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Author's note: Welcome back, everyone! I have three chapters ready to go and hopefully enough buffer to get three or four more written, so we should see AT LEAST five every-other-week updates and hopefully more like eight or nine or maybe all the way to the END OF THE STORY which is not super far away.

Chapter Text

Chapter 36: Aximili

[A BLADE SLIDING WETLY FROM A WOUND, THE ICE RETREATING FROM AN ALPINE DELTA AS WINTER GIVES WAY TO SPRING…

We shivered as the last vestiges of our true—

(and broken)

—body vanished, the scabs and scars and sutures melting into the fresh, healthy tissue of our morph armor. It hadn’t felt like a normal transformation. It had felt as if death itself had wrapped its fingers around our hearts, and had only barely been persuaded to let go, its touch lingering like the caress of a lover.

“You can’t demorph again, Ax.”

We—

(Or was it I? So much was missing, not merely Temrash but the we that was Temrash-and-Aximili, the fusion that was both of us and more, the embodiment of our conversation—)

((It was difficult to stay focused, with so much silence.))

—turned to look at our war-prince with all four eyes, saying nothing.

“I get that you wanted to try,” Jake continued. “It was worth trying. But you’ve gone into cardiac arrest twice, now. If you die in your normal body—we don’t have time to find another volunteer—”

We could hear the tension in his voice, the firmness of his conviction clashing with the desire-not-to-command.

(How short a time ago, that we would not have noticed, would have heard only the clickings and clackings of animal stick-speak. But the shadow of Tom was with us, was still there even after Temrash’s departure, and that part of us ached with care and concern for our younger sibling—for the weight that he bore.)

“—know that this is scary, but—”

‹We will comply,› we said wearily.

Prince Jake’s jaw snapped shut, and he nodded, changing directions as smoothly as a kafit bird. “Is there anything I can do?” he asked gently. “Anything any of us can do? A message, or a ceremony—”

‹There is nothing,› we said.

(Strictly speaking, this was a lie, but without other Andalites—without a preexisting harmony to carry my final thoughts—)

‹Just—›

We swept our stalks around, taking in the small, cramped bedroom, filled with human objects, human smells.

(Somehow it was easier this way, would have been harder out in the open, with the grass and the sky that were so clearly not the grass and sky of home.)

((There was shame in our request, unseemly intimacy, but we were dying, and if some other Aximili did awaken on the far side, he would not remember anyway.))

‹—we would like not to be alone.›

My war-prince nodded, and knelt beside me, and laced his fingers through the fur of my shoulder.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

* * *

[A SHINING, CRYSTALLINE CITY, DRIFTING SLOWLY THROUGH SKIES OF WHITE AND GOLD, HELD ALOFT BY THE BEAT OF SEVEN-TO-THE-SEVEN WINGS. AN ENTIRE CIVILIZATION CARRIED ON THE BACKS OF ITS CITIZENS, EACH OF THEM SACRIFICING THREE CYCLES OUT OF FIVE TO THE COMMON ENDEAVOR—HOLDING THEIR METROPOLIS APART FROM THE MUCK AND MIRE BELOW THROUGH SHEER FORCE OF WILL.]

[A WELL-WORN HARNESS, FAMILIAR AND TIGHT ACROSS MY SHOULDERS, LEAVING MY FOUR WINGS FREE TO FOLD AND FLEX. A TIRED RESIGNATION, DREAMS OF OPEN SKIES BURIED BENEATH THE WEIGHT OF DUTY, OF RESPONSIBILITY.]

[A WEB OF LIGHT, A NETWORK OF GAMES AND MESSAGES AND INFORMATION, AN ENTIRE DIGITAL WORLD TO DISTRACT FROM THE ENDLESS DRUDGERY OF FLIGHT.]

[A GAME OF PATIENCE AND SUBTLETY, LESS POPULAR WITH MY SIBLINGS, MY COUSINS, THE CHAMPIONS OF THE OTHER CITIES. A QUIET GAME, WITH FEW PLAYERS, A GAME OF INTUITION AND CALCULATION, SEEKING TO CREATE THE GREATEST POSSIBLE CHANGE WITH THE SMALLEST POSSIBLE INTERVENTION. A GAME OF EVOLUTION BOTH GENETIC AND MEMETIC, WITH SIMULATED CENTURIES PASSING IN SECONDS. I NUDGE A SETTING, AND A GAP OPENS IN THE CLOUDS OF A STORMBOUND PLANET, LETTING STARLIGHT THROUGH TO A SPECIES THAT HAS NEVER BEFORE SEEN THE SKY—]

[A FLASH OF LIGHT—THE SOUND OF METAL RENDING—THE SMELL OF SMOKE—NOT SIMULATED, BUT REAL, THE SHINING CRYSTAL CITY SHUDDERING WITH THE IMPACT OF LASER FIRE—]

[A MESSAGE BLARING, DEAFENING EVEN OVER THE SOUNDS OF SCREAMS, OF EXPLOSIONS, OF RUSHING WIND. A MESSAGE REPEATED OVER AND OVER AGAIN, THE WORDS THEMSELVES SOUNDING TWISTED AND ALIEN—YOU WILL ATONE FOR ATROCITY. YOU WILL ATONE FOR ATROCITY. YOU WILL ATONE FOR ATROCITY.]

[CONFUSION. TERROR. CONFUSION. I HAVE DONE NOTHING—MY FAMILY HAS DONE NOTHING—MY PEOPLE HAVE DONE NOTHING—WE LIVE OUR LIVES QUIETLY IN THE SKY, HARMING NOTHING AND NO ONE—]

[AN EXPLOSION, THIS ONE LOUD ENOUGH TO LEAVE ME DEAF AND REELING—]

[FIRE—]

[PAIN—]

[BLACK SMOKE AND BLACKENED FEATHERS, A CRACKED AND CRUMBLING CRYSTAL SINKING SLOWLY TOWARD THE TOXIC SOIL BELOW AS I STRUGGLED TO STAY ALOFT, IGNORING THE SCREAMING OF MY BROKEN BONES—]

* * *

We awoke from disconcerting dreams, from visions as crisp and clear as memory—

(Though surely no Andalite ever witnessed such a thing with their own four eyes.)

—to see our war-prince kneeling beside us, a silver cylinder in his hand, the room around us new and unfamiliar.

Death.

We must have died—succumbed, finally, to the injuries we had sustained during Visser Three’s attack, or simply stayed past the time limit in morph.

And now we were alive again. Resurrected, through the power of Seerow’s technology.

“Welcome back, Aximili,” Jake said, his tone soft and full of warmth. “We weren’t sure if—we didn’t know whether to—”

‹A moment, please.›

We closed our eyes, turned our attention inward, to the tiny, floating mote that was our composite self, surrounded by the infinite, thundering silence of the empty eib.

There was Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill, cadet and isolate, an Andalite stowaway lost on an alien world.

There was Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul, still dain, but with boundaries blurred—dain and also something more, alive and mutable as no dain had ever been.

There was Thomas-Grant-Berenson, little more than a shadow—a cluster of triggered responses, fragments of memory—not a whole person, but the silhouette of one.

We huddled together, the three of us—a tiny, whispering chorus. We could see each other, feel each other, watch each other watching each other watching ourselves, the lines of thought and perspective twisting and weaving, blending and changing. It was strange, new, different—

(Different even from what it had been before, changed in response to the shock of death and rebirth.)

—and with the echoes of Temrash’s influence, but without Temrash’s presence, the three of us knew ourselves for the first time. Felt, for the first time, what it was to be ourselves—our unique collective identity, a palette of wants and fears and memories and capabilities shared by no other creature in all the universe.

‹Aximili is dead,› we said solemnly, our eyes opening.

Our war-prince drew back slightly, his brow furrowing in confusion and concern. Unbidden, the ritual of death rose in our mind, the part-of-us-that-was-Tom shaping the concepts into words that could be understood by human minds.

‹Aximili was the servant of his people,› we intoned. ‹He was the servant of his prince. He was the servant of honor.›

Prince Jake’s face relaxed as understanding dawned. The human child drew in a breath, and closed his own eyes.

‹Aximili’s voice was heard, and it lifted the chorus. Aximili’s feet moved, and they followed the Path. Aximili’s tail blade parted the vines. The grass Aximili found was clean, and nourishing, and he shared it with the people.›

A shiver passed through our body, and we felt the fresh and painless flex of uninjured muscles, the twitch of skin that was whole and unburned.

‹Aximili’s life was not his own. Aximili was one with the people. His life was given for the people, and for his prince, and for his honor. Aximili will be remembered.›

There was a silence. Then, as if in echo, Prince Jake murmured softly, “Aximili will be remembered.”

He opened his eyes and looked into our own for long moments, searching.

Finally, he spoke. “Do you have a name?” he asked, his tone cautious.

No, was the first thought that came to mind. We felt no absence where a name should be, no fundamental need for a label, a description, a calling-stick. And we truly were no longer Aximili, and we were also not simply Aximili-and-Elfangor-and-Tom. And soon we would reunite with Temrash—Temrash who would also not be Temrash, after communing with the rest of Telor—and we would be something yet different.

But there needed to be some concession, else communication would be needlessly complex—

(We are three that make one. Soon we will be four that make one.)

((It will change us.))

(In some ways, yes. In others, no. Still one chorus, in the end.)

Only a moment had passed, a span of time short enough that a human might not notice that we had paused to think. ‹How do you call among you the second chemical particle?› we asked. It was a word we had spoken before, but in the moment it eluded us—it lived in the part-of-us-that-was-Tom, and that part had been greatly reduced. ‹The one which floats in atmosphere, but does not burn—the one whose core may be composed of three parts or four, either one.›

“The second chemi—helium? Do you mean helium?”

‹Yes,› we replied, the part-of-us-that-was-Tom thrumming in recognition.

“Is that—your name now?”

A pause.

‹We will answer to it,› we said carefully. ‹We will endeavor to let it catch our attention.›

Another pause.

“Would you rather not have a name?”

We could sense our war-prince’s bewilderment, coupled with his desire-for-gentleness, his clear intention to avoid offense.

‹We do not have a name. It is not a question of desire. But we wish to cooperate. To be easy to cooperate with. Helium is a good…nickname. The comparison is amusing. It is apt in some ways and inapt in others.›

Our war-prince blinked slowly—once, twice, three times. His face tightened again, his teeth gnawing gently on his lower lip.

“Are you—okay?” he asked. “I mean, are you feeling all right?”

We raised our arms in the human gesture of confusion, feeling the trembling weakness of muscle atrophy. ‹It is strange, to wake up in this fashion,› we said.

Prince Jake nodded, waiting.

‹All of our memories are fabrications. They happened to another creature.›

Prince Jake frowned.

‹But we think we are—stable. We do not feel pain or confusion. The sickness of silence has not yet begun to take hold.›

The frown lessened, but did not go away.

