As always, thank you so very much for reading, and if you have the time, please please please leave a comment or a review, or skip on over to r/rational to participate in the discussion there. I apologize again for the extremely unreliable update schedule, but really and truly, your feedback is what keeps me going.

Author's Note: There were quite mixed results from my poll about update scheduling, with most of Reddit preferring batches and most of ff and ao3 preferring single releases. I think what I will do is continue to release chapters one at a time, and refrain from making promises about the future (since I'm clearly quite bad at predicting myself), and ask that people who repost these stories elsewhere put a note somewhere like "Not a complete arc" or something.

Chapter Text

Chapter 35: Tobias

People think that beauty is supposed to be solemn.

I mean, not everybody. But people, you know?

Most people.

Like, that’s sort of the mainstream deal, even though nobody exactly spells it out—you go to an art museum, or a rose garden, or the top of a mountain or whatever, and everybody’s all hushed and serious. Like there’s something sacred about it, sacred the way a church is sacred—something fragile that you’re not supposed to disturb. Like it’s expensive, so you have to act all dignified and upper class.

But then you see kids—

—young kids, like preschoolers or kindergarteners or whatever—

—and you show them a butterfly, or a kaleidoscope, or a picture of Jupiter, and they don’t just sit there looking all serious. They don’t, like, just take in a deep breath and nod meaningfully at each other.

They gasp.

They scream.

Their eyes go big, and they laugh out loud, and they call all their friends over to see it, and they get all excited and won’t stop talking about it and it just—

Lights them up.

Like they’re not bigger than the beauty. Like they can’t quite hold it in, you know? Like it’s more than they can handle and they’re just—totally along for the ride.

Like the time that Garrett dragged me out to the field behind Oak Landing—literally dragged me, came into the room and grabbed me by the arm and wouldn’t let me go—because the sun was coming through the leaves just right and there was this patch of dirt in the corner with a bunch of mica and it looked like—like a magic potion, all sparks and shimmers as the breeze pushed the shadows back and forth.

We sat there for an hour—a whole hour—and Garret just would not stop laughing. Laughed the whole time, couldn’t help but laugh, was so overcome with delight that the laughter was just—

Just the way it was.

The right thing, is how he’d say it now. If it happened today.

And I thought—I was twelve at the time, and even then I sort of already knew, somewhere deep down inside—

That there was something missing, in the rest of us. Something lost, or maybe forgotten. That it was sad—broken, somehow—that Garrett was the only one who was really swept away by it.

Some of the other kids, they came by and saw him laughing, started making fun of him. Calling him retarded, mocking his tics, stuff like that. Stupid stuff. Ordinarily, I would’ve stepped up, maybe thrown a couple of punches. But Garrett didn’t even notice. He just kept laughing like he couldn’t even hear them, and I looked back and forth, and in that moment—

—compared to him—

—they just seemed so—

I don’t know. Small? Empty? Gray?

Like, here was this kid who was happy, who was caught up in something bright and beautiful and perfect, and meanwhile these other kids, they couldn’t see it, didn’t have it, and so all they could think of to do was tear it down, make fun of it, drag it through the mud and make it ugly, and they couldn’t even do that, Garrett was so swept up in it that he literally didn’t even see them.

And for a second it all made sense, in a sort of sad, Sunday school kind of way. Like, I could feel where I was supposed to be angry, where it was supposed to bother me, but instead it all just seemed kind of boring and pathetic and predictable. Like—like they couldn’t help it any more than Garrett could, so why bother. I didn’t say anything, just kind of looked at them, and after a while they gave up and left, and meanwhile Garrett never stopped laughing.

A whole hour, man. That’s a long time.

And it hurt, a little. The fact that I wasn’t—

That I couldn’t—

I dunno. Like, I could see what Garrett was seeing, I knew what he was so hyped up about, but I couldn’t sink in to it the same way he was. Couldn’t let go.

I mean, I get it. You grow up in an orphanage on the wrong side of the tracks, you see a lot of people that can’t really afford to just go along for the ride. People who can’t let themselves get carried away. Can’t let their guard down, not all the way——not even for a minute. There’s too much at stake. You see them walking down the street, and you can see that they’re on edge, taking it all in, digesting it—that they know exactly who’s around them and where all the exits are, that they could tell you how many steps it’d take them to get to the next safe place.

I used to tell Garrett that nothing really bad had ever happened to me, and that it was because I kept my eyes open. Because I noticed when there were too many teenagers on the next street corner, or when a man was being just a little too nice to me in the arcade, or when one of the older kids was starting to get the dangerous kind of bored.

So yeah, I get it—the need to hang on, to stay on top of things, to stay alert and in control. To be bigger than whatever’s happening around you, so that it can’t sweep you away—to be able to watch it and judge it instead of letting it really hit you.

I mean, it’s not like I do the overcome-with-excitement thing very often, myself.

But I kind of think—

I dunno.

That maybe it would be better if I could?

That it’s a better world to live in, you know? A better way to be. That the people who can let go, but don’t—the ones who act all stuffed-up and dignified no matter how much money they have or how safe their neighborhood is—that they’re missing something important. Like driving a car when you could be riding a rollercoaster, or carefully unwrapping your presents when you could just tear through the paper.

I mean, how many of us even get the chance to have our breath taken away?

I think—looking back—that that’s most of why I kept wanting to put up shields around Garrett. Even after everything. Not because he couldn’t take care of himself, but because I didn’t want him to have to. Not all the time. Sometimes, I want him to be able to just let go—to be the kid he was two years ago, the kid I think he’s somehow supposed to be.

Not like he’s not supposed to grow up. Just—I don’t know. More like the difference between childish and childlike. I’d do just about anything to keep that part of him alive—the part of him that knows how to be overwhelmed, that hasn’t forgotten what it’s like to be truly, genuinely awestruck. The part of him that—what—believes in the spirit of Christmas, or something?

Or like, the non-stupid, non-embarrassing version of that, anyway.

And then I think about the day we first found Ax. Down in the dark, in squid morph. And those lights, swirling and sparkling all around us, green and blue and purple and white and colors I’d never seen before, and I think about him whispering the word pretty, just that one word and then he went silent, went silent and got back to work, because he was trying to do the right thing, and I feel like—

Like—

Well. It’s stupid, I guess. But if I’m being honest, it feels exactly the same way that it felt when the Ellimist or whoever it was teleported me into the YMCA and I saw Garrett standing there frozen with a laser beam pointed at the back of his head. Like I had let him down, like it was my fault for not—

I don’t know. Making it okay? Showing him, instead of just telling him?

He volunteered, Jake said, as we stood there in the middle of all the smoke and horror. Said it was the right thing to do. Wanted me to tell you, if he died, that he wasn’t afraid.

And that—

That was on me.

The way Jake and Marco had talked about the Yeerk pool, it was basically hell on Earth, and Garrett had strapped a bunch of bombs to himself and gone straight in without hesitation, because he thought—

—he thought that was the sort of thing I’d want him to do. That he was living up to me, by doing it.

Somewhere along the line, I’d forgotten. Forgotten just how hard he listened, how blindly he trusted. Forgotten that I wasn’t just his brother, that I was also his—what—his hero, his role model, that he was looking up to me, actually looking, actually paying attention—that he watched me for clues about how the world worked, and what sort of person he should be inside of it.

And me—

I can’t remember the last time I just laughed. Laughed without looking around first, laughed without worrying or thinking, laughed because the laughter felt alive. It was all caution and calculation and consequences, everything channeled and controlled.

And I realized—

—after I woke up and found out that Garrett had literally died for me, that he’d given up his own life to try to save mine, morphed into me instead of into himself—

That I didn’t want that.

I didn’t want him to be like that. To be like me—to think that the way I am, the way I was for him, that that was what he was supposed to grow up into.

I wanted him to do better. To be better.

And that meant being better myself. Showing him that it was okay. That he was allowed to be scared, that he didn’t have to be perfect, that it was okay to be small and to be human and to sometimes say no, that’s too big, I can’t do it, can’t carry it.

It meant learning how to let go.

Rolling onto my back, I curved downward into the deep, dark blue, like an Olympic diver doing a backflip off of a high dive—pointed my snout toward the distant, sandy bottom and cut through the water like a torpedo. At the last second, I twisted—swept so close to the mud and silt that they billowed up around me like a smoke bomb—and arrowed upward again, pumping my tail, moving at what felt like a hundred miles an hour even though it was probably only thirty.

Ahead of me was a school of fish, darting and swelling, their scales flashing silver in the dim, filtered light. I angled toward them, letting out a series of clicks to feel their position, and shot straight through the center of the could, scattering them in all directions. Banking like a fighter jet, I pointed my nose at the sun and shot toward the surface—

I’ve been a bird. I’ve been a hawk, and a snipe, and a seagull, and a goose—I’ve climbed through the clouds, floated on billowing thermals, folded my wings and dropped through the sky like a shooting star.

But somehow, none of that felt half as much like flying as this. The split second of weightless freedom as my body cleared the waves. The thousand tiny droplets sparkling in the sunlight like shattered glass. The heat of the open air on my skin. It was like stepping through a portal between worlds, or falling into a dream at the snap of a hypnotist’s fingers—there was something about how very not at home I was in the air that made it all the more exhilarating.

