Author's note: This is the complete version of Chapter 19, including both the part published on 6/5/2016 and the part published on 6/11/2016. This is also the part that will be preserved; the new post is just the second half, and will be deleted when I post the next chapter so that everything will be neat and clean.

As always, I ask that you post comments, reviews, and critiques, either here or over on r/rational, where there's a lively discussion board with a lot of interesting thoughts and theorizing. We're somewhere in the vicinity of the halfway point, and I love hearing what people like, what people hate, what hints and clues people have noticed, and what conclusions they've drawn about the future. Your feedback keeps me going!

Lastly, I accept patronage at the obvious website dot com slash sabien, and I appreciate every penny my readers are able to spare. I've got a cool project I'm saving the funds for (kids' rationality bootcamp) and I've recently had to put my own self-contributions to it on pause to deal with medical bills, so donations make a real difference.

Chapter 19: Tobias

IT IS DONE.

And without warning—without even the tiniest physical sensation—I was back.

No burning Yeerk pool. No strange, elfish god. No laser beams hovering at the back of my little brother's head. Just a small, ordinary-looking office, with a single, tidy desk and a window with a distant view of the Potomac river.

I glanced down at my blue Andalite hands—glanced down with my stalk eyes while my main eyes stayed forward, watched my ten slim fingers curl into fists as my double thumbs folded over them. Five seconds ago, those hands had been human, the knuckles swollen and bleeding where they'd smashed into Jake's face.

In front of me, the man behind the desk—Jeremiah Poznanski, a mid-level operative at the Department of Homeland Security—was scribbling furiously on a notepad, just as I'd told him to do. I'd said it was to prevent his half of the conversation from being recorded, and he'd given absolutely nothing away as he nodded, knowing full well that there was a camera watching from each corner of the room.

—priority to establish a core of known-clean operatives, start securing area. 100+ high-value targets in perimeter (SS, exec, legis, CIA, FBI, NSA, Penta, my superiors, four billionaires, eight CEOs, lobbyists, journalists). Once we have core, can send team to investigate Ventura. Confirm no way to ID compromised from outside? No giveaways?

I couldn't help it. I began to laugh, my morphed body translating the impulse into a sort of staccato stomping as my tail curled and quivered.

In front of me, Jeremiah stopped writing—frowned—jotted a single line off in the margin of the page.

Something wrong?

My thoughts were—sliding. Like a giant stack of magazines, or a mud-covered hillside, gradually picking up momentum as my mind began to unravel.

Sir? Elfangor?

I ignored him, ignored his tiny little paper, his silly little scratchings, sank to the floor and continued to shake, wild laughter echoing silently—unsatisfyingly—in my head. I wanted a mouth. I wanted a mouth so I could howl. Without so much as a thought for the consequences, I began to demorph.

It was just too funny, you know? The seven of us, trying so hard, trying—ha—our best—hanging on by our fingertips, scrambling for every inch, every tiny scrap of intel or advantage, and the whole time—the whole time—the whole thing—just a game, just pawns—alien warlords who could wipe entire cities off the map—insane chess gods with crazy time powers—and Garrett and I could turn into birds, and we thought that would matter, I thought it was enough to keep us safe—and now suddenly I was back, back here with this Washington spook, and the things I'd told him so far were a house of cards, it was all puppetry, I'd told him just what we wanted him to know, like I could somehow stay in control—

In front of me, Jeremiah was on his feet, frozen with indecision, his pen and paper forgotten. I saw his eyes twitch toward his desk drawer—the drawer where he kept his issue sidearm, a loaded Beretta M9 with the safety off—and I laughed harder, wheezing huffs emerging from the gash in my face as my mouth appeared, as my skin crawled backwards to merge with my half-human trachea.

I'd been so careful. So many houses, so many people—digging through minds, dodging security systems, always morphing with one of Ax's shredders in my hands. Thirty Controllers—that was our best guess, based on the tiny bit of data from Ax's planetwide scan, back when we'd first woken him up. There were maybe thirty Controllers scattered across Washington, and I'd been doing everything I could to avoid attracting their attention, to find out who and where they were without giving anything away. I must have acquired and morphed a hundred different people over the past week, sneaking in and out of bedrooms, stunning people in their sleep. Jeremiah Poznanski's son slept with an open window. Jeremiah Poznanski slept alone in a king size bed since his wife left last year.

Jeremiah Poznanski wasn't a Controller. None of them were. Visser Three was dropping asteroids, and I was sneaking around on tiptoe.

I squeezed my eyes shut—just the two of them, as the stalks shriveled and shrank and vanished under my hair—squeezed them shut as tears began to leak out.

‹Investigate the city,› I'd told him—not even five minutes ago, before being snatched away by whatever-the-fuck that little Keebler god had been. I'd told him about the YMCA, the hospital, the high school. Told him about the valley. The Gardens. The Bug fighters hovering over Jake and Rachel and Marco's houses. Told him to use satellites for surveillance—to investigate the people who should've already been doing that surveillance, to see if they'd been taken.

Because I'd assumed the city would still be there.

Because I'd assumed that things made sense—that even in a world with secret alien invasions and teenagers with morphing technology, there were some things that just didn't happen, cities didn't just disappear because it was more convenient that way.

We were not ready for Visser Three.

And if we weren't ready for Visser Three, I didn't even know what we weren't, with regards to whatever Crayak and Ellimist were up to.

So I laughed. Laughed as my human body finished emerging, clothes and bookbag and all—laughed as I pushed myself up to my feet, laughed as the shredder grew out of my palm and I leveled it at Jeremiah Poznanski, making him swallow visibly.

Hands flat on desk, didn't even go for his gun, willing to die rather than risk pissing off the nice alien visitor, what a patriot—

I thought about Garrett, frozen in time, his death a mere heartbeat away, and I laughed.

I thought about Cassie, who even now would be in a race for her life—unless the whole thing had been a prank, a troll, one giant fucking intergalactic lie—and I laughed.

I thought about Louis, and Fletcher, and Johnny, and all the other kids from Oak Landing, who would all be dead in thirty minutes. I thought about Jake, and Rachel, and Marco, who would not—unless they would—and I cackled madly, my whole body shaking.

So this is what a nervous breakdown feels like, a part of me whispered.

My thoughts were swirling, my brain off-kilter. Like the time I'd thought the magic Rice Krispies treats weren't doing anything, so I'd gone ahead and eaten four more.

In front of me, Jeremiah's paralysis had finally broken, and he reached for the phone on his desk. I didn't bother to stop him, just laughed harder, wheezing. The phone wasn't connected to anything; I'd made sure of that before ever setting foot in his office.

"Elfangor—" he began, his voice quiet—hesitant—unsure.

"Elfangor's dead," I managed to choke out, and the look on Jeremiah's face triggered another wave of hysterical giggles.

"What—"

"Fuck it," I said, dropping heavily into the chair in front of the desk. For a single, split second, a tiny voice inside of me shouted that maybe—just maybe—the meteor strike would buy us some cover, that maybe Visser Three would assume he'd killed all of us, as long as I didn't give us away here in D.C.

But that just made me crack up again. Clever little boy, clever plans, so tricksy, that's cute. "Fuck it," I repeated, barely managing to hold the shredder steady. "Fuck it fuck it fuck it fuck it fuck that fuck me fuck you fuck everything fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck—" and then I laughed some more because it sounded just like the song that Zach had showed me in the library, that got us kicked out, the guy with the bad teeth and the weird afro—

"Are you—" Jeremiah began, before breaking off to swallow again. "Are you going to kill me?"

He's really handling himself quite well, all things considered. Not everyday you come back from your bathroom break to find an alien waiting to tell you about a bodysnatcher invasion before transforming into a crazy teenager with a blaster. I should tell his boss to give him a raise.

"How's fifty an hour sound?" I wheezed.

Slowly, smoothly, keeping his eyes on me the whole time, Jeremiah leaned back, began to reach toward his desk drawer. I watched impassively, still laughing, as he slid it open—watched as he glanced down—as he did a no-shit real-life double take, a look of horror and disbelief settling onto his face.

"Looking for this?" I asked, reaching into my bookbag with my free hand, drawing out the gun. I grinned involuntarily—it was just so funny to see him there, to see that he didn't know what was going on, had no idea how to respond, so lost, so scared, no script, no plan, didn't know, didn't know, didn't know—

Tobias! Pull it together, man!

Why, though? Having it together was not going to matter. Having it together was not going to help me deal with Darth Vader chucking asteroids around, or Q turning everybody into puppets.

This is serious! Garrett—

Was either alive or dead, had already alived or died, and there was nothing, absolutely no thing at all that I could do about it.

—would fucking slap you in the face for giving up right now.

But that was because he was a naïve little kid, because I had protected him, sheltered him, stopped him from having to face the cruelty, the utter insanity of everything that was now impossible to ignore, if I was a better friend I wouldn't have lied to him, would have just told him when I saw his birth parents at the mall with their eight-year-old daughter, so rich and clean and happy—

Jeremiah cleared his throat. "What—" he said, and then faltered. "I don't—can you tell me what—just happened? What's going on?"

Why did you suddenly lose your fucking mind, kid?

"I've just received a transmission from the mothership," I said, my voice still shaky with laughter. "No point investigating Ventura county—Visser Three is taking a mulligan."

"What?"

"There's an asteroid coming. Garrett blew up the pool, and they're all going to starve, so Visser Three's starting over because dealing with a bunch of starving headaches—"

Tobias! Come on!

"—he's got twelve more ships coming in like five months, so why bother—"

"Stop," Jeremiah cut in, his voice tense. "Wait. Do you want—I mean, should we be talking out—"

"That was a lie," I broke in. "I know you've got cameras and bugs everywhere and your agents and the fifth floor, I was trying to make you think I didn't know everything, Jeremiah Poznanski who used to eat five boxes of Lucky Charms a week, who got blackout drunk and beat his kid, you should feel in control so you can relax because I'm not dangerous."

I felt my lips twitch at the words in control, but I held it together—barely.

Jeremiah no longer looked even remotely composed. His eyes were darting back and forth—from the door, to the pair of guns I was holding, to me, to the papers on his desk. He was starting to sweat, and I could see a tremor in his jaw.

Good. Now he fucking knows how I feel.

"What do you mean, an asteroid?" he asked finally.

I could feel the laughter creeping in around the edges, the wild hysteria that I was just barely keeping at bay. There was a part of me that was horrified, watching the whole train wreck as it unfolded in slow motion—the dropping of the mask, the ruin of all my careful planning and maneuvering—but the rest of me just couldn't find a reason to care.

