Author's notes:

1. Slight retcon to morphing time limits, to normalize everybody to the same mathematical curve. This involved some minor changes to previous chapters that I probably won't bother to fix anytime soon, because probably nobody would have noticed anyway. In essence, they're all clustered around two hours, ranging from Jake (slightly under) and Ax (well under) to Garrett (well over).

2. Odds of tweaks to this chapter are higher than usual; it's been a stressful two weeks and I didn't hit all of the notes I wanted to hit. Your critical comments are even more greatly appreciated than usual, especially if accompanied by concrete suggestions. As always, I read every review here, and I love it when people join the discussion over at r/rational.

3. I have a ( dot com slash sabien). I have about five patrons at the moment. I'd love to have more, if people want to contribute to the development of the middle school rationality bootcamp I'm working on.

Chapter 15: Marco

My eyes were already open as I came awake—my feet already under me, my clothes already on. There were three stones in my right hand, as I'd known there would be, as there basically had to be.

I took a deep breath. I'd prepared for this as best I could, but the reality—

Are you there? I asked in my thoughts—quietly, to whatever extent "quiet" meant anything inside my own head.

Silence. Inevitable, expected.

I began to count doubles—one, two, four, eight, sixteen—growing more and more tense with each passing number, sweat prickling under my hair and trickling down the back of my neck.

Thirty-two.

Sixty-four.

One-twenty-eight.

Two-fifty-six.

Five hundred twelve.

One thousand twenty-four.

Two thousand forty-eight.

Four thousand ninety-six.

Eight thousand one hundred ninety-two.

Sixteen thousand three hundred eighty four.

Thirty two thousand six hundred—seven?—seven hundred and—

I stopped. I had two-to-the-fourteenth memorized, and not two-to-the-fifteenth, and with that, it was settled, my last scrap of self-protective doubt obliterated, annihilated. I had known it from the first moment, but knowing was one thing, and proof was—

Something else.

I took another deep breath, the air catching raggedly in my throat.

What day is it? I thought.

Like magic—like thought-speak—the answer came back, a whisper from the other Marco. The real Marco, the one in control, who'd been quietly giving me space as I dealt with the reality of the situation.

‹It's Tuesday,› he said. ‹The twelfth.›

Six days. One for the memory to sink in—to become a part of the physical structure of my brain. Then the acquisition, which I didn't remember—couldn't remember, any more than I could remember the last moment of wakefulness before falling asleep.

And then five more days. Five days in which I'd been frozen, unreal, irrelevant—a potential person, a pattern in my own memory. In the meantime, Marco would have calculated two-to-the-fifteenth, would have committed the number to memory. Tomorrow, he would let Jake or Rachel or—no, not Tobias, Tobias would still be gone—let them acquire him, and acquire himself back. And then there would be three of us, where right now there were only two.

Version control.

My idea. Me—the Marco in between.

Can you hear all of this? I asked.

‹Yeah,› came the reply. ‹It's—well—yeah.›

Can you—I mean, can you let me—you know—hear you, too? I tried not to think the word please, knowing even as I did that it was futile, that he—I—would hear it anyway.

Silence. Then—

‹Sorry. I guess not.›

I sucked in another long, slow breath. It's fine, I thought. Don't worry about it.

There was a pause. ‹Do you—I mean, are you—›

It's fine.

There was a strange moment of mental reflection, in which I knew—despite being unable to hear it directly—knew what the other Marco was thinking, and knew that he knew it, and knew that he knew that I knew that he knew it—a cascading upward spiral in which we both considered the question that I wanted to ask, the question I'd anticipated, that I had decided in advance I would not answer, and realized that I—he—was going to answer it anyway. It had been silly to pretend otherwise—a good, general policy taken to an extreme, irrational conclusion.

‹They're all still alive.›

And—

‹No. They've still got him.›

I squeezed my eyes shut, a sudden tremble in my chin. Thanks, I thought, knowing there was nothing more to say.

After a time, I opened my eyes again.

Okay. How can I help?

‹There's a plan.›

I nodded—physically nodded, registering for the first time where we—I—was standing. Marco had climbed up to the highest rock in the shattered pile of boulders that made up the north end of the valley. It was my favorite spot, with a peaceful view of the back side of the mountain range—no humans, no buildings, just greens and browns and granite grays. He had clearly chosen it on purpose—a small but meaningful kindness.

Yeah, you're such a great guy, Marco.

I experienced the thought, rather than broadcasting it intentionally, and the real Marco let it pass without comment. He could afford to be tolerant—of the two of us, he wasn't the one whose lifespan was measured in minutes.

And with that, the thought that I had been trying not to think found wings, broke through the barriers and echoed across the surface of my mind.

Oh, God. I'm going to die.

I had at most two hours—probably less, if the real Marco was under any kind of time pressure. Two hours, and then he would demorph, and I would be gone, dissolved back into the æther. It was completely inevitable—there was not one single thing that I could do to prevent it, and the fact that the original version of me would continue on in his own body failed to provide even the slightest shred of comfort.