I laughed.

Not just in my head. Out loud, with my real voice—with the wild, chittering exuberance of the dolphin, all restraint and modesty forgotten. It was joy, pure joy, and I reveled in it as I sucked in a breath and smashed back into the water, becoming once again a dancer, a gymnast, my fins and tail turning from glider’s wings back into rocket boosters. A distant squeal caught my ear and I turned toward it, listening for the clicks and splashes that meant that the rest of the pod had come back to play—

There was another version of me that would’ve held back. That would have been unable to relax, that would have held on—even in this moment—to the broader perspective, the human world of past and future, of fears and anxieties and plans and consequences. Who would have been on guard, on duty, even at a time when there was nothing to be done—who would have felt guilty about not being able to think of anything to do.

The sort of person who does the right thing, even if it’s hard.

But being that—that militant, that black-or-white—

That wasn’t the right thing.

It was a kind of stupid I hadn’t noticed myself being until recently. It was like trying to get an extra eight hours out of the day by not sleeping—you couldn’t do it, or at least not for very long. There were some situations where just trying harder was a mistake—where it made no difference, where it was just burning fuel. Where there were no levers on the problem, and no ways to build levers, and no ways to get better at building levers—where there were no next actions and nothing to grab onto. And in those cases—

Sometimes, the actual right thing to do was to let go. To really let go, all the way down—to let all the muscles relax, so that they could start to knit themselves back together. Sometimes the race wasn’t a sprint or even a marathon, but a thousand-mile trek into Mordor, and if you didn’t stop to let your blisters heal they’d just keep getting worse. The picture I had in my head, of a lone soldier standing guard through the night no matter how tired he got, constantly vigilant—

It was attractive. Epic. It felt good, to imagine myself in those shoes.

But I didn’t want to do things just because they felt good. Just because they made a nice story to tell myself, about myself. Like the security at an airport, putting on a show, pretending that making everybody take off their shoes was actually helping. I wanted to do what worked—what would really work, in the long run, given all of the ways that I was small and weak and stupid and tired.

I wanted to do the right thing, even if it meant letting go of the story that I’d been doing it all along.

And so—

With nothing better to do, as I waited on things that were already in motion, things I had no way to speed up—

I swam with the dolphins.

Not because I was supposed to. Not out of duty or responsibility, not as medicine. Because it was fun. Because I wanted to, for my own sake, and the only thing that had been holding me back was the illusion that it wasn’t allowed—the illusion that the war could be won in a single breath, a single burst of effort, and that taking a day off was the same thing as giving up.

That wasn’t a lesson I’d been able to learn, before. Wasn’t the sort of thing I could have imagined myself doing, the sort of option I’d allowed myself to notice.

But then, you’d sort of hope that dying and coming back to life would change your perspective a little.

Right?

Another squeal echoed through the water, and I put on a burst of speed, letting out a sharp whistle in response. They would be in the cove, eight of them—the same cove where I’d first found them, first swum out to meet them in my own human body. They’d been fascinated by the transformation, that first time—had swirled around, nudging me with their snouts, clicking and squeaking like a room full of excited toddlers as my legs fused together and my skin turned gray.

Now, as I glided forward, they circled around me again, nipping at my fins, blowing rings of air past my snout, turning upside down to steal Eskimo kisses. They knew who and what I was, recognized me as a copy—there was a moment of jostling confusion, and then suddenly my doppelganger was there, face to face with me—my twin, the original, the male whose form I had borrowed—pushed forward by the others who then backed off to give us space.

For a moment, the other dolphin fixed his eyes on mine, hovering like a hummingbird, unnaturally still in the water. I could see something like thought in his gaze, watch the progress of emotions in his face, his body language. There was something familiar about his stance, something that sparked recognition in the back of my mind, human and animal alike—

Like a dog on its elbows, ready to play.

He twitched, and chirped, and waved a fin, and the message was absolutely, unambiguously clear.

Let’s get them!

I let out a single squeak in agreement, and we were off—darting past each other, the tips of our fins brushing as we gave chase, herding the rest of the pod like sheep. The other dolphins were every bit as fast as we were, but they were playing to play, not to escape—lingering and feinting and clustering and dodging, letting us get within inches before twisting away, filling the water with the sounds of laughter.

Eventually, I managed to tag one of them with my snout, and—just like a human—he switched sides, turning to coordinate with me in a pincer maneuver that caught one of the younger juveniles. Soon, there were six of us who were ‘it,’ and the remaining three turned belly-up in surrender before wriggling skyward, kicking off a round of who-can-jump-the-highest that lasted until one of them came across a floating chunk of driftwood and tossed it into the air for another to catch…

I don’t know how long we romped and frolicked, tearing through the waves. I lost track of time—wasn’t even trying to keep track—didn’t bother to count how many times I demorphed and remorphed as the rest of the pod circled around me, chittering with delight.

Game after game, hour after hour, dancing through the water with barely a human thought crossing my mind. I was drunk, delirious, disinhibited, letting the dolphin’s instincts drive as I sank into the background, letting the part of me that planned and measured and worried and cared recede as my inner five-year-old came out to play. I raced, and I chased, and I dove, and I laughed, dissolving into the moment with no concept of past or future.

When the games began to wear thin, we turned to hunting, darting through the shallows, dragging our snouts across the sea floor to raise billowing walls of silt that tricked the slow-moving skates into clumping together where we could snatch and toss and swallow at will. Eventually, muscles aching and bellies bulging, we slipped into the current and drifted out into the open water.

Enough, I thought, as I rolled to the surface and refilled my lungs. Not the word, the human concept, but the feeling, full and raw—a warm, rounded contentment, a deep and pervasive sense of enough-ness that wrapped around me like a blanket. It was good, it was whole, it was tired, it was satisfied. I was satisfied, body and mind alike—was relaxed and happy and present. I felt as if I could drift forever, tracing the border between sea and sky with the sun on my back. I knew, somewhere in the farthest corner of my mind, that there was something not-quite-true about that, but I also knew that it wasn’t urgent—that I would come back to it, in time, and that for the moment, there was nowhere I was supposed to be, and maybe not even anybody to do the supposing in the first place.

Dipping below the waves, I turned—

—and shuddered at the sudden rush of sensation as one of the other dolphins slid past me—literally slid, belly to belly, its skin gliding across my own from tail to snout. Caught in my wordless daydream, I hadn’t noticed its approach, and as it pulled away, I found myself following by reflex, trailing behind it like a plastic bag caught in the wake of a passing car.

Another reflex produced a series of clicks, and in the echoes I saw that the pod had drifted apart, the other dolphins clustered together in twos and threes, twisting and twining closer than before with lazy, languid movements. There was only one still close to me—one of the younger males—and as I turned he slid under me again, crosswise this time, his snout tickling the area between my fins as he passed.

Still moving on instinct, I darted after him, pumping my tail, coming up under his left fin and rolling him over onto his back as if we were wrestling. He didn’t resist, instead pushing back up against me with his own tail, and I felt something firm between us in the brief instant before we drifted apart, felt a surge of giddy, liquid pleasure that would have made me gasp if I had been in my own body—

Oh.

Oh.

A part of me came awake, then, through the weary euphoria—a thinking, conscious, deliberate part, not the fully fledged human but a fragment of will and judgment. I looked again, with eyes a shade less animal, and this time I saw it, poking out of the underside of the other dolphin’s tail—saw it and recognized it, open and unashamed and unmistakable.

In the same instant, I noticed the change in my own body—a reflective arousal, a feeling of drag under my tail as something less-than-streamlined trailed through the water like a rudder.

Uh—

Time seemed to slow.

There was understanding, in half-formed words and concepts—a hazy awareness that this was a thing that was happening, a set of circumstances bounded by choice and consequence. I was suddenly conscious of my nakedness in a way that I never had been, in morph—felt an overwhelming desire to have hands, and to use them to cover myself.

Just as strong, though, was the hunger—a hot, familiar hunger as the other dolphin came close again, his snout nuzzling at the cleft below my own belly, awakening something inside of me, steel and warmth and reckless longing. A part of me thrashed instinctively, pressing forward into the water, aching for something to press against—

Stop.

It wasn’t a word. I still wasn’t thinking in words. It was a sensation, like the jerk that sometimes happens just before you fall asleep—some deep and primal part of me hitting the brakes, yanking me out of the flow of things and back into something like sapience. I spun around, making space, still feeling the resistance under my tail as I cut through the water. The other dolphin trailed behind me, chirping playfully, looping and darting and blowing bubbles. In the distance, I could see the rest of the pod, tangled and touching—could hear the sounds that they were making, low and soft and guttural.

It hit me, then, in a rush of deadly self-awareness—a realization so unnerving that for a moment I literally stopped dead in the water—

Are you fucking kidding me?

I didn’t answer the voice—didn’t try to—just held still, the seconds ticking by as I let it sink in.

You cannot be serious.