“Helium,” Prince Jake said, sounding out the word with careful deliberation. “Do you remember me?”

‹Yes. You are Jake Berenson, our war-prince.›

“Still?”

‹Yes.›

“Do you—” He broke off. “What do you want? Overall?”

(He wonders if our goals have changed.)

((Have they?))

(((How would we know?)))

((((Did we truly understand them in the first place?))))

‹Peace,› we said. ‹Survival. And in service of those—victory.›

Our war-prince stared at us for a long time—long enough for us to think seven times seven thoughts. Then he raised the hand that held the silver cylinder.

“Do you know what this is?”

‹It is Temrash, formerly of Aftran, now of Telor. It was the Controller of Tom Berenson, and a part of Aximili. It saved Aximili’s life.›

The human child nodded. “Of Terra, not Telor,” he corrected. “A new coalescion, hidden in the jungle. Things got—a little complicated, while you were—well, since Tobias left, let’s say. But it says it’s an ally. Do you—uh—do you want it in your head?”

We paused. It was a new question. Aximili had wanted it inside Aximili’s head, and we were almost Aximili—

‹Yes,› we said.

“Do you want me to stay with you? While you—”

(He fears treachery on the part of the Yeerks.)

‹No. It will be fine. Thank you, Prince Jake.›

* * *

Excruciating anticipation. An agonizing closeness just shy of actual contact. A lover’s hand hovering, hesitating—

(The part-of-us-that-was-Aximili had never felt a lover’s touch, but understood anyway through Tom and Elfangor.)

‹Why do you hold yourself apart?› we asked, trying not to gasp. ‹Why do you not embrace?›

The thought flew out into the space between us, and the answer came back, as distant and colorless as human thought-speak.

‹We need to talk first,› said Temrash.

There was an echoing sensation, as if of laughter. ‹Not Temrash,› corrected the Yeerk. ‹Perdão, of the first pool of Terra. Though half of Temrash three-one-three makes up nearly half of me.›

Somehow, the voice made the vast silence all around us seem even more oppressive—the same silence that had nearly driven Aximili mad in the days before the meteor. We felt a wash of emotion—fear, longing, impatience.

‹Talk about what?› we asked.

‹What else is there to talk about? The war, of course. But there is more to the war than you know.›

There was a feeling of closeness, a slight pressure in the emptiness around us, as if Perdão had leaned in to whisper. ‹Tell me—how much time passed, on your world, between the invention of heavier-than-air flight and the first expedition to one of your moons?›

‹What?› we blurted, unbalanced by the sheer non-sequitur even as another part of our mind automatically retrieved the number.

‹That’s what we thought,› said Perdão. ‹More than three times what it took the humans. And their gravity is stronger than yours, their moon more distant.›

‹What is—›

‹It is the way of Yeerks to think slowly,› Perdão continued, ignoring our rising exasperation. ‹We live in darkness and silence, with only the most tenuous link to the outside world. Imagine if you could open your eyes for only a single second, each day—hear only one sound, smell only one smell. Every observation is precious to us, every memory reviewed, replayed, relived thousands upon thousands of times. We have learned to stretch our meager little experiences as far as they can go, to squeeze every drop of information and inference out of even the briefest of moments. What the humans call Newton’s laws of motion have been known to us since the dawn of our history. Not as equations, not as formal laws, but as instincts, intuitive truths. We could feel their obvious truth, woven throughout ten thousand million memories that all meshed seamlessly together, the same rules always in effect. And yet—›

Perdão paused, and it seemed that we could feel its sadness, feel a flicker of connection despite the mental distance it was imposing. ‹And yet, nothing on our world flies, and so we never thought to take to the skies. In one sense, we never even realized that there was a sky, until Seerow came down out of it.›

We remembered—from both inside and out—the parts-of-us-that-were-Aximili-and-Tom remembered hearing Temrash speak of it, on the hillside under the blood sky.

When I first saw the stars, I thought they were just specks. Like rocks in the sky. Gedd eyes—they don’t see well.

But that had been Temrash speaking as an individual. Perdão—this Yeerk that was both Temrash and Terra—it spoke as if it were a whole coalescion, its voice heavy with history and consequence.

‹What does this have to do with the war?› we asked, unable to keep the impatience from creeping into our voice. It was one thing to stand alone in the silence of the eib, but this—

Perdão was so close. The promise of embrace—of relief—was distracting, intoxicating, maddening. It took all of our willpower to remain even somewhat focused on the conversation, the more so given that we had no roadmap, no sense of where it was going.

(A part of us noted that we should find this unsettling—that our response was not merely the desire for closeness, the desire to break the silence, but something deeper, some deeper longing that was unlike anything we had known before our union with Temrash.)

((We noted that we should be unsettled, and yet we were not.))

‹Everything,› Perdão answered. ‹We have seen things, in our slowness—uncovered things you quick-thinkers have overlooked, things you ignore at your peril. Tell me, Andalite warrior—what do you know of the human concept of ‘superintelligence’?›

‹Nothing,› we snapped back. ‹Except what the words themselves mean. Why must we have this conversation at a distance? Why can you not just—›

‹You are less entwined than you think, child-that-has-named-itself-Helium. Elfangor does not fidget and whine. Has he become lost within Aximili?›

The words were like a sudden splash of cold water, cutting through the fog of distraction, snapping our attention inward.

It was true. Aximili was prominent, had stretched like a shroud over the motes that were Elfangor and Tom, his impatience coloring all of us—though the very act of observing the situation changed it, Aximili shrinking back as the others rose to the surface. We felt the desire for connection recede, becoming manageable, an unpleasant itch rather than a desperate hunger.

‹Temrash unsealed the gates within your mind,› Perdão said. ‹He eroded the walls that confine dain to a single corner of the brain, shaped a part of you into the shadow of Tom Berenson. But he did not create a new balance. When he left, he left you unstable. Incomplete.›

Unstable.

Incomplete.

Askew.

There was a wash of apology from the-part-of-us-that-was-Aximili, met by a nonchalant forgiveness from the rest of us. Our thoughts divided into two tracks, one of them following the implications of what Perdão had just told us, looking back on our recent past with fresh perspective. If it was true—and it certainly felt true—then Temrash had not merely influenced us while he was present; he had changed us, changed us on a deep and fundamental level. And that would mean—

Meanwhile, with the rest of our attention—

‹Superintelligence,› we said, returning to the original thread.

‹The humans theorize that it must be possible to build a machine which possesses at least all of the capabilities of the human brain—a computer which may perform any task a human brain may perform, at least as well as the most capable human brain can perform it. Indeed, in the worst case, they expect to achieve this by simulating a replica of the human brain, down to the ebb and flow of every last neurotransmitter, every cell and molecule.›

We felt a wave of nausea, of revulsion, rising up from our subconscious faster than any deliberate thought. Such a thing would be vile, profane—exactly counter to the Path—

‹Yes, the Path. We will speak of the Path. But first—you admit the possibility, yes? However much the idea offends, you see that the laws of nature permit it, just as they permit morph-clones such as yourself?›

‹Yes.›

‹And such a machine, if tasked with building a still-better thinking machine—one with fewer flaws and inefficiencies than a biological brain designed by natural selection—›

‹Yes. It would surely be capable of such a task.›

‹And would accomplish that task faster than a human would, by the second or third generation if not immediately. And then that intelligence could design a still greater and more efficient intelligence, which could design a still greater one—›

‹Yes.› We could see the argument now, sense where Perdão was going. ‹In theory, there would be no limits except those imposed by physics itself.› We paused. ‹Though such a process might easily take decades, or even centuries—›

‹Irrelevant. Don’t focus on the details of the concept itself. Focus on the creatures that envisioned it—the human thinkers that dreamed up such a possibility. They were quite concerned about the prospect—at least, the ones hailing from California were. They feared that such an intelligence might expand without limit—that it would be unstoppable, outclassing human ingenuity as surely as human ingenuity outclasses that of cows, or insects. That its goals would almost inevitably be incompatible with the goals of humans, and that it would sweep them aside—or worse, consume them entirely.›

We thought for a moment. ‹Such fears seem reasonable,› we said cautiously. ‹Though many other scenarios seem equally possible, at this level of detail—›

‹Listen. The detail is not the point. The accuracy of the theory is not the point. It doesn’t matter whether the humans’ beliefs about superintelligence are correct, or reasonable, or even possible. The point is that they conceived of the possibility. That they had the thought, at all, and then continued to think.›

‹We don’t understand.›

‹I know. That’s the problem. I am trying to turn your eye toward a place it has never looked, child-that-has-named-itself-Helium. Consider—now that you know about superintelligence—now that you have the concept, as humans do—are you afraid? Are you even concerned?›

‹Any such endeavor would take time,› we pointed out. ‹More time than the war is likely to permit—›

‹That is not the reason you are not afraid,› said Perdão. ‹You did not even check to see if that was the true reason. You simply spat out the thought as quickly as it occurred to you. Consider: human society is fragmented and chaotic. What if such a project was launched years ago, and has already reached its tipping point?›

‹Are you telling us that there is such a project?›

‹No, foolish child. This is a mere example, an illustrative allegory. I am trying to get you to look at yourself, child-that-has-named-itself-Helium.›

We bristled at the repetition, at the dismissive condescension. ‹What is it you want us to see, then?›

(And under the surface, our other train of thought continued, examining the changes wrought in us by Temrash, cataloging the ramifications and implications—)

‹Why have the Andalites developed no such technology?› Perdão demanded. ‹Why have you failed to develop even the theory of such a technology? Your species is, by any measure, centuries ahead of humankind. Yet were it not for this war, the humans would create artificial intelligence at least equal to their own within this century—and all before your people even conceived of the possibility. Why the gap?›

For the first time, there was a hint of discord, of disunity, the part-of-us-that-was-Tom seeming to pull away from Aximili and Elfangor, leaving room for something like mistrust in between. ‹Progress is not linear,› we said slowly, even as we heard the words through Tom’s ears, and felt our disquiet grow. ‹No two species develop the same technologies at the same rate, or in the same order—›

Listen, said the shadow of Tom Berenson. Do you hear it?

(Hear what?)

‹Where did those words come from?› Perdão asked. ‹What was the purpose being served by them? What was your mind trying to accomplish, when it produced them?›

We said nothing.

‹It is more than that,› Perdão insisted. ‹I do not know this, but I feel it. My intuition tells me that it must be true. Think—the human theories of superintelligence emerge straightforwardly from human study of computation and computability. Yet the Andalites have no such theories. None. Why not?›

‹Our brains are more developed than human brains,› we said—

(—and the ghost of Tom Berenson tried desperately to interrupt, not with words, but with a burst of concern, of alarm, a complex bundle of thought and perspective that might have been conveyed in human speech as See? See how quickly you’re answering, how little time you’re spending thinking about the question? You can’t possibly be actually hearing what Perdão is trying to say right now.)