Fuck it. Just tell him straight.

"We've been trying to find a way into the pool," I said, fighting valiantly to hold my voice steady. "Blow it up, cut off their food supply, starve them out. Looks like we succeeded, maybe half an hour ago. But Visser Three was one step ahead of us. He had a cloaked asteroid waiting behind the moon, and he's launched it. It's going to hit right on top of the YMCA. There won't be anything left—not the pool, not the hospital, not the whole goddamn city. It'll leave a ten-mile crater in the middle of Ventura county. He's going to kill all of them. Everybody."

I could feel the mudslide slowing, feel my brain slowly stitching itself back together. It was like swimming up from the bottom of a deep pool—for the first time, I noticed that the arm holding the shredder was trembling, felt the sweat that was trickling down the back of my neck. I felt weak—loose—like I was recovering from the flu.

"When?" Jeremiah asked tightly.

"About thi—twenty five minutes," I said, feeling my Joker grin shrink a little further. A small voice in the back of my head had begun to moan—oh, God, what have you done, he's seen your face—

Jeremiah started to stand. "We have to—"

"No," I interrupted, raising the shredder half an inch. "Think."

He froze, and we locked eyes. Another voice arose in the back of my head, this one sounding an awful lot like Marco—come on, don't do the stupid cliché grownup thing, please be actually smart—

"Right," he said, settling back into his chair. A shadow passed over his face, and I relaxed my elbow a little. "Right. Okay. We—"

He trailed off, scrubbed at his forehead, and looked over at me again. "Right," he repeated.

There was a long pause.

"You aren't actually an alien, are you?" he asked quietly. "You have access to one. But you're human."

I said nothing—just continued to hold his gaze.

"You're scared," he said. "Of the people they've taken here in D.C."

"And in New York, Silicon Valley, Tokyo, Seoul, Jakarta, Delhi, Beijing, Moscow, Istanbul, São Paulo, and London," I said, rattling off the list Marco and I had put together from Ax's map. I was not about to try to explain Crayak and Ellimist on top of everything else. "If they have a hundred Controllers in each—"

"Do they?" he asked.

"No. I don't think so. Maybe thirty."

"How are they managing it? Without pools, I mean. You said every three days—"

"We thought about that. Some of them could be flying back and forth to California, but it wouldn't make sense for them all to do that, especially important ones—"

"Like the President."

"Right. They could maybe just be killing their way through hosts and Yeerks, if they had to, or they could be getting Kandrona some other way—like, concentrating it down from the pool, and getting it through an injection or a pill. That can't be easy, though, or they'd do it all the time. Best guess is, they're cycling Yeerks in and out of stasis—"

"What?"

I hesitated for a moment. I could still feel mud and fog clogging up my thoughts, still sense manic laughter lurking just around the corner. I was shaken, confused—in no state to be making important strategic decisions. The plan had been to tell Jeremiah almost everything, but in my disguise as Elfangor, not as a human teenager who could be intimidated, marginalized, dismissed.

So what? Either way, he's going to do what he's going to do.

But in the original version, I would still have been able to call some of the shots—

You just saw how much of a difference that makes.

I sucked in a breath. Five months. We had five months to prepare for the second round of Visser Three's invasion. Five months during which he might drop asteroids, kidnap heads-of-state, send cloaked and shielded Bug fighters to vaporize population centers. We'd bought ourselves some breathing room, but the Yeerks still held the high ground. The second they thought we were gaining the upper hand, they'd decimate the Earth's population.

How much of that did Jeremiah understand? He was an intelligence agent, after all—it was his job to understand strategy. In the abstract, he'd probably do a better job of it than I would—

—especially given that you just fell apart at the seams five minutes ago.

It all boiled down to a question of who. Who had Visser Three ordered taken? Who was watching? Who could I trust? Who did we need on our team, to start getting the Earth ready for the next round?

I didn't have the answers. Jeremiah Poznanski of the Department of Homeland Security, though—

He probably didn't have them either, but he knew where to look. That's why I'd chosen him in the first place. He was the first link in the chain, the first step in a bootstrapping process to get me connected with the people who actually mattered.

—what do you mean, actually mattered, none of us actually matter, this whole thing is a fucking joke, it's a game—

The voice was still there, but it was no longer the loudest thing in my head—no longer able to lever the rest of me into hysteria and despair. A memory of Garrett floated up in response—my own words, but they no longer felt like they belonged to me.

—and if we can't, we'll just do the next thing, and the next, and the next. We'll keep on trying until we figure out a way.

I lowered the shredder, watching to see how Jeremiah would react. His shoulders dropped half an inch, but otherwise he remained motionless, waiting.

Reaching into my bag, I drew out one of the stasis cylinders we'd stolen after Jake woke up. I leaned forward and set it on the desk.

"That's a Yeerk," I said, and Jeremiah's eyes widened fractionally. "Inside. It's in stasis; I don't know how. Controllers carry these for emergencies, in case somebody figures them out and they have to do a quick infestation. Stun somebody, put the canister up to their ear, push that button—"

I trailed off. Jeremiah nodded tightly. Reaching out for the cylinder, he paused. "Is it dangerous?" he asked. "Fragile?"

I shook my head, and he picked it up. "You can analyze that all you want," I said. "Bring the Yeerk out, study it. Maybe even infest somebody, see if you can develop a way to detect Controllers from the outside. But whatever you do, the Yeerk's got only three days, unfrozen, before it starves."

Jeremiah held the cylinder up at eye level, looking closely at the construction, the controls. "So if you had, say, ten of these—"

"—then you could keep somebody Controlled for a month, yeah. Swap in, swap out. That's what we figured. It's not going to be easy—there are probably some issues with changing Yeerks every time, and you'd have to arrange to keep the host body secured during the transition—"

"—but it's a hell of a lot easier than flying the President out to California every three days." Jeremiah set the cylinder down, looking grim. "What else can you give me? That weapon, for example—do you have a spare we could send to the lab, to start reverse engineering?"

I felt the beginnings of another crazy laugh, and squashed them mercilessly. Not now, dammit. Raising the shredder again, I popped the catch to release the charge canister and set both of them on his desk. Reaching into the bag, I drew out one of Ax's spare earplugs—he'd given me eleven once he realized we didn't have similar technology of our own, having used up three on something he didn't want to talk about—and explained what it was for.

"We should also probably consider telling someone about the meteor strike," he said cautiously. "Someone who isn't in one of those cities—someone in a position to record what happens, who we'll have an easier time convincing and recruiting later if we've already proven ourselves by predicting this in advance."

"Do you know who that might be?" I asked, glancing at the clock on the wall. "Because there's not much more than twenty minutes left."

He bit his lip. "Maybe." He glanced down at the shredder, then back up at me. "Depends on whether or not you're going to lift whatever block you have on my phone."

I stared right back. "Depends on whether you're going to stop trying to fuck me over," I said flatly.

There was another long pause.

"So you were lying," Jeremiah said softly. "You can read minds."

I said nothing. It wasn't quite mind-reading, after all—I'd dug through Jeremiah's thoughts and memories hours ago, while morphed into his body, but that didn't mean I had anything like the ability to predict what he was thinking on the spot.

"Section two, subsection three," I said, and he winced.

You had to give Homeland Security some credit. They had actual procedure for interacting with extraterrestrial visitors, all laid out in a huge, branching decision tree that ranged from friendly to hostile, alone to en masse, English-speaking to incomprehensible, carrying tech or not—every possibility I could have come up with and more. Section two, subsection three dealt with gullible, vulnerable, isolated aliens, who could potentially be tricked or trapped or forced to give up valuable technology.

Jeremiah might believe me about the Yeerks. There was no way to be absolutely sure, but he certainly seemed to be taking the threat seriously. But he'd also been stringing me along, keeping me talking, trying to give his colleagues a chance to set up a net in the hallway, the adjacent offices, the floor below, and the roof. There was a pressure pad beneath the carpet, near the corner of his desk, and he'd triggered it almost as soon as I'd made my presence known.

"They're not coming," I said, looking pointedly at the slightly discolored spot on the carpet. "The second you walked into the room, we froze every channel of communication in and out. No radio, no light, no electromagnetic signals of any kind. The track they've got on your heartrate monitor has been watching a loop for as long as you've been sitting here. There've been two phone calls and three instant messages, and as far as anybody outside this room can tell, you've answered all of them normally. I'm not an idiot, Agent Poznanski."

To his credit, Jeremiah didn't try to deny it, didn't get flustered. Without the slightest change in his facial expression, he opened his mouth and shouted. "Fire!" he called out, his eyes flickering toward the door. "Fire in Poznanski's office! Help!"

I didn't move. Together, we waited—ten seconds, twenty. Finally, he shrugged.

"The procedure exists for a reason," he said simply. "It's easier to fool a single agent than to fool the whole department. It's exactly because of threats like your Yeerks that we want as many eyes on a given situation as possible, as soon as possible."

"You can't risk it," I said. "You can't trust your department. I cleared Stevenson, Ramos, Butler, and Wyle on my way up to you, but even they might have been taken in the last day or so. Visser Three took out a whole county—including ten thousand of his own people—just because of a risk of exposure."

"Does he know about you?"

I paused.

Stupid clever boy, things aren't for sense.

"Yes," I admitted. "I don't know why we're different." Other than the god that says we are. "Maybe because we already had a chance to go public, and we didn't. Maybe he doesn't care about a small resistance, for some reason. But he's not fucking around when it comes to the whole planet. If we start alerting the general population and he catches wind of it—the only thing keeping him from glassing every major city on the planet is that he doesn't want to."

"We have to start somewhere."

"Yeah—somewhere outside Washington. Not with the people in this building. Agents in the field, agents in other cities—not New York or Silicon Valley, either—people who haven't been anywhere near infested areas for at least two months."

"Then why are you here? Why are you talking to me at all?"

"Because if they have the President, we have to get her back. Two birds, one stone. Someone like you can help get both balls rolling."

He frowned. "Look. You haven't given me any proof yet, okay? I mean—sure, yes, you've proven that you have telepathic abilities, that you've got transformational powers and a body that looks alien, that you've got a couple of shiny things that are plausibly unknown technology—if they're not just movie props—and that you can shut down communications from my office. All of that means you're somebody interesting, but it doesn't mean there's a secret alien invasion going on. I have to maintain some skepticism—for all I know, these Yeerks are the good guys, and you're doing some kind of preemptive counter-counter-insurgency."

