A/N: Surprise medical emergency = surgery tomorrow morning = this update was somewhat accelerated and the next update may be more than two weeks away. I'm already working on it, but who knows whether I'll be able to make progress over the next fortnight. I am NOT intending to take a long hiatus until after the end of this cycle of chapters, though (we still have Cassie, Tobias, Ax, and Esplin, barring major character deaths or additions).

As always, please please pretty please share as many thoughts as you're willing to type out! I've read and enjoyed every single review on this story so far, as well as every bit of discussion and commentary over on r/rational. And of course, if you feel like supporting me on dot com slash sabien, that is also immensely appreciated.

Chapter 17: Garrett

‹Forty-nine, forty-eight, forty-seven, forty-six, forty-fi—›

There wasn't any transition. One moment, MARCO'S voice was in my head, counting down as RACHEL absorbed us into her morph. The next moment, there was nothing.

No sound.

No light.

No sensation of any kind.

‹Garrett,› I thought. I said my name first so that everybody could tell it was me—that was the rule, except when we were all sounding off. ‹Is anybody there? Over.›

Silence.

Not just silence as in very-quiet, but silence as in there-is-no-such-thing-as-sounds-or-ears-or-a-universe-and-you-are-alone. I once read a book that talked about a thing called PROPRIOCEPTION which is your body's sense of where-it-is, things like how far your finger is away from your nose or whether or not your eyes are open and flies don't have very good PROPRIOCEPTION but even so I could tell the difference between dark-quiet and nothing and this was nothing.

I had no body at all.

Except that wasn't quite right, because I was still thinking and thinking has to happen on something, there has to be some kind of thing that is doing the thinking, so maybe it was better to say that I had no sense of having a body, which could mean that I didn't have a body or that I had suffered some kind of paralyzing injury that had severed my nerve connections or that the morphing technology had malfunctioned or that I had just gone crazy and I was imagining things, but whether it was one of those or something else altogether I was still definitely ME.

Which actually probably meant that it wasn't some kind of injury or craziness, because odds were that most things that would injure me that badly or make me that crazy would do something pretty drastic to my brain, too, and as far as I could tell my brain seemed to be working just fine. To test it, I decided to find the square root of 43716299, which was less than 49000000 and more than 36000000 which meant that the answer was between 6000 and 7000 and also 6500 squared was 42250000 and 6750 squared was 45562500 and after a few more seconds I had zigzagged all the way to 6611.8302 and then that was really really close so I stopped.

Then I decided to check my VERBAL CENTER so I took the word area and tried to turn it into chin by changing one letter at a time—

—aria—

—arid—

—grid—

—grit—

—gait—

—wait—

—wail—

—tail—

—toil—

—coil—

—coin—

—chin—

—and that was easy too so I decided that either my brain was working just fine or it was too broken to tell that it was broken and in any case it wasn't going to do any good to worry about it, so I stopped.

For a second, I wasn't thinking any thoughts at all, and the nothing started to remind me of the time TOBIAS and I went down into THE DARK to find THE GIANT SQUID, and I started to get scared, so I reminded myself that I was NOT AFRAID because I was THE TYPE OF PERSON WHO DOES THE RIGHT THING EVEN IF IT'S HARD, and that helped.

Okay, I thought to myself. Think it through.

I had been sitting on RACHEL'S hand in a fly body, next to AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL, and MARCO had been counting down while RACHEL morphed into MISTER TIDWELL so that she could get ILLIM to infest her to sneak us into THE POOL, and we'd been about halfway through the morph when everything went away—

And just like that, I had the answer, or at least a very good HYPOTHESIS, which was that when my fly body got sent off into Z-SPACE along with the rest of RACHEL, of course all of its senses got put on pause. But the fly body wasn't where my brain was, it was just the input-output channel and my brain was somewhere else—in fact, my brain was on pause in its own little pocket dimension and my thoughts were probably running on some kind of ANDALITE EMULATOR TECHNOLOGY, and of course that hadn't gone into stasis because why would it?

But without the fly body, it didn't have any sort of connection with the real universe, and so I was stuck in some kind of interdimensional limbo, which wasn't great but I guess it wasn't the worst thing, as long as the signal came back when RACHEL came out of morph.

