Author's note: Thanks again to everyone who helped make Interlude 6 awesome (there are like a hundred of you, so I'll hold off on the names). As always, if you enjoy this story, please please PLEASE offer comments and critiques, either here or over on r/rational. I hungrily devour every piece of feedback you feed me, and it's what keeps me updating (mostly) on time. Hearts, stars, and horseshoes.

Chapter 23: Jake

"If we get an extra person, save Erek. I'm going after the kid."

I felt my jaw drop open as my brain struggled to assemble the necessary sentence, the right words in the right order to change her mind, make her see reason. Beside me, Marco shouted something—wrong, the wrong thing, that'll just make her dig in harder—

"Jake."

I jerked awake. "Marco."

It was dark and frigid cold, my clothes wet where they pressed against the dewy grass. Above me, Marco was a vague outline, pitch black against the dried blood color of the dust-choked sky.

"What time is it?" I asked, shivering as I sat up and threw off the blanket. Erek had volunteered to hold all of us inside a force field at night, where it would be comfortable and warm, but so far only Garrett and Mr. Levy had taken him up on it.

"Quarter after four."

"What—"

"Temrash has infested Ax."

"And you just let it happen?"

The android blinked—pretended to blink, shaped the light around its metal face to look like a human blinking. "Oh, I'm sorry," he projected tersely. "I didn't realize that Andalite-Yeerk diplomatic relations needed to be approved by a thirteen-year-old boy."

I bit back my first, unhelpful, knee-jerk response. "You're smarter than that and you know it," I growled. "This has implications. We're in the middle of a war, here."

"It's not like he's going anywhere. I can contain him no matter what he morphs into."

‹Which is not actually a reassuring piece of information, under the circumstances.›

I scrubbed at my eyes and tried not to grind my teeth.

I was tired. Not physically—putting on my morph armor had taken the edge off—but mentally. Emotionally. Fundamentally. It felt like years had passed since we'd encountered Elfangor. I was fatigued in a way that seemed to have taken root inside of me, as if exhaustion had soaked into my bones.

I didn't know what to do. Didn't know what to say, how to react. I wouldn't have predicted this in a million years, and I had absolutely zero ideas for how to salvage the situation.

But I was the one they were all looking to. The one they were all counting on. The one they'd woken up when they were in over their heads and needed somebody to bail them out. I was in charge, which meant as long as I kept talking, the system was working and there was no reason to panic and we were going to be just fine, we'd figure it out eventually, there was bound to be some kind of way to move forward, it wasn't just that things were completely shitty forever and there was nothing we could do about it—

Stop.

I sighed.

I could just give up, I knew. Could unravel. Abdicate. Admit that I was out of ideas, let the cracks show. And then it would all fall on Marco, who was already stretched to the breaking point, who was barely holding it together—or on Rachel, who'd just lost her whole family, or Garrett, who was just a kid, or Mr. Levy, who was a Controller, or Erek, who was an ancient alien robot with unexplained goals, who for some reason had just decided to let Ax turn himself into Visser Three-point-one—

Get a grip.

"What did he say to you, exactly?" I asked. If I just kept throwing out words, I was bound to stumble onto something useful eventually.

Probably.

Maybe.

"Exactly? He said 'Erek Chee—is it possible for you to locate and disable the biomechanical implant in the channel of my left ear?' and then—"

"Wait. What?"

Erek raised a holographic eyebrow.

"You shut down his earplugs?"

Obviously, a part of me sneered. Otherwise, this whole situation would be a whole lot less problematic, wouldn't it?

Erek shrugged. "He asked me to."

"But—we thought—I mean, from what Elfangor said—"

Too slow. My brain was a snail running on fumes.

"Oh. I wouldn't worry—I don't think a Controller would be able to do it. In fact, I'm pretty sure an Andalite couldn't do it. As far as I can tell, the things are designed to be completely permanent. Can't go around leaving loopholes like 'let me infest you or I'll kill all the hostages,' after all."

The android's voice turned bitter at the end, his lip twisting sourly. I glanced over at the spot where Ax was waiting—allegedly waiting, said the cynical part of me—hidden from view by a hologram, a dome of solid, softly glowing white. "Can he hear us right now?" I asked.

"No."

‹Roll to disbelieve.›

I grimaced, and threw another glance over my shoulder, at the log where Marco, Rachel, and Garrett were sitting side by side, washed out in the dim light, identical expressions of wary alertness on all three faces.

‹Seriously, don't say anything you wouldn't want Ax hearing.›

I turned back before the pause could become conspicuous, saying nothing. We were in morph armor—me, Marco, and Rachel—with a private thought-speak channel open between us. Garrett could hear, but not contribute; we'd decided to leave one person morph-ready, for whatever good that might do.