‹Hey—›

Just give me a minute, okay? Just—just give me one fucking minute. I don't need—

He backed off.

Thirty seconds later, I wiped the tears away from my cheeks, blinking until the mountains stopped being blurry. It was a warm, beautiful day, the horizon clearly visible a hundred miles away.

Okay. Talk.

‹We're still trying to crack the Yeerk pool, but we ran into a snag. Something went wrong with the Yeerk morph, and we're not sure what. We're going to try for another one of the cylinders, as a test.›

You're running the exact same—

‹Please. No, we figure it's time to start hitting them for real, and we'll grab a cylinder on our way out.›

He laid out the situation in broad strokes. The Yeerks had concentrated their firepower in four separate locations—the pool, the high school, the downtown police station, and the hospital. According to the Chee, each of them was openly alien on the inside, with holograms at the entrances and Hork-Bajir and other aliens working side by side with human Controllers.

The pool and the high school were both protected by impenetrable shields; Ax claimed that each was only a half-dome, and could be bypassed from below, but he also admitted that Visser Three would have definitely made plans for that possibility.

The police station was currently too tough a nut to crack—it was their main response hub, with three Bug fighters hovering overhead on permanent standby and a lot of troops on alert inside.

The hospital was apparently undefended, and even Rachel was smart enough to recognize the trap.

‹Jake wanted us to take one of the houses back, but I talked him out of it. There's a bunch of other houses with known Controllers, plus a ton of random businesses, and we could always try just snatching someone off the street, but it's getting harder because they're traveling everywhere in triplets and pretty much every one of them has a gun.›

What about the stunners?

‹Ax figures they're running out. There's only so much tech they could have brought with them, and they don't have full manufacturing capability yet.›

So, what's the plan?

‹There's a truck.›

A big one, about the size of a large U-Haul. It left from a supply depot on the outskirts of town every other day, heading for the pool, carrying food and soda.

Obvious target.

‹Yeah. There's a couple of guards in the back, and a team that goes over the cargo with a fine-tooth comb before they let it inside the shield. Looks like they irradiate the whole truck, too, in case of insects. But we're not going to hit it on its way in.›

It had taken them a few reconnaissance trips to notice, but the truck was just as heavy on its return trip as it was when it left the warehouse—just as low on the tires, just as wobbly on the speedbumps, and just as slow on the turns.

‹We don't know what it is, but we figure we ought to steal it, or at the very least wreck it.›

It could be thirty Hork-Bajir!

‹We've got a plan for that.›

About halfway between the pool and the warehouse, the truck's route took it across Lake Mackintosh, the county reservoir. It wasn't a huge lake—maybe a half mile wide at that point—and the bridge was basically just more road, held about twenty feet above the water by thick, concrete pillars.

You're going to blow the bridge?

‹With Ax's phaser things. Shredders.›

What about the Controllers?

‹Cassie's sitting this one out.›

I swallowed. It was a cold, brutal answer, and I could picture exactly how the conversation must have gone down. Okay, I thought. So you—you've got somebody in the water? To rip open the truck?

‹Garrett, as squid. Cassie thinks he can survive for a while in fresh water, so he's going to drag off whatever seems valuable—and pull the Controllers out of the cab, to get their weapons and spare Yeerks.›

We went over the rest of the details, one by one. I bit my lip, looking down at the cloud-shadows mottling the slope of the mountain, my heart sinking as Marco fleshed out the plan in my head. There were a dozen things that could go wrong—a hundred, a thousand. I did my best to point them out, and together, the other Marco and I considered them, making small adjustments to the plan.

What if the bridge doesn't break? I asked, at one point. Or if it falls in early, and the truck just stops?

‹We bail,› Marco said. ‹No point taking extra risk. We're hoping, we do it this way, it all happens so fast the Yeerks never even get a distress signal. Ax is pretty sure he can time it so it falls right as they're coming up to it.›

So no distractions, then?

‹Jake wants everybody nearby, especially since we're down to five. Plus, we don't want to show all our tricks before we're ready to take on the pool, and we don't want somebody getting killed because some Controller happens to get in a lucky shot.›

We talked, and talked, and talked, going over the whole thing twice—thrice—four times. We talked about Visser Three, and the information Rachel had pulled out of his head. We talked about the things he would have been able to pull from Rachel, and whether Ax's surprise presence would provide any sort of advantage, and whether the Visser already knew about using the morphing tech to store objects and tools. We talked about sodium, and bleach, and whether or not the National Guard armory had hand grenades. We talked about Elfangor, though for obvious reasons we both skirted the topic of digging through his memories by force. We talked about Jake, and Marco filled me in on how he was doing. We didn't talk about Dad, but he was there, in the background, underlining our thoughts.

Eventually, it became clear that there was nothing more to talk about. That Marco was stringing things along, stretching out the time.

Keeping me alive.

I fought back a sudden urge to cry, looked down at my feet as the mountains turned blurry once again. In my head, the other Marco said nothing.