But I was. Or at least, a part of me was. And in a second burst of clarity, I recognized the horrified voice for what it was—not me, exactly, but just another part—a should-be, a supposed-to, the part of me that had been stamped into shape by everyone else—

That is so fucking sick—

—reflexive outrage, performative disgust, some frightened part of me that was scrambling to stave off punishment, to look good in front of an imaginary lynch mob—

Hang on, that doesn’t sound quite right either—

I tried to slow down, to pull all of the threads into view where I could see them, even as it felt like my brain was splitting in two and going to war with itself. Imaginary! shouted the first voice. They’re gonna see this the next time they morph into you, Jake or Marco or god forbid Garrett—

And there it was.

With a burst of mental effort, I shut off the voice, clamped down on it and forced it into silence. After a moment’s consideration, I did the same thing to the other voices—the smug dismissal, the wordless lust.

If you ARE there, Garrett, I thought. If you’ve morphed me, and you’re looking back at this memory—

What would I want him to see? What would I want him to take away from this?

Choice.

Not shoulds. Not guilt, conformity, social pressure. And not the opposite of those things, either—recklessness, contrarianism. I didn’t want Garrett to be—

Controlled.

And I didn’t want me to be controlled, either. I wanted to think, not just be yanked around by whatever mental voice happened to be loudest at the time.

I slowed down in the water, tried to center myself, twisted a little to dodge as the other dolphin took another pass at me.

Okay, then, Tobias.

Okay.

So, what’s going on is—

I stumbled a little, my mind hiccupping.

Right. And I—

I maybe—

I maybe actually want to—

Something in me hit the brakes again, and I started over, thinking each thought carefully, one word at a time.

I was tempted.

Actually tempted, and that was incredibly—

—incredibly—

—incredibly something, I was obviously having a major reaction, but my mind wouldn’t let me stick any sort of pretend-label on it, wouldn’t let me give the answers I knew that I was supposed to give, and wouldn’t let me give the opposite of those answers, either.

But it was huge and terrifying and taboo, anyway, and the fact that it was huge and terrifying and taboo hadn’t made it go away, hadn’t deterred that part of me in the slightest, and I was trying to find excuses to run, trying to find excuses to stay, trying not to look straight at what I was considering because either way it would be a choice, either way it would mean something about me as a person, something important—

Wouldn’t it?

Breathe, Tobias.

Oh, right.

I wriggled into motion, heading skyward, breaking the surface to refill my lungs before sinking back down again. The other male was still close, chirping curiously, poking and teasing, and as it brushed against me I rolled away and I could feel it, feel him as our bodies tangled for a moment. The sensation produced another cascade of reactions and counter-reactions, turning my mind upside-down and shaking everything loose like a snow globe—

Okay, fine. It’s too much to process. Just swim away.

But once more, something in me objected, would not actually let me leave. I felt myself slowing down again in the water, felt myself moving carefully from one thought to the next, as if each was a stepping stone made of glass.

Okay.

So, the dolphins.

The dolphins, they’re—they’re horny, they’re fooling around, and I—

I braced myself.

I’m—

I’m maybe kind of into it, on some level, I thought carefully.

Because you’re in morph and the dolphin’s—what, hormones?—are influencing you, said a voice.

Maybe.

Or maybe that was just—

—an excuse?

The other dolphin whispered past me in the water, nudged my fin with his snout, and I squeezed my eyes shut.

Okay, so there’s this fucked-up thing, whatever. But I’m not going to. Obviously.

I opened my eyes again, staring off into the deep blue, away from the rest of the pod.

But why not, though?

The other part of me didn’t answer, and to be fair, it did seem pretty obvious.

That’s not an argument, though. What’s the actual reason?

The other voice—

The other voice had plenty of reasons.

But the central I, the me that felt like it wasn’t just another voice, that felt like it was really me—

It wasn’t quite buying any of them.

Another phrase floated up into my thoughts, a snippet from my earlier musings—the illusion that it wasn’t allowed.

If I’d been in my own body, I would have shaken my head. I wasn’t quite buying that, either. There was something about it that was suspect—a sort of too-convenient cleverness, like it was an excuse for whatever just-fuck-it part of my self was trying to talk the rest of me into it, trying to drive me off the cliff—

What CLIFF, though?

I turned in the water, looking back over my shoulder at the rest of the pod, at the sleek shapes twisting and writhing in the distance. It was a long look, not furtive or glancing this time, but open and honest, really taking it in.

Yep. That—that is happening right now.

I could feel the hunger burning at the edges of my mind, bizarrely out of place but nevertheless familiar, a well-worn longing remembered from a hundred sleepless nights at Oak Landing, trying not to shake the bunk.

And along with the hunger—

Or maybe in response to it?

Ah.

I’m not sure what made it click, but suddenly it was like everything snapped into focus. I could see it, now—the real fear, the underlying pressure that had been causing me to hit the brakes, to reject the easy answers in either direction. The voices inside of me had been trying to skip to the end, and some deeper, more stubborn part had resisted, insisted that I actually think it through.

It wasn’t so much the situation itself. That was weird and unnerving, but honestly at this point I’d been through worse.

No. It was the freedom. It was because no one was watching, because there were no rules or guard rails, no right thing in the way that Garrett cared about. It was the fact that this was a choice without consequences—either way, in a few more hours, I’d be back on land, in a completely different body, following a different set of priorities that were already locked in and weren’t going to change.

No—there was nothing at stake here except the way that I thought about myself. My own identity, and whether this was the sort of thing I wanted to remember doing. Whichever decision I made, stay or go, it would be me making it, with no excuses to hide behind. I couldn’t pretend that there was anything forcing me or stopping me, which meant that I couldn’t pretend it was anyone else’s fault.

And that—

That was terrifying.

I looked again at the younger dolphin, felt a shiver run through my body as he slipped closer, came alongside me, rubbed my fin with his fin and bumped his snout against my lower jaw, letting out a tentative, questioning chirp.

Want to play? he was asking.

It was a good question.

And I—

* * *

I unslung the bundle of fish from my shoulder and dropped it down onto the steel countertop. “Manao ahoana e, Tsiory,” I said.

The old man looked up from his tablet. “Eh, ela tsy nihaonana, Tommy,” he replied, a wide grin spreading across his face. “Fahasalamana?”

“Not bad,” I said, switching to English. “Long day.”

Standing, Tsiory reached for the scale and began to stack the fish inside of it, one by one. “Good haul,” he said, nodding approvingly. “Eighteen kilos!”

I nodded back, my jaw tight. I didn’t feel much like talking. My thoughts were quiet, and slow, and mostly still back in the water. But I needed to sell the fish, and Tsiory always insisted that he needed to practice his English, and it felt rude to just stand there silently. He was a kind man—his wife had brought me dinner more than once, and he had talked me out of a bit of trouble one day when the police showed up to ask why I wasn’t in school.

He was a friend. An ally. And the mood I was in—

Well. It wasn’t his fault, and I didn’t want to make it his problem.

“So!” he said, sliding the fish into a crate half-filled with crushed ice. “Ariary today, or credit?”

“Half and half,” I answered. Ariaries were the local currency—most of what I needed to buy I could get from Tsiory’s shop, with credit, but it still felt good to have some cash in reserve for emergencies. Over the past few weeks, I’d managed to save up almost six hundred dollars’ worth.

I could’ve stolen money, of course. From Tsiory, or from strangers, or from stores or banks if I didn’t want to hurt any specific people. But this way felt cleaner.

“And to take home of?”

I pointed to a handful of items behind the counter, fruits and baked goods and some packaged sweets that the nurse, Alima, was fond of. Tsiory grabbed them, stacking them expertly inside of a woven plastic bag.

“Today is big day for you, Tommy,” he said slyly, shooting me a sidelong grin as he tapped the numbers into his cash register.

“Oh?”

“News! You are to get your letter!”

I blinked, the words yanking me out of my thoughts and into the present moment. “There’s a letter for me?” I asked.

“Yes. You have been waiting, yes? Of four weeks!”

I could feel my heart beating faster. “Yes,” I said. “Four weeks. Can I have it, please?”

With a flourish, Tsiory reached beneath the counter and pulled out a large, manila envelope. “For you, a letter,” he said. “Full of letters! An English joke with love from Malagasy!”

Reaching out, I took it, along with the bag of groceries. “Thanks.”

I looked down at it. Departamento de Cooperacão Interplanetária, read the return address. Loteria de Admissão. To Tommy Rakoto, care of Tsiori Rakotomalala, Rue Marius Barriouand, Mahajanga, Madagascar.

“You are to open it now?” Tsiory asked.

I hesitated. I was out in the open, exposed. Anybody could walk by at any second. But then again—

I looked back up at Tsiory. The old man was still grinning, good-natured curiosity in every line of his face.

Fuck it.

I was in Madagascar. If I wasn’t safe here, I wasn’t any safer back in the hospital.

I tore open the envelope, pulled out the paper inside, flipped to the English translation. Scanning the words, I felt my heartrate tick up again—

“The news,” Tsiory said. “It is of good?”

“Yeah,” I answered, tucking the letter into the bag. “It’s good.”