Erek would know, of course. According to Rachel, he could see some kind of glow around our heads whenever we were in morph. But still—at the very least, having a way to talk without being overheard made us feel better.

"What else did he say?" I asked, trying to weigh Marco's suspicion in the back of my mind. If Erek was openly lying to us—

"He said he wanted to speak to Temrash privately. That he would approach, might get physically very close, but that he intended no violence. He made some kind of Andalite promise—it sounded pretty serious—and asked me not to interfere."

"That's it?"

"That's it. I gather he said other stuff, to Temrash, but I could only hear one side of the conversation."

I closed my eyes for a moment, resisting the urge to look at the second dome of light—the slightly smaller one, on the other side of the android.

The one that held Tom.

Not yet.

I felt my jaw tremble, felt a lump trying to form in my throat, and I forced it down, biting my tongue until it bled. Opening my eyes again, I turned past the second dome, to where Marco's dad—Essak—sat alone on a patch of dark grass.

"Mr. Levy," I said.

"Hmmmm?"

"What do you know about Andalite brains?"

"I know what you're thinking," he replied. "My guess would be that Temrash has partial control at best. I'm not certain, though, and—"

He hesitated, then shrugged. "Also, I know that's exactly the answer I would give if I were trying to lull you into a false sense of security."

"Can't we just test it?" Garrett asked aloud. "Have him come out, like Essak did yesterday?"

"Doesn't really matter," Rachel pointed out. "Ax invited him in, remember? It's not about what Ax will say when he's not controlled, it's about the damage Temrash can do if he takes the wheel at the wrong moment."

"For what it's worth," Mr. Levy began, pausing until I gestured for him to continue. "Temrash was never a fighter. Never one for courage or risk—neither of us were. Nor was he much of a patriot, when it came to the war effort—you'll recall his outburst yesterday evening." He shrugged again. "I know you have to discount everything I'm saying, but still—it's true."

‹Psychological tactics. Repeat a lie over and over again and people start to believe it even if they know it's false.›

I looked back over at Marco, whose expression had turned dark as he stared past the android at his father. ‹In fact—shit—I've only just now realized how much influence a partial Yeerk can have, especially if it's smart about it. Bringing up particular memories at the right moment, stoking your emotions, floating single words, giving you little yucks or yums to shape your behavior. Ax may be even less in control than he realizes.›

I squeezed my eyes shut again. Not right now.

Marco—

Marco was hurting, even though he'd never admit it—was lost, and afraid, and betrayed, didn't know how to handle what had happened to his dad—what his dad had done, what his dad had chosen—and was defaulting to suspicion and hostility, using his anger as a shield. He needed help—needed my help.

But.

But his pain wasn't any worse than Rachel's—Rachel, who'd lost everyone, or me, with my par—

No.

Or Ca—

NO.

Not right now.

"Erek," I said loudly, trying to drown out my own thoughts. "Tell me why."

"Why what?"

"You guys found us. If you hadn't reached out to Rachel at the high school, we would've never known you existed."

"Also, you'd be dead right now," Garrett murmured. "Since Cassie wouldn't have known to save you."

I felt a sensation like a knife through my chest.

Save Erek. I'm going after the kid.

Forcing the memory aside, I nodded tightly, keeping my eyes locked on the android. "So—why? Why this? Why let this happen?"

Erek tilted his head—or seemed to; I had no idea how closely his hologram matched his actual body—and stared at me for a long moment. "Because," he said finally. "Someone has to end this."

I frowned. Isn't that what we were trying to—

"No," Erek continued, jabbing a finger in my direction as he interrupted my train of thought. "Not like that. Don't you see? The Yeerks are a spacefaring species, now. They're on a dozen different worlds. They have hundreds of interstellar ships. This war—"

He broke off, agitated, fidgeting with holographic hands. "It's too late for a violent solution. You can't possibly hunt them down and kill them all. And as long as you're trying to—as long as the Andalites are trying to—of course they're going to fight back. This war, it—it could go on for centuries. It could go on forever—Yeerks on one side, Andalites on the other, everyone else caught in between. Or worse, until one side or the other invents a weapon that can kill across light-years. And I can't—we can't—"

He broke off again, simulated a giant, heaving breath. "I can't stop it. I can't stop it, and I hav—I really, really want to. What Ax was doing—the way Temrash was responding—I could only hear half of the conversation, but it looked like an honest-to-goodness first step toward peace. Toward understanding. And after everything that happened in Ventura—after all the violence, all the death, all the waste—"

He straightened, and though the hologram didn't change, for a moment he looked every bit as strange and ancient as he truly was. "I'll take it," he said simply. "I don't care if it's good for him. I don't care if it's good for you. I don't want the Yeerks to win—I'm on your side, as much as my programming will let me be. But the only way this war is going to end is if the people waging it stop wanting to fight."