I wondered if AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL would figure out the same HYPOTHESIS, or if he'd come up with something totally different, or if he'd already known this was going to happen and hadn't said anything, or if he would just get scared or angry or go crazy. We had staged the scene with ILLIM three miles away from THE POOL, and MISTER TIDWELL had said that he could run three miles in twenty-three minutes because he was a VETERAN, so assuming that it took RACHEL the normal amount of time to morph and demorph and that it would take no more than five minutes to convince ILLIM to go along with the plan and that it would take no more than ten minutes to convince the YEERKS to let us through, then we would only be cut off for forty minutes, which was probably not enough time to really lose it, sanity-wise.

But that was a lot of assumptions, and also there's a rule called MURPHY'S LAW which says that anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and certainly none of us had anticipated this situation. MURPHY'S LAW is sort of a LIE, but it's an interesting one because the more you believe it the less true it is and vice versa, so I believe it very hard most of the time, and so does TOBIAS and from what I can tell so does MARCO and maybe VISSER THREE.

I wondered for a minute if I was able to demorph, but I decided not to test it, partly because then I would be pouring a lot of mass into RACHEL'S pocket dimension—which would change her time limit, not to mention screwing up THE PLAN—and also partly because at the moment my mind was working, but if I demorphed I would be demorphing into a place where everything was in stasis, and since morphing takes concentration then at some point my mind would freeze and I wouldn't be able to finish anyway.

In the end, there was nothing to do but settle in and wait. There was maybe a chance that the signal wouldn't reconnect when RACHEL demorphed, and that this was where I would be stuck forever, but MISTER TIDWELL had been fine when MARCO morphed him away and anyway there wasn't anything I could do about that, so instead I thought about TOBIAS and his mission to WASHINGTON, D.C. and whether or not it had been a good idea for him to go by himself and whether or not it was going well and whether or not he missed me.

Then I counted to ten thousand, which is something I'd always wanted to do, but every other time I'd tried it somebody had interrupted me or I'd fallen asleep.

Then I reviewed THE PLAN in my head.

I was halfway through trying to remember all of the first chapter of Ender's Shadow when all of a sudden the universe came back—temperature, pressure, humidity, light, background noise. Just like before, the change happened all at once, with no warning and no sense of transition.

‹Garrett. Hello?› I asked, keeping my thought-speak on a narrow, private band. ‹Did we make it? Over.›

I'm not at all sure how thought-speak knows where to go. I asked TOBIAS and AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL what they're doing in their heads when they send out private thought-speak, and they gave very different answers that weren't at all like what I do. TOBIAS said that he just focuses really hard on a sort of wanting, like how he wants JAKE or RACHEL or MARCO to be able to hear him. AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL said that with other ANDALITES he can sort of feel who's nearby and reach out to them directly, like holding hands, but that HUMANS feel like rocks in his head and so he just sends messages like throwing darts, only sometimes the darts hurt the rocks and he's had to practice to make his darts softer.

I don't do either of those things. Instead, I have a little picture that represents the person I want to talk to, and I hold up the words beside the picture and that seems to work. My picture of RACHEL is long and gold and sharp, and my picture of AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL is low and blue and furry and wiggly and lonely, and I held both of those up and also I held up my empty picture of NO ONE ELSE just to be sure.

‹Rachel, are we in? Over.›

That was AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL, who had forgotten the rule that we're supposed to identify ourselves when we thought-speak except when it's everybody sounding off, but I could tell it was him anyway because every word was clear-cut and very, very separate from the others.

‹Yes,› said RACHEL, who usually thought with words that got very loud around the second letter before trailing off kind of quietly, like when people say bUllshit or mAke me. ‹We're in.›

I had already taken off by the time she finished think-speaking. I needed to move quickly—I was holding all of the sodium that MARCO and AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL had been able to carry together, which was almost three hundred pounds which meant that me plus the sodium weighed three hundred seventy-five pounds plus or minus five pounds which was only a little bit lighter than ELFANGOR-SIRINIAL-SHAMTUL'S body which meant that my morph time was only a little over an hour which meant that if all of my assumptions about timing were right then I had at most twenty minutes left in morph.