* * *

I stopped short in the doorway. “Oh,” I said, as the three of them turned to look at me. “Uh. Mm. Hi, Jake.”

* * *

“There’s no way he signs off on this,” Marco said as he settled down onto the overturned bucket.

I closed the door to the supply closet and slid down to the floor. “It’s not his call,” I said. “This is between me, Ax, and Temrash.”

“Don’t pull that lone ranger bullshit, Tobias. This affects all of us. If you get caught—as long as Rachel and Garrett are down, and Ax is in critical condition—”

“Ax won’t be in critical condition, if he agrees to go along with it,” I shot back. “And Rachel and Garrett are stable. They can be moved. They’re due to wake up any day now anyway. And you know we’ve been here too long.”

Marco’s eyes narrowed, and he stared at me for a long moment, looking like he was searching for something. “Listen, Tobias,” he began, his voice softer.

I cut him off. “Don’t try to smooth talk me, Marco. There’s only one question here. Is Temrash worth saving, or not?”

Marco grimaced. “That’s the goal, but—”

“You got any better ideas?”

“No, but—”

“Look,” I said. “Don’t take this the wrong way. Or do—whatever—I don’t care. But you and Jake—you’re not—”

I broke off, trying to find the right words and failing. “You’re still new at this,” I said bluntly. “You’re months behind. I mean—Jesus—you woke up five days ago. You don’t even remember anything past Ventura. You’re missing some pretty crucial experience.”

Marco’s face hardened. “Hey. You didn’t make it out of Visser Three’s trap any better than we did,” he said, his voice cold. “And I’ve done my homework.”

“It’s not the same—”

“It is when you live it.”

It took me a second to figure out what he meant. “You read Ax’s memories?”

Marco nodded.

“He let you acquire him?”

“I didn’t ask.”

I paused, weighing his words and the harshness behind them.

Has he read my memories?

Of course he had. Marco had always been the least—

Well. None of them were stupid, exactly. But the least naïve. The least…innocent. Even at the beginning, Marco had known how to make the tough calls.

“Fine,” I said. “Then you know that I’m right.”

He sighed.

“Right?” I pressed.

His face twisted, and he looked me straight in the eye. “If Temrash is worth saving,” he said. “Then sure. God knows we can’t go anywhere near the oatmeal. But Tobias—”

He lowered his voice, but the words were no less firm. “It’s a Yeerk,” he said. “One Yeerk. Is it really worth the risk?”

“The last shard of Aftran,” I reminded him. “We don’t know what happened with Essak. For all we know, they never made it. This isn’t just a rescue mission—there’s a chance Temrash can get us a meeting with Telor, and we need that now more than ever. If Telor sees that we tried to save him, that we were willing to take on serious risk to do it—”

I broke off again. The sort of person who does the right thing, even if it’s hard.

“Besides,” I said firmly. “He saved Ax.”

“Which sort of gets cancelled out if you go off and get killed trying to return the favor,” Marco pointed out.

“So what?” I said, rising to my feet. “You’ll just bring me back again.”

* * *

“How did you manage to secure acceptance to the program?” Ax asked.

He was in human morph, his skin a dark, chestnut color that fit right in with the locals as we wandered through the park outside the hospital.

“I just applied,” I said. “There’s an option for people from poor countries that don’t keep good birth records. An IQ test, short essay. It was only like four pages.”

I had worn the body of a local boy as I filled it out, borrowing his language and his penmanship.

“There must have been many thousands of applicants. Millions, even.”

He was speaking more stiffly, again—formal-sounding, the way he’d talked before Temrash, before he’d picked up the ghost of Tom’s inflection and mannerisms. I wasn’t sure what that was about—whether it meant that the Tom part of his mishmash personality was fading, or whether it had something to do with the pain that he was in, or what.

“Over two million by now, says Google,” I answered. “I applied pretty early, though.”

“How many people are they accepting?”

“Fifty thousand internationals. A hundred thousand Brazilians. In the first wave, anyway.”

Ax frowned. “That makes your success somewhat…surprising.”

“There’s no way they could tell it was me from the application, if that’s what you’re thinking,” I said. “And you do get extra points if the country you’re applying from doesn’t have many people signing up. Plus—”

I shrugged. “Given everything else that’s happened, I kind of figured a one-in-forty chance was more or less a guarantee.”

Ax stopped walking, a wary expression shadowing his face. For a brief moment, I wondered if it was natural, shaped by the morph body’s instincts, or if he was doing it on purpose, for my benefit.

“You think the Ellimist intervened?” he asked quietly.

“I just figured it wouldn’t hurt to apply,” I said. I turned and started walking again, and after a moment, Ax followed.

“So your plan is to deliver Temrash to the Telor coalescion in Brazil,” he said.

I nodded.

“We—that is, Aximili—I will not survive long, without Temrash.”

I pulled my right hand out of my pocket, held it up between the two of us. “Not if you reset,” I said.

Ax was quiet for a long moment. I looked away, giving him space for whatever it was he was doing inside his head—arguing with Temrash, or working through the quasi-religious implications, whatever it was that was going on with the whole Andalite Path thing.

Or maybe he’s worried about the coma. Whether we can get him through it, now that we don’t have the Chee.

We hadn’t told Jake or Marco—though I guess Marco knew by now, if he’d been spying on our memories—but there had actually been six cancer patients in the ward to start with, not just four. Jake and Marco’s first copies hadn’t made it, had died without ever regaining consciousness.

And Garrett and Rachel still hadn’t woken up…

“Why are you so eager to do this, Tobias?” Ax asked, shaking me out of my thoughts.

“What?”

“You must have sent in that application at least four weeks ago. And you spoke with Marco privately, first, and now you’re talking to us privately, before you bring the idea before Prince Jake.”

“Yeah,” I said, fighting back a rising sense of impatience. “Because we’re running out of time. I have a plan. I don’t want to have to deal with all the stupid bullshit that comes up when people try to decide things by committee.”

“Tobias. What you have—it isn’t exactly a plan.”

The impatience bubbled over, became anger. “Look,” I snapped. “Don’t give me that shit about contingencies and exit strategies—”

“That’s not the only—”

“Fuck you,” I snarled, turning to stand in front of him, blocking his way. “Fuck you, Temrash, and fuck you, too, Ax. I’m trying to save you—both of you. You want to just—just fucking roll over and die?”

“No.”

“Then what? What, exactly? What are you—”

I bit off my next sentence, sucked in a breath, brought both hands up to pull at my hair. The rage had come in a flash, like it had been hiding just beneath the surface, waiting for the right trigger. But I didn’t care. I wanted to hit something—to hit Ax.

Did he not see? Could he not understand? Without me—if I hadn’t thought to send in the application a month ago—

Then instead of half a plan, we’d have NOTHING.

It was like they didn’t give a shit whether Temrash lived or died. It was the distress signal from Ax’s escape pod all over again—why was I the only one who was ever willing to get off his ass and do something about it?

I let out the breath I had been holding, dropped my hands back down to my sides. Ax was frowning again, a distant sort of look on his face as he stared at me—as if he was seeing right through me, like I wasn’t really there.

“Among the Andalites,” he said softly, “there are certain tasks which carry with them a great risk of death or injury. Even more so than military duty. Some of those tasks you would not recognize, but others—”

He paused. “Firemen controlling a wildfire. Engineers sent in to repair a radioactive leak. Doctors who tend to the contagious, or to the insane or violent. Rescuers. Explorers. Test pilots. Brave people, you understand?”

I nodded tightly, suppressing a second wave of impatience. I was already willing to take on the risk; there wasn’t any point in lecturing me about heroism or sacrifice—

“Sometimes, though, the people who volunteer for these tasks are not brave. They are not motivated by duty, or love. They are—we don’t have the right word. Not disgraced. Not lonely. They are…”

He trailed off, and I frowned, a fraction of my impatience cooling into confusion and curiosity. “Depressed?” I asked. “Suicidal?”

He shook his head. “No. Not—not finished. The opposite. They are—askew. Driven. Needing-to-find.”

“Find what?”

“It varies. What does not vary is the—the pressure. The need. For things to be different. For something to break—or to break against.”

He focused his eyes on me again—morphed eyes, borrowed from some random human, and yet I could see the alien behind them, weighing everything, the same solemn, searching presence I’d felt when I locked eyes with Elfangor.

“Are you askew, Tobias?” he asked quietly.

“No,” I insisted. And then, in my own head: Right? I mean—

“Why are you so eager to die?”

“I’m not eager, I just—”

“You are not deterred. You throw yourself in the path of danger.”

“It’s not dang—I mean, if it works there’s no reason to think—”

I broke off, my anger beginning to rekindle as Ax shook his head sadly.

Fuck you, you don’t know what’s going to happen any more than I do—

“Look,” I hissed. “Even if it does all go to hell, I can come back. You can come back. Temrash is the only one whose actual life is at stake, here. Doesn’t anybody else care about that? Don’t you?”

“We care,” Ax said. “We could not help but care. But somehow you care more, Tobias.” He tilted his head. “Why?”