Turning, he raised an arm, then lowered it, and the hologram that was hiding Ax from view faded away. "Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill," he said softly. "Time for you to speak for yourself."

I blinked as the afterimage of the dome lingered, peering through to where Ax was resting flat on his belly on a patch of grass, torso relaxed and face down, his legs folded tightly at his sides. As my vision adjusted, he rose smoothly to his feet, rearing up to his full height, looking around with his stalk eyes while the main pair focused on me.

Two thoughts appeared in my head at almost exactly the same time, so that it took me a moment to sort them out.

‹Let's not rule out the possibility that—›

‹Hello, Prince Jake.›

‹—this is just another hologram.›

I blinked.

‹I think that rules it out,› said probably-Rachel. ‹Unless the Chee have secretly had thought-speak this whole time. Also, 'prince'?›

"Hi, Ax," I answered back. I looked him up and down. Maybe it was just my imagination, but he looked—sturdier, I guess—than he had lately. More upright, more awake. "Um. You're a Controller now, I hear."

‹No. I am—we are—a cooperator.› He spread his hands wide, then brought his fingertips to the space between his eyes, then shrugged like a human before letting his arms fall.

"Right. You—ah—you want to talk about that?"

‹Yes. Where would you like to begin?›

"Um." I glanced around the circle—at Mr. Levy, at Erek, at the trio sitting on the log. "I guess, first of all—am I talking to Temrash, or am I talking to Ax?"

‹At the moment, both. Either of us can forcibly take control for a time, we suspect, although neither of us could maintain such a state forever.›

"Uh huh. What about un-forcibly?"

Ax turned all four eyes on me, holding them still in the way Elfangor had—the way I'd interpreted as a gesture of attention and respect. ‹Prince Jake, we wonder if you find it useful to ask questions whose answers cannot be verified?›

‹Damn straight.›

I cleared my throat. "All right, fair enough. Ax—why should I trust you?"

‹You should not, we think—at least, not at first.›

I tilted my head, keeping my expression carefully blank.

‹It seems only reasonable for you to forbid us from morphing, and to set a guard over us—Erek, or if you do not trust him either, Rachel.›

My eyes flickered over toward the log. No one said anything, but I could hear Marco's response anyway—right, recommend a bunch of actions we would've taken anyway, so we're impressed by how reasonable and candid you are—

‹Furthermore, it seems likely that you should hold your councils-of-war in thought-speak for the foreseeable future, excluding us from them. We—I cannot know how much or how little Temrash is influencing my thoughts and behavior on a subconscious level, in addition to its overt contribution.›

"Then what—"

I broke off. What was the question I really wanted to ask?

Not why, but—

"Why didn't you tell us, Ax? If you were thinking about doing this—why didn't you ask? Talk it over with us?"

There was a long silence.

"Because this—I mean, Jesus. They killed your brother. Took mine. And what they did to Ventura—I mean, before the meteor—"

I gestured helplessly. I didn't know how to say the thing I wanted to say. Something about how this didn't affect only him—how it was bigger than him, bigger than all of us. How it might mean the war—either way—and how his unilateral decision meant—it meant—

Are you just mad that he bucked your 'authority'?

I paused. I didn't think that was it, but I honestly couldn't rule it out.

‹You are correct,› Ax said softly. ‹It was an error.›

I waited.

‹I—Ax—I have been ill,› he continued. ‹The effects of telepathic isolation—›

—he should not be alone, at this stage of maturity—

‹—what you would call depression, as well as—the translator is telling us to say schizophrenia. An unraveling of sorts.›

I bit my lip, feeling a sudden rush of heat in my face as a memory floated to the surface—Rachel, yesterday morning, after they returned from their trip into town. You need to check in with Ax, she'd said.

And I just—

Hadn't.

‹My judgment was compromised, and growing more compromised as time went on. It seemed—from the inside, in the moment, it did not seem that I was putting very much at risk. Had it not worked—had Temrash been unable to halt the deterioration—I would have lost control of my own mind just as surely.›

Too tired. I had been too tired—worn down by the effort of holding back my own grief, of worrying about Cassie, of trying to figure out the next move, the next thing to do, how to hold the group together—

It had been one thing too many, and I'd just—ignored it. Let it slide, assumed it wouldn't matter.

And now here we were.

‹In my isolation, I did not consider the cost to the—the togetherness, the sharing. Only the tactical perspective—I noted that Erek's presence would be sufficient to guard against treachery, and then I simply proceeded.›

Togetherness. Sharing.