"The asteroid—"

"Hasn't happened yet. And even if it does, what's to say that wasn't your team? All I've got to go on is your word, and for Christ's sake—you just had what sure looked to me like a meltdown five minutes ago. You aren't exactly inspiring confidence, here."

I clamped down on my knee-jerk response, forced myself to stop and think. "You're right," I said. "Okay? I admit it—you're right. But look—you can see that it makes sense to be cautious, right? At least for now? I mean, if I am telling the truth—"

"There's still a chain of command. I have to go to somebody—I have resources only to the extent that I play by the rules. If you want me to start investigating the rest of the department—if you want me to get these artifacts to somebody who can start to understand them—then I can't just go rogue."

"Who do you need? I can clear a couple of people, if you tell me who they are and where to find them."

"See, that's exactly what I'm not going to do, is tell you the names and locations of important targets in the Department of Homeland Security."

I gave myself a mental kick. Just drag it out of him in morph later. "Point. More generally, then. Who would you go to if you thought everyone in the building had been compromised?"

"I'd go to the NSA, or the CIA, or the FBI, or the Pentagon—they're all right around the corner. Which, by the way, is another element that makes your whole story more than a little difficult to believe. Seems to me that if this Visser Three is as competent as you're making him out to be, he would have either set up shop right here in Washington, or gone to some tiny village somewhere with no internet where he didn't have to worry about anybody noticing what was going on. What's the thinking behind taking some random midsize city in California?"

I gritted my teeth. The conversation was spiraling out of control, and once again, I felt an almost irresistible impulse to laugh. At this point, it would almost be easier to just kill him and start over—but I couldn't do that, either, because of how clever I'd been in setting up the whole conversation.

I glanced over toward the corner of the room—at the closed door, the empty carpet, the unobstructed wall.

"Who would you go to if you couldn't trust anyone in Washington?" I asked, doing my best imitation of patience. "If this were one of those spy movie type situations?"

"DHS branch office in Chicago or Houston."

"And if you couldn't go to DHS at all?"

"I don't have some magical 'contact' that lives 'off the grid,' if that's what you're asking. I know a couple of people at West Point, and I know at least one person at Los Alamos and another at DARPA. Might be able to get something done at Bell Labs, too, at least with the artifacts—my ID should open a few doors there. And if I'm just pulling rank, I could probably do a lot with a National Guard unit. They're generally pretty friendly to DHS."

"You got a way to send secure email?"

Jeremiah scoffed.

"I mean secure from your boss, too."

"Yes."

I looked at the clock. Fifteen minutes, give or take. "Okay. Those people, and only those people. A meteor's about to hit Ventura county, you've got an extremely delicate situation you might need help with, they shouldn't tell anybody, you'll be in touch. Nothing else. Sound fair?"

Jeremiah had already opened his computer and was typing furiously.

"Rictic," I said. "Check the messages before you let them through."

Jeremiah glanced up at me and frowned, but said nothing. Fifteen seconds later, he finished, spinning the laptop around to show me the screen. "Want to rephrase them, so I can't send any secret codes?" he asked, a note of sarcasm in his tone.

"Rictic," I repeated. The screen flickered, the words rearranging themselves, and I nodded. Puzzled, Jeremiah turned the computer back around and then blanched, the blood draining from his face as he realized what had happened.

"You can click 'send,'" I said.

He did, looking faintly nauseated, and then closed his computer. "So," he said, his voice just a little too loud and indifferent. "That's done. Now what?"

I pointed toward the stasis cylinder, earplug, shredder, and charge canister. "Can you actually get those things out of the building, without security noticing?"

His mouth twisted. "If I say yes, will you believe me?"

"No."

"Then why are you asking?"

I couldn't help it. I grinned, a faint memory of Jake drifting up from the ancient past of a few weeks ago. "Because you might say no," I answered.

"No, I can't. They check everything, in and out."

Nodding again, I reached forward to scoop the items into my bookbag, pausing as the lingering thought of Jake drew my gaze toward my knuckles. They were smooth and undamaged, with no trace of the beating I'd given the other boy.

The least important thing for you to be confused about.

"Then it's up to you, I guess," I said. "I've given you all the information I can. You know about Ventura. You know about the Yeerks. You know about thought-speak and the morphing power. If it turns out I can trust you—if you don't do anything stupid while all of this is blowing up—then I'll visit you at your house, and give these back. The sooner we can get human labs manufacturing this stuff, the better."

It was—as Marco would have put it—insane. It would've been one thing to trust this guy after speaking to him as Elfangor, being one step ahead of him the whole time, giving him no reason to worry or doubt. It was a whole different thing, letting him go under these circumstances. He'd seen my face—seen me crack up and break down—been in control of the conversation more than half the time. If I'd left any lasting impression of my personality, it was as an unstable teenager with a gun, not as the aloof, genius alien I'd intended to be. I'd given up a lot of ground.

But there were gods, and asteroids, and even though I'd walked back at least a little bit from my brush with hysteria, the idea of sure and safe still largely seemed ridiculous. There was only so much to be gained from caution and cleverness—we had as little as five months to get ready before the rest of the fleet showed up, and it was time to start doing things Rachel's way. Jeremiah Poznanski wasn't the perfect ally, but he was what I had. That would either be enough, or it wouldn't.

"What about you?" he asked.

Find Garrett.

"There are still thirty Controllers somewhere in Washington," I said reluctantly. "Maybe the President, maybe the Pentagon, maybe one of those billionaires you mentioned. I'm going to keep looking."

Jeremiah grimaced, seeming to struggle for a moment. "How are you—I mean, how do you plan to—get close?"

I shrugged. "I've been doing okay so far just sneaking into people's houses. I've been trading up—that's how I found you."

His grimace deepened. "Paul Evans," he said finally. "Secret Service." He scribbled a few lines on a post-it note, held it out to me. "I don't know him, exactly—not enough to tell you when his birthday is. But we had a few drinks together, after my wife left. If you catch him off-duty, my name should be enough to get him to stop and listen. That's where I'd start—where I will start, if you want my help."

Reaching out, I took the note. It seemed impolite to mention that I already knew all of that—that Paul Evans was a name I'd dragged from Poznanski Prime's brain earlier that morning. "Thanks," I said, dropping the note into my bag. "I'll take it from here—you're more valuable pulling strings inside the DHS."

Standing, I shrugged the bookbag onto my shoulders.

"Where are you—how are you—"

"Window," I said, and began to morph.

It was a test, but not much of one. If Jeremiah made any sort of violent move toward me, Rictic the Chee—currently poised invisibly in the corner by the door, where he'd been standing the whole time, keeping us shielded behind a comm blackout and a hologram—would stop him in his tracks. And if he tried to trap me, refused to let me go—

Well. Once Rictic let me out—I knew where he lived. Knew where his son went to school. It wouldn't be too hard to get the robot to go run some small errand while I cleaned up loose ends.

Clever boy, clever plans.

The type of people who do the right thing.

Did you really think you were the main character of this story?

I shook my head, trying to set aside the voices as I continued to shrink toward the floor. I would have been more certain to avoid notice in fly morph, but I didn't much like the idea of trying to find a safe demorphing zone as a fly, not to mention the fact that Jeremiah didn't need to be grossed out any more than he already was. I knew from experience that it was hard enough watching someone change into a bird.

"That technology," he said suddenly, a thoughtful note creeping into his voice. "Morphing. If you are human—they gave it to you? It isn't species-specific?"

I tried to laugh, but my voice box had already disappeared, my lips protruding and hardening as my teeth dissolved into nothing. Ten seconds—I'd been ten seconds away from making the suggestion when I'd been snatched away by the time lord. It would have been the very next words out of my—well, the next thoughts out of my head, if the whole thing hadn't gone sideways.

‹Yes,› I said, as my skin shattered into feathers and my arms flattened into wings. ‹And I can give it to others, too. Will give it, as soon as I find people I can trust.›

I expected him to say more, but he was silent for the rest of the morph. Silent as I shrank down to barely ten inches long, silent as he opened the window for me, silent as I darted out into the warm afternoon sun, leaving Rictic to keep an eye on him.

I knew how he felt. I didn't know what to say, either.

What do you do, five minutes before a disaster you have no way to prevent?

Tobias from an hour ago would have been darting toward the White House, or the Capitol building, hoping to catch the reactions of important people, to eavesdrop on sensitive conversations. He would've been motivated, energized—focused on the possibility that his efforts might make a difference.

I didn't feel completely helpless. But I was a whole lot less confident than I had been that morning.

I drifted aimlessly across the city, catching the columns of warm air rising off the grass and letting them carry me up and up and up. In a minute, I was level with the peak of the Washington monument, some five miles away; with my hawk vision, I thought I could just barely make out figures moving behind the windows of the observation deck. Two minutes after that, and I was high enough that I could no longer hear any sound except the roar of the occasional passing jet.

Now? a part of my brain kept asking.

I kept rising as no became maybe, maybe became probably, and probably became definitely. I watched the tiny blobs of cars and trucks and people, waiting for—

What?

I'm not sure what I imagined. Maybe that all of the cars would stop, that all of the people would gather around shops and bars, peering at the TVs. Maybe that the Earth would shake, or there would be a flash of light and a thunderclap.

Something, you know?

But there was nothing. If it was going to happen, it had already happened, and down below, the slow crawl of life just—kept going.

There was a part of me that wanted to strike out west, to switch from hawk to snipe and power across the continent, to find Garrett and touch him and look into his eyes and talk to him and know that he was alive, that it had either all been some crazy dream or that the careless god had kept his word.

It wasn't the right thing to do, though. It wasn't the right thing, which meant I couldn't do it, no matter how much I wanted to, because I was still Garrett's number one reason to believe that the right thing was something that actually mattered. It wasn't funny anymore, like it had been back in Jeremiah's office—just sad and heavy and confusing.

If I wanted to give up, and didn't—if I kept hanging on just so someone else wouldn't give up, even though I thought giving up was probably the right move, even for them—

What should you do, when nothing you could do can possibly make a difference?

Even if it's hard. We'll keep on trying until we figure out a way.

Stupid kid. I could've killed Jake, if it wasn't for the fact it was my own damn fault.

I wheeled in a lazy circle, tracing the curve of the horizon with the tip of my wing, trying to think, to understand, to decide.

I could go to the White House, where the President—probably—would make some kind of emergency speech.

I could go to Silver Spring, where Paul Evans lived, and try to acquire him, to see if there was an alien slug living in his brain.

