See you all in the roaring twenties!

(As always, I also heart, star, and horseshoe comments left here and discussion over on r/rational, especially in-depth critique or reaction or theorizing about what comes next.)

3. There's exactly one review of this story on Goodreads that's longer than a sentence! It comes from user Mark and features many memorable sentences like "the author uses this as a vehicle to mine others' notstalgia for their own self-indulgence and misses what made the originals so appealing" and "themes of loss, dehumanization, and the morality of war aren't really carried over" and "the other changes are just fine, I guess, but don't really serve any purpose in my opinion...at best, they make the main characters somewhat one-dimensional" and lots of other interesting claims. If anybody wants to, uh, teach the controversy by adding their own review, that would be Neato Burrito.

2. reddit user u/paxona did a wonderful job helping me clean up the Portuguese in the recent Tobias chapter. Taking that as my cue, I put a lot of Finnish (both language and culture) in this chapter. I did my homework, and did my best, but I've never been to Finland, so if somebody wants to help me fix inaccuracies, I'm grateful for your help.

1. This chapter is quite long (a holiday bonus). As a result, I'm adding a week to my update schedule; I expect to post the next chapter three weeks from now, sometime between Jan 10 and Jan 12. My buffer has shrunk a little bit, due to a housing search taking up a lot of time, but I still don't anticipate a hiatus for at least a few more chapters, and it's possible that I'll just keep doing regular updates, but 3 weeks apart instead of 2 once I run out of already-written stuff.

Chapter Text

Chapter 38: Rachel

Forcing myself to focus, I began to demorph, straining with all my might to localize the change to just the tiniest patch of my body—the palm of my right hand. At first, nothing happened, and then came the familiar tingle, not just in my palm but across my whole right side—

—it’ll be enough, let it be enough—

—and then—

—like a chorus of angels—

‹Garrett. Hello? Did we make it? Over.›

‹Rachel, are we in? Over.›

‹Yes,› I thought wearily, feeling the tiniest tickle as the pair of bugs launched themselves away from my palm, where they had emerged from Z-space. ‹We’re in.›

* * *

Suddenly, I was awake.

Cold.

Dark.

Quiet.

Lying down—

Some instinct kept me still, kept my eyes closed, even as adrenaline hammered at my nerves. I felt my chest heaving and forced myself to slow down, taking a handful of deep, deliberate breaths.

They might be watching.

I didn’t know who they were, had no idea what was going on. But there was a restraint around my waist, and the dull throb of needles in my arm, and even just lying there my body felt weak, my limbs heavy and rubbery.

Drugged?

There had been a battle—

The Yeerk pool, Tidwell and Illim—

Garrett with the explosives, Ax to reverse the shield—

We’d lost contact with Ax, fought our way through to him, taken out the Hork-Bajir troops that had surrounded the control room. Ax had been wounded, had collapsed—we’d made a break for it—

That was all I could remember.

Okay, so we didn’t make it out.

Which meant I’d been picked up by—

Yeerks?

Cops?

Spooks?

It all depended on what had happened after—on who had ultimately taken control of the site. I knew that the pool itself had been destroyed—were there enough Controllers out in the community to cover up the whole thing? What about Jake and Marco and Cassie—

Priorities.

I listened.

The sounds around me were soft, muted—the whir of air conditioning, the hum of electronics, muffled laughter from a television in another room. A pair of rhythmic beeps like heart monitors, one fast and one slow—

Hospital?

There was nothing else—no voices, no footsteps, no sounds of traffic outside.

I cracked one eye open the tiniest bit—just enough to confirm that yes, the room around me was dark.

I tried to shift my leg. It was hard, my muscles straining in protest, almost pulling—but there wasn’t anything stopping me.

I lay still again, counting to three hundred, to see if anyone would show up in response.

All right. So either they’re not watching closely, or they’re messing with me.

Either way, it was time to make a move.

I ran through the available morphs in my head. I could try Tidwell, or the woman I’d acquired a few weeks back, if this was the sort of facility where a random human could bluff their way out. I had both Andalite and Hork-Bajir bodies, as well as a bear and an elephant and a tiger. I had a housefly, and several fast birds—

Housefly.

I focused, and felt—

Felt—

Rising panic. I gave it ten more seconds to be sure—ten seconds in which my heart began to pound again, my breath creeping back toward hyperventilation.

Nothing was happening

Nothing was happening.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Try another morph.

I focused on Tidwell, whose body I’d occupied just an hour or two before, give or take however long I’d been unconscious. It was easy to picture his face in my mind, the way his muscles had felt from the inside—

Nothing.

Okay, don’t freak out, don’t freak out, freaking out will NOT HELP—

It didn’t work. The harder I fought back against the looming fear, the heavier it became, until it seemed like I was using every last scrap of self-control I had just to keep myself motionless in the bed.

They have me. They have me and I can’t morph, I can’t fight, I can’t get away—

But then, just when it seemed like I might crack, like I might just start screaming and never stop, another voice cut in—one that wasn’t pushing back against the fear so much as pulling sideways out from under it.

So what? that other voice said.

So they caught you.

You always knew they would, eventually.

Remember the people in the cages?

The pressure eased slightly, like I’d emerged from the Mariana trench and was now just at the regular bottom of the ocean.

You already won, the voice whispered. The pool is destroyed. It worked. It worked, and you were ready to die for it, if you had to. But here you are, alive. You made it. Everything that happens now is extra credit.

Seconds passed. My breathing slowed once more, my heartrate dropping from a death metal pace back down to mere EDM.

Okay.

Okay.

I felt silly, and a little ashamed—to have ramped up so quickly, come so close to total panic. But whatever—it was over. Time to focus on the present.

Something is wrong with your morphing.

Maybe it had to do with whatever they’d drugged me with?

I felt a spark of hope. If so, it might be temporary—might wear off, with time.

But I decided to give it one last shot, anyway, just to be sure. Taking in a deep breath, I focused once more—

This body will be one of your primary weapons, Elfangor had said. Use it to hide your identity from the Yeerks. It is strong and fast, more than a match for Taxxons and able to defeat all but the most skilled Hork-Bajir.

The Yeerks had my family. They knew exactly who I was. Elfangor’s body wouldn’t help with that.

But strong and fast, I could definitely use.

I strained, concentrating harder than I ever had in my life—

Nothing.

For a moment, the desperate panic threatened to loom over me again. But the memory of the people in the cages closed around me like Iron Man armor.

If they think I can’t hurt them just because I can’t morph—

I opened my eyes.

It was indeed a hospital room, lit by the tiny red and green LEDs of electronics, and the dim blue glow of street lights leaking in past the curtains. There was one other bed opposite mine, with a small, dark-haired figure lying in it.

Garrett?

I couldn’t see clearly, but it was about the right size and shape—was definitely a child, rather than a teenager or a grownup. The heartrate monitor beside it was beeping slowly, well under once per second.

Coma?

I felt my own body go cold.

If that was Garrett—if he was in a coma—

Maybe we’d been injured, during the escape? We could have been unconscious for days, weeks—

I lifted my arm, intending to check my head and torso for scars, bandages—

I paused.

There were wires trailing from my arm—not the IV, not the heartrate monitor clipped to my finger, but thin, light wires ending in little adhesive patches. There was one attached to the middle of my forearm, and one to the lump of muscle just below my elbow—two others on my bicep and my tricep—

I felt around under the blanket. There were more of them attached to my abdomen, my sides, my thighs—thirty or forty in all, all over my body.

I grabbed one of them, began to slide my fingers along it, tracing it back to a bulky, rectangular machine standing sentry beside my bed—

Lihasstimulaatori?

I couldn’t make out any of the other words, in the darkness. The machine was clearly switched off, its screens unlit. The bundle of wires fed into it on one side, and a thick power cable emerged from the other, leading down to a set of outlets along the floor—

I frowned. It was hard to be sure, but the outlets looked different—weren’t the usual two-lines-and-a-half-moon-face that I was used to. Each spot was its own circular depression, with two tiny round holes spaced about an inch apart, and there was a large, old-fashioned switch at the end—

I wasn’t in America.

Correction, said Marco’s voice in my head. Your best guess is that you’re not in America.

I looked up at the TV hanging in the corner.

Later. Priorities.

First things first—I needed to get mobile. The wires running to the powered-off machine could probably be removed without alerting anyone, but the IV and the heart monitor were live and beeping.

That’s got to be set up to send an alert to the nurse, or something, right? I mean, if a coma patient’s heartrate drops to zero…

Maybe if the whole machine were off?

I looked around the room again.

No choice.

I had to move, and I couldn’t do that if I was stuck within three feet of the bed. Killing the heart monitor would either be a problem, or it wouldn’t, and waiting wasn’t going to make it any less of a problem.

I peeled off the other wires first, groaning with the effort as I sat up and undid the restraint around my waist, making sure to keep my movements slow and steady so that my own heartbeat didn’t jump up too quickly. My arms felt like they were made of lead, and my abs burned just from the effort of keeping my torso upright.

Once they were all off, I rolled over and planted my feet on the cold linoleum floor. Kneeling, I followed the power cables from the back of the beeping machines to another set of outlets—

Here goes nothing.

I pulled the plugs, and both the IV and the heartrate monitor went dark.

Moving as quickly as my heavy limbs would allow, I unclipped the monitor from my finger and tugged the IV out of my arm. Straightening, I grabbed an empty food tray from a rolling table between the two beds and shuffled over to lean against the wall beside the door.

Fourteen hippopotamus, fifteen hippopotamus, sixteen hippopotamus…

It was all I could do to keep the plastic rectangle held high above my head, ready to strike. If anything more violent than Cassie came in through the door, I was toast.

Twenty-six hippopotamus, twenty-seven hippopotamus, twenty-eight hippopotamus…

I made it to a hundred and three before I absolutely could not keep my arms up any longer. Trembling—almost shuddering—I lowered the tray.

One-oh-nine hippopotamus, one-ten hippopotamus…

At one-eighty, I finally let myself relax, my muscles spasming as I half-slid, half-collapsed down onto the floor. The door had no visible lock, but with a little bit of effort, I managed to wedge the tray into the tiny crack by the floor. It wouldn’t stop anybody who really wanted to get in, but it might buy me a few seconds in a pinch.

All right. You’re awake, you’re mobile, there’s no one coming. Now what?

The kid.

Hauling myself to my feet, I staggered over to the other bed.

It was Garrett.

It looks like Garrett, whispered Marco. Remember, Garrett doesn’t have earplugs.

“Hey,” I murmured. “Garrett. Can you hear me?”

There was no response. Under the sheet, his chest continued to rise and fall with disturbing slowness.

I tapped his cheek, gently.

Nothing.

“Sorry in advance,” I whispered, and I drew back my hand.

Smack.

The boy didn’t move.

All right. Think.