What would have happened, if he'd asked first? If he'd suggested it to me and Marco and Rachel and Garrett and Erek?

‹I was wrong.›

"No," I said, the word half-catching in my throat. I coughed. "No, actually, I don't think you were."

I could see it in my mind's eye, hear the voices with crystal clarity. Are you fucking kidding me? And give the Yeerks access to a second morph-capable host? Trust a Yeerk with memories of every tactic and strategy we've come up with so far? And up-to-date information about Andalite technology and troop placement? Not to mention that there's zero reason to believe this'll actually fix Ax's problem—

I tried not to look at Marco, even as I could feel the heat of his gaze on me.

It wasn't pessimism, exactly. Pessimism made sense, with the stakes as high as they were. So did suspicion, and skepticism, and caution, and paranoia. Those were the things that would keep us alive—the things that had kept us alive, so far, and even they wouldn't have been enough without a ton of luck-slash-divine-intervention.

It was more like—

Separate-ness. Detached-ness. The dark side of independence, of self-reliance—the sense that it was all riding on you, that only you could be responsible. That you had to hold all the balls, control all the strings, cover all the bases, or else everything would fall apart and it would be your fault.

It was mistrust. No, more subtle than that—it was an absence of trust, an unwillingness to give anyone else the chance to prove themselves, because then they might screw it up. Like how a country wasn't allowed to develop nuclear weapons until it had proven that it wouldn't use them, and the only way to do that was to have them for a while without nuking anybody.

It was Tobias, bringing Garrett onboard without asking anybody else, even if it meant splitting off from the group. It was Marco, unilaterally deciding to rescue Tidwell and not even calling one of us for help. It was me, going into the Yeerk pool that first time, alone and unprepared—the time I couldn't remember, because I'd ended up getting myself killed. It was Cassie—

—flinch—

I looked around, feeling the pressure of everyone's attention as they watched me, waiting for me to speak.

It was everywhere, I realized—this thing was everywhere. It was the reason that Elfangor had come to Earth by himself with a doomsday device, instead of with an entire Andalite fleet at his back. It was the reason Visser Three had executed Aftran, rather than run the risk of letting the rest of the Yeerk civilization decide for themselves, in full possession of the facts. In a way, it was the reason this whole war had started in the first place—because neither the Yeerks nor the Andalites could trust the other species' version of doing it right.

And it meant that this sort of thing—Ax deciding to solve problems, without reference to anyone but himself—it was going to keep on happening, as long as each of us was ready at all times to undercut or override or go around everyone else—

Unless we figured out how to trust each other. Really trust—unless we decided, once and for all, that we weren't willing to put it all on the line with every single call—that we'd rather make mistakes as a group than gamble everything on the assumption that I, and I alone was the only one who saw things clearly.

Another memory floated up, from what felt like forever ago—Cassie, in her barn, the day after Elfangor. We'd been trying to sort out how we were going to do things—who was in charge, how we'd make decisions. And she'd said—

—I could hear the words in her voice, could remember exactly how they'd sounded—

I'm not doing anything just because the four of you tell me to.

My gaze drifted toward Marco's.

She had been right—sort of.

But it wasn't black-or-white. It wasn't all-or-nothing. If you were part of a team—really, truly part of it—and the vote was four-against-one—

That didn't mean you had to just suck it up and go along. It meant that the conversation wasn't over yet.

"There's a thing," I began, looking back at Ax—Ax, who'd taken a gamble, who'd risked everything for a glimmer of hope. "A thing I've just noticed. And it's—I don't know how to say it, yet. How to explain. But it's why—"

I swallowed. "It's why I'm going to vote that we not isolate Ax, and it's also why I'm going to go along if the group decides we should."

I started talking. I said a lot of words, all in a jumble. They asked questions—all of them, including Ax, including Erek, even including Mr. Levy. They raised objections, only some of which I was able to answer. They brought up points I hadn't considered, angles I hadn't taken into account.

We talked about trust.

We talked about mistakes.

We talked about the war, and the future, and how to do the right thing.

We talked about fear, and doubt, and suspicion.

And then, finally, as the sky began to lighten—

"It's my fault that the Yeerks were on alert early," Rachel said hollowly, staring at the ground. "That the Chapmans—I went to scope out their place on that first Saturday, to see if they were—if there was any way I could—"

She broke off, chewing at her lip. "I sent a thought-speak message," she said, her voice taut. "A threat. Pretending to be an Andalite. That's why they—why they—"

She stuttered to a halt again, dropping her face into her hands. "I'm sorry. I screwed up."

The silence stretched out, tense and crackling, as if charged with electricity—

"I already knew," said Marco, "because I've been using morphs to skim through everybody's memories."