I laughed, and it tasted like metal and ashes in my mouth. “You’re asking me?” I said, incredulous. “I have no fucking idea, Ax. Temrash. Whoever the fuck it is that I’m talking to right now. I have no idea why you give so little shit—”

“If the plan to save Temrash’s life required Aximili to die, this would not be an improvement—”

“I’m not going to fucking die!” I shouted, drawing startled looks from some of the nearby people in the park. “Why do you all keep harping on that?”

“Because insisting that this plan is safe does not make it so,” Ax said. “Because you don’t respond when we say it. You don’t hesitate. You don’t care.”

I felt my hands clench into fists. “What part of you can just bring me back do you not fucking get?” I demanded.

“The part where you will die, Tobias. You. The living, breathing, thinking being that is standing here with us now, you will stop. End. Vanish. You will have a—a—a living will, another being who will carry out your wishes, your desires, but you will not be here to see it.”

I opened my mouth to object, felt the words catch in my throat, blocked by a sudden and dizzying sense of déjà vu. It felt like I had had this conversation before, only backwards, mirrored—like I was hearing my own thoughts coming out of Ax’s mouth, and saying words that didn’t belong to me.

Had I talked about this with—

With—

With who? Garrett?

“You are holding up these words as a shield, to stop yourself from seeing what you do not want to see, what you do not want to actually consider—”

“Shut up,” I said, squeezing my eyes closed. It was like trying to hold onto a dream, the thoughts just kept slipping away—

“—and throwing yourself into the fray is not an answer—”

“Ax. Please. Shut up. Shut up and let me think.”

Ax stopped talking. I pressed both of my hands against the sides of my skull, my eyes still closed. For some reason, I felt like I was back in the water, with the dolphins. There was the same terrifying, unsteady sense of potential, like trying to keep my balance on shifting sand.

Why had I gotten so angry, so quickly?

It wasn’t the question Ax had asked. But it was the right question, so I ran with it.

I got angry when—when he tried to talk me out of it, that’s when. When he tried to say it wasn’t a plan, or I was going to die, or I was doing this for the wrong reasons, or it wasn’t going to work—

Was it going to work?

Doesn’t matter. Have to try something. Can’t just sit here.

I stopped, opened my eyes, tilted my head back until the sky filled my vision. Can’t?

The sort of person who does the right—

I shook my head, dispelling the thought. Not like that, I told myself. Not—not forced, not because I had to. Because I wanted to. Because it was my choice.

Why?

It was the same voice that had spoken up in the water—the deep skeptic, the part of me that refused to be satisfied with lies and shoulds, roles and platitudes. I wasn’t sure where that voice had come from. It hadn’t been there before.

Why do you choose this? the voice wanted to know. Because Ax—

Ax was right. About the risk.

I took a slow, steadying breath, felt rather than thought the true answer.

Because Garrett would have.

If it had been Garrett here, instead of me—if he’d morphed into himself, instead of trying to save me—

But he couldn’t have, could he? Not and live with himself. Not when he was the only one with your DNA.

The right thing, even if it’s hard—

Something in me flinched. Balked. There was something there I didn’t want to look at, something bleak and deadly at the end of this train of thought—

You left him no choice, Tobias. No choice at all. And all because he wanted to live up to it, live up to you, your standard, your stupid little mantra—

“Stop,” I said again. But it was a whisper this time.

Was it all just—empty? Me trying to live up to Garrett, and Garrett trying to live up to me, each of us following the other one around in circles, and all of it based on absolutely nothing, just smoke and mirrors—

The sort of person who does the right thing, even if it’s hard.

Lines on the pavement. An imaginary boundary, with nothing to stop the cars from crossing them—

Garrett is d—

“Tobias,” Ax said, interrupting.

I almost screamed—barely stopped myself from screaming, felt my jaw lock shut and my face go rigid as I turned to glare at him.

“We will try your plan,” he said.

I swallowed my broken thoughts, relaxed my muscles with a deliberate effort. “Even though it means—”

I couldn’t finish the sentence.

“Yes,” Ax said flatly. “Because Aximili is doomed regardless, without Temrash, and Temrash is doomed unless we try. This body has little chance either way—the only choice is whether or not to leave behind a revenant, and we still have preferences about the order of the universe even if we are no longer there to witness it. But you, Tobias—”

He broke off, and I saw the tenderness in his face as if it was behind glass, the look on the face of someone watching a wounded zoo animal. “You are not facing an inevitable death,” he said. “And so, we would like to know why.”

I swallowed again, still feeling the fragments of a dozen different thoughts rattling around in my skull, sticking in my throat.

Because it’s the right—

No.

No more.

Not until—

“Like I said before,” I answered, my voice stretched tight enough to break. “Temrash deserves saving.”

* * *

“Jake—”

“Marco says you’ve got an idea to pitch to me.”

“Yeah. It’s about Temrash, I think I’ve—”

“Actually. Uh. Before that.”

“Yeah?”

“I just wanted to say—uh. Sorry. This is awkward. I mean, for you it’s been, what, like two or three months? But for me, it was basically yesterday. Sorry if this is, like, too late, or something.”

“Jake, what—”

“I want to apologize.”

“For what?”

“For sending Garrett into the pool. You—you were right to hit me. I deserved it. I shouldn’t have—ah, geez.”

“No, it’s fine.”

“I didn’t mean to make you—”

“I said it’s fine. Shut up. Say your piece.”

“Well. I mean, that was pretty much it. Just that—you were right, and I’m sorry. If it had—if he’d—”

“Died.”

“Right. It would have been my—I should’ve told him no. Should have kept him safe. I screwed up. I’m sorry. And I wanted you to know, it won’t ever hap—”

“Stop.”

“What? I just—”

“I know, Jake. Just—just stop. Apology accepted, okay? Just—”

“—sorry—”

“—I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

* * *

I raised my finger to my temple, tapped five times on my skull—twice, twice, and once more.

<Message received,> said Temrash. <Ready.>

Taking a deep breath, I stepped forward to the agent behind the podium and handed her the letter. “Ny anarako dia Tommy Rakoto,” I said, the words carefully practiced, fluid and casual. “Madagascar. Tsy manana antontan-taratasy aho. No papers.”

“English?” asked the agent. “Ou Português?”

“English,” I said. “Small English.”

She squinted at the document, lifted it up, shone a small, green light on it, and then laid it back down on her podium and stamped it. “That way,” she said, pointing to the left. I followed, joining the back of a short line waiting to pass through what looked like metal detectors, but were probably something much more advanced.

I tapped my forehead twice.

<Roger,> said Temrash.

There was no denying it—I was tense. Nervous. Afraid, even. But it was the kind of fear that you felt walking alone on a dark street at night—the kind it did no good to show, to indulge. I kept a firm grip on it, letting through only as much tension as I could see on the faces of the other people around me.

There were only maybe fifty of them, which surprised me. Fifty thousand volunteers, spread across a month of scheduled arrivals—that meant they were processing groups this size thirty or forty times a day.

I could feel my heart rate rising as I came closer and closer to the detector, forced myself to take a couple of long, slow breaths.

Either it works, or it doesn’t. Nothing you can do about it now.

We knew some things about the security around the new pool. There was an absorption field—a dome, just like the one they’d had over the YMCA in Ventura. There were cloaked Bug fighters and Brazilian helicopters. There were metal detectors and milliwave scanners, like in an airport, plus Gleet bio-filters and trained sniffer dogs. For first-time volunteers, there was also an X-ray, an MRI, a three-hour quarantine, and a thorough health scan using some kind of alien equipment. And there might be any number of things that the Yeerks were keeping secret, things that hadn’t trickled out or been noticed by the media.

What there wasn’t was chemical showers, or shaved heads, or radiation chambers. No one was gassed, no one was held in quarantine for longer than a day.

“Between the bio-filters and the three-hour wait, they’re counting on being able to keep out morphers,” I’d explained. “But the time limit is based off mass, right? So if Temrash can take on the morphing power, he should be able to stay in morph for hours and hours. Days, even.”

We’d tried morphing into Yeerks. But we hadn’t ever checked to see if a Yeerk could morph into something else.

At first, I thought to have Temrash go in disguise as me. Get to the end of the pier and just dive in. But we didn’t know whether there were guards to prevent that—in case some nutjob tried to attack the coalescion with his bare hands—and there were also the scanners and the dogs to worry about.

“Don’t forget,” Marco had said. “That’s what triggered the whole fiasco with Paul Evans. If they detect what looks like a Yeerk inside somebody who’s supposed to be a first-time volunteer…”

But there was more than one way to sneak a morph-capable Yeerk into the compound.

“No,” Ax had said. “The Gleet bio-filters are not meant to detect microscopic life forms. They are for gross fauna—animals, insects. Not viruses, not bacteria. Their resolution is around half a millimeter.”

And demodex brevis mites—harmless, almost-invisible bugs that lived down in hair follicles and ate dead skin cells—they maxed out at two tenths of a millimeter. The size of the dot on an i on a computer screen. And practically every human being had them—thousands of them.

“It is possible that the Yeerks don’t even know to defend against morphs that small,” Ax had said. “The morphing technology is still extremely new, and between the mites and the tardigrade, you humans may very well have morphed smaller creatures than any Andalite, including the Visser himself.”