My job was to find one of the piers that stretched out over the Yeerk pool and get underneath it and count to fifty to give AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL a head-start on finding the shield generator and then I was supposed to scream very loud for two seconds and then pause for two seconds and then scream again very loud for as long as I could but this time without including RACHEL or AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL and while I was screaming I was supposed to drop down into the pool and demorph where none of the CONTROLLERS could see me. I had taken thirty-six very deep breaths before I started my morph and I had filled my lungs all the way up right before they disappeared so I was pretty sure I could do the whole morph underwater but again MURPHY'S LAW.

It was very important that I only wait fifty seconds instead of just waiting however long it took AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL to find the shield generator, because he might not be able to find it at all and meanwhile RACHEL was going to be the center of a lot of attention and the sooner I started my distraction the better. She was supposed to be right next to the pool and so far she hadn't said anything about not being right next to the pool, so our plan where my first scream would draw the CONTROLLERS' attention away from her and then my second scream would keep them distracted long enough for her to drop into the water was probably still a good one.

‹I believe I am on the ceiling,› said AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL, still forgetting the rule about identifying himself. ‹I am attempting to reorient. It is very difficult to sense my surroundings in this body. Over.›

‹Stay high as much as you can,› reminded RACHEL, who also wasn't following the rule. I wondered for a moment whether maybe I shouldn't follow it either and whether it was like the rule about no talking after lights out which was a LIE and just for show, or whether it was like the rule about doing exercise so you don't have a heart attack and die which people really believe but aren't very good at following for some reason. ‹They've set up this place to be completely bug-proof. If they see a fly, they'll go nuts. Over.›

The reminder wasn't aimed at me, but it made sense and I'd sort of forgotten, so I aimed myself upward until the air around me was only vibrating, not really moving the way it did around HEADS and HANDS and people walking and breathing. The fly brain liked it when the air was still and quiet because it meant less danger, and I liked it because up there the smells weren't complicated and swirling around and so it was much easier to find the wet swampy smell that meant FOOD to the fly brain and TARGET to me.

It was a lot harder than usual to keep track of where I was and where I'd been in the fly body, which could go up and down and sideways and backwards and couldn't exactly see all that well, but it wasn't that much harder than it had been down in THE DARK after THE GIANT SQUID. I'd forgotten to ask where exactly the piers were supposed to be, but I knew there were two of them and I didn't want to distract RACHEL because she was in a compromised position, so once I got out over the water where the CONTROLLERS couldn't see me I dropped down close to the surface and zigzagged back and forth until I found the edges of the pool and then used that to navigate to the center and then started to fly diagonally toward the corner on the side that seemed like it maybe had the most sounds and smells coming from it. I figured that the piers were probably sticking out of the longer side of the rectangle and were probably long enough that a diagonal path would take me right to them, but if I was wrong then once I got to the corner I could travel along the short side and that should work too.

‹I could not find the entrance to the control room using this body's senses,› said AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL, still forgetting the rule about identifying himself. ‹But I believe I have found a suitable place to demorph. Garrett, I will wait until your signal, in case there is surveillance. Over.›

I wanted to answer but I didn't have anything meaningful to add, so I just said ‹Roger› which is an answer that doesn't need you to identify yourself or say over because you only ever use it when there's COMMON KNOWLEDGE about who's talking to who and when you don't want to say anything else anyway, although even with those rules it would get confusing pretty fast if we ever decided to go back to OAK LANDING and recruit ROGER CARSON who is two years older than me and owes TOBIAS a DOLLAR.

The vibrations and air currents were getting stronger in front of me, and I thought I could detect a soft, regular pounding like footsteps even though I was still only two-thirds of the way to the corner and out over the water, so I made a hypothesis that I was almost at the pier which was sort-of proved when my crazy fly eyes started picking up a kind of gray blur above and in front of me and definitely proved when SOMETHING BIG fell past me and splashed into the water. It was a good thing the fly body was so good at dodging because the thing that fell into the water, which I guess was a YEERK, was maybe ten thousand times heavier than me and any one of the droplets which flew up into the air could have knocked me out of the sky. That wouldn't have been too bad, I guess, since I was going to have to get into the water soon anyway, but I wanted to be under the pier when I did it so that there was less of a chance of one of the CONTROLLERS shooting me while I demorphed.