A second silence, even more deafening than the first.

And then Erek, speaking up for the first time in long, long minutes—

"Yesterday, Tobias shot down a Bug fighter on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., after which a second fighter landed and an unknown alien calling itself Esplin publicly turned itself over to the authorities."

It took nearly an hour to get everyone on the same page.

Erek claimed that the Chee had withheld the information from us out of a sense that we could not be trusted—that passing along the news would inevitably lead to violence in a way their programming required them to prevent. That sense had changed, apparently, though it remained to be seen whether he was telling us the whole truth.

If he was—

Tobias was unconscious in an underground sanctuary in Fairfax county, Virginia, while the Chee treated him for an amputation he'd suffered when he brought down the Bug fighter. With him was the cube, a sole surviving shredder, and a twelve-year-old Controller named David Poznanski, who had been involved in some way that Tobias hadn't explained.

The two Bug fighters had been taken in different directions—the crashed one heading south, and the functional one due west. Beyond that, the Chee didn't know where they'd ended up, since Rictic had stayed on the scene to take care of Tobias. The blue centaur pseudolite had also gone off radar, presumably to some government black site where it was being interviewed around the clock while waiting for the President, Putin, and whoever was in charge of China these days.

Erek had used his holographic projectors to play back Rictic's recording of the scene, together with Tobias's report of his private conversation with Esplin. The transcript of the speech was apparently available online, along with copies of photos and videos that kept getting re-hosted as quickly as the government could shoot them down. In the twenty-or-so hours since the story had leaked—

‹Or flooded, more like.›

—no one from the White House or any reputable news source had released any definitive statements. They were openly calling it a crashed UFO on Fox news, and tongue-in-cheek calling it a crashed UFO on CNN. Marco was already planning a reconnaissance trip into town to catch up on news, steal some public wifi, and maybe buy a throwaway phone with a ton of prepaid data.

That is, unless we decided to pack up and ship out.

Esplin's public speech left us with maybe fifty hours before he died of Kandrona starvation—

‹Are we still calling it that? I mean—that's not a normal Yeerk, right? There's got to be something else going on.›

‹We know that the Visser is trying to reverse-engineer the morphing technology, and we know that Erek detected Z-space radiation around his previous remote body. The most likely explanation is that he has replicated the control mechanism independent of the rest of the technology, and is using manufactured versions of the same artificial Yeerk tissue found in morphs.›

—and in his private conversation with Tobias, he'd claimed that Cassie's parents—

‹Wait, what?›

—would be set free in Washington some time tomorrow. That seemed to imply that there would be a second, public landing, unless Esplin was negotiating something quieter with the U.S. military. There was also his intriguing reference to a "cache of useful supplies"—

‹That's bait.›

—off the coast of a tiny, uninhabited island two hundred miles west of Alaska.

On top of all that, Tobias had somehow managed to get some kind of private meeting with President Tyagi, a Secret Service agent, and a Homeland Security analyst—the parent of the kid, David, which was probably significant somehow—although Rictic hadn't been in the room and hadn't gotten many of the details before Tobias collapsed. It seemed unlikely that we'd be able to just waltz in and find the President, but we put it on the list anyway, along with go straight to the press and take over North Korea.

The back-and-forth as we debated options had been a nightmare to follow, with at least two separate threads running in parallel at all times, and sometimes as many as four or five. There were the words that people chose to say aloud, the public thought-speak band that included Ax but excluded Erek and Essak/Mr. Levy, the slightly-more-private band that was just me, Marco, Rachel, and Garrett—Garrett had given up and put on his morph armor after the first half hour—and the direct conversation between me and Marco, which mostly consisted of him outlining various ways in which we'd all gone completely, batshit insane.

That, plus whatever chitchat was going on behind my back.

But finally, as the sun began to creep above the haze-hidden horizon, we settled on a single course of action.

Or rather, inaction.

"Are we sure about this?" Garrett asked anxiously. His shirt wasn't quite covering his face—his fists were clutching the neckline, but for the moment his mouth was still visible over his knuckles.

"No," Marco answered, preempting any longer replies. "But we're not going to be sure, either, and every other option's been vetoed by at least one of us. So if we're serious about this whole Kumbaya business—"

‹Thanks, Marco.›

"—then that's that."

The sticking point had been Esplin's intentions—whether we could afford to rebuff him, if his offer of a truce turned out to be genuine. We'd gone back and forth for almost fifteen minutes, with Erek and Mr. Levy and—surprisingly—Rachel offering arguments in favor of accepting his invitation to talk, while Marco and Ax/Temrash had been ardently opposed.