What are you—

—waiting for, I wanted to say, but some surge of self-preservation instinct stopped me from forming the words, even in my own thoughts. I wanted to shout it, to scream and rage, to retreat from my fear into bitter fury.

But if I did, he might stop waiting, and I didn't want to die.

Cut the crap, a part of me whispered. It's not like you're actually dying, any more than you're actually fourteen. You're a copy. You're a program he booted up for a while. When he turns you off, you're still going to be there.

Except I wouldn't—not really. Not me, not the memories of the past hour. I'd be wiped, reset—reformed from scratch, like when one of our morphs got injured in battle.

You knew this was going to happen. The second you decided to make backups, you knew you'd eventually wake up as the clone.

And I'd thought, then, that I'd be okay with it. That I'd understand. That as long as one of me kept on living, I'd feel like it wasn't really over.

But it was. I had memories of fourteen long years, and in a few minutes, they would end, and me along with them. Scrubbing away the tears, I looked down at my index finger, at the faint scar on the second joint, a memento from the time I'd slammed it in the car door in second grade.

I wasn't just a copy. If Jake was still Jake, even after what had happened, then I really was Marco. Not the original, but still real. If Marco Prime stayed in morph, I'd go on living—would grow up, grow old, have a life. I'd get to go to prom, take the road trip across the country that Dad had been promising for years, start a family somewhere. Even if we lost the war, I wouldn't just vanish.

Marco, I began.

‹Sorry,› he said.

And I felt the changes begin.

I finished throwing up and wiped my lips with the back of my hand, spitting to get the taste of bile out of my mouth. I'd thought about switching him off again—taking back total control—but in the end, I couldn't do it. It would've made me feel better about it, and I didn't want to feel better about it. I deserved every plea, every curse, every heart-wrenching knife that the past version of myself had sunk into me as I slowly murdered him, dissolving his existence away. I would carry that memory with me forever—it would be a part of every new backup I made from now on.

Straightening, I took one last look at the mountain range—at the crumpled ridges, the fluffy white clouds. A hawk floated on the breeze, tracing lazy circles against the deep blue of the sky. It was quiet, and peaceful, and calm.

Fuck you, Elfangor, I thought.

And I turned and headed back to camp.

‹Jake here, ETA four minutes. Down the chain, over.›

‹Jake and Marco ready, four minutes, pass it down, over.›

‹Garrett here. Under water, ready, Jake and Marco set. Three minutes fifty, over.›

There was a long silence as the message continued out of range, Garrett passing word to Ax, who would pass word to Rachel on the far side of the bridge and then bring confirmation back. I peered out from the concealing brush at the side of the road, straining to hear the sound of the distant truck's engine, but it was too soon. At three and a half minutes and something like fifty miles per hour, it was still well over two miles away.

‹Garrett here. Ax is ready at the second break zone, Rachel's good to drop the tree if she has to but she says no one's coming. Over.›

‹Jake,› I broadcast. ‹It's Marco. Everybody's set, over.›

‹Three minutes.›

Ax had used his Shredders to score the bridge structure in two places, weakening the steel and concrete until it was just barely supporting its own weight. As the truck passed the first, the whole section should drop away and into the water; if it didn't, Ax would have a few seconds to cut away the last few supports holding up the second.

Rachel was in Andalite morph on the far shore, ready to block the road in case some innocent family came by in their SUV at the wrong time. As soon as the bridge went down, she'd sprint toward the rest of us. I'd be coming in from behind, chasing the truck, and Jake would dive in from above if he wasn't needed to stop any other cars coming along behind. With luck, we would all converge on Garrett's position within a minute of one another.

‹Still no sign of Bug fighters?› I asked, looking up at the empty sky. ‹From Marco,› I added hastily. ‹Over.›

‹Nothing,› Jake replied. ‹Relax.›

He should have used pigeon morph. He should have used pigeon morph, or better yet we should have brought Cassie and made her use pigeon morph. We should have just blocked the road on the far side and had Rachel standing by closer. We should have warned the Chee. There could be thirty Hork-Bajir with guns in the back of that truck. We should've recruited more kids from Tobias's orphanage. There could be Bug fighters—Rachel's going to be exposed on the bridge for like thirty seconds; if there are Bug fighters she's just going to die. We should—

‹Two minutes.›

I shook my head. Should should should. No point in obsessing over it, at this point. The dice were already rolling.

I'd read the Wikipedia article on the strategy and tactics of guerrilla warfare, on one of our incognito trips to the library to get internet access. Turns out people had just written it all down—attacking in small groups, using camouflage and captured weapons, avoiding casualties while forcing the larger enemy to spread itself thin or waste resources overprotecting every base and transportation route. The operation we were about to pull was basic, almost textbook—hit hard and fast, on a relatively undefended target, and get out before the enemy has time to react.

The question was, was that good enough? Was it a strategy that could win even though Visser Three would have considered it—predicted it?