Visser Three tended to go big, not small. Giants, monsters, the most powerful and frightening species from all across the galaxy. Like the creature he’d turned into when he killed Elfangor.

I would go in to the pool complex myself, in my own body. Once through security, I would transform into my morph armor, taking care not to morph Temrash away—

—we’d tested it; it was tricky but possible—

—and then, once out on the pier, I would signal to Temrash, who would begin to demorph. When my head went under the water, he would drop off and join the coalescion. Meanwhile, I would maintain control of the Yeerk in my own head by threatening to demorph it away if it attempted to raise the alarm, the same way Rachel had controlled Illim in the attack on the first pool.

And then I would wait. Inside the facility, or nearby if it was suspicious to hang around. At some point, Telor would send for me, and I would drop off my temporary parasite, pick up Temrash, and leave—hopefully with a new ally, some new intel, and a new plan for keeping Temrash fed and healthy.

“As long as we’re wishing, I’d love an ATV and an Oculus,” Marco had grumbled.

We all knew it wasn’t a great plan. And even if it worked, getting through Marco’s safety protocol for getting back in touch with the group would take days.

But it was a solid half of a plan, and the first half was the only part that actually mattered. Once Temrash was safe, once he’d made contact with Telor, the two most important goals would have been accomplished, and if things went sideways after that—

Well. At least this time, I knew exactly what I was dying for.

The tech at the detector waved his hand, and the woman in front of me stepped forward. She stood inside the arc of metal for a moment. There was a hum, then a beep, and the tech waved her forward again.

My turn.

I stepped up, unable to keep myself from holding my breath.

HMMMMMMMMMM.

Beep.

The tech waved his arm, and I stepped out of the machine, feeling a tiny bit of tension leave my shoulders.

This was only the beginning.

* * *

“Agradecemos a sua participação. Thank you for your participation. Antes de prosseguirmos à Secretaria de Cooperação Interplanetária, estaremos realizando algumas verificações de segurança. There are only a few more security checks before we grant entrance to the Department of Interplanetary Cooperation. Novamente, agradecemos a sua cooperação. Please be patient.”

I glanced around with the others as the door clicked shut behind us. The room was a brightly lit cube, maybe fifty or sixty feet on each side, with walls and floor and ceiling made of large, square panels of shiny red metal. There was no obvious exit—now that it had shut, it was impossible to tell the door apart from any of the other panels.

“Pedimos aos participantes que sentem-se no chão, confortavelmente, com ao menos um metro de distância uns dos outros. For this test, we ask that you please find a comfortable place to sit on the floor, at least one meter away from each other person.”

We spread out, each person choosing a square as the four Hork-Bajir guards who’d followed us took up stations at the center of each wall.

“Este procedimento pode, ocasionalmente, causar uma sensação de tontura ou vertigem. This test occasionally causes a sensation of dizziness or vertigo. Caso você sinta um desconforto significativo, por favor, diga a um funcionário ‘me ajude.’ If you experience significant distress, please alert a staff member by saying ‘help me.’”

I settled down onto the floor with one leg crossed underneath me and the other drawn in close, foot flat. It was a position that would let me get to my feet in about half a second, if I needed to. I would have tried crouching, but one of the guards was already moving toward a person who was squatting on their heels, gesturing for them to get closer to the floor.

“Por favor, não se mova. Please remain as still as you can. Este procedimento pode levar até quatro minutos. This test may take up to four minutes. Você não será exposto a nenhum raio X, radiação ou campos magnéticos. You will not be exposed to any X-rays, radiation, or magnetic fields. Podem haver alguns flashes de luz que algumas pessoas acham desorientador. There may be some flashes of light which some people find disorienting. Novamente, caso você sinta um desconforto significativo, por favor, diga a um funcionário ‘me ajude.’ Again, if you experience significant distress, please alert a staff member by saying ‘help me.’”

I raised my hand to my head, surreptitiously tapped my forehead twice again.

<Understood,> Temrash replied.

There was a moment of rustling silence, the sounds of people breathing and sniffing and shifting slightly on the floor. Then there was a low, deep vibration, too deep to really be called a sound, followed by a burst of light like a camera flash.

Silence, another vibration, another flash.

Another vibration. Two flashes. A pause, then a third flash, then a longer vibration.

<Tobias!>

The voice was panicked, frightened. I held my body still against the sudden shock, suppressed the animal instinct to bolt as the room hummed and flashed again.

<Tobias, I’m—I’m demorphing! Not on purpose—involuntarily! I can’t stop it!>

Adrenaline flooded my veins. Had they—did they have an anti morphing ray?

<There’s nothing I can do!>

Keeping my expression controlled, I tried to turn my head casually, taking in the faces of the three guards I could see from my position. They were unmoving—alert, but not focused on anything.

Maybe they don’t know, maybe there isn’t any way for them to tell if it’s working—

<I’m going to be visible in about twenty seconds!>

I could feel it, now—a tiny weight on my scalp, just above my left ear, like a ladybug crawling through my hair, growing steadily larger.

If they saw Temrash—

They would—

What?

I had no idea.

<Tobias, what—>

I could feel my thoughts running in opposite directions, one of them scanning through my options—put him in your pocket, take off your shoe, hide him under your shirt—while the other began playing back every doubt, every objection, a million questions I hadn’t even thought to ask—

Fuck, the floor, what if the floor panels are scales, my mass is changing—

I truncated the thought. Temrash was the size of a gumball and still growing, he needed protection, a liquid environment—

Jake was right, Marco was right, Ax was right, we weren’t ready, we’re not going to make it—

<Tobias!>

I reached up, casually, and scratched the top of my head, my hand covering Temrash’s emerging form. Slowly, gently, I closed my fingers around him, feeling a nauseating mix of wet Yeerk-flesh and hard insect carapace—

<What—>

Shifting, I leaned to one side, resting my head on my cupped hand, willing him to figure it out as the rest of my mind looked frantically for a weapon, an exit, an ally—anything.

You don’t have anything, you came here empty-handed, you walked right in—

<Are you—oh. Okay. I understand.>

It took every scrap of willpower I had not to shudder, not to wince, not to throw up as I felt the half-alien horror poking and scraping at my ear, felt it extend a proboscis and begin to slither inside my head. I felt motion where there should be no motion, a sharp, piercing pain inside my skull, and I gritted my teeth—

<Halfway.>

—a cold, cutting sensation as a shrinking shard of exoskeleton dragged across my flesh, leaving a deep cut inside my ear canal—

<Almost there. I’ll stop the bleeding once I’m inside.>

—and then I felt it.

Him.

Temrash.

It was like a stain, spreading out across my—my thoughts, my sensations—across everything. Like a cloud passing over the sun on a hot summer day. I felt my body beginning to tingle, saw double for a moment as my eyes unfocused and then refocused all on their own. There was a dizzy, sick sort of confusion in my thoughts as Temrash dragged his fingers over the pages of my mind, and then my hand was falling away from my ear, my body straightening in response to someone else’s will.

Wait—

I hadn’t meant for him to—

No, no, no, no, no—

There was a drop of blood in the center of my palm, and I felt a wild, nauseated panic as my hand moved to wipe it on my shirt, as it reached up again to swipe a finger around the inside of my ear, all without any input from me.

I couldn’t help it. It didn’t matter that Temrash was my ally. For a moment, it didn’t even matter to me that we were in the middle of a locked room, surrounded by guards. All that mattered was the sudden violation of my body—my kingdom, my whole world—being taken away from me. It was almost a reflex, like a drowning man pushing someone else under the waves. I reached—stretched—pushed—tried with all my might to regain control of my hand—

It was like there was a brick wall in the way. I couldn’t even tell if it had come close to working. I was crippled, paralyzed, unable to do so much as take a breath.

<Not now,> came a voice—his voice, not my own verbal loop echoing someone else’s words, the way thought-speak always was, but a different voice entirely.

Inside my head.

<What are you doing?> I demanded. <You can’t—I didn’t—let me go!>

<This will go better if I am in control,> Temrash replied, the words cold and aloof.

<What? You—>

<You are compromised. Suicidal. I would never have agreed to this if I had fully understood your mental state. I have no intention of letting you throw both of our lives away.>

A part of me flinched. Suicidal?

Another part of me stepped up, traced the outline of an entire argument, saw that it would go nowhere and switched directions mid-thought. <I just saved your life, you—you—>

<Fucking slug? Ah, but you see, you don’t need to say it. I can hear it either way.>

I could feel my panic rising beyond anything I’d ever felt before. If I hadn’t been cut off from my heart, my lungs, I would probably have been in the middle of a heart attack. <Let me—>

<Hush, now.>

There was a sudden burst of anti-sensation—a flash of darkness, a rush of numbness, a concussive silence every bit as quiet as an explosion was loud. For a split second, I was reduced to almost nothing, a tiny mote of consciousness surrounded by a vast, impenetrable void.

It was stunning, in the completely literal sense of the word—in that one brief moment, all of my thoughts dropped straight out of my head and I reeled, disoriented, as if I’d been punched.