"I'm sorry, are we seriously entertaining the idea that there's anything other than a one hundred percent chance that this is a trick? I mean, Erek, I know you guys are like, pathologically charitable or whatever, but seriously—the only reason he's doing all this is to salvage the situation after Tobias shot his cover story out of the sky."

‹We must agree with Marco. This bears all of the hallmarks of a clever deception, meant to throw us into a state of indecision and paralysis. If we did not have access to Temrash and Essak and the Chee, it may even have worked, but—›

"That doesn't mean we can't take it at face value, though," Rachel had countered. "Right now, he has an extremely upper upper hand, but as long as he's playing pacifist, he can't drop rocks or assassinate anyone. If we play along, we might be able to buy ourselves some breathing room, get in touch with the right people, maybe figure out what he's up to."

"It's a big Earth, Rachel. If he's doing stuff in the shadows, we're not going to spot it. And in the meantime, the last place we want to be is right where he can see us, right where he's in control of all the dominoes."

In the lull between sentences, though, a very different conversation was taking place.

‹Okay, so, just to be absolutely, one hundred percent clear—we do not trust the Chee, right? I mean, I get what you're pointing at with all your peace-love-and-understanding, Jake, but this is not the behavior of an ally.›

‹Marco's right,› Rachel said grimly. ‹Start with the fact that there are like a hundred and forty thousand of them, and we still don't really know what they want besides not-violence. Also, I'm not super sure about this, but—thinking about it, I'm pretty sure that everything Erek filled us in on is stuff Tobias knows. Like, stuff Tobias is eventually going to tell us himself, someday. Nothing more. We didn't hear anything that the Chee might have figured out on their own, only things they'd get caught for not telling us.›

‹Garrett here. They are helping though, right? I mean—Erek's had our backs, out here, and it sounds like Rictic did some pretty heavy lifting for Tobias out in Washington. I know the whole secrets thing isn't cool, but they're not not on our side. Over.›

‹World isn't split into good people and Death Eaters. They could just be along for the ride until it stops being convenient. At which point….›

As we talked, I could feel the lines solidifying, the boundary between us and them growing clearer with each careful misdirect, each quiet clarification. We'd ruled out St. Matthews island and the alleged prisoner dropoff as probable traps, and we knocked a visit to the Fairfax county sanctuary off the list for the same reason, though out loud we just said that it made more sense to wait until Tobias was fully recovered.

In the end, the lines ended up pretty much exactly where I would have expected them to, with Marco, Rachel, and Garrett "in," and Erek and Mr. Levy "out."

‹Garrett here. What about Ax? Do we trust him, or not? Over.›

I shot a hopefully-subtle glance at Marco, received a fleeting grimace in answer.

‹Look,› he whispered softly, as Mr. Levy began speculating on whether or not his bank accounts were still active. ‹I get what you're saying, okay? I really do. Five fingers in a fist, and all that. And for sure the cowboy thing has caused a lot of headaches so far. But this—›

I saw his gaze flicker over to the Andalite. ‹Do you really want to hang everything on Ax-rash not fucking us over, in the end?› he continued. ‹Because it seems to me like this is one of those moments where you look back years later and say, if only.›

I took in a long, slow breath. The last time Ax had decided to take unilateral action, he'd pointed a shredder straight at my face—

But then he handed it over to you. Willingly. And Elfangor—

Elfangor said he wouldn't betray you.

I looked over at the alien cadet, at the single stalk-eye that was trained on me.

‹Temrash has plenty of reasons to want this to work,› I reminded Marco. ‹We're his best route to vengeance for the rest of Aftran.›

‹No, a double-cross is his best route to vengeance. Using us to get to the Visser, and then jumping ship. Also, I'm pretty sure you're biased, here, since one of the side effects of this whole situation is Tom not having a Yeerk in his head anymore.›

I winced, trying not to look over at the remaining dome. Tom had been stuck in there, incommunicado, for almost two hours—

Not yet.

‹Yeah,› I admitted. ‹But look at it this way—this might actually be the peaceful solution. If they're willing to give up control—if they're really just in it for the sensation and the experience—they could all be passengers. Cooperators.›

‹Cooperators,› Marco echoed, and even in thought-speak, I could hear his skepticism. ‹That could just be one more way to get to the same end goal,› he pointed out. ‹You get a partial Yeerk into everybody's head, how long do you think it'll be before we all just decide—of our own free will, of course—that it makes more sense to go all the way?›

‹Okay, so maybe it's not the best plan. But Ax isn't a whole invasion. He's a single experiment. And if this works—if we can someday get Temrash back into a pool, and let the whole Yeerk species know that peace is possible—›

‹You're grasping at straws, man. It's been two hours. You are way too ready to buy into this whole thing.›

‹So you're vetoing, then? We keep him out of the loop?›

There was a long stretch of time during which the out-loud conversation continued, with Erek, Ax, and Mr. Levy making rough predictions about how things would play out over the next couple of days.