The Yeerks didn't know about Ax. They didn't know about weaponized thought-speak. They didn't know we could carry items in morph, or that we could access the memories of anyone we morphed into—unless maybe they did. It was impossible to tell what Visser Three did or didn't know, impossible to judge what he'd managed to pull out of Rachel's head during their split-second mind meld, or what he'd simply figured out on his own. He'd had access to the morphing tech for almost two years, according to Ax, and he could look at all of Alloran's memories and theories.

Did we want to use every advantage we had, maximizing our chances of success? Or did we want to hold back, preserving a few surprises, a few critical tricks?

‹One minute.›

I'd done a report on Alan Turing, in eighth grade—on Bletchley Park and Ultra, the secret British codebreaking operation that cracked the Nazi military communications during World War II. For a while, the British had known the positions of just about every German U-Boat in the Atlantic, and had foreknowledge of over half of the upcoming attacks on Allied ships.

And what they'd done with that information was—mostly—nothing. At each step of the way, it was more important to preserve their overall ability to read German communications than it was to rescue this or that convoy. If the Germans had figured out that their codes were broken, they would've just switched to a better system. So the Allies waited, and watched, intervening only when the intel could be explained away as luck or reconnaissance or the work of double agents. And eventually, the secrecy, the sacrifices—it all paid off, on D-Day.

Already the Yeerks were traveling in triplets. Already, according to the Chee, they were stunning people the second the Yeerks crawled out of their heads, storing the unconscious bodies along the side of the pool and reviving people only after they'd already been reinfested. If each of our successes made the odds of the next success smaller, rather than bigger—

We needed to hit the Yeerk pool yesterday.

‹Here we go. Nearest car is about four miles back.›

‹Incoming,› I relayed to Garrett, and watched through the tangle of leaves and branches as the truck came around the bend and accelerated into the straightaway. There were two Controllers visible in the front cab, both wearing navy blue overalls and looking bored. The box in the back was maybe fifteen feet long, with a bright painting of a cornucopia on the side.

It passed me, and I tensed, waiting for the right moment. I didn't want them to spot me chasing after them in the rearview mirror. Above me, the small gray dot that was Jake angled past, shedding altitude as it accelerated toward the critical point.

There was a crack—a rumble—a splash—the sound of a horn, sustained but muffled—

‹Now.›

I burst from the undergrowth, the thorns pulling a few of my feathers loose from my thick, scaly skin. Ahead of me, Jake dove below the road and out of sight, disappearing into the cloud of dust rising from the gaping, fifty-foot hole.

‹Jake here. It's not sinking. Over.›

‹What?› I demanded, my legs pumping as fast as they could, claws clicking against the asphalt as I held my long tail rigid behind me for balance.

‹Front's underwater. It's headfirst. Back's upright, sticking out maybe five feet. Garrett?›

‹Garrett. I'm on it. Over.›

I reached the edge of the ragged breakpoint just as Garrett's tentacles broke the surface, latching on to the crumpled box and tugging it sideways. ‹If they managed to send a signal—›

‹We know, Marco,› said Jake, flapping for altitude as he rose in a tight spiral.

‹It is unlikely that anyone inside is conscious,› came a voice that I assumed was Ax. ‹The acceleration to zero was extremely violent.›

Across the gap, Rachel approached, her blue fur blurring and melting together into the tight, dark Spandex of her gymnastics outfit. ‹Rachel here,› she said. ‹What morph? Combat? Evasion? Over.›

‹Give me a minute. Jake, over.›

‹AHHHHHHHH!›

‹Who was that? What happened?›

‹They're shooting!›

‹What?›

‹Inside the truck. Dracon beams. I—it's me, Garrett. They shot off one of my tentacles—›

‹Get clear!›

‹Roger.›

I peered over the edge, at the churning, turbulent water. The truck was completely submerged now, lying sideways with the nearer side about eight feet down. I thought I saw a dark stain that might have been blood, and a stream of bubbles rising from the hole the Controller inside had just made—

TSEWWWWWW!

I reared backward and fell as the laser beam sliced shockingly close to my face, my tail bending painfully underneath me. ‹Watch it!› I shouted. ‹They're cutting their way out!›

There was a popping sound, followed by a gurgling sort of whumpf, and I rolled over onto my stomach, crawling awkwardly back to the lip. Turning my long snout sideways, I peered over.

There were two humans in combat gear, floating in the water. One appeared to be unconscious, held up by the other, who was using his one free arm to swim and shoot at the same time and doing a bad job of both.

‹We're going to have company,› somebody said.

Pushing myself to my feet, I crouched on the edge, my eyes tracking the wild flailing of the Yeerk weapon. The man was panicked, gasping, his attention on the water around and under him.

‹Garrett,› I whispered. ‹It's Marco. Make a splash in three seconds. Over.›

Three—

Two—

One—

I stepped out into open space just as a tentacle broke the surface, thirty feet away. Whirling, the man fired, the beam sending up a curtain of steam as I extended my legs, claws first—

I hit hard, one foot on his shoulder, the other on the top of his skull. I felt bone give way in both places, felt the impact shiver up my legs as he plunged into the water, the waves closing in around me.