I don’t know how long it took me to recover. When I came online again, the test was over, Temrash puppetmastering my body to its feet as the door opened and words came over the intercom. I felt another wave of nauseated horror as I watched—felt—my limbs moving without my permission, and I—

I faltered.

I had meant to fight back again. To rouse myself. To struggle. But at the last second—

Temrash’s assault on my senses—whatever it was he had done—it had bypassed my conscious brain entirely, had shaken me all the way to my core, the place where I was more animal than human. Without being able to put it into words, I knew—I could feel—that some deep and crucial part of me had been dominated, cowed—had seen the shadow of death in Temrash’s power, and was now holding back. Hesitating. Cringing. Resisting any attempt by the rest of me to do anything that might displease my—

I stopped myself from thinking the word master, but Temrash heard it anyway, and laughed.

I felt anger.

Confusion.

Shame.

Denial.

Defiance.

Defiance, but it was a hollow defiance—a pretense, shot through with caution, the caution of a toddler who’d burned his hand on the stove and now insisted that there was some other reason why he was avoiding the kitchen—

It had all happened so fast—was still happening so fast. It can’t be that easy! I shouted at myself. You’re stronger than that!

Temrash laughed again.

We were following the group, now, moving down a long, narrow corridor toward another open space. Temrash’s control was effortless, perfect, his movements smooth and casual in exactly the way I would have made them.

Why?

Why was he doing this?

I could feel the hidden purpose in the question—the retreat, some part of me backing away from the immediate horror of what was happening, looking for something else to latch onto, to distract myself.

But still.

What was he thinking? Once we got back to the others—

I went cold. Unless—

<Don’t be melodramatic,> Temrash said. <You’ll have your precious little body back soon enough.>

I realized, then—I had always known it, but suddenly it was real to me—that the psychic link between Yeerk and host was one-way. That Temrash could see everything, hear everything, but that Ax had never glimpsed the inside of Temrash’s mind, that his measure of Temrash’s character was based entirely on the Yeerk’s behavior—

Ax didn’t know. The whole time, he never knew that Temrash was—that he would—

There was a vague, sourceless feeling of derision, a sort of psychic sneer that wrapped around me like a mocking crowd.

I couldn’t see what was next. I didn’t know what to do. It was all happening too fast, I wasn’t ready, wasn’t in control, and meanwhile we were still in the middle of a Yeerk stronghold, and I had no resources, no weapons, no time to think, I needed to—

To what?

To WHAT, exactly?

All of the thoughts I had somehow failed to think over the past month—all of the things that Marco and Ax and Jake had said, the concerns I had dismissed, a thousand precautions I hadn’t bothered to take—they all flooded my mind, while above and underneath and inside of all of it I felt myself continuing to unravel.

It was true—I was suicidal. Must have been, to come in here with so little reason to hope, to fight for the chance to come in here and die—

<Honestly. You’re worse than Tom.>

My rage unfolded again, white-hot and impotent at how easily, how carelessly my privacy had been violated—

Temrash did—something—and I felt a sudden rush of arousal, coupled with the mental image of a dolphin—

<Fuck you!> I shouted.

<But I’m not a dolphin.>

And as I spluttered, silent and helpless, the rest of the world caught up to us.

“Obrigado pela sua participação,” came the voice over the intercom. “Thank you for your participation.”

We had entered another chamber, a larger one this time, ringed with clear glass doors leading to small, brightly-lit cubicles.

“Existem dois pontos de verificação de segurança restantes. There are two security checkpoints remaining. Em seguida é uma varredura de saúde do corpo inteiro. Por favor, escolha um cubículo e sente-se no assento dentro dele. Next is a full body health scan. Please choose a cubicle and sit down on the seat inside of it…”

I felt a strange sort of detachment, an awareness that my heart should have started beating faster, even though it hadn’t. If they did a full-body scan, they might notice that I was already infested, and then—

<Relax,> said Temrash.

And before I could do anything about it—before I could even try to resist—

“Help me,” Temrash said, with my voice.

One of the guards looked up, stepped over. Temrash sent my gaze flickering across the other guards, saw that they had stiffened slightly, their hands drifting toward pockets that almost certainly held weapons.

“English?” asked the first guard.

“Gharabak tul,” said Temrash, pitching my voice low, so that it would not carry. “Mik Aftran.”

And then everything seemed to happen at once.

The guard’s eyes widened, and he leapt backward, pointing at me and shouting something that sounded like “Ghafrash!” as he reached toward his pocket with his other hand. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the other guards drawing weapons.

Temrash threw my body aside, a convulsive jerk that would’ve pulled a muscle if I’d tried it myself.

And then—

They froze.

I froze, halfway to the ground.

We were all of us as still as statues, not even our clothes rippling.

What—

There was a hum, and then the weapons flew forward out of their hands—flew together into the center of the room and exploded—a tiny, contained blast, the ball of white expanding to the size of a basketball and then stopping abruptly, as if contained—

Force field.

“I am sorry,” spoke a voice—a voice that seemed to echo from everywhere at once, emerging from the empty air. “I had hoped not to interfere with your operation, but I cannot permit open violence.”

Chee!

“Where are—” Temrash began.

“No time. The Yeerks have countermeasures. You must escape.”

There was a boom, and for a moment I saw the outline of the robot as its hologram flickered, all of its power consumed by an immense expenditure of effort. Sudden sunlight angled into the room from a tunnel in what had been one of the walls—a tunnel that was at least sixty or seventy feet long, whose walls were the shattered floor and ceiling panels of what had been several other rooms between this one and the outside.

I felt a small weight drop into my palm, and my eyes dropped to see—

Nothing?

My hand curled around the nothingness, and felt something small, cool, angular, and hard.

“Go,” came the voice, just as another flash filled the room—

The Chee was visible again, toppling like a falling tree, dead or at least disabled. Around it, the four guards were held fast by wrench-wrought scraps of metal dragged up from the floor. There was a muffled whumpf, and suddenly black smoke was pouring out of the robot’s chrome-and-ivory frame, and then a split second later all the lights went out.

Temrash went. We ran straight for the hole, confused and frightened voices rising behind us.

<That’s in!> I shouted. <That’s the pool complex!>

<No shit.>

I scrambled—gasped—kicked at my brain, trying to get my thoughts into gear. That had been—there had been a Chee—

Following us? Or stationed inside the whole time?

It had been shut down somehow, and before that it had saved us, bought us an escape—

Those guards.

The guards had drawn on us immediately, had responded to whatever Yeerkish thing Temrash had said with swift, unquestioning violence—

We burst out into the sunlight before I could finish the thought—into the sunlight, and into—

<What—>

The part of my brain that didn’t think in words, that was always tracking things in the background and didn’t really use up any RAM—that part had sort of low-key expected us to run out into a ring of waiting security guards, or maybe a crowd of curious civilians peering into the hole.

Instead, we had emerged into a war zone.

<—the—>

I couldn’t see anything clearly, with Temrash controlling my eyes, Temrash turning my head, searching for cover as we ran. But I caught glimpses.

The flash of Dracon fire, and the ch-ch-ch of military assault rifles in answer.

A black smear of smoke and oil on the surface of the dome-shaped force field, trailing behind the flaming wreck of a helicopter as it tumbled downward.

Two ragged, circular holes in the concrete of the plaza outside the building, as big around as oak trees, as if something had burst out of the ground, with men in beige camouflage climbing out of them.

A third hole opening up as a monster chewed its way up from underground, a giant yellow tube the size of a small car, all wriggling legs and bulging flesh.

A flash of orange and black that I thought might have been a tiger, and another blur cutting through the air, some kind of hawk or falcon.

People running.

Smoke.

Bodies.

<—fuck!>

<Resistance fighters,> Temrash said, as he threw us behind what looked like a dumpster off to one side of the firefight. <Your people—your auxiliary Animorphs. They must have dug up from below.>

<What was—>

But before I could finish the question, the information was already flooding into my mind, Temrash cracking open the gates to let the knowledge leak through. I heard the name Taxxon, saw what looked like a giant centipede, ten feet long and thicker than a man, with hundreds of sharp, metallic-looking legs and an open, slavering, circular maw above four red-jelly eyes. I knew, without any explanation, that their hunger was legendary across the galaxy—that they would turn on each other like sharks in a feeding frenzy, and that they would eat straight through dirt, through concrete, through steel, driven only by the insatiable desire for more. In the back of my mind, I remembered the nightmare I’d witnessed in Jake and Marco’s memories, a dark tunnel full of slavering monsters—

<But—they—those are aliens. How could—and the tiger—>

Temrash shrugged irritably, still dragging my gaze around in a jerky motion, filling me with a sort of disembodied nausea. There was a shout, and the sound of an explosion, and the dumpster we were hiding behind shook as dust and pebbles filled the air around us. I felt the tingle of transformation sweep over me, saw that Temrash was putting on morph armor, felt again the desperate, overwhelming need to regain control—

<What for? Anything you can do, I can do better.>

As if to prove the point, Temrash leaned out from behind cover, swept my eyes around the immediate vicinity, and broke into a sprint. There was the plink of a bullet hitting the ground beside us, and he juked like a running back, changing direction and darting around the corner of a squat, concrete building.