‹No,› Marco said finally, and something in his tone let me know that he was including Rachel and Garrett once again. ‹If you say trust him—›

He broke off. ‹Well. I trust you, Fearless Leader. As long as we're going into this thing with our eyes open. And let's say we acquire him in a couple of days and take a look at this whole situation from the inside, yeah?›

‹That's probably a good idea in general,› I said. ‹As long as we're okay with him wanting to do the same to us. In fact, we should maybe all swap morphs at this point?›

‹Well, if we're not going to have any secrets anymore, I might as well go ahead and confess: consoles are better than PCs, I liked the prequels more than the originals, and I'll take regular fries over curly fries any day of the week.›

I smiled in spite of myself. ‹Monster,› I replied. And then, privately: ‹Thanks.›

‹Don't thank me,› he shot back, his tone halfway between banter and blunt. ‹Just—be right, okay? Don't let this be the thing that gets us all killed.›

"You want me to stick around?"

The sun had risen, the conversations had ended, and the clearing was empty except for me, Marco, and Erek, and the bright white dome that Erek had been maintaining for the past two and a half hours. Mr. Levy had gone back to sleep, Ax had gone off to graze—with Garrett keeping an eye on him—and Rachel had morphed into an eagle and taken to the sky. The rest of the day was divvied up between rest, reconnaissance, and planning, and there was no longer any reason to hold off.

"No," I answered, taking in a deep breath. "I think I've got this one."

Marco nodded, rested a hand on my shoulder for a moment, and then turned to leave, angling off toward the nearby town. Erek watched him go, expressionless, and then swiveled his holographic face to point at me.

"Ready?" he asked.

I wasn't sure where my reluctance was coming from—as always, when I turned my little black box on itself, I got nothing useful in response. It could have been guilt—over the fact that it was my fault Tom had been taken in the first place, or that I hadn't done anything to rescue him afterward. It could have been guilt over what had happened to our parents, and the rest of Ventura. Or maybe I was feeling guilty about—

—starting to notice a pattern here, maybe—

Fine. Guilt. That was at least a partial explanation, and it wasn't going to get any better from me sitting around stalling.

"Ready," I said.

Erek's arm moved, the dome vanished, and in its place stood my brother.

He was on his feet, his body tense, facing in slightly the wrong direction. He whirled as the hologram disappeared, taking in a full view of the clearing, eyes wide and head turning frantically from side to side. When he saw that it was just me and Erek, he stopped and straightened, but his shoulders remained tense, his fists clenched.

I could see streaks of grime on his cheeks, and his eyes were red and puffy, but his voice was clear and level as he spoke. "Where is he?" he asked. "The Andalite—Ax—did he—"

"He's still here," I answered, resisting an impulse to hold up my hands in the sort of calming gesture that never made people calm. "He's—we're going to give it a shot."

"So you're—"

His voice cracked, and his eyes flickered almost imperceptibly back and forth. "You're not going to make me—you're not going to—to put it back?"

"Wh—"

Oh.

Oh, god.

"No," I said, fighting to keep my own voice steady. "Never. Never, ever, ever, for any reason. I'd—"

—die first, I meant to say, but before I could finish the thought, Tom broke—broke and fell forward, collapsing into me, almost knocking me over as he dissolved into enormous, heaving sobs. I staggered back, and Erek was there, steadying us both as we sank toward the ground.

For a long time, I didn't say anything. Just held him, as he cried himself dry, emptying out everything that had built up in the—

—had it only been weeks?

Two weeks, since they took the high school. Maybe. Definitely not three.

But it was enough—enough to have shaken him, cracked him. And then on top of it, our parents—

—our grandparents—

—our aunt and uncle and cousins, Rachel's family—

—everybody—

I didn't let go. I couldn't, not all the way—not while they still needed me, not with Erek watching, not with Tom clinging to me like a branch in a raging river.

But I let it out, a little. Leaned into the hug. Put my head next to my brother's, and cried along with him. Squeezed him, and let myself feel grateful that at least he was alive, at least he was free—that at least one person had made it out, and was going to be okay.

Probably.