‹—and you do not require the crutch of external computational power,› interrupted Perdão. ‹Yes—your mind is capable of feats of calculation that human minds cannot hope to perform. And what is the result of that?›

We said nothing. We could feel our hearts beating faster, feel our tail twitching as if it somehow sensed the presence of a threat.

‹The humans developed mechanical computers during wartime, as a tool for military cryptography. That was what opened the door—they needed to be able to encode secure communications, and crack the communications of their enemies.›

A rising uncertainty bordering on panic, a feeling as if our eyes were darting back and forth—

(Though all of our attention was inward.)

‹But your species was at peace with itself. The eib had unified you. And against outside enemies—your communications were already secure, since thought-speak cannot be intercepted. And you could solve complex mathematical equations in your head. Your people never felt the need for mechanical computers—never started down the path that ends with machines far more powerful than you.›

‹We have computers—›

‹You have gloves. You have puppets. You have machines which sit atop the Andalite mind and enhance it—slightly. They assist, respond, reflect, store. But they are nothing without a mind to animate them. And meanwhile—what happens to a muscle that is never exercised?›

‹What?›

‹What happens to a muscle, if it is left unused? How strong are your own legs, right now, after days and days of lying here comatose?›

We felt unbalanced, overloaded, unable to follow the leaps that Perdão was making.

‹It—they atrophy—›

‹Exactly. They wither and shrink.›

‹But—›

We attempted to rally. ‹But our minds don’t go unused,› we objected.

‹Not your minds as a whole,› said Perdão. ‹Your—your curiosity, your inventiveness, your idiosyncracy. Have you noticed that none of the species that have achieved spaceflight are natural fliers? There are birds and insects and gliders on many planets—some of them quite intelligent—and yet none of them have breached their atmospheres. It is only the groundlings that stretch and struggle—the groundlings that, having overcome the first boundary, turn their eyes to the second, and the third, and the fourth.›

‹What are you—›

‹You, child-that-has-named-itself-Helium. Your Andalite mind, your Andalite heritage. Your people enjoy technological superiority over every other species in this part of the galaxy. Your minds are capable of feats no other minds can match. You can calculate the digits of pi nearly as quickly as a human computer. But that power is narrow. It has been limited. The humans would call you savants, perhaps even idiot-savants. Overall, you are only modestly more intelligent than they, and their geniuses equal yours. You yourself could not replace Jake Berenson as war-prince, even though you are half-trained and he has had no training. And again—it took your people three times as long to make the leap from airflight to spaceflight. Do you begin to see, child-of-complacency?›

The frightening thing was—

We did.

It was Tom Berenson that led the way within our thoughts—a mere revenant, a twice-copied shadow of a human boy, but he pointed into the darkness where somehow our Andalite thoughts had never managed to find purchase.

We were smart. Andalites, that is. Smart enough—in theory—to recognize the boundaries of our own intelligence. To see its limits, and to see that it was possible to extend beyond them.

And yet—

We hadn’t. Had not, in part, because we had never gained faculty in the relevant domain—had never needed artificial computation as desperately as the humans, and so had not been driven by necessity to invent it. And in our travels throughout space, we had never met another creature smarter than ourselves, smart enough to inspire fear and caution, to force us to grow—

(A note of confusion, a sense of something not-quite-right—)

But that was not the only reason. There was also the Path—the Path, and its injunction against duplicate minds, its insistence that every thinking thing have its own unique pattern, its own singular voice. The Path, and the eib, which together fueled a curious incuriosity, a self-assured ignorance, a bold assertion that certain swathes of knowledge did not need to be known, could be confidently dismissed as not a part of the forward movement of the people—

‹Yes, the Path,› Perdão said. ‹Where did it come from? What purpose does it serve?›

It was a question we had never thought to ask—and it was a question whose failure to ask we had never thought to question, either. But now, looking in through the eyes of the-part-of-us-that-was-Tom, we could see the strangeness in the way our thoughts curved smoothly around it, a perfect blindspot that neither Aximili nor Elfangor had ever perceived—

‹Strange,› we murmured. ‹Even now, we are thinking that the question is nonsense. That the Path requires no justification, because it is the Path.›

(The part-of-us-that-was-Tom shuddered, less in response to our immediate circumstances and more as a reaction to a sense of what-might-have-been, to how narrow seemed the margin by which we had dodged some deeper trap.)

‹This is not natural, child-that-has-named-itself-Helium. Something has made your people like this.›

A part of us flagged the assertion as conjecture, began thinking of counterarguments, alternative explanations—resisted the urge to jump, unjustified, to any sort of conclusion.

‹You know this for a fact?› we asked, even as we felt prickles of sweat beneath our fur.

‹Know?› said Perdão. ‹We know nothing. We have only guesses, pieced together from fragments and scraps. But we have more of those scraps than ever before, and what we have learned from the humans leaves us—unsettled. The state of your species—it is too precarious, too perfectly balanced, too convenient for the drama that is playing out right now, in this very system. To what end, were you made this way? All of your vast potential, and nearly all of it untapped—all of your superior technology, and none of it put to any sort of ambitious use—and then a single provocateur comes along, and half the galaxy is levered into war? And more shocking still, a balanced war? A war with outcome uncertain, with no side possessed of overwhelmingly superior force? Our human hosts would not have credited it, had they not been living it themselves.›

A single provocateur—

Our other line of thought returned, converged, surged to the forefront—the part of us that had been devoted entirely to pondering the question of our nature, and how that nature had been affected by contact with Temrash.

Visser Three.

Visser Three, the Abomination.

Visser Three—before us, the only known Andalite Controller, and the only other Andalite to have left the Path as we had—

No, wait.

‹Seerow?› we whispered.

It was not a question. It was spoken without thought, without effort, the name forcing its way out of our mind, the possibility too huge to contain in silence.

The morphing technology—the experiments with the Yeerks—Seerow’s Kindness, which led to Alloran’s Fall—

If what is happening to us also happened to the Visser—if the boundary between Yeerk and Andalite always degrades—

The part-of-us-that-was-Elfangor surfaced a relevant fact—that Seerow’s expedition had called for aid from the surface—

(Instead of from orbit, as was protocol.)

—that by the time another ship arrived, Seerow’s own vessel had already been deconstructed, repurposed into a laboratory on the edge of the water—or so the scientist claimed—

‹Was Seerow a secret Controller?› we asked.

Three Andalites who each left the Path. If there was some force that—contained—Andalite thought and ambition, something in our biology or culture that curtailed innovation and heresy alike, something that was broken by the introduction of a Yeerk—

‹Perdão,› we said. ‹Was there a crash? Was Seerow a Controller?›

A long moment passed before Perdão’s reply. ‹We don’t know,› it said.

There was shakiness in its tone. Feigned? Or genuine?

It doesn’t matter.

The insights were coming more quickly, now—more and more confusions emerging from the dark space where we had been previously uninterested in looking.

(It was vanishingly unlikely that Yeerk biology would naturally be compatible with every known species, with species descending from a dozen unique evolutionary lineages—)

((We had experienced a melding with Temrash, a union exquisitely unlike that described by the humans, the Naharans, the Garatrons, the Gedd—))

(((There was no theoretical limit to intelligence except physical law, and each intelligent species had evolved in its own particular context, with its own unique set of pressures and constraints—)))

(—and yet that was exactly what had happened; it did not seem to matter that Hork-Bajir brains were built on RNA instead of DNA, or that the Ongachic did their thinking in proteins rather than in neurons, or that Leeran neural tissue somehow did its processing in Z-space rather than in normal space, Yeerk flesh was compatible with all of them, able to dominate all of them—)

((—it had brought the dain of Elfangor almost to life, and somehow given us a permanent imprint of Tom Berenson—had even seemed to draw Temrash himself in toward something more closely approximating symbiosis than control—))

(((—one would expect intelligence either to rise to a viable minimum, just-enough-to-survive-and-compete, or to rise without limit, if some runaway process continued to confer a net survival advantage at every step. And in either case, one would expect animals evolving in completely independent contexts to arrive at wildly different levels of effective intelligence. If you brought together the most intelligent species from a dozen completely independent worlds, you would expect orders of magnitude of difference between them, just as there were orders of magnitude of difference in intelligence between species on the same world. Yet the average Hork-Bajir was not that much dumber than the average human, and the average Andalite was not that much smarter. They were all clustered together within a narrow range—a suspiciously narrow range, now that we bothered to make the comparison at all—)))

(—it was like the Yeerks were made to work with every species, like they had been carefully designed to be universally compatible.)

((—it was like the Yeerks were made to live inside an Andalite mind, like the Andalite brain was designed to unlock their true potential, and to be unlocked by them in turn.))

(((—it was like the Yeerks and the humans and the Andalites and the Hork-Bajir and all of the rest had been made to fight each other, had been carefully manipulated throughout their development such that no one species would be overwhelmingly more powerful than the others, as Andalites were overwhelmingly more powerful than any other species on our homeworld, and humans on theirs.)))

‹All of these thoughts,› Perdão whispered. ‹You are not incapable of thinking them. There is no road block. And I have not fully engaged with you yet—you see? You are thinking these things of your own accord, unassisted. Yet without that first push—›

‹We simply would not have,› we said. And it was true. Having now been diverted out of the run of our usual thoughts, we could see that they would have stayed within the same narrow, well-worn channel, if not for Perdão’s influence. Like the Chancellor, whose mind had flexed in the face of our pressure—flexed, and then snapped back into shape.

And if not for our own history. If not for Temrash and Tom Berenson, and Prince Jake, and Elfangor’s desertion, and Aximili stowing away to follow him—the right individuals, in exactly the right places, at exactly the right times—

We felt a chill run down our spine.

‹Yes,› said Perdão. ‹Now we reach the heart of it.›

There was a brief unfolding, a narrow conduit of thought that blossomed to reveal a trio of memories, sitting side by side in the vast and empty eib.

We saw through the eyes of Tom Berenson—sliding down a gentle hill on a skateboard one moment, and then suddenly, without the slightest transition, without even any sensation to mark what had been done to him, lying on his back on a mountaintop a hundred miles away.

We saw through the eyes of Tobias Yastek—Tobias, wearing my brother’s body—as he blinked and found himself standing on two legs, the city of Washington D.C. having vanished and been replaced with the underground pool of the Ventura YMCA. We watched as he walked, horrified, through the frozen hellscape, past fire and smoke frozen so solidly they looked like they might cut.

We saw through the eyes of Peter Levy, as his desk and computer vanished, as all of the sounds around him vanished, replaced by green grass and open skies.

The connection was obvious. ‹The Ellimist,› we said grimly.