I could go back to Jeremiah's house, and try to slip inside when his son came home from school.

I could admit it didn't matter, and go nowhere.

Is this what they want me to do? Elfangor's gods? Are they hoping I'll spin around in circles, accomplishing nothing?

If I'd had a human face, I would have scowled. There was no point in that kind of thinking. Either everything was predetermined, in which case who cared, or I still had freedom of choice, so it didn't matter. The only thing that had changed was that now I was aware of the larger game, where before I'd just been oblivious.

Elfangor knew, though—didn't he? He'd encountered them before—Crayak, or Ellimist, or both. That's what he meant when he said we were on the widest path to victory.

Only that was bullshit—wasn't it? Elfangor hadn't thought the way to win was to save us. He'd come to burn the planet to a crisp. In fact—

Probably the whole reason his weapon didn't work is that one of them interfered.

I shivered, shedding altitude. If you looked at it that way—

How many of the things that had happened to us hadn't just happened? How many of them had been done to us? The Chapmans—Cassie's parents—Jake, nearly getting eaten alive.

Jake, getting saved. Coming back, practically from the dead, through what seemed—in retrospect—like an awfully big coincidence.

Shit—the whale.

Suddenly, I understood what it was like to be religious. Really religious, like the kind of people who said things like "God works in mysterious ways" or "God helps those who help themselves." For the first time in my life, it seemed possible that there really were no such things as coincidences.

It left me feeling very, very small.

Just—be alive, okay, Garrett?

Please.

I circled aimlessly for a few more minutes, climbing up until my breath began to mist and half the clouds were underneath me.

Okay, fine. You do matter, you don't matter—whatever. You have to do something. You can't just fly in circles forever.

Marco and Jake had sent me to get the President. As a distant second, to try to do some recruiting, or start a second resistance movement. But the President was the obvious target, the most important pawn. More than anything else, I needed to know if the Yeerks already had her.

And for that, I needed to get close—close enough to touch her in my own, human form.

Straightening out, I pointed my nose north and down, beginning the long, straight glide toward Silver Spring. Paul Evans, at 4240 Highwood Place.

I would try not to do anything clever.

Maybe I'd been doing it wrong for weeks, and I should've just been looking for Paul Evans from the very beginning. Or maybe I'd been doing it right all along, and getting to him—without having to go through any Controllers—was the payoff I'd been working for.

Either way, Paul Evans was the perfect ally.

I don't know much about the Secret Service. Just what everybody knows, really—that they're the one agency that's never had a traitor, and that they jump in front of the President whenever bullets start flying.

But those two things say a lot, when you really think about them. People talk about patriots, but it's a whole other thing when you're actually ready to lay down your life for your country. Not to save your buddies in the foxhole, not to take down Adolf Hitler, not in heroic response to a sudden emergency, but just because you've volunteered to be the one they call, if they need someone to die.

I was waiting on his doorstep when he came home—late, at three in the morning, thanks to all the chaos from the meteor strike. I told him Jeremiah Poznanski sent me, that there was a threat to the President, and that I needed to talk to him about it, alone. He called one of his buddies to check on him in three hours, and then escorted me into his living room.

No hesitation. No fear. No questions. It wasn't the sort of thing I could have done—or Marco, for that matter. For me, there was always a balancing act, always a dozen different things to juggle, and rule number one was protect yourself.

But Paul Evans wasn't trying to protect himself. He had exactly one priority, and if hearing what I had to say meant exposing himself to danger, that was just the way things were. It was the sort of job I could see Jake growing up to have, or—oddly enough—Cassie.

"All right," he said, settling himself into the armchair across from me. He stayed upright, not leaning back, his elbows resting on his knees. "What's this about?"

I took a deep breath. I was alone—Rictic was still off keeping an eye on Jeremiah, and while he'd said he could be there fast if I called him, I didn't know what good he would be in a fight, given his blocks against violence. I was wearing my morph armor—which, as far as I knew, the Yeerks were still in the dark about—but other than that, I was on my own. The odds were fifty to one against Paul Evans being a Controller, but if he was—

You're already not in control, I thought. Don't ever forget that.

And then—quieter—Garrett's voice—

Not afraid.

I looked straight into Paul Evans' eyes, tuning into him with every scrap of attention I could muster, every ounce of instinct I'd picked up off the street. "Andalite," I said, looking for a twitch, a tightening, a change in the size of his pupils. "Yeerk. Visser Three."

Nothing.

I exhaled, long and slow. "Those words mean anything to you?" I asked.

The answer would have been no in either case, but I believed him. I was no Jake, but even a Yeerk couldn't have control that good.

"Um," I said, suddenly feeling awkward. "Would you mind—uh—going and getting your sidearm?" He raised an eyebrow, and I shifted uncomfortably. "Maybe even pointing it—at me? I'm—um—probably some of this is going to make you really uncomfortable, and I'd sort of prefer that you felt—uh—in control."

He said nothing for a long moment—just sort of looked at and through and all over me with a kind of Terminator gaze. "Are you carrying any weapons?" he asked quietly.

"Not yet. But—uh—it's complicated. At some point, I—might be." His expression tightened, and I hastened to clarify. "Not yours!" I added. "I just—"

He raised a hand, and I stopped talking, my jaw clicking shut. Pushing the armchair back a few feet, he stood and walked over to a cabinet next to the TV. He typed a four-digit number into a keypad by the handle, and with a click, the door swung open. When he came back, he was holding a very large, very black handgun.

"Thanks," I said as he sat back down, the gun pointed at the coffee table between us. I sucked in another deep breath. "I—okay, look, I'm going to say a bunch of things that are going to sound really crazy, okay? And I kind of want you to give me the benefit of the doubt, so before I say any of them, I'd like to—sort of—prove that I'm not just some stupid kid? If you don't mind?"

He tilted his head fractionally, but said nothing.

Here goes, I thought.

‹John Evans,› I broadcast. ‹Secret Service, four-two-four-zero Highwood Place. No, you're not going crazy, yes, this is coming from the kid in front of you. No, he can't read minds. I, I mean. I can't read minds. But I can think at you, and you'll hear it. For instance, I've got a number between one and a hundred written down on a scrap of paper in my pocket. The number's seventeen. Can I take it out?›

Score two for government agents either being really well trained or just being naturally cool under pressure. Paul Evans' eyes widened when I first began thinking at him, and his knuckles whitened on the grip of his gun, but otherwise he didn't react at all. Slowly, he nodded, and I reached toward my pocket with two fingers.

"What's the number?" I asked aloud, just before drawing it out.

"Seventeen," he said flatly.

I slid the scrap of paper across the coffee table toward him. He ignored it completely.

"We call it thought-speak," I said. "Dumb name, I guess, but it's shorter than saying 'telepathy.'"

"We."

His tone was still flat, the voice of a man who's forcing himself to expect nothing, to be surprised by nothing. Professional.

"There's more," I said. "At some point in the next ninety seconds, a bookbag is going to sort of—ooze—out of my right hand, and a gun out of my left. Um. I'll definitely keep the gun pointed away from you."

I demorphed.

"What kind of weapon is that?" he asked, a hint of tension finally showing through his iron composure.

"Laser," I said, morphing surreptitiously back into my armor inside my clothes, this time without incorporating the gun and the bookbag.

"Demonstrate," he said.

I blinked. "What? How?"

"The floor. Next to the coffee table."

"I—"

"Do it."

Somehow, without seeming to actually move, his own gun had ended up pointed more or less directly at my chest. Swallowing, I turned the shredder toward the polished hardwood, and squeezed the trigger.

TSEWWWWW!

The flash faded, and we both blinked. The floor was undamaged—no gaping hole, no black scorch mark, nothing.

"It's on stun," I explained. "Mostly it just scrambles the nervous system. Can't go around burning people—"

"Set it to maximum. Kill. Whatever. Some kind of reasonably high burn."

I obeyed.

TSEWWWWW!

This time, the beam punched a ragged hole the size of my fist straight through the oak beams, filling the air with the smell of smoke and ozone.

"What's in the bookbag?"

"It's complicated," I said, feeling my heart rate ease a little as my morph armor slid into place. Paul Evans didn't seem like the kind of person who would shoot you on accident, but that didn't mean he wouldn't shoot you, period. "I need to give you some context, first."

"Weapon on the table."

I nodded and complied, but slowly, making a bit of a production out of popping the charge canister and setting each of them carefully down on the glass. "I'm on your side," I reminded him, and after a moment he gave a tight nod.

"My name is Tobias Yastek," I began. "Y-A-S-T-E-K. If you check Social Security, you'll see that I live—or I guess used to live—in Ventura County, California. And no, that's not a coincidence."

It took nearly forty-five minutes, but I told him everything, leaving out only the Chee and Elfangor's gods. The morphing tech. The YMCA. The high school and the hospital. Everybody's families. Kandrona and the stasis cylinders. Ax, and the sensor readings that had led us to believe there were thirtyish Controllers somewhere in Washington.

I told him about accessing memories from a morph, and he insisted I demonstrate, so I put on the body of Jeremiah Poznanski and dredged up as much as I could of the conversations they'd had over scotch after Jeremiah's wife left him.

And then I told him about the asteroid. I made it sound like Ax had some kind of early-warning system, and that's how the rest of them had known to bail out. I told him about Visser Three, and our sense that the Yeerks were only holding off on wholesale destruction because they thought their quiet infiltration was working.

"And you think they have President Tyagi," Paul said when I finally finished, his voice as cold as ice.

"I don't know. We couldn't figure out what they were going for, maintaining a presence in Washington. It can't be easy, without a pool. On the one hand—yeah, you obviously want the President. But on the other hand, there's a lot of power held by people who've got a lot fewer eyes on them, right?"

"You said they starve out after three days?"

"Yeah. I'm pretty sure that hasn't changed."

He stood up and began pacing, his gun forgotten on the table. "How can you detect them from the outside?"

I shook my head. "It's not easy. Right now, the only reliable way is for me to acquire them in their sleep and then morph into them."

"You can read the Yeerk's memories, too?"

"No, but there's usually plenty of other stuff that gives it away. The whole being mindraped thing."

"What else?" Paul asked.

"What?"

"What other methods of detection?"

"Oh. Um—dogs. One of our group has this theory you could train one of those cancer-sniffing dogs to detect them. And we haven't actually tried an MRI, obviously, but Yeerks are pretty big, and there's bound to be some weird activity going on that a brain scan would pick up."

"You said you're giving the spare Yeerk to Poznanski?"

