents' death? It was unkind, for sure—cruel, even. But would it have been any kinder to tell her? To waste time and resources hunting her down, only to deliver the terrible news?

If we'd gone looking—if we'd waited—the whole mission to the pool would have turned out differently. If we'd sent Rachel to find Cassie, and Marco and I had gone in alone—

"That's what I thought," Cassie said sadly. "See, this is the problem. It's not that we're going to make a whole bunch of bad calls and suddenly turn evil or something like that. It's just that the good calls—well, there just aren't any good calls, you know? We keep going like this, we're going to end up in a place where even the least bad option is still something we're not going to be able to live with. And if we do live with it, it'll be because we—because we've stopped—because the good parts inside us—"

She faltered, scrubbing at her eyes with one hand. "I killed a bear, Jake," she said. "Right over there, by the creek. Morphed into Elfangor's body and just killed it, straight out. It pissed me off, so I ended it. And you know what? I don't even think that's particularly crazy. I mean, I can look at it and see, okay, I've got some kind of PTSD thing going on, and I felt like I didn't have any control over my environment, so I did something to give myself a sense of power and—and agency. And it's just a bear. It's not like I killed a person or anything."

The lump in my throat had grown too big to swallow. I felt my fists clenching and unclenching, felt sweat trickling down the back of my neck. I wanted to say something to stop her—to throw the train of thought off the tracks before it could reach its destination—but there was nothing to be said. Nothing true, anyway.

"Rachel—she killed a kid, Jake. She didn't want to talk about it, but I got the story out of Erek. At the school, when everything was going down, Visser Three was in a kid's body, and she just carved it up like it was a Thanksgiving turkey. She cut his arms off, and then knocked him down, and then cut his head off, and then she just dealt with it, like it was nothing. And you know what else? Erek had it all on tape, and I watched it, and as soon as I saw it was a kid I didn't know, I felt better. Like it would have been worse if it were a friend of mine, like this kid's life didn't matter because I didn't know his name."

She looked up at me from her seat on the rotting log, barely two yards away and yet infinitely out of reach. "I talked to Elfangor about the whole Yeerk-morphing thing. At the same time that he was talking to Ax—he can think two things at once, easy. And he made this point, you know, about respect and stuff. Like, if I think that I would want somebody to use my body—if it could help them win the war—then I'm not really respecting them if I assume that they would say no. Like, I'm sort of accusing them of being selfish or short-sighted or something—that if the war is really worth fighting, then I should trust other people to see that it's really worth fighting, and just go ahead and assume that they would consent, if they had the time to really understand. And it wasn't even until I demorphed that I realized just how deeply creepy that sounds, and even then I still believed the argument. I still think it's true."

She shrugged, a quick and casual movement of her shoulders, and I felt the tension inside me double, because she shouldn't be this nonchalant, not Cassie of all people, not about things like this. My black box was shuddering, smoking, ready to break because this was wrong, wrong, wrong—

"And that's the thing, you know? That's what I'm afraid of. Not that we'll wake up one day and realize that we've crossed all the lines, but that we'll look back and we won't even see any lines—that we won't know what all the fuss was about in the first place, because every choice we made was good, every choice we made was justified. I mean, what was Rachel supposed to do—leave Visser Three in control of the battlefield?" She gave a brittle, humorless laugh. "I did that once, and now both my parents are dead. If I'd done what Rachel did, my dad might still be alive right now."

"Cassie—" I interjected, her name like glass in my throat.

"Yeah?" she asked—carelessly curious, heartbreakingly casual.

But once again, there was nothing to be said. The silence stretched out and eventually broke, becoming just an ordinary quiet. After a time, Cassie stood, still looking slightly up at me, the flames reflecting in her eyes imperceptibly dimmer as the fire slowly burned itself out. She looked at me, and smiled—sadly—then shuffled forward, leaning in to brush her lips against mine for the first time.

"Sweet dreams, Jake," she said, as she stepped around me and headed for bed. "I'm glad you're back."

For the third time in a row, I stretched out my hand and focused, watching Cassie's borrowed body go still as the acquiring process took hold.

"Last one for now," I said, drawing back as she began to demorph. "I don't want you getting morph-sick."

‹That's only three,› she pointed out in public thought-speak. ‹Are you sure?›

"For now," I repeated wearily. "We need to move on. Lot of stuff to sort out."

I stepped away as her feathers began to melt together, slowly darkening into the deep purple of her t-shirt. Turning, I picked up the Iscafil device and handed it back to Rachel. "Hold on to this," I said. "We'll figure out what to do with it later."