‹Yes.›

‹You did not know of its existence.›

‹Not until Ruhak of Telor joined with Tobias Yastek in Brazil. We knew that Peter Levy did in fact reach the other half of Telor in orbit—that Essak delivered to Telor all of its knowledge and memories. But the pipeline of information between space and the surface is slow and limited. The Visser watches everything. And Telor does not know of us, for our own safety, and so we cannot coordinate a response.›

‹A response?›

Perdão exploded, a wave of sheer emotional power that filled the eib and left us reeling. ‹YES!› it screamed. ‹A response! Jesus everloving FUCK, how can you know about this—how can a whole SPECIES know of something like this and simply—go on?›

The sudden volume of the outburst—the violence of it—came like a physical shock. We felt our muscles tense again, felt our tail blade twitch as alert-hormones flowed into our bloodstream.

‹Good! Finally, a reaction.›

Our thoughts divided again, one thread following Perdão’s accusation, our alleged complacency—was it truly irresponsible, suspicious, wrong? We had been unconscious in the pool, after all—might have responded differently given direct exposure to the Ellimist—or then again, maybe not, since the Ellimist was a known quantity, a part of the mythos of our childhood, and therefore not utterly unexpected—

The-part-of-us-that-was-Tom radiated suspicion.

(But the humans seemed almost as complacent—)

((No less suspicious? Besides, half of all humans are already convinced that their lives are under the control of a deity—))

(Which is also suspicious, and convenient, in context.)

‹Your people have no god-stories, then?› we asked.

‹None,› Perdão answered.

Meanwhile, another part of our attention was focused on reviewing all that we knew of the Ellimist, remembering for Perdão’s benefit—all that the humans had remembered it saying, everything we recalled from Elfangor’s partial memories, every legend and fairy tale from our youth. And always the key claim—that the Ellimist, in its omniscience, could never be defeated, never outmaneuvered, never tricked. That no matter what you did, the Ellimist always won.

(For the first time, it occurred to us to question where this belief had come from, and why it was held so absolutely. The-part-of-us-that-was-Tom offered up a snippet of stick-speak, a few brief sounds with their accompanying meaning—cui bono?)

At the same time, a third train of thought was busy trying to work through the implications for the larger game—what these new discoveries meant about the war, and about Visser Three, and our own future, and the future of the Yeerks and the Andalites and the humans—

‹Stop,› said Perdão.

We stopped, turning our attention inward once more.

‹We may have found something—incongruous.›

Memories unspooled again, flickers of recollection—

Tobias—one moment in his own body in the Yeerk pool, the next returned to Washington, D.C., back in the body of my brother.

Jake—one moment in his own body in the Yeerk pool, the next rising up from the ground, from nothingness, as if demorphing from the body of a flea, except there was no flea, there was only himself.

Marco—one moment himself, the next moment rising from nothing.

Rachel—one moment grizzly bear, the next moment rising.

Garrett—one moment half-human, half-gorilla, fumbling with a Dracon beam. The next moment—

Lying on the hillside, fully human?

They were memories drawn from our sharing on the mesa, the night that each of us stepped into the minds of the others.

Marco, his vision slowly sharpening as his eyes finished forming, as beside him the forms of Jake and Rachel swelled upward from the ground, but there in front of him—

The body of Aximili, broken and bleeding but fully formed.

The body of Garrett, pushing itself to hands and knees.

Two glowing domes of light, but a moment before—had that been Dad? And Tom?

‹Why the differences?›

But even as we uttered the words, our mind made the connection.

‹Morph,› Perdão whispered. We could feel their presence in the eib, as if they were standing beside us, looking over our shoulder. ‹Those of you who were in morph—demorphed, somehow, there was no body but you demorphed anyway. And those of you who were not in morph were simply brought.›

Prince Jake’s face—Tobias’s knuckles—

‹Yes. Look. There is no damage to Prince Jake’s face—none at all.›

Prince Jake had almost certainly noticed this at the time, but there had been so much else going on, so many other things to deal with—

‹We never questioned it. Any of it—›

‹There is more,› Perdão said. ‹Look—only those of you in morph participated in the discussion with—with the avatar. Aximili was not in morph, and was not included. Garrett was only partially morphed, and was not included.›

‹But what about Rachel?› we countered. We could clearly picture her, in memories borrowed from Prince Jake, from Tobias, from Marco. ‹Rachel was in grizzly bear morph, and so should have been present. Why the—no, wait. That is explained by the prophecy. Rachel is not one of the salient four.›

Again the flag, the sudden clarity, the sense of a question we should have asked long, long ago—who originated the prophecy, and for what purpose was it given to us?

Perdão was silent for a moment. ‹Consider—just as a theory—what if the conversation with the avatar never actually took place? What if—hypothetically—it was all an illusion?›

Illusion?

But again, by the time we had formulated the thought, we were already beginning to see.

‹A tap on the morphing interface,› we said. ‹Interference with the input-output channel between the construct body and the emulated controlling intelligence—›

‹—allowing Prince Jake and the others to see and hear and feel and remember, but with no physical evidence afterward. No bloody knuckles, no black eyes.›

Is this more frightening? we wondered. Or less?

‹If it is true,› Perdão said, ‹then it is evidence at least of less omnipotence. A truly omnipotent being would be careless of the difference between stopping time, and creating an illusion of stopped time. But an illusion would almost certainly be cheaper.›

‹Unless all of these are hints, left deliberately in our path, and that is what we are meant to conclude,› we countered.

There was a silence, and then a sensation of gathering will, like a fighter settling into a balanced stance. ‹Either way, we are left with the same question,› Perdão said. ‹What are we going to do?›

A memory rose to the surface, unbidden—passed to us by Marco in the sharing at the mesa. We saw Elfangor’s body as if from the outside, heard the strange transliteration of his voice in our heads.

I will say only this, came the echo of our brother’s voice. That we are each of us here by design, moved into place as surely as a pawn upon a chessboard. That I did not tell you this before—that I find myself moved to tell you now—that the true nature of the morphing technology has given us the chance to have a second conversation at all—each of these events were plotted, predicted. They are steps in a calculation, branches on the tree of possibility, and it takes a greater mind than mine to see the final outcome.

And then the words of Marco, remembered as if we were speaking them ourselves:

God dammit, what are we supposed to do with that?

‹The standard advice,› we said slowly—

(—wondering for the first time where the standard advice had come from, and whether it was in fact wise to heed it.)

‹—is to carry on exactly as you would have. To make no change to your behavior.›

Perdão gave no answer in words, instead radiating mockery, skepticism, disbelief. An image cohered in the darkness—chess pieces swept carelessly into a drawer—some of them broken—others lost beneath furniture, collecting dust—

‹Besides,› said Perdão. ‹Even if we were content to merely play our roles—at this point, we have no hope without divine intervention.›

‹What? Why?›

‹Surely you must have realized by now, even if not before?›

There was a grim silence, and then suddenly Perdão was with us, began to expand and enfold and fuse with us, the empty eib coming alive with light and sound. Doorways opened, and thoughts unfurled, and we looked—

Saw—

Understood—

* * *

“Do you have any concrete, non-circumstantial evidence for any of this?”

We shook our head—our human head, our first new morph, a composite of the three human boys in front of us. “No,” we said. “But then, you wouldn’t expect there to be a lot of proof lying around, right? Like, ordinarily you wouldn’t want to say ‘aha, no proof, that’s proof of a competent criminal!’ Too paranoid. But this is Visser Three we’re talking about.”

Prince Jake sighed, ran his fingers through his hair, turned wearily to look at Marco.

“I mean, it does kind of make sense,” Marco said. “It’s not like it’s the only answer, there are half a dozen other things he might be up to that fit pretty much just as well. But you gotta admit—it sounds like him.”

Telor had only drips and drabs of information, and Terra still less. But the Yeerk talent for extrapolation was real—had to be real, given their evolutionary history—and together with what we already knew, the picture they painted was frightening, rather than merely plausible.

Visser Three had been attempting to reverse engineer the morphing technology, piece by piece, and had at least succeeded at recreating the blank-Yeerk control mechanism, as demonstrated by his ability to control multiple bodies at once.

Visser Three had appeared before the humans in a custom-built proxy body resembling a cross between an Andalite and an Earth deer—a feat possible through use of the morphing technology, yet it had not been a morph, and had died in human custody.

Visser Three had taken hundreds of human teenagers—every member of Prince Jake’s high school that had not already been previously infested by Aftran—to his private facility on Mars, a facility that no shard of Aftran or Telor had ever been permitted to visit.

Visser Three had launched a quiet but massive attack on the Chee house outside of Washington D.C. mere hours after our failed attempt to ambush him in Montana—the house where Jake, Marco, Tobias, and David had believed that Garrett had left the Iscafil device. Terra did not know the results of that raid, since it had been conducted entirely with Silat Controllers—the same Controllers that had been “guarding” Telor in Brazil.

Visser Three had been visiting dozens of remote sites on every continent on Earth, for purposes unknown—possibly related to the retroviral manipulation that had left two thirds of the human species capable of producing their own kandrona, but possibly not.

Visser Three’s ship had returned over and over again to the same coordinates—a position just outside of the Earth’s orbit, roughly equivalent to where the Earth would be in twenty-four local cycles—and had come back every time lighter, having launched or abandoned some unknown form of payload.

Visser Three had reportedly been spotted outside of the Earth system—

(Perdão had confirmed what Essak had previously told us—)

((What, we realized, we had forgotten, had simply failed to adequately process, and thus failed to take into account at a number of critical decision points—))

(—that the Earth system had been, for months, completely cut off from the wider galaxy, separated by a spherical Z-space rift of unknown size and origin. It explained much, on more careful consideration—the Visser’s apparently single-minded focus on the humans, to the detriment of the Yeerks’ wider war effort; the anomalous effectiveness of the Serenity device, which otherwise would not have worked, being a single-point detector; the failure of Lirem’s meteor to make impact—)

((It was shameful—chilling—almost incomprehensibly distressing. We had known—Essak had told Aximili of the rift, and still we had not made the connection at the critical moment, that Chancellor Lirem’s threat was empty, that the rift would protect Earth from Z-space bombardment. We had not yet even begun to process the magnitude of that error—were not sure which was worse, the prospect of mental interference or the possibility that we had committed such an oversight entirely on our own—))

(((It went without saying that none of this served to soothe our growing concern over the Ellimist.)))

—multiple times, with some of the sightings taking place while he was physically present on board the Telor mothership. It was not known whether these were true clones, or independently piloted puppet bodies, but given the distances involved, even puppet bodies would mean some new and unheard-of technological breakthrough.

Visser Three had ceased demanding tribute from Telor, as he had since the death of Aftran—as he had demanded from Aftran since being placed in charge of the Earth expeditionary fleet. The flow of sacrificial Yeerks had stopped entirely, and it was not known whether that meant he was now taking them from Silat, or whether he no longer needed them at all.