If they left me and Garrett in the same room—

Possibility One was that they were just friendly. No need to keep the two of us apart, since we were all on the same team to begin with.

Possibility Two…

Was there any reason for the Yeerks to play mind games with me?

Leaning on the bed, I tried to force my mind into motion. In the hypothetical world where Garrett was already a Controller—

Unless it’s not the Yeerks. Could be the government.

My inner Marco scoffed at the idea that the government would go to this much trouble and not post a guard inside the room.

Actually, now that I thought about it, that probably applied to the Yeerks, too.

Only good guys are this sloppy.

But if that was the case, there should at least be a note or something—

Oh.

Working my way around the bed, I picked up the folded sheet of paper on the table next to Garrett’s head and held it up in the dim light leaking through the blinds.

Garrett,

Sorry I couldn’t be there when you woke up. There’s a lot going on, and there’s something I’ve got to do down where it’s pretty.

Koskinen will fill you in if Rachel isn’t awake yet. Think of him like Miss Harper.

If I’m not back by 10/10, go to Nordea on Hämeenkatu. There’s a safety deposit box there under your name. The password owes me a dollar.

Two, one, zero, and so forth. —yBB

I put the paper down, my thoughts swirling.

The letter was from Tobias, clearly—either that, or it was faked to seem like it had come from Tobias. And there was no mention of Jake, Cassie, Marco, or Ax…

Also, October tenth? Either he was expecting us to wait around for a long time, or I really had been unconscious for months.

I hobbled over to the window and peered out.

Autumn.

It was autumn.

I ran my hands over my own body again, looking for any sign of a serious injury—stitches, scarring, metal plates.

Nothing.

Then how can it be autumn?

The realization hit me all at once—actually hit me, so hard I found myself sinking to the floor, my muscles screaming in protest.

Jake.

Like when Jake had gone down into the tunnel, and died, and come alive again inside of his morph armor—

Something must have happened. Something must have gone wrong, and I’d been injured, and had to reset—Garrett, too—

But the Chee woke Jake up. Why wouldn’t they—

In my head, Marco rolled his eyes, his expression a mixture of exasperation and pity.

The Chee aren’t on our side anymore.

I took in a handful of deep, slow breaths. That—

That was just a guess, and not even necessarily a very likely one.

But at the very least, something had kept Tobias from bringing in the Chee to help us. Had caused him to leave me—to leave Garrett—alone in a hospital in—

—somewhere—

—without anyone there in case we eventually woke up. While he went off to do something important, something that couldn’t wait.

And the letter hadn’t said anything about Jake, or Cassie, or Marco, or Ax.

The fear was back—not a looming, overwhelming panic this time, but a tight, cold tension, like electricity. I needed to get out of this room—not for my own sake, but because things were happening and as long as I was in this room there wasn’t anything that I could do about them—

* * *

“Tunnetko olosi mukavaksi?”

I lifted my head from where it had been pressed up against the car window and looked over at the eyes in the rear-view mirror. They weren’t looking back at me—had already returned to focus on the road if they’d ever even pointed at me in the first place.

“Olen kunnossa,” I answered, letting the mind of the body I was wearing handle the translation.

Are you comfortable?

I’m fine.

They were the first words we had exchanged in nearly an hour of driving. It was just the two of us in the tiny car, him in the driver’s seat and me in the back. The sky was gray and cold, the road narrow as it curved gently back and forth through farms and fields and endless pine forests.

The whole thing was weirdly familiar, like I’d done it a hundred times before—like the long, quiet drive between my uncle’s and my grandmother’s every Thanksgiving.

But I was about nine thousand miles from Ventura, and the sense of normalcy was just an illusion.

Part of it might have been the morph I was in, the girl’s intuitions and expectations leaking through along with her understanding of the language. Her name was Aino Sakala, and she’d lived her entire life right here, except for a school trip to Estonia when she was nine.

But another part of it was that it was normal, in a sense—normal in a way that no longer fit me, since Elfangor showed up. Trees. Highways. Clouds. Minutes crawling by, with nowhere important to go and nothing important to do.

I twisted around in the seat, looking back at the empty road behind us.

“Ei paljon kauemmin,” came the driver’s voice behind me. “Alle tunti.”

I turned my head to look, but he was once again—or still—staring straight forward, his eyes focused on the road ahead.

Not much longer. Another hour.

I hadn’t managed to make it out of the hospital. Hadn’t even made it off of the floor, between my atrophied muscles and my inability to morph. The nurses had caught me almost immediately, and politely held me, until “lääkäri Koskinen” could be roused and brought in.

Hello, Rachel, the man had said, his English clear and crisp behind a faint accent. My name is Rand Koskinen. I am a doctor here at Hatanpää City Hospital. May we speak in private?

And then, once he’d closed the door behind us, he’d transformed into an elk.

I turned to face forward again, resettling in my seat, watching his eyes in the rear-view mirror. Five minutes might have passed before his gaze flickered, meeting mine for the briefest of moments before returning to the road.

I understand that you’re dealing with some disorientation, he had said. If you’d like, I would be happy to explain the situation.

And he had. Ventura. Washington. Marco’s broadcast. The bombing of the peace conference, and the subsequent nuclear disarmament. The destruction of the voluntary pool in Brazil, followed by the mass withdrawal of Yeerk personnel.

The eerie, uneasy silence that had followed.

When the Yeerks pulled out, we expected them to curtail the manufacturing efforts that they had been supervising, but they did not. This made many suspicious.

And there had been no communication since, nor any response to Earth messages. In eight days’ time, an international delegation was set to launch from Geneva, aboard one of the original Bug fighters, for a rendezvous around Europa two days later—a trip that would have taken an ordinary human spaceship three or four years.

And, as I’d halfway guessed—

Your friends tell me there was an encounter with Yeerk forces, in the summer. Apparently several of you were killed, and the survivors used the morphing technology to regenerate the fallen.

Koskinen knew about the morphing technology because Jake and Tobias and Marco had given it to him—him, and four other members of his staff—in exchange for off-the-books medical care for me and Garrett. And according to Koskinen, he wasn’t alone, either—there were apparently upwards of a thousand other morphers, the result of a months-long recruitment effort that I had apparently lived through, maybe even been a part of—

Ah, yes, this reminds me. I am to tell you that they have given the morphing power back to you and Garrett as well. But you will need to begin building your morph library anew. If I may suggest, there is another patient here who bears a strong physical resemblance to you, and whose knowledge of our language and culture you may find useful.

Why? I had asked.

Obviously you are free to go as you please, the doctor had answered. But I am charged with the care of your friend Garrett for as long as he remains unconscious. And this hospital is where your friends will return, if they return at all. I have no special resources, but I have friends and family that I trust, in my home city. It’s not far from here. You may stay with them in the meantime, if you wish.

I had looked down at Garrett, placed my hand on his cheek, watched his chest rise and fall with agonizing slowness.

As much as I’d wanted to say no—

As much as I’d wanted to say screw you and stride off into the sunset—

I was afraid.

Not the overriding panic I’d felt upon waking up, or the frantic urgency that had filled me as I’d made my break for the hospital door. This was a different kind of fear, thick and queasy and somehow slow, like quicksand.

I don’t think that I can handle this.

Not on my own. Not by myself. Not with absolutely nothing and no one.

It was the same fear I’d felt the first time I spent the night away from home, during a week-long stint at summer camp. The same fear I’d felt getting on the bus to visit my father, that first time after my mom kicked him out. Or the time when I was four years old, when I’d wandered outside and, when my mom came looking for me, had somehow managed to circle the house at the exact same speed, turning around at the exact same times, so that no matter how many times I looked for her she wasn’t there, no matter how hard I screamed she was gone, she was never coming back—

It was like that, except this time it was true.

They were dead.

All of them were dead.

My mother, my sisters, my father. My teammates and coaches and teachers—almost everyone I’d ever known, except for Jake and Marco and Tobias.

Even Cassie.

They were dead, and I was alone. Orphaned. Abandoned. Homeless.

And when I thought about walking—

About taking the last, the very last, the absolute last connection that I had left on Earth, and breaking it—

A part of me didn’t even care about the possibility that Koskinen was a Controller, or some kind of government agent, or even just a run-of-the-mill scumbag.

If I lost touch with Garrett—if I missed the chance to reconnect with Jake, with Marco—

I didn’t know if I could make it on my own.

I knew, on some level, that I was being ridiculous. Knew that plenty of fourteen-year-olds end up on the street and survive just fine. Knew that, homeless or not, as long as I had the morphing power, I was one of the most dangerous and capable people on the planet.

But still. I didn’t want that. Didn’t want the—the hardness that I sometimes saw in Tobias, when Garrett wasn’t around—that look, like a bird of prey trapped inside a building. Didn’t want the ocean floor to drop out from under me, leaving me adrift.

And so I’d followed Dr. Koskinen into another room and laid my hands on a strange girl’s arm, acquiring her. Then I’d dressed myself in clothes from the lost and found and followed him down to his car.

It was crazy. It was risky. It was putting myself entirely in the hands of a total stranger.

But the alternative was to face the world—the war—all of it—entirely, utterly alone.

It’s just for a few days, I told myself. Build up some strength, acquire a few morphs, get your bearings. It’s not like they can make you stay—not unless this is a way more serious operation than it looks, and in that case they already have you.

I knew that wasn’t an answer, at all—that it was my brain’s way of dodging the real questions, questions I wasn’t stable enough to handle.

But I was okay with that, for now.

We pulled off the road into a gas station. Without a word, Koskinen got out, set the pump running, and turned and walked into the small convenience store. He emerged a minute and a half later carrying two bottles of orange juice, two packaged sandwiches, and a small, steaming carton of scrambled eggs. Setting them on the passenger seat, he reholstered the pump, then got back into the car.

“Nälkäinen?” he asked. Hungry?

I nodded. “Kiitos,” I replied. A minute later, we were back on the road, Koskinen holding a sandwich in one hand as he drove with the other.

I looked down at the eggs in my lap. “Aion muuttaa,” I said—I’m going to demorph. No point in eating while I was wearing somebody else’s body.

Koskinen nodded, saying nothing. Putting the food down on the seat next to me, I closed my eyes and focused.

After my brief panic in the hospital room earlier, it was still something of a relief to feel the familiar tingle of the morphing process sweeping over me. Aino was almost exactly the same height, weight, and skin color, and I was morphing inside of my clothes, so there was very little visible change, but—

“—have some kind of distraction?” Garrett said, his voice tight with tension, both of his fists clenched around his shirt collar as he held it up over his nose and mouth.