She nodded, her face an unreadable mask. Her knuckles were white as she gripped the small, blue box, her eyes locked on it as if it were a poisonous snake.

After Visser Three had done whatever-it-was that had put the two of them and Erek into some kind of mind-meld, she'd gone straight for the construction site, digging the box out of its hiding place and delivering it to Marco before going to rescue her own family. By the time she'd gotten home, the Yeerks were already there.

Later, I told myself. You'll deal with it later.

"Sound off," I said, turning to the rest of the group. "Flight morphs."

"Osprey," said Marco.

"Barn owl," said Garrett.

"Red-tail," said Tobias.

"Eagle," said Rachel.

There was a mental flash, the image of a great horned owl, and Ax lifted a hand. He had been practicing thought-speaking at human brains just as much as he had been practicing human speech, but he still found it easier to communicate in pictures and concepts rather than words.

"Snipe," said Cassie, as her mouth appeared out of the peregrine falcon's beak.

"And I'll take the falcon," I said.

Since most of our morphs had been acquired from Cassie, we'd decided to divide them up between us, so that there would be no chance of accidental interference in the middle of combat. For the most part, the birds had been independently acquired and could be overlapped, but Garrett, Ax, and I were all using borrowed morphs, so we'd each claimed one of them, as well. It would make it easier for us to tell one another apart in the air, and we always had the option of acquiring our own copies of different birds later.

"We're going to look like a birdwatcher's wet dream when we're all flying together," Marco quipped. "We'll need to be careful—stay spaced out and stuff."

"Bulldozer morphs," I continued, refusing to be distracted.

"Elephant," answered Rachel.

"Polar bear," added Garrett.

Ax transmitted the image of a moose.

"Gorilla," said Marco.

"Cape buffalo," said Tobias.

"And Cassie and I will share the rhino, for now," I concluded. "Okay. Combat. I've got the tiger."

"Gorilla again," Marco chimed in. "Ain't broke."

"Wolf," Cassie said softly.

‹My own body will be sufficient,› said Ax, his thought-speak only a little bit like razor blades dancing across our minds.

Garrett was the first to recover. "Ouch," he said. "And, grizzly."

"I'll play Elfangor," said Tobias. I suppressed the urge to study Ax's reaction.

"Hork-Bajir," said Rachel.

I raised an eyebrow—when did that happen?—but she didn't elaborate, just looked down at the cube in her hands.

I took in a deep breath. Later. I would deal with it later, along with Ax's alien dogma and Tobias's continued skepticism and Marco's increasing irritability and Cassie's quiet despair and Garrett's weird tics and the fact that we were all stuck out in the woods and all of our friends and family had been taken and I was a fake a clone a copy a ghost—

Later.

"Okay," I said, and I was relieved that no hint of my exhaustion and anxiety managed to make its way into my voice. "Let's make a plan."

"It works," Marco said, holding out both hands like a stage magician. Slowly, his palms began to swell, bulging outward, taking on new colors and texture. A minute and a half later, and two reusable grocery bags dropped to the forest floor, their contents spilling out across the pine needles.

"Cassie was right," he continued. "I didn't have to think about what was in the bags; I just focused on the outside, and it pulled the whole thing into the morph."

"It's going to cut down on your time limit," Rachel said. "Right? I mean, if the thing is based on mass—"

"Yeah, but hand grenades don't weigh much, and neither do AK-47s."

"When Cassie returns, you may tell her that her prediction was correct," said Ax. "The pigeon was capable of detecting wavelengths of light well beyond the range of both human and Andalite vision."

"There's a cloaked Bug fighter over your house, Rachel's house, and Marco's house," Garrett added. "You can't really see them, even in morph, but you can tell they're there. Nothing over Oak Landing, and nothing over Cassie's. One over the school, though, and the big force field is still there. Sorry, Jake—I don't think we're going to be getting anybody's family out any time soon."

"Took them maybe three minutes to show up after Rachel stung him. They're getting faster, and they're following up on everything now. I think they've got every single cop, EMT, and firefighter, not to mention most of the people who work downtown. Pretty soon, we're not going to be able to move around in the city at all."

"Did you get the cylinder?"

"Yeah, we got it."

"I can't help you," Erek said. "I want to, believe me. But I can't." He unzipped his backpack, revealing the groceries inside. "This is the best I can do, for now."

"What about the rest of your people?" I asked.

"We're still gathering, just in case. But there's nothing we can do. Our understanding of psychological trauma is learned—as far as our core programming is concerned, the Yeerk invasion is a good thing. Crime is down by fifty percent and still falling. Pretty soon, there won't be any violence left at all."