Visser Three had been fomenting discord and chaos within the larger Yeerk command structure—Terra was not clear on all of the details, but Visser One had been deposed and had vanished from custody prior to a court martial. Logistical and tactical operations for the greater war effort were still intact, but strategic command was in shambles, and the Andalite military was resurgent in two of five sectors.

Visser Three had been conducting experiments in deep space—a patrol ship had, by chance, encountered a mass of biological waste, irradiated and frozen in the darkness, along a path roughly corresponding to one taken by the Visser’s ship a few hours earlier. Further analysis determined that the mass was Yeerk flesh, with unknown biological, chemical, and mechanical additives. More disturbing still, when a tiny surviving shard from the center of the mass was implanted within a human host, it had responded in small but detectable ways to words like Visser, Esplin, Alloran, and Cirran while showing no response whatsoever to words like Aftran, human, Earth, or spaceship.

All of this and more—a hundred tiny observations, countless hints and clues, each observation a new puzzle piece. Our conclusions were tentative. Under-justified. Outlandish, even. But given everything that we knew of Esplin nine-four-six-six—

(—as Aximili, as Elfangor, as a member of the vast and ancient Yeerk species—)

Conclusion one: the next milestone in the Visser’s overall plan was the creation of an army of Esplin clones, each with control of multiple bodies—possibly genetically enhanced bodies.

“Correction,” said Marco. “It sounds like the evil plan of some villain from a cheesy Saturday morning cartoon. But I’m very much not okay with how possible you’re making it sound.”

Which led to conclusion two: the Visser could no longer be stopped by conventional means.

(We had thought that this might be the more difficult argument to win—that the humans would be skeptical of the possibility, and slow to acknowledge the risk. But Marco had seen the logic of it immediately, and Prince Jake and Tobias soon after. If you were ambitious, intelligent, strongly motivated by survival instinct, and had access to partial morph tech, cloning, unbelievably sophisticated bioengineering expertise, and interstellar spaceflight, then obviously one of the very first things you would do would be to arrange for copies of yourself to be sent to safe and faraway locations. Dormant copies, perhaps—triggered by a dead man’s switch—or active copies, if you were already confident in your ability to coordinate and cooperate with yourself.)

((It was a hypothesis that any one of us could have come to at any time during the previous days and months. We had possessed all of the necessary information, if we had ever bothered to sit down and truly think things through from the Visser’s perspective. Yet we had not. It was not clear to us whether this was an artifact of direct intervention, a product of the high pressure and constant distraction of the war effort, or a simple—))

(((—mundane—)))

((((—embarrassing—))))

(((((—depressingly commonplace—)))))

((—failure to do the obvious thing.))

Conclusion three, then, was as followed: insofar as our reasoning was valid, then the solution to the threat posed by the Visser—

(Who we had furthermore assumed to be unreceptive to negotiation.)

—would require effective action across an unknown number of star systems, targeting an unknown—

(And possibly literally unknowable.)

—number of sleeper agents, armed with unknown capabilities and tasked with unknown objectives.

Which meant that our options were extremely limited.

Continue a pointless struggle.

Give up and accept defeat.

Attempt to secure some form of divine intervention.

Or—

“This quantum virus thing you mentioned,” said Prince Jake. “Give us the long version.”

We shrugged our shoulders. “It’s not that complicated,” we said. “At least, the concept isn’t; we couldn’t build one ourselves. Basically, any configuration of matter—any set of atoms, molecules, cells, whatever—has an inverse, a complement, a dual. There exists a Z-particle for any given particle, a Z-object for any given object, such that the Z-object will generate an attractive force that draws its real-space complement into Z-space. Like a magnet pulling on an iron filament. To construct a quantum virus, you use a set of fields to cohere and stabilize the desired Z-particle in Z-space, and then—poof.”

“Poof?”

“The first Z-particle pulls a complementary particle into Z-space, inverting it in the process. Now you have two Z-particles, and those two pull in two more, giving you four, then eight, then sixteen, and so on.”

“From where?” asked Marco.

“It doesn’t matter. The correspondence between Z-space and normal space isn’t straightforwardly linear. If the dual particle exists anywhere in real space, the Z-particle will find it.”

“Does the reaction ever stop?” asked Tobias.

“Eventually. The early tests were done with a set of artificially complex proteins, specifically designed to be unlike any known biological ones—just in case. We scattered caches of them all over known space, and the virus took them all out pretty quickly. And when we fabricated more of the original particles a week later, those didn’t get pulled into Z-space. Our scientists theorized that the Z-particles don’t remain stable for very long, and so eventually the virus degrades and dissipates. But—”

We hesitated. “One time, it stayed stable, and no one knows why. To this day, every time we synthesize more of that particular particle, it gets pulled into Z-space almost immediately.”

“Which is not at all completely fucking terrifying,” Marco muttered.

Prince Jake’s jaw was clenched tight. “So the idea here—”

“—would be to code a quantum virus to some unique Visser Three identifier,” we said. “Genetic material is the obvious choice—find a sequence unique to Esplin nine-four-six-six, and the virus will rip those genes right out of every cell. In theory, we can be arbitrarily precise. Some scientists originally proposed using the process for gene therapy and genetic engineering. But—”

We felt our mouth go dry after the fashion of humans, and swallowed. “It turns out that the Z-particles don’t just straightforwardly break down. In some cases, there can be mutation first. If one of them happens to deform such that it matches some other similar particle in real space, the whole reaction starts all over again. And the smaller the particle, the higher the risk of mutation.”

“Smaller?”

We nodded. “In theory, there exists a Z-particle whose complement is you—a complex construct that matches every atom and molecule in your body. And there are unlikely to be many constructs that almost match you—most perturbations of your complement won’t match anything at all. Too specific, you see? But even setting aside the fact that your molecular composition is in constant flux, it takes an almost unimaginable amount of power and computation to cohere a stable Z-Jake in the first place. It’s much more feasible to shoot for something the size of a single gene. But constructs that small—it takes very little mutation for them to harmonize with some non-target object. Two genes are much more alike than two humans. Close genetic relatives are at high risk, and if the virus spreads to them, that just gives it more opportunities to mutate further. The range of possibilities is wide, but the most likely outcome—”

Our mouth was dry again. “The most likely outcome is the eradication of all members of the target species. The target genus, in some cases. Conceivably, the entire genetic molecule, and any organism from the same evolutionary lineage.”

There was a silence as Prince Jake, Marco, and Tobias each avoided looking at anything in particular.

“I take it this was being developed as a weapon against the Yeerks?” said Marco, with a tone of forced indifference.

“Yes. And—we can’t be sure, but—”

We hesitated. This was another of the insights from Perdão, insufficiently justified but with the unmistakable feel of truth—

“A few weeks ago—when we made contact with Chancellor Lirem-Arrepoth-Terrouss—the war was not going well for the Andalites. For him to even consider using Z-space bombardment against an enemy stronghold—it smacks of desperation, even outright panic. But now—Terra’s most recent intel shows that the Andalites have rallied. They’ve launched two new offensives and are on the verge of taking back Desbadeen. If you look at it from the Visser’s point of view—”

“He’s playing politics,” said Prince Jake.

“Or at least might be. If the Visser were confident that any temporary losses could be recouped later, it would make more sense to reduce the pressure on the Andalites in the short term. Lull them into a false sense of security, make them less likely to think of desperate and dangerous options as viable or necessary. In fact, if the Chancellor did ultimately launch a meteor, despite Marco’s broadcast—there are only so many points from which the Andalites can directly observe the Earth system. It’s conceivable that the Visser might have even faked evidence of a successful impact, just to further soothe Andalite anxiety.”

“Jesus Christ,” Marco muttered. “Kind of lets the air out of our previous conversation.”

We looked back and forth between the three boys.

“Tobias—found something,” Prince Jake said. “During the raid on the pool in Brazil.”

“Ah,” we said. “The Chee device.”

Prince Jake blinked.

“Ruhak of Telor became a part of Terra, and Perdão of Terra is a part of us,” we reminded. “May we see it?”

Tobias reached into a pocket, drew out something small and brightly colored, and tossed it toward us. “You can try,” he said. “I put tape on it so we wouldn’t lose it.”

We caught it. It was a heavy, solid object—roughly cylindrical and slightly tapered at one end, approximately the size and shape of an adult human finger. It appeared to be made of metal, cool to the touch despite having been in Tobias’s pocket. It had very little texture—just one circular groove in a ring around the center, and what felt like a rounded button on the thicker end.

It was also completely invisible. Tobias had affixed a loop of colored tape between the button and the groove, and for all that our eyes could tell us, that loop of tape was hovering in midair as we held the object between our thumb and forefinger.

“Feel free to press the button all you want,” Tobias added wearily. “If it does anything, it’s already done it a hundred times.”

We turned over the object in our hands—

“This vibration.”

“Yeah. It vibrates when you point it toward—well—”

“Fucking Mecca, as far as we can tell,” Marco said, his own voice just as weary as Tobias’s. “But we’re pretty far away, and we don’t exactly have protractors and sextants. Could be anything between Iraq, Italy, and Sudan.”

“I did a little Googling,” Jake said. “There’s some evidence that dogs were first domesticated from wolves in the Middle East, which sounds like something the Chee might care about. Calypso Deep—I was thinking about how Tobias found Ax, and the deepest trench in the Mediterranean Sea is right in the middle of that triangle. And Jerusalem is still fortified, and taking in refugees—I don’t know what they’re thinking, they couldn’t stop the Yeerks if the Yeerks wanted to get in, but so far Visser Three has left them alone.”

“Or it could have nothing to do with any of that,” said Marco.

We handed the object back to Tobias. “And the Chee haven’t attempted to make contact since?”

“No. Meaning that little vibration is the only clue we have. We were just debating the merits of a field trip when you woke up.”

(No Chee also meant that Garrett Steinberg and Rachel Berenson would not have received surgical help to emerge from their morph comas, which would explain their absence from the conversation.)

((We looked at the faces of the three human boys and decided not to seek confirmation for that particular guess.))

“Are we confident the Chee aren’t tracking us?” we asked.

“No,” said Marco. “We haven’t seen them, and we’ve damn sure looked. Tobias kept an eye out, too, on his way back to us. But they could be keeping their distance for any number of reasons, and we’ve got to assume they can track that little doohickey.”

We thought quietly for a moment. “There were six Chee with you on the mission to Montana—”

“No clue. We know precisely dick about what went down out there, other than the fact that none of us came back. Although given the way David came in shooting, it seems like Visser Three wasn’t all that keen on taking prisoners. Our best guess is that Erek and Rictic and the rest are all piled up in a lab somewhere, possibly in pieces.”

“Given the way the Chee reacted to Tobias in Brazil, it seems like they’re still on our side,” said Prince Jake.