“What would you call that?” I shot back, as Ax continued to rip his way through the bakery display, shoveling cinnamon buns into his mouth in front of the horrified crowd. “Besides, we’ll be out of here before any big guns show up—”

My arms swelled like marshmallows in a microwave, the skin turning black as the gorilla’s muscles bubbled up out of my thin frame. Thirty feet away, the first of the security guards attempted to tackle Ax to the ground, but the alien dodged like a drunken master, sending the man crashing through a nearby glass display case.

“Rachel—”

“I know, okay? Just give me—” ‹—a second.›

Two more black-uniformed guards came running, one of them dropping almost immediately as Ax whirled, smashing an open four-pack of buns right into his face.

God dammit, of all the things we don’t need to be dealing with right now—

“Rachel! Can you hear me? Perkele—RACHEL!”

I snapped back to my senses all at once, my whole body aching like I’d just tried to pick up an elephant. I was still in the back of Koskinen’s car, but I was down on the floor, wedged into the space between the back seat and the passenger seat. The car was stopped, the engine still running, Koskinen’s door hanging open as he sprinted around the front to my side—

“I—I’m—”

I’m okay, I tried to say, but some honest impulse blocked the words before they could leave my mouth. I had no idea whether I was okay—

Koskinen threw open the door beside me, leaned forward to lift me up onto the seat. “Lie back,” he barked. “Lie still.”

I obeyed, letting him rearrange my limbs, wincing at the twinge and tug of overloaded muscles. “What—what happened?” I managed to gasp.

“Seizure,” the doctor said. “I think. You were convulsing, unresponsive. Can you breathe? Airways clear?”

“I—I think so,” I said. I felt wetness on my lip, reached up a hand—

Blood.

“Lie still,” Koskinen repeated. He held my wrist for a moment, then pressed a hand to my forehead. “Did you feel disorientation before the seizure began? Confusion, spaciness, out-of-body?”

“Wh—no. No, I don’t think so. I was just—focused on demorphing—”

“Any tingling?” he asked. “Dizziness? Strange tastes or smells?”

“No.”

“Tell me your full name and the date.”

“Rachel Ellen Berenson. It’s—I think you said it was October first—”

Koskinen vanished from the doorway, and out of the corner of my eye I saw the trunk open. I could hear him muttering to himself—“Kolmekymmentä, neljäkymmentäviisi sekuntia. Lamotrigiini, topiramaatti, valproiinihappo—”

I pushed myself up to a sitting position, glanced at my reflection in the rear-view mirror. It was me—I was back in my own body, my hair a tangled halo, blood running down my chin from a nosebleed. Somehow, I had finished demorphing, even while I was—

What was that?

A dream? A memory? A vision?

It was still crystal clear in my mind, as clear as if I had actually just lived it, moments before. I remembered the look of pale horror on Garrett’s face—the ragged, unhinged quality of Ax’s human voice—the feel of my own anger as I drew the gorilla’s strength around me like a blanket—

“Drink this,” Koskinen said brusquely, coming back around to my door.

“What is—”

“Water. I don’t have anything else. The episode lasted for under a minute, so emergency treatment is not indicated—do you have a history of seizures?”

“No. I’ve never had one before.”

“Any chronic illnesses at all?”

“No.”

“Allergies?”

“No.”

“How do you feel now?”

I closed my eyes, running my attention over my body the way my coaches had taught me. “Fine, I think? My muscles ache.”

“Can you tell me, please, what is thirty-seven multiplied by upholstery?”

I blinked. “No,” I said slowly. “That doesn’t make sense. Was that a test?”

The doctor nodded, expressionless. He peered at me for a long moment, and then shrugged. “Onward,” he said, pushing the door closed and walking back around to the driver’s side.

But—but—

But what? What do you want him to do, take you back to the hospital?

I—maybe?

I collapsed back against the seat, my eyes half-following the pine trees as we pulled back into the road and began to pick up speed.

I guess it just feels like we’re supposed to DO something? Not just shrug and say “well, that was weird.”

Yeah, but—what?

I didn’t know.

What the hell had just happened?

* * *

“Kuule, arvostan tätä todella, etenkin näin lyhyellä varoitusajalla. Asumistilanteen selviämiseen pitäisi mennä korkeintaan viikko tai kaksi—”

“Rauhoitu, Rand, rauhoitu—olemme perhettä ja nämä ovat vaikeita aikoja. Jos emme voisi luottaa toisiimme...”

The woman—Sofia, if I’d heard her correctly—leaned in and gave Dr. Koskinen a quick hug, then turned to me, leaving a hand on his shoulder.

“Rachel,” she said, her voice warm, her accent thick and clipped and sort of robotic. “Welcome. Rand tells me you speak only English in your—normal body?”

I opened my mouth, slightly taken aback and not sure I had any right to be. I hadn’t remorphed after the seizure—

“Of course I told her,” Koskinen cut in. “She is my sister, and she is taking you into her home.”

The woman smiled. “Your secret is safe, soturikka. Would you like to be called Rachel, or something else? It is a Finnish name too.”

“Rachel is fine,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Please. Come inside. And Rand—äla vetää!”

I followed her across the threshold, only realizing that Koskinen wasn’t with us as the door clicked shut behind me.

Sofia was already striding forward through a wide, open, low-ceilinged lobby, lit by bright fluorescents and held up by squat, concrete columns. The place looked shabby, but clean—no grime or graffiti, just cracked, faded paint and a few missing floor tiles. There was a wall of mailboxes on one side, and a cork bulletin board on the other, filled with brightly colored flyers.

I jogged a few steps to try to catch up, stopping almost immediately as my muscles went on strike. “Pahoittelut,” Sofia said, when she reached the elevators on the far side and turned to see me lagging behind. “Rand said you were struggling. I will go slower.”

We rode the elevators in silence to the fourth floor, stepping out into a long, narrow apartment hallway.

“Number four-zero-eight,” Sofia said. “I will give you the spare key. Please be careful with it. You will stay in Petri’s old room; she is away at Lund.”

Turning the key in the lock, she swept into the unit, kicking off her shoes. I followed and did the same.

The apartment was nice—compact and extremely clean, with cool light shining in through floor-to-ceiling windows on the far side. I cringed a little at myself for thinking it, but it really did look like one of those IKEA display apartments—the ones where they fit a ton of furniture into a small space without making things feel cramped. There was a living area with a sofa and a couple of chairs and a TV, a dining area with a table and four stools, and a kitchen blocked off from the rest by a long wooden counter.

“That door is Petri’s,” said Sofia, pointing. “The one next to it belongs to Ante. He left for school just before you arrived and will be home a little after fourteen. Your rooms share a bathroom, so lock the door. You are welcome to any of the food in the kitchen; we can go shopping tonight to pick up some things that you like, and get you some clothes. That door over there is mine, and that one is the sauna. For now, please stay within the apartment. I will have Ante show you around the lähiö later.”

“Wait,” I cut in. “You’re leaving?”

“Yes, I have work. Is there anything you need before I go?”

I could feel my jaw hanging open. Everything was happening so quickly, for all that I’d spent two hours in the car and was apparently about to spend another four or five alone in the apartment. It felt like Sofia had said barely a hundred words, and now she was just going to leave me, unsupervised, inside her home—

“I just—um. Is this okay? I mean, you don’t—you don’t know me.”

Sofia tilted her head to one side.

“You are from Ventura, yes?” she asked.

I nodded.

“And Rand tells me, for you it is like yesterday.”

I nodded again, my throat suddenly tight.

“We all saw what happened in Ventura,” she said quietly. “The whole world, you understand? And then after—in Washington, and Japan, and Brazil—”

She broke off. “This is hätä, child. A time of distress. You are young, you are alone, you are American. My brother tells me you are a soldier, that we cannot go to the police, or to the ministry. Of course I have questions. Concerns. But—”

She fixed me with a close, intent look. “Are you going to run away?”

I shook my head.

“Are you going to steal from me?”

“No, but—”

“Are you a danger to my son?”

I closed my mouth, shook my head again.

Sofia shrugged. “Then it is simple,” she said. “Trust, over fear. Later, I will ask you many, many questions, but for now—”

She smiled softly. "Sisu," she said. "For now, it is good for you to be alone. No eyes, no expectations. Take some time, catch your breath. Eat. Sleep. Cry. Be naked. For now, nothing is your responsibility, okay?”

And just like that, she was gone. I heard the sliding of the lock as she turned the key, and then there was silence.

My mother would never.

I clamped down on the thought, and the pain that came with it, even as my brain offered up Cassie’s parents would have, though, along with another wave of grief.

For now, nothing is your responsibility.

I took a deep, deep breath.

Held it. Let it out.

It wasn’t enough. I let myself sink down to the floor—first sitting, then lying flat out, the plush rug beneath me almost as soft as a mattress.

For now, nothing is your responsibility.

I squeezed my eyes shut.

That was what she had said. Sofia. A grownup. A mother, all the way out here in—

I couldn’t pronounce it.

But she’d meant it—I could tell. Had put the full force of her authority behind it. Had really wanted me to hear it, to believe it—was sure that she was right.

For now, nothing is your responsibility.

It was what my own mother would have said, too. My own mother, who had been dead for months, however much it felt like I had seen her just last week—

You mean, when you gave her up to the Yeerks?

The words dropped into my thoughts like a boulder, scattering everything else, leaving behind a horrible, echoing silence. I rolled over onto my belly, pressed my face into the rug, my breath hot and humid and close.

That’s not fair, I whispered to myself.

Cold, bitter laughter.

Louder, more confidently—that’s not FAIR.

Oh, really? Then explain to me how—

NO.

The word was loud and unyielding, triggering a second long silence. I felt my fists clench, felt the strain of muscles that hadn’t been used in weeks.

When my thoughts began to flow again, they were in Marco’s voice, instead of my own.

You do not get to beat yourself up for that. You had about zero point three seconds to pick between saving your family or keeping the box out of Visser Three’s hands—

I could have destroyed it, whispered a tiny, traitorous voice. Destroyed it, and gone to save them.

Yeah, well. If you’d done THAT, we’d ALL be dead now, and the war would be over.

It took almost everything I had in me to stop myself from thinking the word good.

I rolled over onto my back, opening my eyes, looking up at the stubbled ceiling.

What are you doing here, Rachel? I asked myself, as other voices carried on the argument in the background. What is this going to accomplish?

Nothing. There was nothing I could do. I couldn’t change it, I couldn’t fix it, I had no idea what to do next. I was alone, and weak, and I had no morphs and no information—

Then LET IT GO.

I took another deep breath.

Just let it go. Let it go for one damn day. You can pick it back up tomorrow.

I let gravity empty my lungs, my ribcage sagging without any help from my muscles.

Only—

I hesitated, almost too afraid to let myself think the thought.

Would I?

Would I, in fact, pick it back up again? If I let it go now?

We had been planning to rescue them—my mom, my sisters, Cassie’s parents, Jake’s family. Had planned the raid for a time when none of them would be at the pool. I’d told myself that it was coming, that I just had to hold it together a little longer and then everything would be back to normal, just hang in there, we’re coming for you—

What was there to fight for, now?