‹He's down. Marco took care of it.›

A tentacle wrapped itself around my chest, gentle but terrifyingly strong. It lifted me up to the surface, unwound itself, rested beneath my abdomen as I caught my breath, my feathers heavy and waterlogged.

‹Thanks.›

‹Rachel, Ax—into the water. Rachel in the back, Ax in the cab. Grab what you can and get under the bridge. Morph fish and take the stuff with you. Garrett and Marco and I will meet you at the rendezvous.›

‹I can—›

‹Shut up. Demorph.›

‹What's going—›

‹I don't know. I'm out of the sky. Demorphing already. Garrett, let Marco go, grab what you can from the truck, and move.›

The tentacle beneath me vanished, and I floundered, spreading my arms and tail and kicking as I fought to stay afloat. I heard splashes around me as Rachel and Ax entered the water, as Garrett dove back below the surface. I concentrated on my human form, wishing for once that I could choose to demorph naked. But the clothes I'd sent along with my body came back, shoes and all, and I struggled to stay afloat as I tried vainly to remove various waterlogged items that were still physically connected to my skin.

Finally, the morph was complete. Kicking off my shoes and pants, I swam back under the uncollapsed portion of the bridge, where Jake was waiting. "Bug fighters?" I asked.

"Don't know," Jake said tersely. "Don't think so, but it's time to get out of here." He nodded toward the truck. "No cylinders. Not one, on any of the four of them."

Shit. "What else did we get?"

"Later."

Taking several deep breaths, he dove beneath the surface and headed for the truck. I treaded water for a moment, out of sight beneath the bridge, straining my ears for the sound of—

Retard. Move.

I swam two strokes and then stopped, my brain finally processing what I was seeing.

The water around me was mostly still, the gush of air from the truck having finally petered out. The blood—from Garrett, from the Controller I'd killed—had mostly thinned out. There were two bodies floating nearby, both wearing black combat gear. One of them was face down, the gaping wounds in his head and shoulders mercifully hidden by the gentle waves.

The other was on his back, and his chest was moving.

Shit.

He had been unconscious the whole time. He hadn't seen anything.

Shit shit shit.

I swam over to him. He was beefy, maybe in his mid-thirties, with a five o'clock shadow and a lump the size of a tennis ball on his forehead. His breathing was slow and steady, his torso buoyed by his Kevlar vest.

I could roll him over, and let the water take care of it. I could leave him, and join Jake in the truck, collecting more of whatever was down there.

Or—

You did come here looking for a Yeerk to acquire.

Or I could take him with me.

No time. Decide.

Letting out a strangled yell of frustration, I grabbed him by the arm and began tugging him back under the bridge and out of sight.

He weighs two hundred pounds, maybe two hundred thirty with all the gear. Ax weighs two twenty two and has a morph time of eighty minutes. I weigh one hundred and have a morph time of one thirty-six minutes. Rise over run, that's—that's—

—should have figured this equation out ahead of time—

—shut up, that's—one hundred twenty two pounds and—and fifty-six minutes' difference—so two pounds cuts off one minute, so two hundred thirty pounds cuts off a hundred and fifteen minutes, making my time limit—

Twenty-one minutes. Maybe. Assuming the relationship was linear, which it almost certainly wasn't, because why would it be? We'd drawn out the points, I remembered drawing out the points, but I couldn't remember which way the thing curved, so I'd either have more than twenty-one minutes, or I'd have less—

Go.

Turning, I pulled the Controller into an embrace and focused. Osprey—it was small, it was fast, and it was able to take off out of water. I could fly for ten minutes and be five miles away.

And then—

Later. Move.

‹I can't go back to the valley just yet.›

‹What? Why not?›

‹Because one of the things I'm carrying is probably a Yeerk tracking device.›

‹Marco, what the—›

‹I'll explain later.›

Tick-tock, tick-tock.

I demorphed as quickly as I could, half expecting the Controller to come out dead or disintegrated or something. But he was fine. As quickly as I could, I stripped him down to his underwear, throwing everything except his Dracon beam into a pile under a bush. Grabbing the beam in one hand and the Controller's hand in the other, I focused again, this time on the snipe.

If the tracker isn't in his stuff—if it's under his skin—

Later. I would deal with it later.

It was almost sunset by the time I made it back to the valley. I'd morphed and demorphed four more times, unwilling to take chances with the time limit. After the second change, I'd paused for an hour to rest, leaving the Controller spread-eagled at the top of a sheer stone spire and waiting a few hundred yards away to see if the Yeerks would come looking for him.

They didn't.

Don't get cocky. Just because the trackers aren't embedded in their skin YET doesn't mean they won't be next week.

And on top of that—

Just because they haven't showed up HERE doesn't mean they're not tracking you. They could be waiting to see where you end up before barging in. In fact, they could be mapping all of this, to check out later.