"I'm sorry," I whispered, and I meant it—sorry for what he'd been through, sorry that I hadn't been able to help, sorry that even after everything else I'd left him locked in a bubble for two and a half hours, not knowing what was going on or whether he was just going to get thrown right back into the nightmare. For weeks, he'd been a prisoner inside his own head, while I—

Oh, come on, that's not fair—

I'd basically just been camping out. Keeping my head down, taking potshots, always making sure we had a way out, that we didn't do anything too risky. And the whole time, my brother had been trapped, him and ten thousand other people, trapped and helpless, hopeless—

Come on, you took out the pool—

No. Rachel took out the pool. I sat on the sidelines. It had been Rachel and Garrett and Ax, following the plan that had been cooked up by Marco and Tidwell—Tidwell, who Marco had saved after I left him to drown. And before that, Rachel had taken down Visser Three's doombot, and Garrett and Tobias had rescued Ax, and now Tobias had lost his hand taking down a Bug figher, and Cassie—

I flinched.

Backpedaled.

Started over.

This is it, I realized, connecting the dots. The reason I'd been reluctant to look Tom in the eye, the reason I'd been having trouble sleeping, the thing that had been nagging at me all morning as we talked ourselves out of action—as I talked everybody out of action, they were obviously traps and some part of me wanted to take the bait anyway, to get up and do something, anything other than just sit around waiting for the next crisis to hit—

It was guilt. Guilt over the fact that I hadn't suffered, while everyone else had. Hadn't fought and bled the way the others had. Hadn't lost anything at all until the day before yesterday, and couldn't even justify feeling bad about that when so many others had lost so much more—

God, Rachel—

I'd been in exactly one battle that was any kind of serious, and I couldn't even remember it because I'd screwed it up so badly that I'd ended up dying in morph.

This isn't fair, a part of me tried to argue. Not every general fights on the front lines. You've been holding the group together.

It wasn't enough, though. I could feel the pressure building inside of me, feel my blood running thick and hot like lava. I needed—

Respect?

No.

Revenge?

No.

Release?

No—not quite. I needed—

Satisfaction.

That was the word. Satisfaction, like an old timey duel. Something I could destroy, to put things back into balance. I needed to win—to make them pay for what they'd done to us—to my brother, my cousin, my city, my planet. I needed to see them bleed, and to know that I was the reason, the instrument of justice.

For Cassie, I thought. Allowed myself to think, for the first time—that she might not have made it out, that she might already be dead. That we might never really know, never find out for sure one way or the other. I allowed myself to think it, and the anger flared up around me like a bonfire, burning up the pain and leaving behind brittle, black resolve.

Beside me, Tom's sobs softened—slowed—tapered off into sighs and sniffles. I loosened my grip on his shoulders, and he pulled away from me, scrubbing self-consciously at the tears still leaking from his eyes.

And for Tom, I added, as we talked—as he began to ask questions, as I filled him in on what was happening, as we both avoided mention of our parents, of anything more than two days in the past. For Tom, and for mom and dad, and for Aunt Naomi and Uncle Dan and Jordan and Sara and—

The names kept coming, and I fed each one into the fire, just as I fed my guilt and regret over keeping Tom out of the loop—because we didn't have the cube, didn't have earplugs, and so my brother wasn't in, could not be one of us, was still an outsider and a liability, for all that his soul was burning, too. I put him off with easy words and empty promises, told him to rest and took the pangs of shame I felt and transmuted them into fuel.

Afterward, I took to the air, flying high up into the dust-filled sky, searching my brain for answers—for some target we could hit, some weak spot Visser Three would not have reinforced, some tiny piece of information he didn't know we knew, and therefore couldn't predict we would exploit. I made lists in my head, pored over every detail of my memories, replayed every word I remembered Elfangor or Temrash or Essak ever saying.

And then—

"Essak. Mr. Levy. Essak."

"Hmmm? Wha—Jake? What's going on?"

"Sorry to wake you up. I just had one quick question—does the pool ship have a lot of manufacturing capability?"

"I—what?"

"Manufacturing. Like, if Visser Three wanted to grow a bunch of plants, or build a bunch of machinery, or something like that. Can he—you know—make stuff? In large quantities?"

"No. No, not really. He's got—there's a high level of technology on board, he can do a lot of fine tinkering, but nothing at scale. That's part of what the Earth is good for—that's why Aftran had an assembly line inside the pool facility."

"All right, thanks."

"But what—"

"Sorry—I'll tell you later."

‹Marco. It's Jake. Don't look around, don't react. Just listen. I think I've got a target. It's not a sure thing, but it's big, it's important, and Visser Three doesn't know we know about it. And if I'm right, we can slow them down and get proof that they're still operating on Earth. But we need to lose Erek first.›

‹All right, Fearless Leader, I'll bite. What are you thinking?›

‹I did some research into that oatmeal. Ralph's brand, maple and ginger. There's only one place that makes it—a big factory out in Iowa. It's open, it's isolated, and unless they pulled out everybody—›

‹—then they're dependent on it, and that means they probably took over production.›

‹Right. You tell Rachel; I'll find Garrett. If we're doing this, we want to do it now.›