I knew the thought was wrong, knew that the rest of the world still mattered—that it still mattered to me—knew that I was being selfish, childish, self-centered.

It didn’t matter. It still felt true. Right then, it felt true.

How about this, then? argued the voice of Marco in my head. You’ve ALREADY let it go, and now you’re just pretending that you haven’t and beating yourself up for it, like you can make up for it if you feel bad enough. Which you can’t, so you’re not doing any good AND you’re also not getting any rest, which is dumbfuck stupid.

There was a kind of silence, even inside my own head.

I sat up.

What is it your kind’s always saying? ‘Don’t think about it’?

I looked down at my hands, trembling slightly with fatigue.

Okay.

Fine.

Fair enough.

For now, nothing was my responsibility.

Say it, whispered my inner Marco. Say it out loud.

“I’m not supposed to do anything about anything.”

The words didn’t echo. They weren’t dramatic. They were flat, quick, mundane. As soon as I stopped speaking, the silence came right back.

But something had shifted. I felt—emptier, somehow. Hollowed-out. Deflated. Like I could just be tired and that was it, there didn’t have to be anything else after that.

I pushed myself up to my feet. There was pain, in the background, but it didn’t really matter.

I looked over at the kitchen, tried to imagine eating, felt only a sort of gray indifference.

Slowly, shuffling, I walked over to the door to Petri’s room and pulled it open. It was clean and spare—just a couple of paintings on the wall, a few keepsakes on the bedside table, a stuffed animal sitting on the chair in the corner. There was a desk with a small bookshelf, and a bed that looked extremely inviting.

There were two more doors inside the room. One was clearly a closet. I tried the other.

It was locked.

Your rooms share a bathroom—

The brother—Ante—must have left the bathroom locked from his side.

Stepping back out into the apartment, I opened the door to Ante’s room and—

—

—

—

It took what felt like an eternity to even process what I was seeing, at which point my brain just completely gave up on the idea of producing a coherent response.

There were at least twelve different pictures of Marco scattered across the walls of the tiny room. A dozen different copies of Marco’s face, staring back at me from a dozen different posters, each accompanied by a caption like Welcome to the Resistance or There’s no going back or This is your moment or Change is coming. There were shots of Marco grinning, Marco staring intently straight into the camera, Marco with a dangerous, focused look on his face like a jaguar tracking its prey. In one image, his head had been photoshopped onto the body of some futuristic supersoldier from Starship Troopers or Edge of Tomorrow or something, surrounded by wreckage and carrying a gun that looked like it could kill a spaceship. In another, somebody had taken five or six snapshots out of a crossfade between Marco and a charging bull, and edited them together into a crude representation of morphing.

In between and around the Marcos were a hundred other pictures, posters, and flyers, in a wild mix of English and Finnish and a handful of other languages. There were newspaper clippings, screenshots of Google and Reddit, blueprints and diagrams and maps. Pictures of fighter jets, rows of uniformed soldiers, high-tech assembly lines. Cheesy images of laser beams blowing up UFOs, 1950’s-style propaganda cartoons of kids pouring salt on slugs. Down near the bottom was what looked like a satellite photo of the crater where Ventura used to be, with the hashtags #äläkoskaanunohda and #ihmiskuntayhdistyi.

What the—HOW the—

And then it clicked.

Koskinen had told me about the broadcast, after all—that it had gone viral, that “Animorphs” had become a household name. I just hadn’t realized—

This is everywhere.

If this was here, in the bedroom of a random teenager in a random suburb in Finland, of all places, then—

The war really had gone worldwide. It was one thing to hear Koskinen say it, in a handful of clipped, terse sentences. It was another thing to see Marco Levy being given the Batman treatment.

Still half-stunned, I stepped into the room, nudging aside some crumpled laundry. The place was messy and cluttered, the bed unmade. There were bits of wire and metal all over the desk, mixed in with tools and scraps of electronics and various half-finished gizmos. On the bedside table was a folding knife, a magnesium firestarter, and a small cardboard box with SAKO printed on the side, half-full of rifle ammunition.

I spotted a picture frame on the corner of the desk, behind a jumbled stack of papers and textbooks, and leaned in closer to see what must have been the whole family. There was a younger-looking Sofia, a man with weathered skin and a bright, crinkled smile, a girl about my age, and a young boy with dark hair and a serious face.

Ante.

A memory unfolded in my mind—from my first visit to the Yeerk pool, in the chaos after Jake and Marco had escaped—

“You can beat them!” the woman yelled. “If you try hard enough, you can take back control! Not for long, but if enough of us do it, there’s no way they can keep it a secret!”

It seemed very real, standing there in the middle of Ante’s bedroom, surrounded by resistance propaganda. Very real, and very close, as if there was some magical bridge between the two places, and the woman might step out at any moment, leaving Ante huddled in the back of a cage—

Steady.

I swayed, and gripped the desk with both hands. I felt dizzy, disoriented, strangely loose, like a knot on the verge of unraveling—

Did you feel disorientation before the seizure began? Confusion, spaciness, out-of-body?

No.

I sat down on the corner of the unmade bed.

It was crazy.

This was crazy.

I had been in the middle of a war zone—literally right in the middle of a firefight, that had been like five hours ago as far as my brain was concerned, and then I had woken up halfway around the globe and now I was here, and the war was here too, it had followed me, if I could drop out of it in a heartbeat like that then who was to say I couldn’t be dropped back in—

I could feel my breathing creeping up again, feel the clinical part of my mind running through a set of flash cards—asthma, panic attack, PTSD, seizure. I took a dozen deep, slow breaths, looked around the room for as many objects as I could name.

Marco, bookshelf, Marco, soldering iron, Marco, underwear, Marco, Marco, Marco—

I closed my eyes.

It’s just some dumb kid’s bedroom.

Only it wasn’t. It wasn’t just that.

There is nothing standing in their way except us—did you get that? Just the five of us. If we don’t make it, if we screw it up, then the human race will actually lose.

Marco had said that—the real Marco, not the copy in my head. All the way back at the very beginning, during our first meeting, before we’d even elected Jake as our leader. It was the first thing I’d ever remembered him saying—the first time I’d ever really noticed him as anything other than the smartass short kid that liked to hang out with my cousin.

He’d been yelling at me, when he said those things. Because I’d been reckless. Stupid. Because we couldn’t afford mistakes, back then, when the five of us were one hundred percent of Earth’s defensive forces.

I opened my eyes again.

All right, fine. What about now?

It wasn’t a meaningful question. Just some part of my brain, trying to pull it all back together, trying to make it all make sense.

What are you doing here, Rachel?

“Nothing,” I said, out loud.

And it was true.

For now, nothing is your responsibility.

I grabbed onto the thought like a life preserver, shutting out everything else. Standing, I stepped through the bathroom and unlocked the door on the far side, then backed out into the main apartment, closing Ante’s door firmly behind me.

For now, nothing is your responsibility.

I repeated the words as I showered, as I toweled off, as I set my borrowed clothes on Petri’s chair and buried myself in her bed. I kept repeating them, my eyes shut tight against the outside world—but I couldn’t quite stop some self-aware part of me from observing that if I had to say them so deliberately, there must be something else that I was using them to drown out.

Fortunately, there was an obvious remedy for that.

* * *

“Rachel.”

My eyes snapped open.

“Rachel—will you be going to school with Ante?”

I sat upright in the bed, my muscles complaining like I’d spent the whole previous day drilling routines on the spring floor. Sofia was standing in the open doorway, and judging by the light behind her, it was morning.

I had slept all the way through the night.

Focus. School?

I scrubbed at my eyes. “Um,” I said. “I don’t know. Should I?”

There was a long silence.

“Yes,” said Sofia. She pointed. “I picked up some clothes for you. Breakfast in the kitchen in ten minutes.”

And with that, she left, pulling the door closed behind her.

School.

The last time I had been at school—

I lunged forward before the boy-puppet could dodge, whipping my tail through the air with rattlesnake speed. I cut off one arm, then the other, the puppet’s blood spurting wildly as I aimed my third strike at its legs—

I shoved the memory aside, along with the next four thoughts that followed it, until my mind was something resembling empty and clear.

So. School.

Sofia thought I should go to school.

Of course she does. She’s a mom, you’re a teenager.

Of course, I didn’t have to be a teenager…

Whoa. Slow down.

I counted to ten and started over.

What are you going to do today?

Options: stay in the apartment all day, wander around town as a teenager, go to school, go rogue.

Out of that list, going to school didn’t sound too bad. It would be a way for me to get my bearings, at least, given that right now I didn’t even know what city I was in. And school would give me opportunities to pick up a few new human morphs without running into any truant officers—

Does Finland even have truant officers?

Does Finland even have truancy laws?

I didn’t know, which was another point in favor of going, at least for a day.

There were some benefits to just sticking around the apartment, too, but they came along with a lot of time to just sit and think, alone with myself, which—if yesterday’s panics were anything to go by—was not necessarily a healthy thing for me at the moment. And the thought of going fully rogue was still too terrifying to seriously consider.

Okay, so school.

School.

I stood, stretched, and was halfway through dressing when it occurred to me that I didn’t speak Finnish.

So go in mor—

Oh. Right.

I glanced at the clock. There were seven minutes left of the ten Sophia had given me. Three minutes to morph and demorph, ninety more seconds to remorph after that, if it all went well—

I had a little over a minute to think it over.

As it turned out, I only needed about ten seconds.

If the seizure thing is going to happen again—if there’s a problem with you, or with morphing in general, or with morphing into that person in particular—you’re going to need to know that anyway, so why wait?

Actually, there were at least a few good reasons to wait, two of which occurred to me immediately—

No.

I had slept a whole day away. A part of me needed to not-wait the same way I needed water or food. I finished pulling on my shirt, closed my eyes, and focused.

The familiar tingle began at the small of my back this time, spreading and trickling across my skin, seeming to move with agonizing slowness, though I was pretty sure that was more about watched pots than anything else.

Forty-five hippopotamus, forty-six hippopotamus, forty-seven hippopotamus…

As I passed the halfway mark, I felt the tension slowly leak out of my shoulders. Forty seconds later, I opened my eyes to see the face of my Finnish doppelgänger in the mirror over the desk.

I let out a sigh. So far, so good.

Closing my eyes again, I refocused on my own body, wishing as I did that I could morph away the soreness, the lingering weakness—

Maybe do something about that bed-head, while I’m at it?

I counted in my head as the morph proceeded. I was exactly forty-one hippopotamuses in when—

It was maybe midnight by the time the moon rose, backlighting the dust that filled the sky over northern New Mexico, and we settled by silent, mutual agreement on top of a shattered sandstone mesa in the middle of the wide, cold nothingness.