So I'd spent the third and fourth morphs going in a completely different direction, looking for a convenient place to tie him up. Eventually, I found an old shack, at least five miles from the nearest road, with a half-collapsed roof and a hundred feet of sketchy, moldy rope. I burned another half hour in gorilla morph, piling logs all around the shack and covering the hole with a mess of brambles.

Then I headed back to the others.

"His name is Aaron Tidwell," I said. It was just me, Jake, Cassie, and Rachel; Garrett and Ax were off somewhere with some of the tech they'd recovered from the truck. "He's ex-military, Iraq war two. He got out in 2011 and signed up for a private security company called Bastion, Inc. He's been a Controller for three weeks now—since just a couple days before Elfangor landed. He's got no kids, no girlfriend. He usually covers armored car deliveries, but when the Yeerks noticed Bastion they took it over and folded all the guys in with the rest of the police and the local National Guard group. He's been running this route for over a week."

"Does he know what goes on at the other end?" Rachel asked.

I shook my head. "He stays with the truck. They fill up with food, they drop off all over town. They fill up again, they drop off at the Yeerk pool, and sometimes they load up with stuff and bring it back to the warehouse."

I looked over at the rest of our loot, an assortment of metal objects lying in neat rows on the grass of the meadow. "He doesn't really know what any of that is," I continued. "Does Ax?"

"Not important," Jake said, making a small chopping motion with his hand. "Not right now. Priority one is what we do with this guy."

I chewed at my lip. Jake had said that none of the four Controllers had cylinders on them. Garrett had been in squid morph, Ax had checked the cab, and Rachel had gone straight into the rear compartment of the truck. That meant it had been Jake who checked the two floating bodies, and Jake who'd decided not to mention that one of them was still alive.

"He hadn't woken up, as of about forty-five minutes ago," I said. "I don't know what that means as far as brain injuries are concerned, but it's not good."

Jake shifted minutely, his gaze shifting to Cassie. "Erek?" he asked.

She nodded and left the circle.

Turning back to me, Jake crossed his arms. "Risky," he said simply. "Explain."

I shrugged. "No time to think," I said. "This kept options open."

"You acquired him?"

"Yeah. Like I said, he still hadn't woken up."

"What's he know?"

"Not much. Passwords for getting into the Yeerk pool, but they'll change those. A look at the inside of the pool from two days ago. A few Controllers who outrank him; couple people there we might look into. He's a guy who follows orders. His Yeerk is pretty much the same."

"You got something on the Yeerk?"

"Not really. Just what Tidwell remembers. The Yeerk's name is Illim. Seems—alien. Didn't talk much, didn't really interact with Tidwell at all. Ignored him, mostly." I glanced at Rachel. "Not at all like Esplin."

Jake's expression went sour, and he stood up and began to pace. Beside me, Rachel was silent, her eyes occasionally drifting toward the pile of stolen Yeerk tech as she slowly rubbed her hands together.

There were really only two options. Three, I guess, if you counted the possibility that Tidwell might just die of whatever head injury he'd suffered during the crash. We could hold him for a day and a half, starve the Yeerk out of his head, and acquire it.

Or we could kill him.

"You weren't tracked?" Jake asked abruptly. "He didn't have any kind of communicator on him?"

"Stripped him down to his underwear," I said. "Watched for an hour to see if the Yeerks would show up. I think he's clean."

There was a long moment in which Jake seemed to study me, looking me up and down and then locking eyes for what felt like forever. "All right," he said. "We wait for Erek to get back, and then we go."

"What are you—I mean, what are we going to do, once we get there?"

"That depends on the Yeerk."

There was noise inside the shack—motion.

"Erek," Jake whispered. "Go."

Nodding tightly, the boy spun and disappeared back into the forest. He had been trembling throughout the entire journey, his human body shaking and shivering like he was shirtless in a snowstorm. We still hadn't figured out exactly what the limits on his programming were—those very limits made it impossible for him to explain—but it couldn't have been easy to accompany the four of us to a shack where we'd tied up a prisoner we were maybe going to end up torturing. It was just as well that Mr. Tidwell had woken up; if he still needed medical attention, we could give it to him back at the camp.

"Marco," Jake said, his voice still low. "You're up."

‹Illim,› I called out in thought-speak, and the motion stopped.

Beside me, Rachel was seven and a half feet tall in her Hork-Bajir morph, a deadly-looking laser rifle in one hand and a shock-stick in the other. As luck would have it, nearly a quarter of the things we'd stolen had turned out to be weapons.

‹Illim, your host body is injured. You're defenseless, and you're a long way from home. We've got you surrounded. Will you talk?›

Silence from the shack. "Start moving the trees," Jake said.

I loped forward, my gorilla knuckles dragging across the ground. One at a time, I heaved on the logs that were blocking the door, tipping them over into the undergrowth beside the dilapidated cabin. I paused before removing the last log, and Rachel leveled the gun, lining up her sights.

Jake nodded.