I closed my eyes. "Five seconds," I called out, focusing my thoughts. Twenty-three times forty-seven—that's twenty-three times fifty minus twenty-three times three; twenty-three times one hundred is twenty-three hundred, cut that in half and it's—

‹JOHHHHHHHN JACOB JINGLEHEIMER SCHMIDT—HIS NAME IS MY NAME TOOOOOO! WHENEVER WE GO OUT, THE PEOPLE ALWAYS SHOUT—›

"Stop!" I managed to choke out, my train of thought utterly derailed. "Please, stop!"

‹Did it work?›

"Yeah," I said, unable to keep a smile from spreading across my face. "It worked."

‹I still don't understand why Cassie's the only one of us who can pull this off,› Marco grumbled.

‹Doesn't matter,› said Rachel, holding up one three-fingered hand and studying the sharp, curved claws. ‹A, it's awesome, and B, as long as we can acquire from her—›

‹—and as long as we don't need all seven of us in morph,› Marco interjected.

‹—then this is just as good.›

"If we do it this way, we're all on the line," Marco pointed out.

"Yeah, but if we split up, we're weaker at every step," I said. "We've all seen Episode III—I'm not sending half of us to one place and half of us to another, when we can all just do both missions. It's bad enough that we don't have Tobias—if something goes wrong, I want everybody there to help."

"Are you sure you want to do this, Garrett?" I asked. Around me, skepticism showed more or less openly on every face—Rachel dubious, Marco visibly opposed, Cassie sympathetic, Ax idly curious.

Garrett didn't look up, didn't speak—just sat there with his shirt pulled up around his mouth, staring resolutely at my shoes. But he nodded.

Be straightforward with him, Tobias had told me, just before leaving. Blunt, even. Just don't bullshit him.

"I'm a little nervous about this," I said carefully. "Because it looks like you're nervous, and this is—well, this is the most important job."

"Don't talk to me like I'm a retard," Garrett said—but mildly.

I nodded. "Fine. Garrett, you're not acting like you can handle this."

"Because I won't look you in the eye."

"And because you've got the shirt over your mouth. And because you're curled up in a little ball. And there's that sound you make when we're not looking. This is pretty much the worst I've ever seen you, as far as—that stuff—is concerned. And Tobias isn't here to—"

"I don't need Tobias to take care of me."

"—to help you. The way Marco helps me. This stuff is scary—it's okay to be scared. But not too scared. Right now, you look too scared, which makes me want to ask Cassie or Marco to do it instead."

I waited for the younger boy's response.

‹This is a waste of—›

‹Ten seconds,› I interrupted, looking over to see whether it was Marco or Rachel I was interrupting. Neither face looked confused, which told me that whoever had sent the first message had sent it so that all of us could hear.

All of us except—I hoped—Garrett himself.

It wasn't the first time that the others had expressed reservations about the strange little orphan kid. The subject had come up twice since Tobias left, exacerbated by the fact that—in the older boy's absence—Garrett had spent almost all of his time with Ax. Marco and Rachel and Cassie had seen little of his competence, and a lot of his awkward, antisocial weirdness. It took energy to deal with him, especially as the days dragged on and the little valley felt smaller and smaller—energy that was in short supply, given the stress we were already under.

But.

I wasn't entirely sure why I was defending him—why I wanted to defend him, as opposed to doing it out of a sense of duty or loyalty or virtue. It wasn't any one thing—more like a mix of reasons, none of which would have been sufficient on their own.

There was the talk I'd had with Cassie, and the bad taste it had left in my mouth, that made me want to be a better person than—strictly speaking—I had to be.

There was the fact that Tobias did feel like an important part of the group, and that Tobias and Garrett were a package deal.

There was my quiet sense that Garrett was in fact a useful ally—that he had perspective and potential that we would miss, if we lost it. By all accounts, he'd already saved Tobias's life once, not to mention his role in bringing us together with Ax.

Mostly, though, it was about the shape of the little tribe we were forming, the kind of group we needed to be, if we wanted to win this war. Sooner or later—and probably sooner—we were going to have to start growing. Recruiting. Sharing the morphing power, accepting that we didn't have a monopoly on action. Ax was Elfangor's brother—in a very real sense, Garrett was our only outsider. That made him—for me, at least—what, a weathervane? A test case? The question of whether we could make it work with Garrett seemed meaningfully tied up with the question of whether we could make it work with anyone who wasn't there from the beginning. It was a matter of setting precedent, of self-fulfilling prophecy—either way, we'd be creating a feedback loop.

But—and even I admitted this, had no interest in denying it—none of that would be relevant if he couldn't pull his weight.

‹That's ten,› said Marco, or maybe Rachel. ‹Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen.›

Marco.