No one spoke as we demorphed, our bodies rising shivering from the uneven rock. There was a kind of supernatural seriousness in the air—a ritual silence, dark and heavy, the sort of thing I’d imagine feeling at Stonehenge or the pyramids or those sacred catacombs in India. Words just—didn’t fit. Weren’t appropriate.

There was a soft crunch as something invisible landed at the edge of the pillar, and suddenly the air around us grew warm as Erek dropped his holographic camouflage and expanded his force field to include us all. I looked at Jake, who looked at Marco, who looked at Garrett—who for once kept his eyes up and looked back—and slowly we mingled and drifted, acquiring one another, dipping in and out of the strange alien trance as the technology did its work—

OUCH.

The transition was instantaneous, as if I’d been teleported straight from New Mexico to Finland. My hand flew to my forehead, where there was already a lump the size of a strawberry, blood trickling down my cheek to join the flow from my nose. I had fallen off of the bed—must have slammed my head on the desk on the way down, or on the hard wooden leg while on the floor—

Okay. Okay, think.

I was two-for-two on the whatever-it-was, memory or hallucination or what—

Think FASTER.

Right. Okay.

Assume it happens whenever I demorph.

Unless it’s something about Aino’s body in particular—

Irrelevant, since if I was going to morph again right now it was going to be into Aino’s body anyway—

Negative side-effects: spasm/seizure, muscle cramps, bloody nose—

How about risk of losing an eye? Or of making enough noise that people came running?

Any lasting damage?

I closed my eyes and checked over my body, just as I had done in the car the day before. I felt drained again—my muscles must have been clenching and cramping during the seizure—but nothing felt broken except for my head.

Which meant I could walk out of the room in three minutes as Rachel—

—with a bloody nose and a giant lump on your forehead—

—or I could go out there as Aino and have another seizure in two hours.

Heads I win, tails you lose—

* * *

“Terve, Rachel,” said Sofia, as I emerged from the bedroom.

“Kiitos, Sofia,” I replied. “Samoin.”

The boy at the table—recognizable from the photo, but four or five years older, and with longer, messier hair—lifted his head. “Moro,” he mumbled.

Sofia crumpled up a paper towel and threw it at him. He batted it aside, rolled his eyes, and spoke again with a tinge of sing-song mockery. “Tervetuloa, Rachel.”

“Nyt on parempi,” Sofia said, her eyes twinkling. She pointed, and I slid into the seat across from the boy just as she set down two bowls of some kind of porridge, followed by a pair of open-faced sandwiches on rye bread.

I was half-expecting some kind of interrogation, or at least the usual get-to-know-you small talk, but Ante dug into his porridge without a word. In the kitchen, Sofia continued to bustle around in near-silence, making coffee.

Not big talkers, then.

That was fine by me—picking up my spoon, I turned my attention inward, mulling over the new vision-memory I’d acquired during the seizure.

It seemed that whatever-it-was wasn’t just a scene that I had watched—it was more like a complete memory that I had recovered, somehow. Like I had forgotten it, and then remembered it again. I couldn’t bring up anything before or after, but I could delve into the narrow slice that I’d seen, and draw out new detail that hadn’t been a part of the brief hallucination. I was sure, for instance, that—real or not—the scene took place a day and a half after we’d invaded the pool, while we were on our way to Washington, D.C. I was also sure that Jake’s brother Tom and Marco’s father Peter were both there, and that Tobias wasn’t.

And—

—this part was less sure; it felt true but who knows what was really going on—

—both of the visions had taken place inside my own body. Like, not just from a random first-person perspective, but inside my body—the body of Rachel Berenson. By this point, I knew what it felt like to wear someone else’s skin and bones, and both visions had carried that quiet but unmistakable note of familiarity and comfort.

Which meant that, if they were real—

If, I reassured my inner Marco, who was spluttering. If.

If they were real, then—

The most straightforward explanation was that I was somehow recovering memories from the previous Rachel—memories that the earlier version of me had lived, but that hadn’t been transferred during my resurrection. Events that had taken place after this version of me had been acquired.

Which—

I didn’t know.

I didn’t know so hard that I couldn’t even form a question.

But if it happened every time I demorphed—

“Ante,” said Sofia, breaking my reverie.

“Mmm?”

“Osoitatte häntä ympäri, peruskoulu jälkeen? Kirjasto, markkinat, nuorisokeskus...”

It wasn’t that I understood Finnish, while I was wearing Aino’s body. It was more like, Aino understood Finnish, and I understood Aino. The meaning passed perfectly from her dormant mind to my own, without the need for word-to-word translation, and I was able to convert my own thoughts into Finnish sentences via the same channel.

Will you show her around, after school? Sofia had asked. The library, the market, the youth center…

“En tiedä,” Ante replied, and though I could make out the individual sounds if I tried, mostly I just heard I don’t know.

“It’s Friday,” he continued, still speaking in Finnish. “The Territorial Forces are coming by.”

“After, then.”

“I was going to go past the fence with Elias and Juhani.”

“So take her with you,” Sofia countered, a note of impatience creeping into her tone.

Ante turned to give me a look, sizing me up. “Does she even want to go?” he asked.

I felt a tiny spike of indignation. “Olen täällä, tiedät,” I said, my eyes narrowing. I’m right here, you know.

“No niin,” he replied, shrugging. “Do you, though?”

“What’s past the fence?”

He squinted. “What do you mean?”

“What’s out there?”

“Past the fence.”

“Right.”

“What?”

“Enough,” Sofia broke in. “Ante, you will look after her today, understand? She is from Tampere, she doesn’t know her way around. Stay in town or go past the fence, I don’t care, but you take her with you. No reading the Bible like the Devil.”

“Manu has done his job,” Ante intoned. “Manu is dismissed.”

The last two lines meant no loopholes and your wish is my command, more or less, which made me grateful all over again for my decision to remorph Aino, because seizures or no seizures—even if they’d said those words in straight English, I don’t think I would have been able to figure out what they actually meant.

There was silence for the rest of the meal—not awkward or stilted, just the same comfortable silence that had come before. When Ante finished, he stood and brought his dishes over to the sink. I did the same.

“Oh, Rachel,” Sofia said, as Ante vanished back into his bedroom. “Rand called with a prescription.” She held out a hand with a small plastic bottle. “He said to take these for your muscle pain and nosebleeds. And here’s the spare key.”

Right.

“Thanks.”

“We’ll talk more tonight, okay?”

“Okay.”

I pocketed the items as Ante reemerged, wearing a black jacket and a brown knit hat with a small backpack slung over his shoulder.

“Do I need to bring anything?” I asked.

Ante shook his head, then jerked it in a come on sort of gesture and headed for the door. “’Bye, Mom,” he said, his back to the kitchen where Sofia still sat.

I waved awkwardly, ducked into Petri’s room to grab the coat and hat that Sofia had left for me, and followed him out into the hall. He said nothing as we walked, as we waited in the elevator, as we exited the lobby out into the crisp, cold sunlight.

“How far is school?” I asked, breaking the silence. “Are we taking a bus?”

He shook his head. “Walking distance.”

The roads were wide and quiet, with clean sidewalks and large, green lawns glistening with frost in front of every building. The buildings themselves were low and spread out, most shorter than three stories and none taller than six or seven, with leafy trees planted here and there between them. The whole thing felt a little bit like a college campus, or a nice suburb in an uncrowded state—empty and spacious compared to the dense neighborhoods of Ventura.

We passed a playground, another apartment building, another playground, and a small, modest church, all without a word.

“Will I be in your class?” I asked finally.

I knew from Aino’s memories that Finnish schools were divided by age, just like American ones, but I wasn’t sure how old Ante was.

Then again, I wasn’t sure he knew how old I was, either, so maybe he wouldn’t know the answer in any case—

“We’re not in classes,” Ante scoffed, his pace slowing as he threw me a sort of bully-flavored look, half-disgusted and half-disbelieving. “We’re taking part in the Common Endeavor.”

Yhteinen Yritys, he had said, the capital letters audible in his tone along with the unstated duh. I felt my heartrate tick up. Aino had no idea what that meant, and suddenly it occurred to me that I had no idea how long she had been in the hospital—

“Right,” I said. “Obviously. In the city, we were still separated by age, though.”

Ante’s look deepened into suspicion, and a totally automatic part of my brain began planning what it would do after we punched him in the nose and ran away—

“Hei, Ante!”

Ante’s head swiveled around. “Hei,” he called back.

There was another boy jogging up to us from a side street. He was maybe Jake’s height, slender-looking—though it was hard to tell with the bulky coat he was wearing—with longish, shaggy blond hair sticking out from under a bright red hat.

“Juhani, Rachel,” Ante said, gesturing. “Rachel, Juhani.”

“Hei,” Juhani repeated, giving me a small wave.

“Hei,” I said. “How are you?”

The boy’s expression flickered momentarily, the ghost of a frown passing through his mouth, his eyebrows—

“Rachel’s visiting from Tampere,” Ante said, cutting him off. “I’m her guide today.”

I felt another flash of irritation. Turista opas, he’d said, with a sour twist—tourist guide.

“I’m not a tourist,” I growled, the words popping out of me by sheer reflex.

Hey, um. Why do we care what this random kid thinks?

“No niin,” Ante said, shrugging.

He turned and began walking again. Juhani offered me a brief, sympathetic look and a shrug of his own, and then followed.

We traveled in silence for another five minutes or so, as the apartment buildings gave way to more of a midtown vibe, parks and houses and small, isolated strips of three or four shops in a row. There were other kids on the sidewalk, now, all flowing in the same general direction. One of them joined us and was introduced as Luukas.

As we passed the library, the school came into view, a squat, two-story brick building with a playground and athletic fields on one side and a small parking lot on the other. Even from a distance, I could see decorations filling the windows on the second floor, each classroom distinct from the next as one set of artwork gave way to another.

The trickle of kids was now starting to resemble a flood, and I glanced back and forth between the street and the building, running numbers in my head. Two classrooms wide times maybe ten classrooms long, times two floors, times twenty kids per classroom—

Eight hundred kids?

And from Aino’s memory I knew that the youngest student would be seven and the oldest sixteen, so—

Around eighty kids per year, give or take. Four classrooms per grade.

And you need to know this why? grumbled the part of my brain that was still busy being annoyed.

Be prepared? Know your ground? Take advantage of any information that’s just lying around? We did die last time, you know.

If there were eight hundred kids, that meant there were—what—three or four thousand people in the whole lähiö, maybe? Five thousand, if most families didn’t have very many kids?

I thought back to some of the buildings we had passed. One bank, one dentist, one grocery store. And the streets we had been walking ended in two directions—the school at the end of the road we were currently on, and the library at the end of the road we’d just turned off of.