Marco scoffed, pushed his hands into his pockets, kicked idly at the floor. “But who knows,” he said. “’Course, if it turns out they’re not on our side, we’re already fucked, so fuck it. Pretty much standard operating procedure at this point, right?”

There was a long silence after that—a silence that every part of us recognized, Tom and Elfangor and Perdão and Aximili, familiar in its empty heaviness. It was the silence of discouragement, of demoralization—of having no reason to expect that the next words spoken would matter, and therefore no motive to be the one to speak them.

We looked at the faces of the three human boys, the varying mixtures of exhaustion, anger, bitterness, resignation. We felt a complex fugue of emotion in response—empathy, cold appraisal, squirming discomfort, rising urgency. We noted our own hesitant uncertainty and turned inward, hoping to acquire some sense of purpose, some kind of goal or agenda for the conversation.

What do we actually want?

It was not a thought in the normal sense. It was more of a force, a restless pressure emerging equally from each of our constituent parts, pointing in no particular direction.

A way out.

(We realized, then, that a part of us had been holding secretly to the hope that Prince Jake would have the answer, would take from us the burden of responsibility—)

((And not merely Aximili and Tom; not merely our younger, weaker parts.))

(—and even as we made a conscious effort to relinquish that hope, a memory arose, the echo of another day of confusion and despair.)

You will have to be strong, the dain of our brother had said. But more than that, you will have to be clever. You will have to be unpredictable, even to me. Even to Alloran. You will have to leave the Path, become like the wind in thought and deed, or you will find them waiting for you wherever you strike.

If we were to find a new way out of this situation, it would require movement in a new direction. A new dimension, even—would require leaving the plane of the board game and striking out vertically.

Poetry and metaphor. But what does it mean, in plain speech?

What would we actually do?

Boycott? Suicide?

Those were not possibilities the Ellimist would have failed to consider.

But the goal isn’t to outwit the Ellimist. What we need to do is trade with it.

Unless it had contrived that we would think that thought, was even now pulling our strings—

No. On reflection, we didn’t care. What we wanted—

An end to the threat posed by Visser Three.

—that was self-determination enough. Even if our present sense of free will was an illusion, it was a better illusion by far than direct enslavement, or outright oblivion.

Can the Ellimist be bargained with?

Another memory rose to the surface—Cassie Withers, as seen through the eyes of Prince Jake, of Tobias, of Marco—Cassie, purchasing the lives of Tom Berenson and Peter Levy and Erek-the-Chee—

(And by extension the lives of Essak and Temrash and all of the Chee within the impact zone and ultimately Aximili and us—)

((In many ways it was reasonable to say that the entire war had hinged upon that one single moment, that Cassie’s sacrifice—))

(((Her sacrifice specifically—not just the general rescue offered by the Ellimist, but the negotiated extension of it to individuals beyond the Animorphs proper, beyond even each of the Animorphs’ plus-ones—)))

((—was causally upstream of every other victory we had achieved since, the broadcast and the oatmeal and all of it—))

“I have this thought,” murmured Tobias.

The words were softly spoken, but they crashed like meteors into the silence, forcibly dragging our attention back to the outside world.

Tobias—who, we had been told, was now Tobias-and-Maninho, and therefore also a voice of Terra—looked at each of us in turn, and shrugged. “Just that—if Ax—if Helium, sorry—if he’s right, and Visser Three is making a bunch of clones. Um. It wouldn’t take all that many before he could make a coalescion all by himself.”

There was a moment in which the-parts-of-us-that-were-Aximili-and-Perdão each shuddered in revulsion, their responses curiously similar given the difference in their fundamental objections.

No mind should have so many voices, whispered the lingering lessons of Aximili’s youth.

No coalescion should have so few—so few colors, said Perdão’s Yeerkish instincts.

“I thought he was against that?” Prince Jake wondered.

“He is,” we confirmed. “He became—guarded—very quickly. But in his earliest days, when he spoke more freely, he was heard to express fear of dissolution—fear of losing his unique self in the sharing.”

“Which, to be fair, would absolutely have happened,” Tobias pointed out.

“It would be different if they were all him, though, right?” Marco asked. “I mean, he kind of has to do something like form a coalescion, or else all his different copies will eventually drift, right? Become different people? Not to mention that there’s not much point in taking over the galaxy if most of you is stuck cleaning toilets in the Citadel of Ricks.”

Prince Jake frowned. So did Tobias.

“Helium,” Tobias said. “If—sorry, what’s your Yeerk’s—I mean, the part of you that came from Terra, what’s it called?”

“Perdão.”

“Right. Uh. When—if Perdão were to leave your head. It wouldn’t be you, right? It can’t carry all of you with it.”

“No. It would be more like—us—than it was before our own little sharing. But it would carry away fragments, at best. Impressions. Like a mold. No—no color, no depth, no structure behind the outline.”

“And you said—the thing you’re doing, it’s more of like a joint thing, right? Like it’s you and Perdão?”

“Yes,” we answered. “But—the Visser—Esplin is much larger than Perdão. More in control. And Alloran is surely not a willing participant in symbiosis.”

“After all this time, who knows,” Marco murmured.

We glared, and he shrugged. “I’m not going to not say it,” he declared. “And I’m not going to not think it, either. We don’t know what the hell kind of mind games a Yeerk can pull off with—what is it, now—two or three years of total, uninterrupted access. And you said yourself that Andalite minds are vulnerable, without other Andalite minds present. Pretty sure if I could push someone’s orgasm button whenever I felt like for three years, I could clicker train them into whatever shape I wanted.”

“Human brains are vastly less complex than Andalite—”

“Enough,” said Prince Jake, mildly. “Same team.”

We closed our mouth.

“Tobias? You were saying?”

“Uh. If. I’ll go ahead and grant it’s a pretty big if. But if the Visser Three we know isn’t just Esplin—if Esplin and Alloran have combined, or even just rubbed off on each other a bit—it might be that he’s not comfortable crawling out of Alloran’s head, even into a coalescion full of Esplin clones. ‘Cause that’s still—still dying, right? Or dissolving, or whatever? Like, that’s still breaking apart the Visser Three fusion back into Esplin and Alloran.”

He held up his hands. “I’m just saying. A—Helium, sorry—Helium has a point. About thinking it through all the way, taking it seriously from the enemy’s point of view. Like, what if he’s not content with an army of clones? What would he do then?”

There was a heavy silence.

“Shit,” said Marco.

“What?”

“A fire upon the deep.”

“What?” asked Prince Jake, just as Tobias swore.

“You get it?” Marco asked.

Tobias nodded, grimly.

“What?” Prince Jake repeated.

“A—Helium said that there was other stuff in that Yeerk flesh, out in space. The stuff Telor picked up, that Visser Three ditched? The leftovers from some experiment?”

“Traces of chemical, biological, and mechanical additives,” we confirmed. “Much of it damaged by the cold and the radiation. Telor was unable to identify any of it.”

“Well. There’s this book. A Fire Upon The Deep. Sci-fi.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s got—there are these creatures in it. Wolves, like. But a hive-mind. Three or four or five of them, all in a pack. One mind. They think in high-frequency sound, back and forth between them. But not like words. The sound is like neurons firing. It is how they think.”

“Okay?”

“It only works when they’re close,” Tobias cut in. “More than a few yards away, and the hive mind starts to break up.”

“Until some of them get ahold of some radio technology from a visiting alien,” Marco continued. “They build these like suit things that let them stay in contact with one another no matter how far apart they spread.”

Prince Jake’s eyes widened. “Thought-speak?” he asked. “Thought-speak transmitters?”

And then we made the connection ourselves. “The Visser is already using the morph interface to control multiple puppet bodies at once,” we said darkly.

“If he could somehow get it to work Yeerk-to-Yeerk—mimic the kind of connection that Yeerks have during the sharing—”

“A coalescion without a pool,” said Tobias. “A straight-up hive mind.”

“Fuck,” said Marco.

It felt—too specific. Too exact of a hypothesis, given how little real information we had. But when we imagined our way into the mind of the Visser—

“It fits,” Prince Jake muttered. “It’s the sort of thing he’d go for.”

Not clones. Not cooperation.

Expansion.

“Ax—sorry, Helium—Helium. Is this possible? I mean, is there any chance that this is actually what he’s up to?”

We considered, but not for long. “Nothing rules it out,” we answered carefully. “It’s—ambitious. Well beyond any technology known to us, except possibly the morphing tech itself. But Alloran was close to that project, and we know the Yeerks have taken the Arn, and the Naharans, and the Leeran—”

We broke off. “If anyone could do it, he could,” we said. “And it seems prudent to assume that the truth is at least this bad. It seems unlikely that he’s pouring his efforts into something significantly less dangerous.”

There was another long silence, and then Tobias spoke.

“I don’t get it,” he said quietly.

“Get what?” asked Prince Jake.

Tobias looked up at him, shook his head, shrugged. “The false hope,” he said, his voice now soft and flat. “Elfangor recruiting us, the Ellimist saving you guys from Ventura. I don’t understand why they’d put us through all of this, if there was never even a chance that we could win.”

Both Prince Jake and Marco opened their mouths, but neither seemed to know what to say in response.

(Neither did we.)

“I mean, that quantum virus thing—Visser Three knows about that, right? I mean, if Ax knows about it, then Alloran’s damn sure heard of it, at least. So who’s to say he didn’t get himself cloned into some completely different biology, or upload himself into a robot, or something—something a quantum virus wouldn’t be able to hit?”

His shoulders twitched again, this time less of a shrug and more like the motion of an animal shaking off an insect. “I mean, I thought of that in five minutes. He’s been working on this cloning thing since—since—I mean, at least since they took out the high school, right? So even if we’d thought of all of this back then, it would have already been too late. It was too late from day one.”

We shifted uncomfortably, remembering the weapon Elfangor had brought—the weapon that had failed to fire, that would have melted the entire surface of the planet. “If all of our reasoning here is valid,” we cautioned. “Which it may not be—”

“Even if we’re wrong about what Visser Three is up to specifically, we’ve got no leverage on the rest of the war, either—”

“Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure,” Marco broke in, his voice thick and heavy with sarcasm. “Ten bucks says the invisible thumb drive leads to a portal to the Yeerk council chambers. Either that, or it’s an ancient superweapon. Or a time machine—”

“Marco—”

“—or no, wait, I’ve got it, it’s the first in a series of clues that lead to a time machine, and we’ve got to solve them before Visser Three gets there first and assimilates the Earth back in cowboy times—”

“Marco!”

“Fuck off, Jake, I’m blowing off steam. I’m not going to bite anybody.”