‹Garrett,› I thought, holding up my pictures of RACHEL and AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL. ‹I'm at the pier, over.›

Swooping into the slightly-darker-and-quieter space between the metal and the water, I latched onto something hard and let my wings rest, unable to stop the fly body from spitting and rubbing its hands together. I was going to start counting to fifty, but then I decided that didn't make sense anymore since AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL didn't need extra time and RACHEL was still in danger. I checked in with them both, and then braced myself, holding up a picture of a sphere three hundred meters across whose volume of one hundred thirteen million, ninety-seven thousand, three hundred thirty-five point five three cubic meters was completely filled up so that the thought-speak would know to go to EVERYBODY.

‹EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE,› I broadcast, for as close to two seconds as I could manage.

When TOBIAS and I were down in THE DARK with THE GIANT SQUID, I had sort-of-accidentally-on-purpose discovered that we could use thought-speak as a weapon, like how parents who lift cars off of their children really are trying to lift cars off of their children but probably aren't expecting it to actually work. All of the others had tried it, too, but only AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL was able to do it, and even he couldn't do it half as well as I could or for as long as I could.

TOBIAS said it was a superpower, like JAKE understanding people or CASSIE being the best morpher, and he held up his hand with the scar that means we are TRUE FRIENDS. But he was wrong because the screaming isn't a superpower any more than being good with numbers or having a mental map or being able to hear the difference between other people's thought-speak is a superpower. I maybe have a superpower but it's just one superpower, not four of them, and it's not particularly interesting or special because it's just that when I'm doing something hard I use all of my head to do it instead of getting lazy or distracted the way most people do.

I held up my sphere-picture again, this time with two small holes in it shaped like RACHEL and AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL.

‹EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE—›

I kept on thought-screaming as I demorphed, right up until the moment that I felt the little hiccup that was the morphing tech handing my mind back over to my real brain, which was usually more or less halfway. I was getting pretty big at that point, but I was pretty sure that none of the CONTROLLERS would have seen me yet, because all of them would have been pretty incapacitated by forty-five seconds of brain-not-working. For a second, I wondered if it had been a mistake to do my thought-scream to EVERYBODY, since that would include all of the CONTROLLERS in the building and a lot of the ones on the street and maybe even all of the ones down underground doing the digging which meant it would be pretty obvious where the scream was coming from, if you were outside and paying attention, and at the center was ME and I didn't particularly want to get shot. But then I remembered the shield and decided that it wasn't very likely even given that the YEERKS were probably actually paying very very close attention.

‹All activity within the building seems to have stopped,› said AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL, still forgetting the rule about identifying himself. ‹Many of the Controllers I can see are unconscious, and the rest are visibly incapacitated.› There was a long pause, almost long enough that I thought he'd forgotten to say over, too, but then he continued. ‹It appears that we drastically underestimated the offensive power of thought-speak against species that do not have the eib. This is an area worth exploring, in the future. Over.›

I didn't respond, because by that point I was almost fully human, the foam-wrapped chunks of sodium popping out of my skin and falling off like some sort of time-lapse video of apples ripening on a tree. RACHEL had thought that there might be some danger of the sodium reacting with the water mid-morph, but MARCO pointed out that none of us had started bleeding during the morphing process which meant that there was probably already some kind of CONTAINMENT FIELD keeping everything sane.

Along with the sodium came the earplugs, headphones, and helmet that I'd worn as protection against the YEERKS, and the Dracon beam I'd brought with me as protection against the CONTROLLERS. But as my eyes finally un-segmented and the world came back into focus, I saw that even the pool had gone quiet, the surface still and unbroken except by the ripples coming from me and from RACHEL.

RACHEL was clinging to the edge of the pool, her own Dracon beam out and firing at low power, pouring stun bolts into every CONTROLLER she could see. "Bombs away?" she called between blasts, her voice carrying easily across the distance between us but still hard to hear because all of the things I had protecting my ears.

"Yeah," I answered, pulling off the helmet and headphones and dropping them into the water. "Clock's ticking. Are we still morphing in the water?"