With one swift motion, I tossed the final log out of the way, unbarring the door. ‹Come out,› I said. ‹Slowly.›

The door creaked open and the human body of Aaron Tidwell emerged into the moonlight.

"Stop," Jake said, his voice heavy with authority.

Tidwell stopped. He looked awful, the lump on his forehead forcing one of his eyes shut, stripes of dirt covering his body where I'd tied him up with the filthy, fraying rope. His fingernails were cracked and bleeding, and there were scratches on his arms that made me think he'd tried to climb out through the brambles on the roof.

"Andalite?" he asked, his voice hoarse.

"No. Human."

Jake stepped forward, Rachel drifting slowly to one side to keep a line of fire open. When he was ten feet away, he stopped, looking up at the heavyset veteran.

"My name is Jake," he said coldly. "My friends and I raided your truck today. The other three Controllers on board were killed."

Tidwell's eyes narrowed, and he turned his head slowly to look at me, then at Rachel, wincing slightly with the motion. "You are—human?"

"Yes." Jake held up his arm, revealing a fully-formed tiger's paw, which slowly began to melt back into a human hand. "Humans who morph."

"You know my name."

"Yes. And we know the name of your host—Aaron Tidwell."

"How?"

Jake shook his head. "No." He turned his hand over, and as the last of the fur disappeared, a small, silvery cylinder began to grow out of his palm.

Tidwell's eyes widened.

"I show you secrets," Jake said. "Do you understand what that means?"

Tidwell's shoulders slumped, his jaw going slack. "You're going to kill me now."

"Maybe." He held up the cylinder. "Or maybe not. You know what this is?"

Tidwell nodded.

"Will you give up your host? Willingly? It's been two days since you last went to the Yeerk pool. You've got to be feeling hungry, in there. If you come out, we will keep you alive—keep you safe."

Tidwell's eyes narrowed. Jake shrugged, an elaborately casual motion. "It makes no difference to us, Illim" he drawled. "Either way, Aaron Tidwell walks out of this forest a free man. You can either give him up now, or you can trade your life for an extra day, and we'll burn your shriveled husk out of his head after you die. I don't know what Kandrona starvation is like, but if it's anything like the human kind, it'll be punishment enough."

He held up his other hand, all five fingers extended. "Offer made," he said. "Five seconds."

He put down a finger. "Now four."

He put down another.

Then another.

"All right," said Tidwell. Illim. "Give me the cylinder."

Jake tossed it lightly, underhanded. Ax had checked it out before we left, confirming that there were no alarms or weapons or communicators hidden in its circuits. Tidwell reached to catch it—missed—almost lost his balance as the cylinder fell to the forest floor. Wincing again, he bent to pick it up, pressed a few buttons, held the device up to his ear.

At the last second, he hesitated. "You will—you will stun my host?" he asked. "So that he does not kill me as I relinquish control?"

Jake shook his head. "Nope," he said bluntly. "You can beg him for forgiveness—ask him to let you live. If he says no—well." He shrugged again. "If he says no, you can stay in there until you rot."

Even inside the gorilla, I felt an urge to let my jaw drop. This was a side of Jake I'd never seen before—cold and cruel and completely uncaring. It was different from the way he wrangled Rachel and Tobias—different even from the way he spoke to Ax, constantly reinforcing his dominance over the alien cadet. He sounded like a killer, like a sociopath, like—

—like somebody whose father is being held captive in a concentration camp inside his own head.

Tidwell stood frozen for a long moment, his expression irresolute. We waited—me resting on my knuckles, Jake standing with his hands clasped behind his back, Rachel with the rifle held perfectly steady.

Finally, he moved. Without another word, he pressed the cylinder against his ear, the pained expression on his face doubling as he slowly sank to his knees. There was a soft squelching sound, like someone stepping on a sponge, and a red light appeared on the end of the stasis device.

After a few seconds, the light turned white, and Tidwell seemed to sag, the cylinder falling away from his hands as he dropped forward onto all fours. For a pair of heartbeats, none of us moved, and then he began to cry—harsh, barking sobs that tore their way out of his throat, shaking his whole body.

"What are you going to do with the Yeerk?" I asked.

"Illim," Jake said softly turning the cylinder over in his hands. "Its name is Illim."

We'd pulled it out of stasis long enough to acquire it, then put it back into the little metal tube while we tried the morph again. Tidwell hadn't stuck around to watch—after we brought him back to the valley, he disappeared into one of the huts with Erek and Cassie and hadn't come out since.

The morph had gone exactly as it had the previous time, with both Jake and Rachel turning into swollen, veiny, gelatinous masses before giving up and reverting back to their own bodies. We were no closer to solving the mystery, which meant we were no closer to getting inside the pool—at least, not with Plan A.

In front of me, Jake's eyes glittered in the firelight, his expression closed and thoughtful. We were the last two awake, the moon sinking down toward the horizon as the air grew cold and wet.

"I guess we'll keep it," he said. "We did promise to keep it alive. And it may end up being useful for something, eventually."