"If he doesn't do anything stupid in the meantime. He thinks one of his lab friends might be able to do something useful with it."

"We can do better than that," Paul muttered, but then he grimaced. "If they've taken President Tyagi, though, we're going to have a hell of a time. There's zero chance we can come up with a way to keep her incommunicado for three days, especially since that means they'll have her family and the White House staff and her current SS detachment at least."

"Aren't you—I mean, doesn't that include—"

"I'm on Vice President Kehler."

"Oh." I paused as Paul continued to pace. "Anyway, I thought about that," I continued, cautiously. "If we get eyes close enough, we could try to figure out when she's feeding or switching Yeerks or whatever, and catch her near the end of the three day window, so there's less of a wait. And we could use morphing tech to cover for her, if we had to."

We could also get Rictic or one of the other Chee to try impersonating her, but that was a lot riskier than having direct access to her memories and personality. Unfortunately, for Paul, that wasn't a plus.

"Absolutely not," he said, a hint of steel underlying the words. "You don't even begin to have the clearance it would take to have access to all the things she knows about, not to mention the fact that I'm not signing off on any plan that involves a stranger digging through her mind."

"Even if there's a Yeerk already doing that?" I argued. "Look—it doesn't have to be me. It could be her husband, or the VP—hell, it could be you, if it had to be."

He froze mid-step. "Wait," he said. "You have the blue box?"

"I told you, remember? My friend Garr—"

"No," he interrupted. "I mean, you have it? Here? It's not back in California with the rest of your group?"

"Oh—no. I mean, yeah. Yes. I have it. Not here here, but—yeah."

"Why?"

"What?" I asked, taken aback by the sudden intensity in his tone.

"Why do you have it? What did you intend to do with it?"

"Recruit," I said, somewhat bewildered. "I thought that was obvious."

"So you're not giving it up for study, too?"

There was a long, long pause, during which Paul fixed me with another one of those X-ray looks, and I chose my next words very carefully.

"No," I said slowly. "I'm giving up the gun and the stasis tube and the Yeerk, because those bear directly on the war effort. If we manage to get our hands on a shield or a cloaking device, I'll pass those along, too. But the cube is ours. It's our number one advantage, and the second we give it up, we're no longer able to keep it safe from the Yeerks. I'll give individual people the ability to morph, but I'm not handing over the source."

There was another, equally tense pause, and then Paul nodded. "Fair enough," he said. "What do I have to do to qualify?"

"To morph?"

"Yes."

I bit my lip. Okay, that was fast.

Even though this was part of what I'd come to Washington to do—even though Paul Evans seemed like exactly the kind of person we wanted on our side—it just didn't quite feel right. Not like it had when I'd given the power to Garrett. Paul was a stranger, complete and total—I knew nothing about him except the memory of a few drinks and the impressions of the past hour. If I gave him the morphing power, I'd be leveling him up into one of the most dangerous people on the planet. He would be able to go anywhere, do almost anything, look inside the mind of any person he crossed paths with.

It was a lot to ask for, coming from somebody I didn't even know.

And yet—

I looked up and into Paul's eyes. He was so much older than me—a grownup, a soldier, a patriot. A man who'd let a teenage kid into his house in the middle of the night, because he had something to protect. Who'd listened, and watched, without batting an eye. Who was now asking me for a weapon, because he wanted to get into the fight.

The type of people who do the right thing, even if it's hard.

And then, another thought—another memory.

For the time being, at least, the game revolves around you—your decisions, your fate.

It wasn't the sort of thing Marco would do.

But then again, Jake hadn't sent Marco. He'd sent me.

"Just one thing," I said, finally, breaking the silence. "Hold out your hand, and let me acquire you."

For the third time that day, I explained. About Elfangor, about Visser Three, about the war that had been brewing, that had started in earnest just a few hours earlier. I explained, and the most powerful person in the world listened.

On one level, I was astonished. My model of how government worked came from movies and TV, where the President never did anything without a room full of people putting their two cents in. I'd basically assumed it would be impossible to talk to her alone, and doubly impossible for her to make any unilateral decisions, without first consulting a dozen other bigwigs that Paul and I would have to clear.

But here we were, and it seemed to be working. The whole thing gave me a new appreciation for the Yeerks—their outlook, their whole way of doing things. For weeks, I'd been feeling my way around D.C. in the dark, getting nowhere, doing a slow burn through security guards and cops and low-level government spooks. And then I'd had one conversation with Jeremiah—one conversation, and I'd leapfrogged straight from Paul Evans to the President of the United States. And now—

Now, humankind's most advanced military was in the fight.

It was all about knowing the right people. Knowing them, or finding them—following the lines of connection, the web of relationships. It was the whole six degrees of separation thing—you were never more than a few handshakes away from a billionaire, or an admiral, or a Nobel Prize-winning scientist.

But by the same token, the Yeerks really needed only a handful of hosts to take over the world. Ninety-nine percent of Earth's resources were owned by one percent of its population—it wasn't literally true, but the metaphor was solid. How many countries were there, after all? How many truly important companies? There were only so many presidents, so many CEOs. You could conquer the whole world, with a thousand Yeerks in the right heads—would pretty much already have the world, no conquering needed. In six weeks, they'd basically taken over an entire city without anyone noticing. The only reason we hadn't already lost is that they'd landed in Ventura County, instead of Washington or Beijing.

We'd gotten lucky. Or somebody had been pulling strings on our behalf. Either way, we couldn't count on it the second time around. They'd be back—this time in strength—with all the knowledge that they'd culled from ten thousand human brains.

Not in control, never in control.

‹May Tobias demorph, Madam President? He's carrying the artifacts with him.›

An indistinct vibration, long enough to be a single word. Then—

‹Go ahead, Tobias.›

Picking my way across fibers as large as tree trunks, I climbed up toward the light, out of the roll in Paul's pant cuff. Launching myself away from his ankle, I zipped out into the open and landed somewhere in the middle of the seemingly infinite carpet.

‹Sorry,› I apologized, as I began to demorph. ‹This is going to be pretty gross.›

We'd entered the White House over an hour earlier, having first waited for the morphing tech to finish analyzing Paul's two DNA samples—mine and his own—and for him to spend a few minutes in my body, confirming my story. We'd debated various possible configurations—Paul as himself and me as Jeremiah, me as Paul and Paul as something small, Paul in morph armor with me morphed away inside—before settling on Paul in morph armor and me as a housefly.

"That way, I can carry a second gun past security," he'd reasoned. "Plus, it'll be much easier for me to get a private conversation with her alone than if I'm with an unscheduled, uncleared guest with no ID."

It also meant that our conversation had been weirdly disjointed, with President Tyagi speaking directly to Paul, who'd translated in thought-speak that both of us could hear, with me broadcasting to both of them in turn. It wasn't too bad, given that the President didn't talk much—as an extra precaution, Paul had insisted that she limit herself to yes, no, and questions written in code—but it meant that I'd been explaining blind, without being able to gauge her reactions or see what kind of impact I was having.

And now I was coming out of fly morph, of all things—a horrific mixture of human and bug the size of a toddler, swelling up from her carpet like some sort of cancerous balloon. Not the best of first impressions, though it still probably beat out the day I'd met Jake while upside-down inside of a toilet.

‹About ninety seconds, Madam President.›

Another vibration.

‹Yes, Madam President. Regardless of size.›

Slowly, my fly vision changed back to normal, the million tiny shattered views popping one by one, like tiny bubbles merging together. I could feel my wings folding back and fusing together, track the loss of sensation as part of them expanded into the bookbag. I was facedown on the carpet, and I rolled over, immediately regretting the decision as I caught a glimpse of the look on President Tyagi's face.

‹Sorry,› I repeated, my still-insectoid limbs twitching reflexively.

She grimaced, nodding curtly.

‹It's not always this bad,› I said. ‹And it doesn't hurt, so there's that.›

She nodded again, her gaze unwavering despite her obvious disgust.

‹If she's a Controller, she's doing a good job of it,› I said privately, to Paul.

He didn't answer.

We had discussed the possibility in his house, before leaving, and agreed it didn't seem likely—even with a hundred Yeerks, they couldn't cover the First Family and the White House staff and the Secret Service and all of the other people who came into contact with the President every day. The risk of discovery—especially if she had to carry a stunner or store spare Yeerks in stasis cylinders—was just too high.

Probably.

Which meant that—if we were lucky—the only thing we were up against right now was Murphy's Law.

And if we were unlucky—

Well. It was my job to get her out of there, one way or another. We didn't have Rictic blocking communications—I'd thought about texting him, but there was no safe way to get him into the building, even with holograms—so we'd have to rely on Paul to hold the door long enough for me to fold her into a morph, if things went south. As a snipe, I could make it back to his house in under ten minutes; he'd left the back door open and a bunch of zipties, duct tape, and rope on the kitchen counter. None of the windows in the Oval Office opened, of course, and they were all bulletproof, but the shredder should be able to make a hole easily enough.

Thankfully, though, it didn't look like it was going to come to that.

I climbed to my feet as the last of the changes rippled across my body, leaving me fully human. Paul and President Tyagi were sitting in two of the chairs in front of the huge, ornate desk, and I settled into a third, dropping the bookbag at my feet.

"Um," I said reflexively, before Paul cut me off with a thought-speak hiss.

Of course the room is bugged, he'd scoffed, hours earlier. You think they bug the Department of Homeland Security and NOT the White House?

Leaning forward, President Tyagi extended her hand.

I glanced at Paul, whose eyes narrowed as he shook his head microscopically no.

I swallowed. Looked back at the President, then back at Paul. Jerked my head, hoping he would figure it out, and explain.

‹The acquiring process requires touch,› Paul reminded her. ‹Neither one of us will touch you without permission.›

President Tyagi rolled her eyes, reached for her pen and paper and scribbled a line of gibberish, which she flashed impatiently at Paul.

‹She says you can shake her hand, and please—›

She snapped her wrist, flourishing the paper.

‹She says you can shake her hand, dammit, and please do not acquire her.›

I swallowed again, leaning forward to grasp her hand with mine. She smiled, and I smiled back—weakly—letting go as quickly as I could without being rude.

More scribbling. Impatient, I began to morph into my armor so that I would be able to thought-speak again. ‹She's a little miffed that neither one of us mentioned you were a teenager,› Paul continued, translating. ‹She says—›

He paused, reading carefully.

‹She wants to know if you know anything about the—roadrunners? Am I reading that corr—›

"Yes," she said aloud. She began writing at breakneck speed, twisting awkwardly in her chair so that Paul could read as she went along.