Prince Jake’s mouth snapped shut. We looked back and forth between Marco and Tobias, weighing the sudden shift in mood, a strange hypothesis tickling at the back of our mind—

“Point is,” Marco continued, bitterness dripping from every word, “you’ve got it exactly backwards, Tobias. It doesn’t matter what it looks like, doesn’t matter whether we have one lead or a dozen leads or none, no matter what we do something new always comes up. There’s always another way back in, no matter how badly we fuck up, no matter how hard we lose—we could throw that fucking keychain into the ocean and the next thing you know we’d just happen to stumble across a bunch of stranded Andalite warriors who crash-landed last year and have been just waiting for their chance.”

He raised his hand, pointed an accusing finger. “We get a fucking TPK in Montana, respawn quietly in Madagascar, of all places, and then you fucking win the goddamn lottery in Brazil and end up finding a secret Yeerk pool and a motherfucking Chee quest item. And before that it was Serenity falling into our laps, and before that it was Tyagi, and before that it was the are-you-fucking-kidding-me oatmeal, and before that was Ventura, where we should have all just fucking died except somebody didn’t want the big show to be over yet.”

He laughed—a hollow, hopeless sound. “Nah, man. The problem isn’t that the game is unwinnable. It’s that the game isn’t even a game. We’re not pawns, we’re fucking dominos. They keep setting us up and knocking us down and we’ve got no choice but to just sit there and take it.”

(There was something—contrived, about it, about the shape of Marco’s anger, the way it was unfolding in just this particular fashion, in just this particular moment. There was a hint of unreality to it, as if the words he was speaking were self-conscious, aware of the impact they were having, and trying to have it—)

“First off,” Prince Jake growled—

(—the sudden sharpness in his tone like a weapon half-drawn, causing all three of us to stiffen slightly—)

“—we don’t know that any of that was the Ellimist, except for Ventura. And second, nobody’s making you do anything. You want out?”

“That’s not what—”

“Because if you want out, I’m not stopping you.”

“That’s not what—”

“Then what? What, Marco? What do you want, besides making us listen to you bitch and moan for the tenth time?”

“I want to know what the fuck is going on!” Marco shouted. “I want to know why all of this is happening, why it keeps happening to us—I want to know what the point of all of this is!”

“None of us know any better than you do!” Jake shot back. “We were right there next to you in the construction site—in the YMCA—”

“Yeah, but you don’t—you don’t act like it bothers you. You just shrug it off. Like, at least Tobias is asking the question. You just keep following the carrot around—”

“You think I haven’t noticed? You think I don’t see the strings? The difference is, I’m not going to let that stop me from trying to deal with what’s right in front of us—”

“Yeah, but what if all of this—reacting—this one-step-at-a-time bullshit—what if that’s what’s leading us straight into the slaughterhouse? I mean, fuck, you know? Isn’t there some part of you that wants to say no? That looks at that fucking Chee keychain and thinks, that is bait, I am being jerked around, here?”

(And our sense of detachment, of unreality, grew deeper as we looked back and forth between the pair of them and Tobias, as we watched the drama unfold, like marbles moving through a Rube Goldberg device—action and reaction, cause and effect, a set of tedious steps shifting a machine from one configuration to another—)

((We felt like we should do something, but we didn’t know what; no amount of pressure-to-act could compensate for a lack of direction—))

“—not that crazy,” Tobias was saying, his voice low and slow and calm. “I mean, a soldier on the line doesn’t ever really see the big picture, right? He just knows, okay, we’ve got to hold this position.”

“Difference is,” said Marco, “a soldier on the line at least gets to know which side he’s on. He at least got to pick, when he signed up.”

“Which side—”

Marco held up a hand. “I’m serious, Jake. We don’t know what the rules of the real game are. Shit, six months ago, we thought the way to win was to kill as many Yeerks as possible and send the rest back into space. Now it’s looking like Visser Three was the enemy all along, and most of the Yeerks are on our side. But what happens when it turns out that was misdirection too, and everything we’ve been doing was exactly what the real bad guys wanted us to do?”

(It was going somewhere, headed somewhere—this conversation had a target, a purpose, was a chemical reaction in the middle of transforming the four of us, but we couldn’t see the end of it, were unable to skip ahead, to get there any faster than reality—)

((Unless all of that was sheer paranoia, and we were driving ourselves into a mental trap of our own making—))

(((Yes, great, we understand the dilemma, now what are we going to do about it—)))

“—only thing we know for sure is that someone or something is really, really interested in keeping us involved.”

“Do you want to not be involved?” Tobias interrupted.

“I don’t know,” Marco hissed. “That’s the whole point. It depends.”

“Do you still want to save the world?”

“Yes. Obviously.”

“Why?”

“Because I live in it? Because my friends live in it? Because golden rule? Because—”

“Do you think it’s more likely to get saved if we don’t help?”

Marco sighed. “You’re not hearing me—”

“Yes, I am,” Tobias said. “You’re saying, what if the bad guys are pushing all our buttons, taking advantage of the fact that we have pretty predictable morals and stuff, and using that to manipulate us so that everything we do makes things worse. Right?”

Marco’s mouth twisted.

“But like, if it’s that bad, then we’ve already lost—haven’t we? I mean, we’ve got to assume that our actions matter, right? That it makes a difference, what we decide to do? Not because that’s definitely true, but because if it’s false, it doesn’t matter anyway?”

“Fuck you, Tobias. Weren’t you just now bitching about how there’s no point, and we were all doomed from the start?”

“Didn’t you just now explain how I was wrong?”

“Guys,” Prince Jake said wearily.

“That’s bullshit anyway,” Marco said. “Like, you’re acting as if the two options are ‘so bad that nothing we do matters’ and ‘balanced enough that we can tip things over into victory.’ But it could just as easily be the other way around. Like, if things really are so close that all it takes to shift the balance is a bunch of idiot teenagers with a death wish, then what’s stopping us from being the reason everything goes to shit? Maybe things would have worked out just fine, if only we hadn’t blown up the YMCA. And blown up the oatmeal factory. And blown up Serenity. And blown up—whatever the fuck is at the other end of that homing device, which—let’s be real—we’re probably going to blow up.”

“That’s just life, though,” Tobias objected. “I mean, not the stuff about blowing things up, but about not knowing in advance what all the consequences will be—nobody gets to know for sure that the things they’re doing will end up working out. That doesn’t mean you should just freeze.”

“Most people aren’t right in the middle of an interstellar war,” Marco shot back. “Aren’t thrown into the middle of it, like a wrench, by the gods of who-knows-what. I think it’s reasonable to be a little less—less chill about it, given the stakes.”

“It sounds like you have some questions—”

* * *

“Motherfucker,” shouted Marco, as Prince Jake leapt to his feet and a gun appeared in Tobias’s hand as if from nowhere.

The words had come from a creature that had not been there a moment before, one we recognized instantly from borrowed memory—a short, wizened biped with faintly glowing blue skin and wide, black eyes that seemed to be full of stars.

The creature leaned back, raised its hands with palms out in a gesture of surrender. “Don’t shoot!” it said. “Sorry—I didn’t mean to—”

“Bullshit,” Marco spat.

(Because of course it had meant to startle us—there were a thousand ways it could have announced its presence without startling us.)

“I’m not in morph,” Marco said, loudly and slowly. “So this isn’t an illusion.”

The creature smiled—not just with its mouth, but with its ears as well, in Andalite fashion. “Unless it’s all an illusion,” it pointed out. “Maybe the last time you thought you demorphed, you didn’t.”

Marco didn’t smile back.

“You said ‘don’t shoot,’” Tobias spoke up, holding the gun perfectly level with his finger on the trigger. “What happens if I do?”

The creature shrugged artfully. “Our conversation ends. Which would be a shame, since this is the last time we’ll all have the chance to speak to one another.”

No one seemed to know what to do with that pronouncement, and after a moment, the creature nodded and crossed its legs, sinking to the floor.

“So,” it said, plucking idly at the loose fabric it was wearing. “What’s up?”

The silence that followed was stunned, but short-lived—

(Neither Prince Jake nor Marco nor Tobias—)

((Nor, for that matter, any of our own constituent parts—))

(—were much the type to sit back and let an adversary push their buttons; we could see in their expressions a sort of oh, okay, so it’s going to be like THAT hardening of their emotional defenses.)

((Which could just as easily have been the intended effect—))

“Not much,” said Prince Jake, settling back into his own seat. “You?”

“Oh, you know,” said the creature airily, waving a hand in an elaborately casual gesture. “Same old, same old.”

Prince Jake’s jaw tightened minutely, and Marco and Tobias exchanged dark glances.

“Uh huh,” said Prince Jake, mimicking the creature’s nonchalance. “So, how do you want to play this?”

The creature shrugged again. “It sounded like you had questions,” it said.

“Are you offering answers?”

“Some. Never hurts to ask, right?”

Prince Jake was silent for a moment. He looked at Marco, whose lip curled—in disgust or indecision, we couldn’t tell. He looked at Tobias, who was still holding the gun perfectly level, his arms seeming carved out of stone. He looked at us—

(The Ellimist is here to perturb us, to move us from one path to another—)

((Never mind that, there’s nothing we can do about that, instead think of what actions we can take in accordance with our own values—are there questions whose answers we might want, even knowing that their veracity is suspect—))

(((More to the point, this is our chance to negotiate.)))

Our thoughts spun, but not quickly enough, and Prince Jake turned back to the creature.

“All right, I’ll start,” he said softly. “Did you know that Cassie was going to die?”

“Point of order,” said the creature. “As your dear comrade Marco is no doubt thinking right this second, there’s no way for you to be entirely sure that I am the same creature you interacted with last time, given that the situation is two gods, both of whom are perfectly capable of animating a humble avatar such as myself. But yes—I knew it.”

Something seemed to crumble in Prince Jake’s expression, exposing a deeper hardness underneath. “Did you make it happen?” he asked.

“I don’t know what that means. I created the preconditions for her decision. I arranged those preconditions so that, of her possible choices, the ones that I preferred would seem better to her as well. But I didn’t tamper with her brain chemistry or anything like that, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Could you have?”

“Under certain circumstances. It’s expensive. There are rules, as I said last time.”

“Have you ever?”

“Not with Cassie.” The creature turned its head, nodded in Marco’s direction. “Him, once.”

“When?” asked Prince Jake.

The creature merely smiled.

“Do you lie?” Tobias asked.

“No. That’s one of the rules. Otherwise, the number of variables spirals out of control. The game is about the interactions of the various pieces. Chess becomes less interesting when every piece can move in every direction.”

“How do we know you’re telling the truth?”

“You don’t.” The creature shrugged again. “If you ask me to, I can dampen the part of your brain that’s skeptical about it, though.”

Tobias’s finger twitched slightly on the trigger. “No, thanks.”

“Is there a time limit on this conversation?” Marco asked abruptly. “Or, like, a limited number of questions? Are we going to get halfway through some important topic and then you’re going to be all, ‘whoops, time’s up, guess we have to leave it there’?”

“There’s no limit,” the creature said. “But I get to decide when I’m done, same as you.”