So unless there were two schools, two mirrored neighborhoods—

The whole lähiö couldn’t be more than maybe a square mile, maybe a little less, with what looked like dense forest on at least two sides.

Which meant it wouldn’t be that hard to disappear, in a pinch.

I glanced at Ante as we approached the double doors of the main entrance. He had said something about wanting to go past the fence, which now sounded like it might have meant outside the lähiö—

A calm, detached part of me noted that the rest of me was running on yellow alert—tense, attentive, as if something might go down at any second.

Nerves? Habit? Or something else?

What’s the matter, boy? Did you see something?

I tried to mentally backtrack as we squeezed through the double doors, see if I could figure out what had put me on edge. The crush closed around me, sweeping me down the hallway, the flow of students all moving in one direction. For a moment, I thought about asking Ante where we were going, what I should do, but my inner toddler vetoed.

Little snot could have explained everything by now if he’d wanted to.

We rounded a corner into what looked like the main hallway of the school, lined with lockers and alternating doors. The crowd stretched ahead of us all the way to the end, where it turned and vanished through a side door.

“Take off your hat,” Ante hissed.

I blinked, realizing that all of the other heads around me were bare. I reached up, pulling my own hat off—

That’s it. It’s too quiet.

Ante’s voice had been barely louder than a whisper, yet I’d easily been able to hear it. The crowd wasn’t silent—far from it. But it was quiet in a way that would have taken serious threats, if this had been an American school. Most of the students weren’t talking at all, and the few who were were speaking in soft, muted tones, like we were in a restaurant, or a movie theater before the movie had started.

And before that, on the walk to school—

And before that, in Ante’s apartment—

And before that, in the car with Koskinen—

Okay, so—Finnish people are just quieter?

I felt my brain relax a little as the explanation sunk in, felt myself downshifting from yellow alert to mere everyday readiness as we turned through the doors and into the gymnasium.

Hey, uh. Even ‘mere everyday readiness’ might be overkill. This is high school, after all.

The gym was just like any school gym—polished wooden floor, basketball hoops on either end, fold-out bleachers covering the length of the two longer walls. There were doors at the back, presumably leading to locker rooms and storage closets. The kids were sorting themselves into groups via some complicated mechanism I didn’t quite understand; Luukas and Juhani peeled off as Ante grabbed me by my shirtsleeve and pulled me over toward one of the adults.

“Mrs. Virtanen,” he said. “This is my cousin, Rachel Koskinen. She’s visiting for the week.”

The teacher nodded. “Welcome, Rachel,” she said. “Have you checked in at the office?”

My jaw dropped a little, my mouth hanging open—

“My mom called yesterday,” Ante said. “They did all the paperwork then.”

“Ah, good. Just have her travel around with you for today, then. I’ll make sure she’s marked present.”

Ante nodded, and I followed him to a spot in the bleachers. Again, I felt the urge to ask questions, to extract some kind of orienting information out of the boy, and again some stubborn part of me put its foot down.

After all, the stakes are so high.

I looked around at the nearby kids. They were a near-even mix, ranging from tiny seven-year-olds up to my age and a year or two older. Most of them were just sitting quietly, but a few were playing games or chatting or reading books.

Actually—

I looked closer, sweeping my eyes around the bleachers.

Every section had a near-even mix of ages. And there was just a little bit of a gap between each section—kids leaving just a little more space than they were anywhere else, as if the boundaries between the groups was important—

We’re not in classes, Ante had sneered.

Mixed-age groups? As a part of ‘the Common Endeavor,’ whatever that was?

Movement on the gym floor caught my eye, and I turned to see a woman in a gray suit stepping out into the center circle. Almost instantly, all conversation ceased, all eyes turning to point toward her.

“Hyvää päivää, opiskelijat,” the woman said.

Some of the younger children called back in response, and she smiled warmly. “I see you have all found your families. Please, take a moment to check for absences.”

“Yksi.”

“Kaksi.”

“Kolme.”

“Neljä.”

All around me, voices were calling out numbers, one after the other, each section of the bleachers turned inward.

“Where’s Fanni?”

“Sick, her mother called my mother this morning—”

“Viisitoista.”

“Kuusitoista.”

“Seitsemäntoista,” called Ante. “And I have an extra with me—Rachel.”

“Tervetuloa, Rachel,” chorused two dozen voices.

The counting continued for maybe a minute, with children double-checking absences, occasionally assigning someone to follow up where there was no known story. One student stood up from each section of the bleachers and delivered a sheet of paper to one of the teachers on the floor. Eventually, the gym fell silent again.

“Good work,” said the woman in the gray suit. “Now, announcements. Remember that there will only be three full periods today—third, fourth, and fifth. First period, we’re going to stay here in the gym; our guest Mr. Lampi has a bit of a demonstration for you. Second period, you’ll be practicing what you learned from him together with your family. After that, you will be back in age groups, and you will rotate between Engineering, Sustenance, and Classical Education. Don’t forget that on Monday, we will be holding the final judgment for the competition on water capture systems.”

There was a small rustle of what might have been excitement, or maybe apprehension.

“In the meantime, Mr. Lampi has a lot of information to cover, so we’re going to skip the rest of morning announcements and get to work. Sisu, my students.”

“Sisu!” called out eight hundred voices in unison.

I couldn’t help it—I jumped, in my seat, and Ante smirked at me again.

Sisu. The meaning drifted up out of Aino’s mind, refusing to match with any single English word. It meant courage, but also persistence. Endurance, but also action. It conjured up a sense of adversity, of overwhelming odds, a sense of boundaries being broken and obstacles being overcome.

I was surprised. I hadn’t known there was a word like that. But it fit, with what I’d seen so far—of Koskinen and Sofia, and the walls of Ante’s bedroom.

I liked it.

Sisu.

There were a bunch of adults out in the middle of the gym floor, now—laying down tarps, setting up tables. One of them was carrying a giant, empty, plastic tray, the sort of thing you’d use to mix concrete; two more were following behind with large bags of what looked like playground sand.

“Hello, children,” said a short, balding man, stepping slightly away from the bustle of setup and sweeping his gaze across the bleachers. “My name is Mr. Lampi. I work for a welding company in Jyväskylä. Can anyone tell me what welding is? Yes, you—in the red.”

His words were slow and clear, the tone and cadence of a children’s television host. Down in front, the kid he’d pointed to stood up and answered. “It’s when you stick metal together by melting it.”

“Correct,” Mr. Lampi said gravely. “Thank you. Ordinarily, children, my job is to fix pipes and build buildings. Sometimes I repair machines. But today, I am going to teach you about something called termiittiä.”

It was a word Aino didn’t know, and judging from the looks on the faces around me, she wasn’t alone. I glanced at Ante—

Huh.

Ante’s face was bright, almost wild with delight.

“Before we begin, I must ask you to make a very serious promise. It’s so serious, in fact, that I am going to ask you to make this promise more than once, to each of the people around you. Are you ready?”

The entire gym seemed to hold its breath.

“The promise is this: I will never, ever be silly with termiittiä. I will never play with it. I will not use it for games, or pranks, or just because I am upset with someone. Termiittiä is a grownup thing, and I will treat it with the utmost respect. That is a lot of words, but you can promise using just the short version, which is I promise I will never use termiittiä in a way I know Mr. Lampi would not like. Okay? Promise, now, please, to the person in front of you and the person behind you and the people beside you—everyone whose hand you can shake without getting up out of your seat.”

The air filled with voices—nervous voices, excited voices, uncertain voices, curious voices.

Dynamite? I wondered. But no—Aino knew the word for dynamite—dynamiitti.

“Thank you,” said Mr. Lampi, as the voices died down. “Now please—look around. Is there anyone next to you who did not promise to you? We cannot proceed unless everyone has promised.”

A moment of weighing silence.

“Remember that, please. You have promised, not just once, but four or five or six times. Look again at every one of the people you have promised to. If you break your word, you are breaking your word with all of them.”

Another silence, more somber this time.

“Remember, there may come a day when you have yourself a fiendishly good idea, and all you need to pull it off is a little bit of termiittiä. When that happens, you will remember me, Mr. Lampi, standing there with a frown, shaking my head. And you will remember all of the people you have promised to, and then you will either be good, or you will be bad. Which do you think you will be?”

“Good!” shouted hundreds of voices—mostly the younger ones. Ante’s lips didn’t move, and neither did mine.

It has to be a weapon, or something. Something dangerous.

“All right, then, let us begin. First, I need you to remember two numbers. The first number is twenty-seven, and twenty-seven is the first number because it is smaller, and because it goes with the letter A. A is for alumiini, and what is the number which goes with A?”

“Twenty-seven.”

“Good. The second number is eighty, and it goes with the letter R, for ruoste. What is the number which goes with R?”

“Eighty.”

“Good. So we have alumiini, twenty-seven, and we have ruoste, eighty.”

I frowned. Aluminum and rust?

“So now I will come over here to the table, and I will show you my ingredients, which will not surprise you. This first bucket is full of aluminum dust—do you see? It is the same metal that makes up your soda cans, only it has been chopped up and ground down into a fine powder. This powder is very very bad for you to breathe, so you see I am putting a mask on, as you will also do if you must ever work with aluminum dust.”

“Ante,” I whispered. “What is this?”

“Shhh,” he whispered back, not looking at me, his eyes wide with anticipation. “You’ll see.”

“—bucket is filled with rust, just like you would find on any old piece of iron lying around. When you leave to practice with your families, you will talk more about where you can find these things, aluminum dust and iron rust. Now, I do not have time to careful-count out twenty-seven measures of aluminum and eighty more measures of rust, so I am going to do a simple thing which you might have to do, if circumstances call for it. I am going to grab one measure of aluminum, and three measures of rust, because twenty-seven times three is eighty-one, and that is very close to eighty, yes?”

As he talked, Mr. Lampi was using a scoop and a digital scale to measure out each of the two powders, dumping both of them into a large, metal bowl. He then picked up a large fork and began to stir.

“I stir, stir, stir, many times. Let’s say one hundred and seven times, twenty-seven for the aluminum and eighty for the rust. It is very important to stir until it is all one single, smooth color—no bright silver or dark red, okay? And once I have stirred one hundred and seven times, what we have left is called termiittiä. Say that word for me, please.”

“Termiittiä,” chorused the students.

Mr. Lampi placed the bowl down onto one of the tables. “Now, for sure by now you are asking yourself, what is termiittiä? I will tell you, now. Termiittiä is fire. It is one of the hottest fires you will ever see. It is a fire so hot that you must not look straight at it, or you might hurt your eyes. It is a fire so hot that it will burn straight through this bowl, straight through this table, and down through the floor—except that, as you see, I have this tray full of sand beneath, to catch it.”