‹She says there was an incident yesterday—in Ventura County—about twenty-five minutes prior to impact. Extremely strong winds—car windows breaking in a rolling shock wave—a couple of sonic booms. All heading away from the city—mostly northwest—along the coast. Described by eyewitnesses as being like the roadrunner in the cartoon. They were about to dispatch investigators when—well.›

I frowned. ‹What—› I began, my thought-speak returning as my morph passed the halfway mark. ‹No—um—apparent cause? They didn't see anything?›

"No."

Some kind of Yeerk vehicles, getting out before the meteor hit?

But the Yeerks didn't have anything that fast, or they would have used it to run us down when we started probing their operational security.

Something new, maybe? Something they just developed?

President Tyagi cleared her throat, and I twitched. ‹Sorry,› I said hastily. ‹I was th—I don't know. Not related to us. Maybe it was the Yeerks, removing material before impact?›

She nodded tightly, adding a few more nonsense words to the page.

‹That's her best guess at the moment, as well.› Paul waited as she continued to write. ‹She wants—can you give another run-down of the Yeerks' known capabilities?›

‹What do you mean?› I asked him in private thought-speak.

‹Stats and tech,› he answered quietly. ‹She wants a summary she can give to the military.›

I took a deep breath. A lot of that had been covered in bits and pieces during my long, winding explanation, but—

‹One capital ship, waiting behind the moon. That'll have a pool with half a million Yeerks in it, and be about three thousand feet long, with room for maybe twenty thousand crew. It's got about a dozen beam weapons that can hit targets on the ground from orbit, and it's got a force field around it.›

I'd spent a lot of time in the woods talking things over with Ax and Garrett, and then Marco and I had gone over everything again before I left.

‹Pool ships usually come with a squadron of thirteen—we call them 'Bug fighters.' About the size of a school bus, usually cloaked and shielded, capable of hovering and maneuvering in the atmosphere. Beam weapons, crew of four, can carry ten or so in a pinch.›

President Tyagi was taking notes without looking down at the page, her eyes locked onto mine.

‹Um. That's it, as far as spacecraft go, but there's supposed to be twelve more pool ships on the way, maybe five months out. As for Yeerks on the ground—›

I bit my lip. ‹They carry stunners, communicators, tracking devices, and spare Yeerks. Some of them carry Dracon beams, which are basically blasters or phasers. They seem to move around in groups of three or more—or did, I dunno about the ones who are left. They generally take one person, and then that person takes everybody around them, like family members or coworkers or whatever. They only once did a major, hostile takeover—that was the high school—and they've also done sneaky stuff like use hospitals to infest large numbers of people one after the other. Once infested, the Yeerk has total control, and access to all of your knowledge and memories. We're not clear on what actually happens in the pool, but they have at least partial ability to transfer knowledge around between them, so new discoveries spread pretty quick. We've seen three other species in their invasion group—Hork Bajir, which are basically like ninja dinosaurs, very tall and muscular with lots of blades—Taxxons, which are giant cannibal centipedes, pretty fragile but dangerous in large groups—Naharans, which are like big orange spiders and have a lot of engineering expertise.›

President Tyagi held up her pad, and Paul leaned forward, squinting. ‹How intelligent are they?› he asked. ‹How are they organized?›

‹Um. We don't know anything about how they're organized, except that Visser Three is in charge. Ax says they're like, plus fifteen IQ points intelligent? Like, they sort of hijack the host brain to do a lot of processing, and the Yeerk tissue adds a little bit on top of whatever's already there. Out of the hosts they've got here on Earth, that makes humans the smartest except for the small number of Naharans. And Visser Three, of course. He's—um—Ax estimated somewhere between two and four hundred, IQ. Alloran—his host—he was basically like the Einstein of this generation of Andalites, and Visser Three is—not like other Yeerks.›

More scribbling. ‹And your group?› Paul translated. ‹Numbers and resources?›

I hesitated. ‹Um,› I said. ‹I'm sorry, Madam President. But—›

Paul raised a hand as President Tyagi raised an eyebrow. ‹What he doesn't know how to say, Madam President, is that you remain a potential enemy combatant until you've been cleared of infestation, and even then you pose a risk until you've been proofed against future infection.›

I grimaced. That was a charitable interpretation, to say the least—I wasn't sure I wanted to give them details about the rest of the group under any circumstances, though I realized too late that Paul could simply lift them from his personal copy of my brain.

That's assuming all of your info is still current. You don't know what happened after Ellimist/Crayak/whatever-it-was sent you back.

At least he didn't have access to any of that craziness—it wouldn't have been encoded into long-term memory, yet. Silver linings.

In front of me, President Tyagi took in a long breath through her nose, leaning back in her chair, her fingers steepled in front of her face.

‹It's a reasonable—›

Paul broke off as she reached for her pad and pen again.

‹How do you guard against infestation?› he read.

I reached into my backpack in answer, drew out a pair of the Andalite earplugs.

‹These will protect you from the Yeerks,› I said. ‹It doesn't stop them from getting in, but it kills them in the process.›

She stretched out a hand, and I passed the earplugs over to her. ‹They hurt, when you put them in. There's some blood. But they're basically undetectable after that.›

I'd brought all five-and-a-half pairs with me to Washington, rather than leaving a pair for Garrett, a decision I was starting to regret. I'd tried to offer two to Paul, but he'd refused, saying they should go to someone important—like the President—or to engineers who might be able to duplicate them, or to field agents.

Switching the earplugs to one hand, she scribbled another note and held up the pad.

‹She wants to know whether they work on Yeerks coming out of the head, too.›

What—

Oh.

I shook my head. ‹Not enough proof,› I said. ‹Visser Three just killed something like ten thousand Yeerks for, like—just, you know, as a move. If—hypothetically speaking—you're a Controller right now, I wouldn't put it past you to pull a suicide mission just so you could get this information back to the rest of the invasion force.›

She tilted her head, her eyes asking the obvious question.

‹There are two options,› I said carefully. ‹One is we keep you under total surveillance for three days. That includes bathroom breaks, that includes sleep time, that includes everything. You go nowhere, do nothing, without one of us watching, until seventy-two hours have passed.›

I could see from her expression that this option didn't exactly appeal to her.

‹The other is you let one of us acquire and morph you. In morph, we can check your memories of everything but the past twelve hours or so.›

It stillwasn't foolproof. It was conceivable—barely—that the Yeerks would've taken advantage of the confusion to capture her at some point within the past day. But given their level of risk aversion, this seemed less likely than average, not more. She'd been on TV at least four separate times since yesterday afternoon, and Paul said they'd tripled her protection detail, in case the Ventura impact had been part one of a multi-strike terror attack.

It was theoretically something they could have pulled off. But—as Marco would say—if the Yeerks were that on-the-ball, we were fucked anyway.

Not in control, never in control.

There was a battle going down on President Tyagi's face, as she seemed to struggle with the implications of the two options. I'd initially expected her to reject both—to try to pull rank or make some other argument about being exempt from security concerns. But when we'd discussed it ahead of time, Paul—somewhat scornfully—had told me not to be an idiot, and not to think of them as idiots, either.

"There are protocols for this," he'd reminded me. "For infiltration, subversion, the use of hypnosis or mind-altering drugs or doubles and look-alikes. Everyone's aware of the risks, and everyone's committed to taking steps to guard against them. If what we're asking her to do makes sense, she'll do it."

She picked up her pad, wrote a single word.

‹Clearance,› Paul said.

She nodded.

‹Neither of us has it.›

She nodded again, looking each of us straight in the eye for a long moment.

‹The choice is obvious,› Paul said flatly. ‹Forgive me, Madam President,› he added. ‹But I took an oath. I will abide by it absolutely.›

She tilted her head, seeming to weigh his words. The silence stretched out, longer than any other in the conversation so far. I wondered whether I should say something—couldn't think of anything—decided to keep quiet.

After what felt like a full minute, she began writing once again, this time taking the time to jot down several long sentences. She showed them to Paul, then reached for a second, official-looking pad with a presidential seal at the top.

‹She wants to know how much you told Jeremiah about the morphing power,› Paul said, sounding slightly confused. ‹Whether he knows you gave it to me, for instance.›

She handed the second pad to Paul, who read it and frowned. Craning my neck, I saw that it was in English, not in cipher: DHS J Poznanski to WH ASAP.

‹Madam President, I'm not sure—›

"Do it," she said, her tone brooking no argument.

Swallowing whatever objection he had been about to make, Paul rose to his feet and walked over to the door, handing the note to one of the aides waiting outside in the hall.

Beside me, President Tyagi cleared her throat again, and I turned to find her looking at me, expectant.

‹Right,› I said. ‹I told him about the time limit. Told him that it was technology the Yeerks want, but don't have. Um. He knows I can carry things in morph—saw me demorph holding a weapon. I don't think I mentioned the acquiring process, or self-morphing. I didn't tell him how many of us there were, or how the ability is transferred.›

Paul sat back down in his chair, and she pointed at him, as if to ask—

‹No, he doesn't know Paul can morph.›

Looking faintly triumphant, she bent over her pad again, writing the longest note so far. It took nearly two minutes, and when she handed it over to Paul, he read it through twice before responding.

‹No,› he said, his tone equal parts shock and stubbornness. ‹Absolutely not.›

They'd argued for nearly half an hour—him telepathically, her with notes written in increasingly jagged and insistent handwriting. They'd paused only once, when an aide knocked at the door—I hid under the desk—to say that Jeremiah had arrived and was sitting in the antechamber.

‹Have him wait,› Paul said tersely, and—after shooting him the sort of look teachers give to Marco—President Tyagi repeated the same instruction to the aide.

‹Please, Madam President,› Paul had pleaded, after the door clicked shut again. ‹The amount of risk you're assuming here is completely unacceptable—›

Death toll Ventura County ~600000, she'd scribbled, no longer bothering to take the time to translate into code. That's 200 9/11 attacks. We have 5 months. I willnotsitidlyby.

‹You have resources you can rely on,› he argued. ‹NSA. DHS. This is what the Secret Service is for—›

Compromised. Can't wait. Next attack could already be incoming.

‹Then leave Washington! Take the First Family and go to Camp David, or to Bastion, while we work things out on this end—›

If just leave, Yeerks will track. This way, don't even know to look.

‹If something happens to you—›

Then you're backup.

Welcome to irrelevance, I'd thought to myself, as the pair of them glared and gestured and argued and generally acted like I wasn't even in the room.