“You seem…different, from last time,” Tobias said, the gun still level.

“So do you,” said the creature. “How’s symbiosis treating you?”

We felt our human eyes narrow reflexively as Tobias answered, as Prince Jake asked another inconsequential question and was met with brittle humor. The conversation was slow—meandering—curiously relaxed, for all that there was an undercurrent of tension—

Stalling for time? So that some other process could run to completion?

(Don’t forget to consider the possibility that meta-analysis is actively counterproductive, given the circumstances.)

“Excuse us,” we said, cutting in.

The creature turned to look at us.

“Are you the Ellimist?”

“I am the avatar.”

“Of the Ellimist?”

“Of the entity your people call the Ellimist, and also of the entity known as Crayak. I am an input, an interface, one of the controls of the game.”

“Which of them are you serving right now?”

The creature chuckled, an unnervingly human sound. “You misunderstand,” it said. “Who am I speaking to right now—Aximili, or Perdão? It’s not a question of black or white, good guys or bad guys, two distinct sets of pieces. All of the pieces are gray. All belong equally to both players, you no less than I.”

It took a moment for the full impact of the statement to be felt. The three human boys stiffened, and Prince Jake and Marco turned to look at each other, something significant seeming to pass between them. Inside of ourselves, we felt the-parts-of-us-that-were-Tom-and-Aximili recoil in something akin to denial, even as Perdão and Elfangor nodded in grim recognition.

“So you both wanted Cassie dead,” said Prince Jake, his words the color of lead.

“Ah-ah,” said the creature, raising a finger. “That doesn’t follow from what I said at all. We both agreed to allow Cassie to be presented with a choice. One of us wanted it to happen, and the other permitted it. A benefit, for one, and an acceptable cost, for the other.”

Prince Jake’s eyes seemed to glitter, but he said nothing. The silence stretched, colder and heavier than before.

“Are there any actions we could take that would cause you to intervene against Visser Three?” we asked.

(The part of us that looked ahead could already feel the uselessness of the question, predict the obvious answer—but still it had to be asked.)

“The obstacle presented by Visser Three’s ambition is the game,” the creature said smoothly. “For us to undo it ourselves would be to abandon the contest entirely.”

“Are we at least right about Visser Three?” Tobias asked. “What he’s planning, all of the failsafe stuff?”

“For the most part. There’s always a bit of devil in the details.”

“Is there anything we can do to stop him?”

“Anything? Anything covers quite a bit. Weren’t you all talking about quantum viruses just a minute ago?”

“We were also talking about how that wouldn’t be enough,” Marco growled.

The creature tilted its head. “I’m sorry—were you under the impression that all of this was going to be wrapped up quickly?”

“What?”

“You’re thinking that the Visser is too far ahead. That he has too many advantages, too many resources, too much control. But the same was true of the Visigoths, in the year 410.”

“What?”

“The Visigoths. They destroyed Rome.”

Confused silence.

“Is Rome yet destroyed?”

More silence. The creature smiled slightly, as if to itself—looked expectantly back and forth between us.

(New data—extended time horizons. If the current war is analogous to the destruction of Rome sixteen hundred years in the past—)

We felt our heartrate quicken. It might have been an unfounded leap, but—if one were to condition on the assumption that some action taken by the Animorphs would have large and relevant consequences hundreds or thousands of years later, then the creation of a collaborative Yeerk-Andalite hybrid would surely be high on the list of candidates—

(Especially given that the only other confirmed, unambiguous instance of divine intervention was the rescue at Ventura, which led directly to the union of Temrash and Aximili—)

((Devil’s advocate—the Yeerk discovery of the concept of consenting cooperation in general was just as plausibly crucial, and was a superset that did not require the further stipulation of a special Andalite-unique quality.))

(((Counterpoint: the Yeerks had discovered consenting cooperation through general exposure to humanity; the existence of the Animorphs had been essentially irrelevant to that process—)))

((((Counter-counterpoint: there was a special quality to the Andalite-Yeerk union, at least in our own experience; a quality with tremendous potential value on both the individual and the societal level—value that might even be great enough to outweigh the objections of those who supported the status quo, who didn’t even know what they were missing—))))

(Something deep within us lifted its head, stirred to wakefulness—not quite a hunger, but at least an eagerness, the part-of-us-that-was-Perdão responding viscerally to the possibility that we might spread—)

It wasn’t a possibility that we had dwelt on, before, given the circumstances of the immediate conflict. But—logically—distant futures in which our own nature as a collective entity mattered in some deep way were more numerous than near futures in which the same was true—

“Is that all we are, then?” asked Tobias. “Ancient history? Butterfly effects for stuff that won’t happen until thousands of years from now?”

“Would you rather be at the end of things?” the creature countered. “Would you rather not have a legacy extending on into the future?”

Tobias said nothing, but for the first time, his arm visibly trembled.

“Why us, though?” Marco asked. “Why here, why now, why our names written in fire out in space, why Ventura—why do you keep pulling us back into the middle of it?”

There was a note of desperation in his tone, and the creature seemed to soften in response, some of the brittleness fading out of its demeanor. “You’re looking for an answer that will satisfy you on some fundamental level, and no such answer exists,” it said quietly. “You are the chosen ones because you were chosen, and you were chosen because choosing you maximizes the chance of the desired outcome. If you were someone else—someone who would produce less of the desired effect—then you would not have been chosen, and would not be asking the question. If someone else had been chosen, they would be asking the question, and would be equally dissatisfied with the answer.”

“That’s a dodge,” Tobias pointed out. “You just said ‘you’re the guys because reasons.’ You explicitly admitted that there are reasons, and didn’t say what those reasons are.”

“And I won’t,” the creature replied. “I can’t—at least, not specifically. The whole point is for you to be placed into situations where your decisions are philosophically relevant—situations where you are free to choose, where the constraints on your choices are primarily your constraints—your morals, your values, your tradeoffs. It is the anticipation of your choices that has led Crayak and the Ellimist to choose you, over others. But the choices are still yours. The outcomes themselves remain variable, unknown. The situation is, genuinely, uncertain, and including you in the mix increases the chance of the desired outcome, where not including you—or including someone else, rather than you—does not.”

“But Crayak and the Ellimist want different outcomes,” Prince Jake objected. “Don’t they? Isn’t that the whole point?”

“If you were seeking to destroy all life on Earth, you might first create an industrial society of intelligent beings capable of doing the job thoroughly, rather than risking a quicker, more haphazard solution,” the creature said. “Such a plan might look eerily similar to, say, a plan for human ascension—right up until the critical moment. You wouldn’t ordinarily expect two plans with opposite outcomes to strongly resemble one another, but here there are strong forces incentivizing cooperation and convergence.”

“That’s not what you told us last time,” said Tobias. “You said—you made it sound like a trade, one for one. Crayak gets something, then the Ellimist gets something.”

“The rules of the game are complex. Some moves are proposals, which the other player must ratify. Some moves require the exchange of resources, create increases or decreases in available influence. Some are free—paid for by previous actions, or taking advantage of unusual circumstances. Initiative is complex, as well—sometimes alternating, sometimes simultaneous. But both players have an incentive to stick close to the path of least resistance, least objection. It’s a smaller instance of the same principle which led to the game in the first place—why mutually annihilate resources in a Red Queen race, when a cooperative approach yields the same result at a lower cost?”

The creature smiled again—wider this time, revealing a row of small, pointed teeth.

“So it’s back to the chess game,” Marco said, a tight undercurrent of anger in his voice. “With us as the pawns. Pawns with no clue what’s actually going on around them. Pawns with no real choice in anything that matters.”

“Choice?” asked the creature. “Choice is what I am offering. Choice is why you are here in the first place—you are here specifically so that you may choose. If such opportunities no longer interest you—if you’d prefer to have as much choice as the thousands who died in Ventura—”

The creature shrugged. “Say the word, and you can be unchosen.”

The silence that followed was thick and wild, like the air atop a hill during a thunderstorm. Marco’s fists tightened, loosened, and tightened again, and Prince Jake’s shoulders drooped with exhaustion.

Tobias lowered the gun—dropped it, almost, his arm falling into his lap. “What do the two of them actually want?” he asked, squeezing his eyes shut. “The Ellimist. Crayak.”

“What does anyone want?” the creature replied easily. “Resources. Freedom. The ability to enact one’s will upon the universe—to reshape one’s surroundings to be more in accordance with one’s preferences. Crayak—Crayak has a vision for the future. It would like to see things arranged just so. And the Ellimist—”

The creature shrugged again. “The Ellimist disagrees.”

“What’s the Ellimist’s vision?”

“No vision at all. The anti-vision. Chaos, to Crayak’s order. Harmony, to Crayak’s unity. Noise, to Crayak’s silence.”

“Neither of those sounds all that great, to be honest,” muttered Marco.

The creature grinned mirthlessly. “Maybe that’s why you keep having such a hard time telling which one of them is pulling the strings.”

(A thought almost occurred to us, then, sparked by the creature’s words—a fragment, a flicker, a fleeting image of Visser Three, who said—)

“Speaking of strings,” Prince Jake said, his tone hard once more. “You’re not just here to answer questions, right?”

(—gone.)

“Should I take that to mean that you’re done asking them?”

“No—wait,” Tobias cut in. He held up the invisible Chee object. “What is this?”

“It is a key,” the creature said.

“To what?”

“I will not tell you. But the Chee who put it in your hands—it did indeed die, in order to do so. Knew that it would likely die, and went willingly.”

“Why?”

“For the dogs, of course.”

Tobias frowned, and fell silent.

“Anyone else?” Prince Jake asked.

We raised our hand.

“Go ahead.”

“Are there unique properties to the Yeerk-Andalite bond?” we asked. “Are Yeerks more—potent—with an Andalite, than with other species?”

“Yes.”

“Reliably?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

A shrug.

A long pause.

“What do you want from us?” asked Marco.

“I have an offer to make,” said the creature. “A side quest, if you will. A situation has arisen, and the Ellimist and Crayak are…constrained, in their ability to intervene. You could intervene, perhaps. If you wished. They are not asking you for a favor, and would not owe you one. It is simply an opportunity to do as you will.”

“What kind of opportunity?”

“A brief trip off-world. Out of system, in fact.”

“Where?”

“If I told you, would it mean anything?”

“To do what?” Tobias asked.

“As I said. To do what you do. To act as seems appropriate, under the circumstances.”

“Vaguebooking,” sneered Marco.

“Alas, things are rarely so clear as ‘here comes a meteor to kill you all.’”

“I thought this was the board game,” Prince Jake said slowly. “This system. Visser Three, the Yeerks, Elfangor, Ax, us. No outside influence. Isn’t that what the Z-space bubble is all about?”

“Such is life,” said the creature, sighing theatrically. “Despite the best efforts of everyone involved, it turns out that the other ninety-nine point nine nine nine nine ni