He nudged the tray with his foot. “This sand is very important,” he said. “It is part of a rule: never put anything underneath termiittiä, unless you want that thing to be destroyed. Just like your father’s rifle, yes? Never point a rifle at anything you are unwilling to kill—this is the same rule, except for termiittiä the dangerous direction is down.”

Mr. Lampi reached into his pocket and pulled out something I couldn’t make out, from a distance.

“Now, there is one other thing you must know about termiittiä. Termiittiä, my children, is sleepy. It does not like to wake up. Watch—”

There was a collective gasp as he pointed the object in his hand at the bowl of dust and pulled a trigger, igniting a narrow cone of bright, hot flame. Several people flinched, and one of the younger kids shrieked.

“You see?” he said calmly, sweeping the flame back and forth across the surface of the powder. “I am burning the termiittiä with all of my might, burning and burning, but nothing is happening. That is because you need an extra special spark to wake up your termiittiä. And so, we have one more ingredient, which is magnesium.”

He held up his other hand, and I thought I could see a glint of something silvery.

“Now, children, prepare yourselves, for magnesium is bright and termiittiä is bright also. You must squint, hold your eyes almost all the way shut, and if it is too bright, you must look away. See how I am putting on special sunglasses? I am much closer to the light than you, and so I need the sunglasses to be safe.”

Again the feeling that the whole room was holding its breath, eight hundred pairs of eyes locked firmly on the bowl of dull red powder. Mr. Lampi stuck the piece of silvery metal into it like a wick and stepped back, holding his lighter out at arms’ length.

And then, without any further warning—

HSSSSSSSSSS—

FWOOOOOM.

I lowered my arm from where it had instinctively flown up to cover my face.

“Ah, yes,” said Mr. Lampi, sounding artificially sad. “It is as I had feared. Look.”

Using a pair of tongs, he picked up the remains of the bowl—a warped, still-glowing ring of twisted, dripping metal. He held it up, spun slowly around so that each of us could see it—could see him through it.

“And of course, our poor table, as well,” he said, gesturing.

The smell was beginning to spread, now, a mixture of smoke and plastic fumes. Down in the front row, someone was coughing. There was a hole in the small folding table about the size of my head, as if the bowlful of powder had turned into lava and dropped straight down.

What do you mean, ‘as if’? That’s exactly what happened.

“You understand, yes, why it was important to me that you promise?” Mr. Lampia asked. “That you will not play with termiittiä? It is a powerful tool, and a dangerous tool. Imagine what happens, if you are not careful, and it falls on your foot.”

Another hiss as several hundred children sucked in their breath.

“But it is an important tool, as well, and one which you might someday need. A cupful of termiittiä on the outside of an unshielded hyönteisten alus—”

Insect vessel?

Oh. Bug fighter.

“—more than enough to disable it. You can use termiittiä to cut metal, burn away locks, open doors, destroy vehicles and weapons—raise your hand if you remember Iowa, in the United States? The oatmeal factory?”

Hands went up, and I felt a tickle of vertigo, as if the world had tilted by half a degree. He’d used the same tone of voice a teacher might have used to say remember Tiananmen Square?

“It was termiittiä that the American resistance used to destroy that factory.”

Mr. Lampi continued to lecture as my mind—slid. Somehow, the mention of the factory mission—a mission I had probably been on, all things considered—that brought the surreality of the whole situation into focus, broke the spell of the balding man’s calm, reassuring voice.

“Ante,” I whispered. “Is this normal?”

“What do you mean?”

“Learning about—about how to make bombs.”

The boy gave me a flat, inscrutable look. “It’s the Common Endeavor,” he said. “No civilians. Six million soldiers.”

But bombs?

I couldn’t make the words come out, and after a moment, Ante shrugged. “Last week it was driving lessons,” he said. “The week before that, field medicine. Next week, who knows?”

I looked down across the bleachers, at the seven- and eight- and nine-year-olds still riveted, fixated on the small, balding man as he held up a pair of Ziploc bags—one about the size of a sandwich, the other smaller than a playing card, both already full of powder. In front of him, on the table, were a handgun and a laptop.

But they’re just kids, a part of me wanted to say.

I squeezed my eyes shut as my brain threw up a memory—the same memory, the memory I returned to over and over again, the pool and the cages and the people trapped inside.

“Sam!” cried a young boy, his voice breaking. “Sam, don’t worry! It’s going to be okay! I’m here, Sam! I’m not going to leave you!”

I remembered the boy’s face. He couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old. The same age as Jordan.

And now he was dead.

I gritted my teeth, holding my head still against a mounting pressure to do something, to get up, to shout, to move. It was too much to contain, too much to digest—felt like it might melt its way out of me at any second, burning down through the bleachers beneath me.

These people—

They were serious.

They weren’t just plugging their ears and getting on with their lives and hoping it would all go away. They were turning their entire culture on its head in a frantic attempt to ready themselves—to ready their children—to arm their children against the coming storm. And this was just school—who knew what the rest of them were up to, out in the lähiö?

And yet—

At the same time—

I hated the thought, hated myself for thinking it, but I didn’t let that stop me—

What good is a bunch of nine-year-olds who know how to make pipe bombs, against an enemy who levels whole cities?

The first thought established the pattern, and a dozen more came nipping at its heels, the words falling into place like puzzle pieces.

What good were cars, against spaceships?

What good were rifles, against force fields?

What good was a militia, if the Yeerks had all the nukes?

What was the point in a common endeavor, when the enemy could be anyone, anywhere—could slip in unnoticed at any time, and cut off the resistance at the knees?

Yeah, well. What’s the point of giving five idiot teenagers the ability to turn into horses?

I felt my body go still.

I mean, it’s the same thing, isn’t it? said my inner Marco—said the part of me that liked to pretend it was Marco. You work with what you’ve got. Sometimes it’s enough, and sometimes it isn’t. That’s all there is to it.

I opened my eyes again, looking down at the kids in the bleachers below me. Looking sideways at Ante, whose face was still flushed with excitement, his eyes locked on Mr. Lampi below like he was some kind of celebrity.

Sisu, I thought. I guess they’re not any better off NOT knowing how to make pipe bombs.

Except—

Except when I saw that look on Ante’s face—that look of pure excitement, of eagerness, like he couldn’t wait to get his hands on some termiittiä and get started—

They weren’t ready.

These kids. These kids were not ready. And backwoods redneck military expertise was not going to make them ready, but it might make them think they were, and that would be ten times worse—

Hey, check your privilege. We can’t all watch a legendary Andalite war-prince get eaten alive on day one.

But that was the thing—even with that lesson, I had still screwed up. Overreached. I had gotten Melissa and her family killed by thinking I was ready when I wasn’t.

Okay, but would they really be better off with nothing? What’s worse, a little overconfidence, or a total lack of resources?

I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know.

I fight the Yeerks, I had said, to the people in the cages. To Sam and his brother, along with all the rest. You fight them as well, and for that I honor you.

I had said that, and then I’d left them all behind.

And now they were dead.

I held still, for a moment—mentally, emotionally—let the echoes of the thought settle before trying to respond.

You can’t save everybody, Rachel.

But it felt like I should. Like I should at least try. Like I should have something to say to these people, stuck way out here in the suburbs, trying to prepare for a war they barely understood. It felt like I should do something about them. Do something for them. Like I shouldn’t just sit there and watch as they fumbled around blindly in the dark, shouldn’t let them waste their time and effort—

For now, nothing is your resp—

Yeah, yeah. But still.

I let out a breath, shook my head, tried to set aside the confused, jumbled tangle of my thoughts.

Just for today. For one day, you can wait, and watch, and do nothing.

A sudden hush fell over the crowd, and my eyes snapped open.

While I’d been thinking, Mr. Lampi’s demonstration had continued. He had burned a hole straight through the laptop, had almost completely melted the handgun, and had cut through the surface of the table in two more places.

But that wasn’t why everyone had gone quiet.

Oh, no.

Another adult had emerged from the doors at the end of the court, a grim look on his face as he pushed a rolling, rectangular cart in front of him. On that cart was a wire-frame cage with a thick, black top, just like the cages in Cassie’s barn back in Ventura.

And in that cage was an animal.

A vole, a rat, a possum of some kind—I wasn’t sure. Couldn’t tell, from this far away. Might not have known even if I’d been up close. It was definitely a rodent, though—a big one, almost the size of a Corgi.

No, no, no, that’s too much, too far, don’t—

“Your attention, please,” called out Mr. Lampi—uselessly, since every person in the room was already transfixed. “We come now to a sad, but necessary part of the lesson. For you see, it is not quite enough for you to promise with words. It is important that you know that termiittiä is dangerous. Not just with your head, but with your heart also—that you feel the danger in your bones.”

A rising clamor—expressions of dismay—

“You must watch,” said Mr. Lampi.

Shouts of fear, of anguish—several students had leapt to their feet, were being held back by others around them. I felt my own jaw hanging open in shock, felt the blood draining out of my face—

What was it you were just thinking, about having to watch Elfangor die?

Mr. Lampi lifted a pint-sized bag of dull-red dust and placed it on top of the cage as the shouts grew louder, wilder, poked a magnesium wick into the plastic as even some of the adults turned away, looking sick. Inside the bars, the animal was terrified—quivering, squeaking, turning circles, looking for some place to hide—

“Remember,” said Mr. Lampi.

There was a burst of light too bright to look at—a shower of sparks—a hundred strangled cries—

I blinked, trying to clear away the afterimage as the sudden horror gave way to confusion.

The animal was fine.

The cage was fine.

There was a molten puddle in the middle of the black top, slowly dimming from white to orange to red.

A hundred voices stuttered into silence.

“This is a cage that I built myself, for this lesson,” said Mr. Lampi, his voice still calm and slow. “It is made with a secret that I will not teach you. You do not know how to build a thing which termiittiä cannot destroy. This animal is alive because I chose to save it. If it were not for me—if it had been just you, and the animal, and the termiittiä—”

He broke off, shrugged, reached over to the ruined bowl from the first burn and held it up. “Remember the power of termiittiä,” he said. “Remember what it did to this metal bowl. Remember what it would have done to this poor animal—what it would do to you. To your face. To your hands. To your genitals. Look at this.”

He held the bowl up higher. “Repeat after me,” he said. “Termiittiä is not a toy.”

Nothing. Stunned silence. Not a single person spoke.

“Good,” said Mr. Lampi, with a dry little chuckle. “I see that the lesson is learned.”

* * *

Taking a deep breath, I locked the door to the teachers’ lounge, turned off the light, and groped my way back toward the space I had cleared on the floor by the sofa. I lay down, arranging the throw pillows and the duvet around my head.

Sisu.