I wasn't sure how to feel about it—wasn't sure what I was feeling, what the pressure in my chest translated to, in words. It was to be expected, sort of—now that the grownups were getting involved, things were going to start moving faster. There would be decisions we had no say in, plans we had no control over—very soon, the message would spread, and we would be nothing but a very small cog in a very large war machine, special only because of our ability to turn into mice. If I kept recruiting on my own—and I should, right? Probably?—then soon enough even that wouldn't matter.

But that was the point, wasn't it? It's not like any of you want this on your shoulders.

I definitely didn't, anyway. And we were obviously better off if the whole resistance couldn't be taken out by a single bomb.

At the same time, though, I didn't like the way the two of them had already written me out of their argument. As if my opinion didn't matter, as if whatever they decided was best was what was going to end up happening.

I mean, to be fair, it probably was. But that didn't mean it felt good. If I'd been less honest with them—showed up as Elfangor, the way I had at the start of my conversation with Jeremiah—things would be going down differently.

Not in control, never in control.

Gods and asteroids. Might as well add presidents to the list.

After trying every protest and objection in his arsenal at least three times, Paul finally gave up. Tyagi was the Commander-in-Chief, after all—when push came to shove, that was the end of it.

Even when she was asking him to give up his life.

Patriotism, I thought, feeling almost jealous. Something to protect, something to die for. Garrett's face swam up in my mind, and the pressure in my chest turned into an ache.

I looked down at the box cradled in my lap, its sides glowing a faint, otherworldly blue, the strange symbols traced in deep, liquid black.

Cheer up. You're winning.

I looked up at President Tyagi, whose face was taut with nervous anticipation. Extending the cube, I nodded to Paul. I was out of morph, myself, as I had to be in my own, natural body to activate the device.

‹Press your hand against the surface,› Paul instructed, and the President obeyed, her shoulders still as she held her breath.

I focused my mind in the way Elfangor had showed us, willing the box to recognize Tyagi, to transfer some part of itself into her. There was a hum, and a tingle, as if I'd stuck my hand into an electrical socket—

And then it was done. The glow faded, I nodded, and she pulled her hand away. Pulling open the bag, I stuffed the cube inside and zipped it shut.

There was a moment of silent expectation, in which the three of us all just sort of looked at each other, unsure what to say.

Paul spoke. ‹You're sure that I can't—›

"No," Tyagi said, her tone emphatic and final. She stuck out her hand, and Paul looked at it as if it were a snake.

"Now," she said, her eyes narrowing.

His mouth a thin line, Paul reached forward, his pale hand clasping her smaller, darker one. They stared directly at one another for a long moment before both of their eyes fluttered shut in perfect synch.

Acquiring each other.

A few seconds passed, and then they each let go, their eyes drifting lazily open.

"Now," President Tyagi repeated, her tone more gentle this time.

With a final, resigned nod, Paul stood. He began loosening his tie, as President Tyagi stepped behind the desk, unstrapping her shoes. I stayed seated, feeling awkward, trying not to look at either of them as I transformed into myself once again.

It took about ten minutes for Paul to complete his transformation—ninety seconds to demorph, ninety seconds to morph, and another seven or so minutes to don the President's clothes. He tapped me on the shoulder when he was finished, and I opened my eyes to see his slight nod.

Not a Controller, then.

The real President Tyagi had a much longer wait, as her instantiation of the morphing tech performed its primary analysis, decomposing everything that was Paul Evans into a set of instructions for building a perfect copy. She went ahead and put on his clothes, the fabric loose and baggy, looking oddly ridiculous beneath her calm, serious face.

The plan was simple, for all that it was completely insane—Paul would stay in the White House in morph, as a decoy, using the President's memories to guide his choices and decisions. In the meantime, she would travel around the country under the radar, looping in various parts of the military and other potential key players in the war to come. Should anything happen to the "President Tyagi" in Washington, she would have the option of coming out of hiding or of continuing to operate in secrecy, as the situation demanded.

Paul had pointed out that his time limit of eighty-five minutes might not be enough to maintain the deception, and Tyagi had shrugged.

Figure it out, she'd written. Or stay in morph permanently.

My jaw had dropped when I'd read those words, but Paul had simply nodded, his face a mask of grim resolve. I'd told them both about the coma, about the way Yeerk tissue would interfere with normal brain function, and they'd taken the information in stride.

‹The papers,› Paul said suddenly. ‹Tobias—can you destroy them?›

I looked down, at the notes President Tyagi had written. ‹What—with the shredder?› I asked. ‹Isn't that sort of—overkill? And it's going to make a noise—›

He sighed, the expression still somehow very much his, even through the body of the small Indian woman. ‹The bag, then. Take them with you.›

I looked over to the real Tyagi, who nodded. Unshouldering my bookbag, I slipped the papers inside, remembering the spare shredder and the stasis cylinder as I did so.

‹What about these?› I asked, pulling them out. ‹Do they go with one of you, or do I take them to Jeremiah?›

The two Tyagis looked at each other for a long moment, saying nothing. Eventually, the real one pointed to herself.

‹I'll explain to Jeremiah once you're gone,› Paul said.

Detaching the charge canister, I handed it, the shredder, and the stasis cylinder to the President, then—almost as an afterthought—added the single extra earplug to the stack.

‹It's easiest to take stuff into your morph if it's in a bag,› I advised. ‹Just visualize the whole bag getting sucked away along with the rest of your body, and the morphing tech will take care of it. If you have four separate things, you kind of have to focus on all four at once—much harder.›

She nodded, and we fell silent once more. After another long moment, she pointed at me, then at herself, and then shrugged, an open question written on her face.

I considered. It was funny—what with all of the risks, all of the what-ifs, all of the things that could have gone wrong, I actually hadn't given any thought at all to what I'd do in this moment—what would happen if everything went off without a hitch.

On the one hand, we almost certainly wanted somebody to stay in touch with whatever resistance the military was putting together. On the other, not every adult would be as understanding as Paul and Tyagi had been, about the fact that I was refusing to give up the cube. The threat of a mental self-destruct would only go so far once I was surrounded by people who killed for a living—

Stop stalling and flip a goddamn coin, already.

I reached into the bag once more, pulled out the burner cell phone I'd bought for keeping in touch with Rictic. ‹Take this, too,› I said. ‹It's only got one number programmed in; that's the other phone. I'm going to head back to Ventura, try to reconnect with the rest of my group.›

A shadow flickered across Tyagi's face, and I made a mental note to set up a less traceable line of communication at the first available opportunity.

Am I being an idiot? I wondered, as she reached out to take the phone. Was there some obvious move that Marco would see, that I couldn't?

I'd "secured" the President—better than, considering how impossible it all had seemed just twenty-four hours ago. Paul Evans was loyal and competent, and his access to Tyagi's memories would make him a perfect decoy. And Tyagi herself was now Yeerk-proof and morph-capable.

Should I just go with her? It was maybe ridiculous to assume that I could protect her—once clear of Washington, she was overwhelmingly unlikely to run into any Controllers, and in her guise as Paul Evans, she was a fully capable government agent, complete with a gun, ID, and top-secret clearance.

But it might be worth it to stay more closely in touch. I could simply hide the cube and follow along. It might even be easier to find the others, once I had government resources at my disposal—

And then the military will know where they are, too.

I frowned. We were all on the same team—weren't we?

Except that you're holding back valuable technology. You're keeping secrets about the Chee and the Ellimist. And let's not forget that there's a pretty convincing argument to be made that it's our fault Ventura County got turned to dust.

Oh, come on, no one in their right mind would—

As if. They'll be all over it—reckless children, can't be allowed to run loose, look what happened last time they acted unilaterally, instead of passing along their intelligence to the proper authorities—

I shifted slightly, looking back and forth between Tyagi and Tyagi Prime, now wondering if I was being a little too paranoid.

It only takes one, the voice in the back of my head pointed out. One mistake, one traitor, one honest difference of opinion from somebody who thinks they know best, thinks they're in control. And there's only one blue box. If you go with them, and something happens, that's it—no do-overs.

And there was still that bit about Jake, Marco, and Cassie being somehow astronomically important, and me along with them.

And there was Garrett. Garrett, who I'd last seen an inch away from death, whose uncertain fate was gnawing away at the back of my mind. Garrett, who I hadn't been there to protect.

Your decisions, your fate.

I could feel my uncertainty waning—not because I was confident in what I was doing, but because I knew there wasn't ever going to be a clear answer.

Sometimes, things just happen.

I stood, drawing the other shredder out of the bag as I began to demorph back into my true body. ‹Okay,› I broadcast. ‹I guess that's it for now, then.›

The two Tyagis looked at one another, then back at me.

"Yes," said the real one.

‹Stay safe,› said Paul, a look of concern on his borrowed face. ‹And Tobias—›

‹Yeah?›

‹Thank you. You—these last few weeks can't have been easy.› He looked over at the President, who seemed to listen for a moment, and then nodded gravely. ‹Your country appreciates what you've done.›

I swallowed, not sure how to respond.

I finished demorphing in silence, stepped over to the door, and focused on the fly.

And then, feeling anticlimactic, I left.

I was so lost in thought on my way back to Jeremiah Poznanski's house that I almost didn't notice the telltale shimmer in the air until it was too late.

Bug fighter!

Banking sharply, I broke off my approach and darted into the boughs of a nearby oak, waiting to see if they would fire, wishing I'd chosen the snipe's diminutive form instead of the larger red-tailed hawk. Three seconds—five—ten—

Safe.

What—

The ship was hovering, motionless, above and slightly in front of the house.

Directly over the front steps.

Tractor beam.

Did Bug fighters have tractor beams? I had no idea.

How can you have no idea? What—you just FORGOT to ask?

I flitted across a small patch of sky to another tree, farther away, feeling the hawk's heart pounding in my chest. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a panicked voice had started up—get away get away get away get away—while another one simply laughed.

There was no way. No way. It was impossible, a coincidence so extraordinary it defied belief.

A way to track morphing?

Rachel said the Chee could do it—that they could somehow see the link between our construct brain and our real bodies off in Z-space. But if the Yeerks had learned how to do the same, they wouldn't just be waiting for me—

Jeremiah. He was a Controller after all, or—or he talked, told his colleagues, somebody told the wrong person and they figured it out—

No. Without any conscious input from me, another hypothesis emerged, clicking irresistibly into place.

The bugs. The bugs in the Oval Office.

We'd been quiet, in case they were recording—had said almost nothing out loud, doing half the talking on paper and the other half in thought-speak.