"And Tidwell?"

He shrugged. "Not sure. We don't have the cube, so we can't exactly recruit him, full stop. And the Yeerks will have their eyes out for him. Might be that the best we can do for him is send him away."

"He's a grownup," I pointed out. "And a vet. He might be able to help get us in with somebody in the military."

"Nothing we can't do ourselves," Jake countered. "Especially since you've already acquired him."

"Well," I said, trailing off.

I still hadn't told anybody about what had happened with the other Marco—not even Rachel, who'd been the one to help me acquire him. Me. Myself. I had dipped into Tidwell's mind, but I'd kept an iron grip on his consciousness, holding him in a sort of dream state while I dug through his memory. Even that had been nauseating, and I wasn't looking forward to repeating the experience.

Not like you have a choice. There is a war on, you know—every scrap of intel helps.

"Anyway," Jake continued, snapping me out of my reverie. "Whatever we decide, tomorrow's going to be busy. Ax finished inventorying the stuff we got, and there's a lot—enough to make a dent in the police station and the hospital, if not the pool."

I frowned, looking over across the fire at my friend, trying to make out his expression in the shifting, flickering light. His voice sounded off—flat, empty, like he still hadn't fully recovered from his performance at the shack.

"Jake," I said cautiously. He didn't look up. "Jake, are you all right?"

There was a long pause. "No," he said, his voice barely more than a whisper.

"What—"

"In the water. Tidwell. I checked him for cylinders. I knew he was alive."

I blinked. "Yeah," I said slowly. "I figured."

"I knew he was alive, and I knew I should do something about it, and I couldn't think of what to do, so I just—ignored it. Just ignored him and kept going."

"So?"

"So maybe Cassie's right. About this whole thing. About where our heads are going to end up. Because I—he—he was going to drown, Marco. Right? I mean, sure, he managed to float for a little while, but if we'd just left—with the waves, and with all that gear—"

He broke off, and turned to squint at me. "But you didn't just leave him. Even after you killed the other one. You knew what to do. And now he's alive—he's alive, and he's free, and he would've been dead if it were up to me, because I couldn't take ten extra seconds to brainstorm."

My mouth worked soundlessly as I struggled to find words. "You—I mean—we—it was tense." I gritted my teeth, hoping I sounded more convincing than I felt. "We were under pressure, you were trying to get everybody out. It was a lot to juggle. And with Cassie and Tobias gone—"

"Maybe we shouldn't be in charge of this war, Marco. Maybe I shouldn't. I mean, I know Tobias is working on it, but maybe—maybe it's time to do more than that. Maybe you're right—maybe this Tidwell—"

"No," I cut in. "I mean, yeah, definitely, for sure, but not—not because—"

I trailed off, trying to put my thoughts into coherent sentences. "Look. The way you handled Ax? The way you handled Garrett? The way you talked the Yeerk out of Tidwell's head? Sure—we're way past due to get some grownups involved. But this group? Us? We're only working because of you, man. Whatever magic it is that you do—I can't do it. Rachel can't. Earlier today, when Cassie bailed on the mission—that would have torn the whole group apart, if you hadn't been there to smooth it over."

Jake said nothing, only continued staring at the cylinder in his hands.

"I—look," I continued. "It's not about you getting every call exactly right, okay? It's not like I made the right choice, and you made the wrong one. We're a team, you know? A bunch of teenage superhero animal morphers. Animorphs, man—here to save the world. And just because you're calling the shots doesn't mean you have to do all the work. You be Captain America, and the rest of us, we've got your back."

"Maybe," he repeated, his tone heavy and dull. "Maybe. But the next time, it's not going to be so easy. And what if it's not some random Controller? What if it's Rachel's cousins? Or your dad? Or Tom?"

I flinched. "If it comes down to that," I said slowly, "I'd rather have you making the call than anybody else."

But even as I said it, I couldn't help but remember the very first night, when he'd morphed into Homer after agreeing it made sense to wait. Or the first time, at the pool, when he'd barged in headfirst without stopping to think or plan.

If you counted Tidwell—and I wasn't sure you should, but if you did—that was three bad decisions, all completely on his shoulders. Taken together with the way he handled the group, it wasn't terrible overall. But it wasn't great, either.

I stood, walking over to rest a hand on his shoulder. "Good night, buddy," I said. "Get some rest."

He said nothing, and I turned and walked away, heading for my tent.

Now what?

I wasn't sure. I didn't think he was going to crack, but he was definitely cracking, present tense. And if it got any worse, we were going to be in serious trouble. I needed a backup plan, and I needed it fast, before Jake talked himself into something really stupid.

Fortunately, I knew exactly who to ask for help.

‹YEERK! GET OUT OF MY HEAD!›

‹First of all, no. Second of all, not a Yeerk. And third of all, fuck you, Elfangor. Fuck your bullshit, fuck your secrets, fuck your mysterious little plan. I want to know everything, and I want to know it right now.›