I began to demorph, ears alert for any sign that someone was coming. The lounge had been unlocked and empty, the upper floor abandoned with everyone else down in the gym, but there were still eleven minutes left in the break between first and second period, and for all I knew someone was going to come looking for a cup of coffee or—

“Cassie?” I croaked, my heart suddenly in my throat. “Cassie, oh my god, it’s—”

And then my brain caught up, recognized the dirty green t-shirt, the baggy jeans, the shoes so scuffed and muddy it was hard to tell they’d ever been white. I felt a pain in my gut like I’d been shot, felt my knees go soft and rubbery.

“Jake?” I asked, my voice trembling. “Is that you?”

She—he—the face turned to me, tears glistening in the moonlight, skin already fading from brown to peach, hair lengthening and softening.

“Hi, Rachel,” Jake said hollowly, his voice still halfway hers.

“Jake, what—what—”

I couldn’t finish the sentence, didn’t even know what the rest of it might be. For one moment—one single, precious, beautiful moment, she had been alive again. I could still taste it—how possible it had felt, how reasonable and believable, of course she’d made it out alive, had come to find us—

Anger and misery fought over the steering wheel as I stared at my cousin.

“I’m sorry,” Jake whispered, burying his face in his hands. “I just—I just—I have to talk to her, sometimes.”

I didn’t know what to say. I felt frozen, stretched, pulled taut between the vast weight of my own grief and the sudden horror I was feeling, a horror so neatly summed up by those two little words, ‘have to.’

And then—

—just then, as if that wasn’t enough—

—that’s when my brain decided to make the connection, to realize that I had Sara’s morph tucked away in my collection, that she wasn’t fully gone, that some part of her could be brought back, and then I had to wrench my thoughts away from that option, focus everything I had on my determination not to do it, or I might have fallen to pieces right then and there—

* * *

“Hei,” said Ante, as I stepped up beside him, his breath making little clouds in the cold morning air.

“Hei,” I replied.

And then nothing—nothing for the next twenty minutes, as the teachers explained the safety procedures, handed out the materials, and watched us mix and bag termiittiä.

I could really get used to this not-bothering-people thing.

I had come out of my morph-hallucination gasping, the muscles in my legs knotting and seizing. It was worse than before—with how quickly I’d remorphed earlier that morning, I’d spent less than two minutes total in my real body, which meant that as far as my muscles were concerned, I’d had two seizures in about three minutes. I needed time to rest and recover or a third morph might end up actually tearing something.

Unfortunately, I’d had no idea what kind of trouble Ante might kick up if I didn’t come back for second period, so time to rest and recover had ended up being about five minutes. I’d massaged out the cramps as best I could, taken some of the pills Sofia had given me, stolen a banana from a bowl of fruit in the teachers’ lounge, and put Aino’s body back on before rejoining the other kids in the parking lot outside the gym.

Now, I had a little more than an hour and a half before it happened again.

I’d gone around in circles for a while, asking myself a bunch of useless questions like how and why and what, exactly and for how long? But ultimately, those questions had gotten me nowhere, so I’d fallen back to nuts and bolts.

One. If this was going to happen every time—and it looked like it would; I hadn’t tried morphing into some other body yet but the thing was only happening when I got back into my own body, so I didn’t see what difference that would make—

If this was going to happen every time, then I had way less flexibility in how I used the morphing power. If I needed a wide, flat, safe place every time I demorphed—if I was going to be, for all intents and purposes, fully unconscious every time I demorphed—

Two. I needed to find out whether these visions were real in any meaningful sense. The second and third had both been in private—I would need to talk to the others, to Jake and the rest, assuming that their own resurrections hadn’t wiped out the memories.

But the first one—the incident in the grocery store—that might have made the news. It wasn’t for sure; if I couldn’t find any record of it that didn’t prove that it hadn’t happened. But if there was some public record—

I needed a computer, and some time to search.

Three…

Well. Assuming the visions were real—

It wasn’t exactly seeing the future. Everything I’d witnessed had already happened, to some other version of me. There wasn’t any way for me to win the lottery or prevent an assassination or any other shenanigans like that.

But all of those things had happened in my future. They’d happened to a Rachel who was older than me, who’d lived through everything I’d lived through and then some. There was knowledge in there that I could use, and perspective, too—already, my relationship to what had happened in Ventura was changing in response to what I’d seen in that brief, horrible glimpse of Jake. If these weren’t just random fever dreams—

—or worse, some kind of low-key mind control—

Yeah, okay, but if they weren’t that—

Then I wanted more. Wanted all of it, in fact—wanted to see as much as I could of this alternate-timeline Rachel, to get as much as I could out of the things she’d seen, the missions she’d been on, her experiences, her mistakes.

Which brought me to four:

I really couldn’t be sure that this wasn’t killing me.

It was one thing if it was just muscle cramps. But the nosebleeds had me scared. And I was no expert, but I thought I’d heard that grand mal seizures left cumulative damage, got worse over time.

Which meant—

Which meant—

I don’t know why you keep going ‘which meant’ when there are only two options and it’s obvious which one you’re going to pick. You don’t have enough info to make, like, an informed decision, and you’re not gonna get that info way out here in a Finnish suburb.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. I could go back to Koskinen, see if he was willing to run some brain scans, maybe get a neurologist colleague to take a look.

Come to think of it, why hasn’t Koskinen followed up? He was there the first time.

No, that was putting too much on him. He’d sent the medication, after all. He was probably just acting on the completely reasonable assumption that I’d contact him, if it kept happening.

Which I probably would do, sooner or later.

Only—

What if it turns out it is hurting you? What if it’s lethal, or crippling?

Say I had—I dunno—twenty morphs left in me. Say Koskinen told me that, and I believed him.

What then?

I wasn’t sure. I especially wasn’t sure in the world where the visions were real, and there was a tradeoff between how-long-I-stayed-alive and how-much-information-I-could-recover. There was more to this war than just me, after all, and it’s possible the old Rachel knew enough that it was literally worth dying for, if I could pass it along to Garrett or Jake or the others.

Plus, if they’d brought me back once, they could do it again, right?

That’s a lot of ifs all stacked up on top of each other, my inner Marco observed.

Fine. I wouldn’t make plans—at least, not the kinds of plans that meant locking yourself into a course of action in advance.

You mean like going ahead and morphing back into Aino’s body when you could’ve just left and walked back to the apartment?

I clenched my feet as hard as I could, a trick I’d picked up at family dinners where I couldn’t get away with clenching my fists.

What was done was done. Every period was forty-five minutes, with a fifteen minute break, and school let out at 12:45 under Common Endeavor rules. It was 9:30 now—if I demorphed and remorphed at 10:45, that would be enough to take me to the end of the school day. Two more times through the ringer probably wasn’t enough to kill or cripple me, and if it was, then honestly I was already screwed.

One of the teachers blew a whistle, signaling the end of prep time, and Ante and I gathered our bags of termiittiä and lined up with the rest of the children. Our group had six testing stations and about fifty kids, so it wouldn’t take long to rotate everybody through.

“Hei, Rachel,” said Ante suddenly, making me jump a little bit.

“Mmm?”

“How totally awesome is this?”

I glanced over at the older boy, his eyes still bright and eager. Up ahead, the first of the students had lit her magnesium, and the brilliant light cast half of Ante’s face in flickering shadow.

“I know, right?” I agreed, trying inject some enthusiasm into my voice. “Real Fight Club.”

Ante smiled, looking almost wolfish for a second, and then turned his attention back to the testing station, where two more kids were lighting up their bags. One of them burned a lot brighter and longer than the other, but from where I was in line, I couldn’t tell if they’d had a better mixture or just a bigger batch.

Eventually, it was our turn.

“Ante Niska,” said the teacher, making a check mark on a clipboard. “And…?”

“Rachel Koskinen,” said Ante. “My cousin.”

“Who will sign her receipt?” the teacher asked.

“My mother,” said Ante. “Sofia Niska.”

The teacher nodded, making another note. “Bags on the scale, please.”

We dumped our dozen-or-so bags into the silvery bowl.

“Almost three kilograms,” said the teacher. “Very good. Remove the bags you wish to test.”

We each reached in and grabbed a bag.

“Two point three seven kilograms,” the teacher said, tearing off a strip of paper and handing it to Ante. “Have your mother sign this and bring it back tomorrow.”

“We’re keeping this stuff?” I whispered, as we fed the other bags into our pockets and placed the two we’d removed atop two cinderblock stands.

Ante shrugged. “We can’t use it in an emergency if we don’t have it.”

“You can’t burn your house down with it, either,” I shot back.

“We’re not stupid, you know,” Ante bit out, his tone suddenly sharp. “Maybe the kids in Tampere fuck around, but out here we know not to shoot ourselves in the foot. Besides, you can’t light it without magnesium, and they’re not giving us that.”

It was true. The teachers were unspooling lengths of flattened magnesium ribbon from a single, central roll, and sticking them into the bags themselves before handing over the lighters.

“Besides, you’re missing the point,” he said, after we’d burned our bags and were walking back to clean up our supplies. “It’s not about the termiittiä.”

“What do you mean?”

He held up one of his bags. “Look at this stuff. Rust and metal. Completely harmless unless you get it up over seventeen hundred degrees. And even if you do, it doesn’t explode, it just burns. You couldn’t make a bomb out of it. It’s not even a restricted substance. Mr. Lampi probably bought the ingredients at a hardware supply store. And every parent in the lähiö is going to collect it as soon as they get home tonight, and lock it up tight.”

Ante raised an eyebrow at me, and I shook my head. “I don’t get it.”

“It’s a game,” he said. “A play. Charades. For the little ones. It’s not real.”

“Still don’t get it.”

“The little ones, they’re looking around, they see Mommy and Daddy stressed, arguing—scared, even. Half the grownups aren’t working their regular jobs. School is fucked. There are all kinds of weird new rules, new emergency drills. You hear about Ventura and Masaki on the news, hear people saying that the aliens are coming, that it’s the end of the world. This thing with the termiittiä—”

He shrugged. “If you ask me, it’s a stuffed animal. A security blanket. The grownups, they’re thinking, what can we do to give these kids a sense of control, stop them from going out of their minds with anxiety. Keep them calm. And from their point of view, this stuff is only a little bit more dangerous than building campfires, which all the little ones already know how to do. It’s—it’s theater.”

He fell silent, his face flushed a little, and I realized that this was the first time he’d—I don’t know—let go? The first time he’d said more than a dozen words in a row in front of me, let me peek behind the curtain.

“Plus,” he said, more softly this time, “they really do want supplies on hand everywhere in the lähiö, and you know how it is when they tell you not to touch something. This way, it’s not—tempting. It’s not forbidden or new. It’s just like a hammer or a saw.”

He had a point. Certainly if this had been a lesson in an American school, with some central, guarded cache of termiittiä and a bunch of teachers treating the students like rabid monkey thieves, I’d have ended up spending the next two days trying to talk Jake and Marco out of sneaking in to steal some just on general principle.

In fa