I opened my mouth—

Sucking in a deep breath, Garrett uncurled and climbed to his feet. Pulling his shirt down, he fixed his gaze somewhere in the vicinity of my left nostril, his arms held rigidly by his sides.

"I'd like to do this," he said loudly. "I'm the smallest one, with the longest time limit, so it makes sense for it to be me. And I can handle it. I'm sorry I'm not as sneaky as everybody else is about whether or not I'm scared."

I looked over at the others, caught Marco's eye.

Your call, Fearless Leader.

"Okay, then," I said. "Trial number one. Let's do this."

Without further ceremony, I lay down on a patch of grass a few yards away from the firepit. Still looking vaguely terrified, Garrett stepped over and stood with one foot on either side of my torso, straddling me. For the briefest of moments, we made actual eye contact, and I gave him what I hoped would be taken as an encouraging nod.

"Here goes," he muttered under his breath, and closed his eyes.

The basic idea was simple. According to Ax, the Yeerks either already had or very soon would have something called a Gleet bio-filter installed at every entrance to the Yeerk pool. It would detect—and vaporize—any living thing that attempted to pass through it that was not approved—i.e. a human, Taxxon, or Hork-Bajir, complete with ride-along Yeerk.

In all likelihood, this would not be the only hurdle we would need to overcome. Given that Cassie and Marco had each independently come up with the idea in the same five-minute period, it was almost certain that Visser Three had defenses in place to guard against it.

But it was an important piece of the puzzle, which was: how do you get a two-hundred-pound lump of cesium—or better still, a hundred two-pound lumps—into the middle of the Yeerk pool?

Above, I had an unpleasantly clear view of Garrett as his skin turned gray and began to ooze a slimy, snailey lubricant. With unnerving swiftness, his eyelids fused shut and his mouth and nostrils vanished, leaving his face a horrifying lump of alien flesh. Dropping to his knees, he fell forward onto my chest, and I grimaced as the thick, wet heat began to soak through my shirt.

‹Sorry.›

I heard a sort of garbage-disposal sound that I could only imagine was his entire skeletal system shattering and dissolving. A septic, swampy odor filled the air, and the pressure on my legs and torso evened out as his own limbs melted together into a single puddle of goo. I closed my eyes, wishing he had started by shrinking.

‹Sorry.›

"Don't worry about it," I said, unsure whether he would even be able to hear me. Next time, we let him morph in a pot of water and scoop him out. The theory had been that it would be easier and more hygienic if he started out in contact with my body, but we hadn't really taken into account just how gross the transition would be.

‹Jake.›

"Hmmm?" I said.

‹Jake, something's wrong.›

Feeling a sudden spike of adrenaline, I opened my eyes.

There was nothing human left of Garrett's body—it was a puddle of oozing gray flesh, covering me like the world's largest booger. It didn't look Yeerkish, either, though—instead of the pale, featureless gray, it was all shot through with delicate black veins, the pattern pulsing and shifting as if it were a nest of writhing snakes.

"What—"

I didn't get to finish the question, because without warning, Garrett's body suddenly swelled, a wave of alien biomass surging forward, knocking me flat on my back.

‹Garrett! Stop! Demorph!›

‹What?›

‹You're suffocating Jake! Back to human, now!›

The slime and gunk were everywhere—in my eyes, in my mouth, up my nose and in my ears. I gagged, trying to inhale, and then retched, my throat filling with bile and acid. Acting on animal instinct, I began tearing at the soft flesh, trying to dig my way out to open air.

‹AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!›

‹Keep demorphing! Don't stop!›

I could feel the weight across my face and chest decreasing, and with a final, desperate heave, I threw the other boy off of me, turning to the side and hacking as I tried to clear my airway. I was dimly aware of the others shouting, of the sound of footsteps, and then what felt like a gallon of water splashed across my face, clearing some of the muck.

‹Sorry sorry sorry what happened sorry so—›

Garrett's thought-speak cut off abruptly as he passed the halfway mark in his demorph. A long forty-five seconds passed, in which I continued to cough and wheeze as the others threw more water on me, wiping my face and neck clean with rough towels.

Eventually, I got my breathing back under control and was able to open my eyes. Garrett was half a dozen yards away, curled up into a ball, his shirt fully obscuring his face, ooze and slime drenching his clothes. The others were standing around me in a semicircle, every expression equal parts confusion and horror.

"What," shouted Marco, still holding an empty bucket, "the fuck? Ax? Cassie? What the everliving fuck just happened?"

‹I am sorry, Marco,› Ax said, sounding bewildered, his thought-speak even more grating than usual in his agitation. ‹I have absolutely no idea.›