But what if they didn't care what we were saying? What if they were only checking whether or not we were saying anything at all?

If there was ever a day for the Yeerks to keep a close eye on the President, it was today. If they had someone down in the security center—

—and of course they would, it's obvious, so much less risky than having someone there in person, it might not even be a Controller, just a data tap—

—then they would know that a Secret Service agent had walked into the Oval Office without an appointment and insisted on seeing the President, alone—had held an almost entirely silent conversation lasting nearly two hours.

And in all that time, the only bit of data that had emerged from the room was a personal summons—Jeremiah Poznanski, of the Department of Homeland Security, was to make his way to the White House as fast as he possibly could.

It was just strange enough to stand out—just enough of a departure from the norm to make them curious, make them nervous, make them want to look closer, to confirm that their cover hadn't been blown. They couldn't take him in public, maybe hadn't even put two and two together until he'd already arrived—

—right? Oh, please, let them not have taken him already—

—but sending a Bug fighter to camp out over his house, that was easy, that made sense, they could nab him as soon as he got home, take him and infest him and find out everything he knew—

They weren't everywhere. They were just everywhere that mattered.

What was I going to do? Rictic—Rictic was shadowing Jeremiah, could possibly protect him or at the very least report on what happened to him. But I'd given up my phone, would have to break into a house somewhere to call him, and who even had landlines anymore—

Breathe, Tobias!

If they already had him—

If they already had him, then they already had—

Not the President. She would have waited, would not have let Jeremiah in until she'd managed to morph into Paul. She would have stayed, and it would have been two against one, even with the element of surprise Jeremiah couldn't have taken them both out, he wouldn't have been able to bring a weapon in past security—

Or she would have left already, and Paul would have faced him alone, disguised—

If they already have him, then they know we're trying to spread the word. They know we're telling people, that we're building up a resistance, and they're going to blow every major city and every military installation to hell—

If they already had him, then I needed to get out of Washington ten minutes ago.

But they didn't have him. They couldn't, it was too fast, there were only thirty of them—fifty at the most—it wasn't like back home, they weren't everywhere, and besides, the Bug fighter—

The Bug fighter—

—didn't make sense, if they already had him.

Right?

That's right, go ahead and think it through, because everything always makes fucking sense, doesn't it, just take it one step at a time and it'll all come together, nothing's ever just random and crazy and batshit insane, you're in control, you're on top of things, clever boy with clever answers, Sherlock that shit—

I darted away again—a third tree, then a fourth—fighting to pull my thoughts under control as I put distance between myself and the hovering ship. At maybe a third of a mile, I stopped, peering back across the treetops at the near-invisible menace.

—shapeshifting, bodysnatchers, mind melds, teleportation, time powers, what's next, maybe Visser Three's going to show up with laser vision or telekinesis—

Somewhere, off in Z-space, my real body was gritting its teeth as I forced—focused—muffled the unhinged babble through sheer willpower and kicked my thoughts into gear.

All right. Bug fighter. Lying in wait.

Options.

I could wait and watch. Could go back to the White House, try to find Jeremiah or Paul or President Tyagi or Rictic.

I could leave.

—who do the right thing—

I could—

I froze.

No.

Oh, no, no, no, no, no—

I felt the laughter bubbling up again, felt it threatening to overwhelm me. It was too much, too perfect, too orchestrated. Like the whale, like Jake's extra life, like the fact that Garrett had just happened to be a heartbeat away from death when whatever-the-fuck-it-was decided to show up and start playing God—

Jeremiah Poznanski's son was walking down the street.

He was half a mile away, on the far side of the house, well beyond the range of thought-speak but perfectly recognizable in my enhanced bird-of-prey vision. He was on foot on the sidewalk in the middle of the day—on his way home in the middle of a school day, the last person I would have expected and very nearly the worst I could imagine.

—maneuvered into place by those you might call God—

They would take him. They would take him, and then he would take his father, and that would be enough for Visser Three. They would give up on secrecy, and the bombs would start to fall. It was happening right here—right now, in front of me, the beginning of the end.

Unless.

I felt my heart beat even faster, the tiny organ thudding until it seemed like it was going to explode out of my feathered chest.

Can't do a flyby. He's too close—they'll see you, shoot you out of the sky.

I would have to switch morphs. Have to pick something that could get close, something that could get inside, could do some damage—

Obvious.

I dropped out of the tree like a stone, already demorphing before I even reached the ground. There was no one in sight, and I didn't bother to hide—just changed shape right there on the sidewalk, my real body swelling upward from the hawk's slender frame.

The clothes wouldn't be right, but that shouldn't matter. The real question was what I should do with the bookbag—should I bring it with me, or hide it, and come back for it?

There was a crawlspace in one of the houses just a few feet away, its white wooden door latched but unlocked.

Your decisions, your fate.

Still half-hawk, I waddled over, the bookbag puffing outward between my shoulder blades like Quasimodo's hump. Eventually, it came loose, and I pulled it off my back, tossing it as far beneath the house as I could. Then I turned my attention to the shredder in my left hand, spinning the dial to maximum power.

Here goes nothing.

Pulling the crawlspace door shut, I stepped away from the house, focusing on the memory of Jeremiah Poznanski. I kept my clothes outside of the morph, but took the shredder in, feeling it shrink and melt as my fingers thickened around it.

Leaning around the corner, I squinted down the sidewalk, my vision blurring and fading as the change progressed. It had been maybe two minutes, and the boy had been three minutes away from the house. He should have been visible on the sidewalk.

Instead, there was no one.

Good, I thought, as my shoes tightened and my body aged. That meant they'd taken him on board, were infesting him in the air rather than trying to do it in public.

They would do the same to me.

I began to walk, the last of the changes sliding into place, wearing the face of their target as I strode toward the house.

They would see me.

They would see me, and they would recognize me, and they would take me.

—what needs to be done.

I felt the jerk when I was a hundred yards away from the front door, felt the sidewalk vanish out from under my feet as I was yanked upwards by my hair, my skin. I passed within the cloaking field, caught a glimpse of the brown metal of the Bug fighter as I hurtled toward the hatch—

There was a sound, a flash of light, and my whole body went numb and limp. The tractor beam guided me into a small hold and released me, where I fell bonelessly into a heap on the cold deck, face down, my forehead hitting the metal with a painful crack.

"Haff Yeerk," shouted a voice, guttural and harsh. "Ghotal!"

Another voice grunted in answer, and a shadow loomed over me, a nightmare of ivory blades and green, porous skin. A thick, clawed hand grabbed my shoulder, rolling me over, and with a snap and a hiss, a cylinder was pressed to my ear.

Wait for it.

Warmth. Wetness. A slithering, probing tendril, like a tongue.

Pushing.

Pushing.

The hulking Hork-Bajir pivoted and left, its footsteps vibrating the plates beneath me. Somewhere behind me, I heard the whir of pistons, and the heavy stillness that meant a door had just closed, sealing me inside.

Wait for it.

There was pain in my ear—pain worse than anything I'd ever felt, like needles of fire threading toward my brain. I wanted to scream, but the bridge between my mind and my body had been broken by the stunner, and instead I just lay there, motionless, not daring to think more than thirty seconds into the future.

Just wait.

The needle thickened, widened—stretched something that shouldn't be stretched—became a pipe, a funnel, a conduit through which the rest of the Yeerk's body could slide into my skull. Something connected, and I felt a presence, as if someone were standing just behind me, their breath tickling the hairs on the back of my neck.

Now.

I began to demorph, the changes sliding across my body like magic, numbed nerves disappearing one by one, replaced by tingling aliveness. I shrank, lightened, felt my tired adult joints tightening as my vision returned to normal.

For a moment, the Yeerk seized full control of my still-morphed brain—tried to shout a warning, to beg, to scream. But the parts of the body it had access to were still inactive, and I was the sole witness to its panic as the universe dissolved around it.

They would notice, eventually. Would hear the grinding of bones, see the thinning of my limbs and the thickening of my hair, catch the shifting of my clothes as the body underneath them changed shape. I might have twenty seconds, or I might have none.

It was a race—against time, against fate. I had rolled the dice—had finally, finally accepted that I wasn't in control, and shouldn't act like it. I was going to die, or I was going to live, and there was no sense in making predictions.

Come on, I whispered to myself, oddly calm as I willed the shredder to emerge from my palm. Faster.

"Hrutnoj?"

I remained motionless, except for the shifting of my half-morphed flesh.

"Lamol! Rhapak mit ghotalandalite—"

It happened as if in slow motion—the vibration of the deck as the Hork-Bajir approached, the swelling of my palm as the shredder returned from Z-space, the shift in temperature as I rolled over, one shoulder pressing against the cold metal while the other rose into the air. I saw the alien approaching, saw it falter as I raised the gun, saw its beaked mouth open wide with alarm.

I fired.

The blast passed straight through the alien's head, punching a hole through the ceiling, revealing the clear blue sky beyond. The alien fell without a sound, its blades shrieking as they scraped across the deck.

"Ghotu buk!"

I heard movement behind me, felt another tremor in the floor, and spun. The second Hork-Bajir was only a few feet away, framed in a doorway, its own Dracon beam already tracking toward my face—

I fired again.

This time, the ship itself began to shake, the floor bucking as the shredder's beam burned through some amount of important machinery. An alarm began to whine, and the floor suddenly tilted, sending me sliding toward the body of the second alien as it collapsed.

A blazing bar of light filled my vision—a near miss from another Dracon beam. Blind, blinking, I slashed my own weapon in a wild arc, holding down the trigger. I heard a shriek of metal, the fizzling snap of broken electronics—

And then suddenly the world fell apart. A howling wind filled the hangar as gravity dropped to zero, the whole ship plummeting downward as it split into two pieces. There was a split second where I thought I might scream, and then—

CRUNCH.

I slammed into the deck a millisecond later, letting out a strangled whoof as every last ounce of air was knocked out of my body. My head collided with the floor for a second time, and I felt an icy pain in my right arm, just below the elbow.

I must have passed out, or at least blacked out, because I felt myself coming to—whether minutes later, or only seconds, I couldn't say. Everything hurt, from the top of my skull all the way down to the bones of my feet, and it felt like I couldn't fill my lungs with air no matter how hard I tried.

Someone was screaming—a long, sustained sound like an animal, coming from what I thought might be the remains of the front of the ship. Dizzy, gasping, I reached up to try to pull myself to my feet, only to see the world in front of me turn suddenly, bafflingly red.

I looked down. Everything was wet 