According to MISTER TIDWELL, the foam canisters he'd assembled around the chunks of sodium should last for at least two and a half minutes, which had felt like the right balance between slow-enough-to-not-kill-us and fast-enough-that-the-YEERKS-couldn't-do-anything-about-it, especially since there were dozens of them. That also meant that Rachel and I had somewhere between one hundred and maybe one hundred thirty seconds before the first of them started to explode, which meant that we had somewhere between ten and forty seconds to start morphing if we wanted to finish morphing before any of the explosions happened, assuming MURPHY'S LAW didn't have anything to do with it.

In the original version of the plan, we'd thought that the room might very well be full of CONTROLLERS who were shooting at us and also we'd thought that even with all of that sodium, probably not all of the water was going to explode or burn away and water is a very good insulator so even though the odds weren't great we'd planned on doing our second morph without getting out of the pool. This had been what MARCO called a BAD PLAN but I was NOT AFRAID because I am THE TYPE OF PERSON WHO DOES THE RIGHT THING EVEN IF IT'S HARD and right now the right thing was to DESTROY THE YEERK POOL and if that meant dying then I was not happy to die but at least I was okay with it and TOBIAS would be proud of me.

"How hot did Cassie say they could stand?" she asked, as I dug the earplugs out of my ears and dropped them into the water as well.

"One hundred fifty degrees C," I called back. I reached up for the edge of the pier, making sure that I could haul myself out if I had to. If RACHEL didn't make a decision within the next ten seconds, I decided, I would make a decision for myself, and the decision would be not to be right next to all of the things that were about to explode but instead maybe to be outside of the building entirely or wherever AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL was. "The explosions can get as hot as eleven hundred C," I added, trying to be helpful.

Fortunately RACHEL is not the type of person who wastes a lot of time when she makes decisions, and there were over two seconds left out of the original ten when she said "Out" and hauled herself out of the water, still firing stun bursts left and right even though by this point she'd pretty much shot everybody who hadn't already been unconscious which according to AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL wasn't many.

I climbed up onto the pier and ran back toward the shore, stepping over two HORK-BAJIR who had fallen over but not fallen all the way into the water. For a moment I thought that RACHEL might be heading for one of the doors, but then I saw that she was simply heading for the corner of the room that was furthest away from the pool and partially protected by a storage shed, which was good because one of the doors led down to where JAKE got eaten which was DANGEROUS and one of the doors led outside but was welded shut and one of the doors led back up to the rest of the building but it had a BIO-FILTER on it and the other two doors led to UNCHARTED TERRITORY. It was going to get to eleven hundred C right by the water but with that much distance we would maybe be safe, especially if the ventilation system wasn't very good and the fire ate up all the oxygen before things got too hot.

As near as I could tell, we were already over a minute and a half past the moment when the first sodium canister had dropped off me by the time we actually started our second morph. And sure enough, we were only a third of the way through when we heard a FTHP and a HSSS and then a very loud BOOM followed by a series of CRACKLES and then several more BOOMS until soon enough the whole thing was just one ongoing VERY LOUD NOISE and there was light that was so bright that I had to squeeze my eyes shut even behind the storage shed and keep them shut until they morphed away along with my ears and by that point I couldn't really sense anything except the feeling of falling in slow motion as my body grew smaller and smaller and smaller into the smallest shape I'd been yet.

CASSIE loves animals and knows a lot about them compared to the rest of us, which is why we go to her when we need to do something that is particularly tricky for humans, and even if she doesn't always know how to get the right animal she almost always knows which animal we want. In this case, what we wanted was an animal that was small enough to avoid notice and tough enough that it wouldn't mind if it got a little crushed and also as fireproof as possible to whatever extent fireproof was a thing-an-animal-might-be. And we'd thought that maybe there weren't any animals like that and this was just going to be a suicide mission, but then CASSIE had said that she knew just the thing and not only that but we could also probably find it right there in the valley if we were willing to spend a few hours looking very closely at different patches of moss.

And so we still had problems, we definitely had problems, we were going to have a very hard time escaping if the building collapsed on us but at least we would probably make it through the initial fireball because TARDIGRADES are some of the toughest creatures on the planet or as MARCO says they absolutely just do not give a FUCK.