<Where are you—>

<Out,> Temrash snapped.

<But—>

<But what?>

I could feel my thoughts starting to click into place, my sluggish brain finally shaking off the shock, catching up to the last minute or so of what had happened.

The Chee, the guards, the lottery, now this—

This was not a coincidence. It couldn’t be. For a battle to open up the very second that a Chee blasted his way through a building, so that hardly anyone would even notice—

<Sure. It’s all to give us a chance to get out of here.>

But that couldn’t be it. For one, it made no sense to bring us here just to have us leave again, and for another, Temrash was still dying of Kandrona starvation—

There was a hollow, echoing laugh. <I’m not, actually.>

<What?>

<I have no idea. But ever since I crawled in your ear, the hunger’s been retreating.>

For once, I managed to keep my mental footing, filed away the absolute shock for later and kept on thinking. Meanwhile, Temrash continued to work his way around the outside of the building, staying out of sight, trying every door we came across.

<Maybe we should just fly out,> he muttered.

I didn’t answer. The Chee, the guards, the lottery—

Something is supposed to happen. This whole mess is for something, like a scene in a movie. The Ellimist wants something. Think. What happens next?

The resistance fighters—

<They’re here to kill Telor,> said Temrash. <Obviously.>

And then—

<Shit,> said Temrash, reading the thought as it unfurled across my mind. <What makes you think—>

<Oh, come on,> I shot back. <You’re telling me Visser Three directed the building of this whole facility, put a half-dome shield over it, security ten layers thick, and he never even considered that somebody might try digging up from underneath? He wants this to happen.>

<Or Telor compromised the security, to let them in,> Temrash argued. <The way those guards fired on us—they weren’t Telor. They were the Visser’s agents. I think Telor is being held hostage in here.>

Plots within plots—

<Why not both?> I asked. <Telor compromises the security, but V3 wanted it to happen anyway, and that’s why it’s working.>

<Why?> Temrash asked, dropping us down behind a bench to hide as a group of uniformed guards ran past.

<He’s letting us take care of the problem for him,> I said.

I remembered all too well the scene in Washington, the way the Visser’s avatar had played to the crowd, weaving lies and truth together into a story that was just sympathetic enough to string everyone along, prevent any kind of mass resistance from cohering. And given that Telor had betrayed him—and that the rest of his fleet was just weeks away—and that he’d already started stripping the planet of military resources—

<All the reasons that made us think Telor might want to ally with us,> I said. <It’s too much of a liability at this point—>

<—and he wants footage of human terrorists destroying the peaceful, collaborative human-Yeerk venture,> Temrash finished. Leaning around another corner, he looked left and right before sprinting another twenty or thirty steps toward the edge of the facility, taking us further from the noise and chaos of the ongoing battle.

<Not just human terrorists,> I said, remembering the flash of orange. <Morphers specifically. He’s setting us up to be the bad guys.>

There might not even be any real resistance fighters out there. They might all be captured Controllers putting on a show.

Or not. Everything we’d just thought of might be completely wrong.

But there has to be some reason why I’m here—right? It can’t just be luck.

So what was I supposed to do?

No. That wasn’t the right question. That wasn’t the way the Ellimist operated. It was like a coach, not a puppetmaster. It had brought me here because I was the right factor to add to the equation. Me, making the sorts of decisions I usually made, not me trying to fit into some puzzle.

Which lent a little credence to the theory Temrash and I had come up with. If we’d been inclined to come up with the wrong theory, the Ellimist wouldn’t have maneuvered us here.

Right?

<You may be jumping the gun a little, there,> interjected Temrash, as we began to approach the outer wall of the facility. A distant corner of my mind noted that the lights were still out, that there were no lights visible anywhere, though it hardly mattered in the bright morning sun.

<What?> I asked.

<Some Yeerks are bred to sacrifice themselves. I am not one of them.>

I stalled, spluttered. <But Telor—the war—the Visser—>

<There’s an argument to be made that it’s more important to preserve my cooperative relationship with an Andalite than to rescue one random coalescion,> Temrash said, in a tone that was almost dry. <And let’s not forget who’s actually in charge, here.>

There was a snap of silence, a faint echo of the blow he’d dealt me earlier, followed by the inevitable flinch, and then rage and self-loathing in equal measure—

<So predictable,> Temrash laughed. <Almost mechanical.>

Motherfucker, I’ll show you predictable—

But on a deeper level, some part of me could see that he was right—that the brainsucking parasite wasn’t just needling me, but had in fact diagnosed a true feature of the human mind, or at least of my mind. It was like the thing with the dolphins all over again—it was easy to just react, to let the pressures around me bounce me back and forth, but what I actually wanted was to be larger than they were, to take them as factors in my decisionmaking instead of being subject to their control.

There’s a time to let go, and this isn’t it.

<Aw, that’s cute. It’s learning a new trick.>

It was like I’d been pulled outside of my body. I could feel the impulse to rage again, to respond to the Yeerk’s mocking praise with contrarian defiance, to reject the lesson I’d just explicitly thought through, to not-do something just because someone I didn’t like thought it was a good idea.

But this time the impulse was small, contained. It stayed well below the surface, producing no real pressure.

This must be what it feels like to be Marco.

The taste of chocolate chip cookies flooded my mouth.

<You know, either way, we don’t exactly have time to waste on you fucking with me,> I growled.

Temrash gave no answer, only directed my gaze upward, at the open sky above the wall ringing the facility. <There are bound to be security countermeasures,> he said, more than half to himself. <The field is outward-facing, but they could easily have other, weaker shields just outside of it, facing in.>

There was a muffled boom, the ground trembling, and I felt my urgency rising again. <Temrash, please,> I said. <We can’t just run. We have to do something.>

<No.>

And as I threw myself against him once again, felt my mental fingers scrabbling across the smooth, impenetrable surface of his control, a single possibility occurred to me—

I didn’t think. Didn’t consider, didn’t give Temrash time to react, to block. Abandoning my attack, I threw all of my effort sideways, at the tiny little mental switch that was always there, in every morph—

Click.

<What the—>

Suddenly, there was a third presence inside my skull—the other Tobias, the dormant mind of the morph armor.

<Yeerk!> I shouted, and as Temrash lunged for the switch and I resisted, I felt the other Tobias heave, dislodging the Yeerk’s control.

It was only for a split second, and then Temrash fell back, wrestling the mental steering wheel away again, but that left me free to put forth pressure again—

My body crumpled, collapsed, began twitching and convulsing as three different minds sent conflicting signals to my limbs.

Temrash tried to focus his attention, to send the demorph signal, and I countered as hard as I could, filling the mental space with static. While Temrash was distracted, the other Tobias pushed back again, and I felt my body start to climb to its feet—

<You can’t hold back both of us,> I said, forcing the words out one by one.

Temrash didn’t answer, instead slicing through the other Tobias’s control and dropping us painfully back to our knees.

<Listen,> I said. <You can still leave. Crawl out of my head and morph, you can get out of here alone and let me keep going.>

A wordless pulse of suspicion, incredulousness—

<Look at my thoughts! I won’t hurt you. I’ll let you acquire me. We can go our separate ways, meet back up at the rendezvous. Just—>

I tightened my resolve, sweat beading on my skin as I concentrated harder than I ever had before. <I don’t know how much time we have,> I pleaded. <They could break through to Telor any minute—>

<Fine.>

I felt as if I’d missed a step, my mental effort spilling wildly forward as Temrash’s resistance suddenly vanished. The tingle of transformation began to pass over me as Temrash moved to demorph and I didn’t resist.

<What the hell was—>

<Too complicated to explain,> I said, cutting off the other Tobias. <We’ve got, like, maybe minutes.>

As the change passed over my body, healing my scraped knees, I tried once again to straighten out my scattered, confused thoughts. It had been—Jesus, it couldn’t have been more than ten minutes since I’d been calmly following the group through the facility—

Where did that Chee come from? Was it following me?

Since when do the Yeerks have an anti-morphing ray, and why aren’t they using it everywhere?

Why was Visser Three keeping Telor captive instead of just killing it?

What the hell did Temrash mean, the hunger was ‘retreating’?

Why the fuck didn’t I listen to Ax and Marco?

I felt a sudden weight in my palm, and glanced down to see—

Nothing?

I curled my fingers into a fist, felt them press against something small and hard and angular.

Oh, right.

The Chee had handed me something, just before it had been deactivated—something with its own invisibility hologram, apparently. I traced the outline of the object with my fingers, trying to figure out what it might be—

No time.

<Goodbye, Tobias,> said Temrash’s voice in the back of my head.

Once again, I felt the intolerable pressure in my ear canal, the sick feeling of movement where there should be no movement. I could feel Temrash peeling back from my mind like a band-aid, slowly ceding territory as he contracted back into a thick, slimy tube and slid out of my skull.

Reaching up with my other hand, I caught him in my palm, pulled him away, swallowed hard against the urge to vomit.

There was a brief flutter of peace, a moment of calm and lethargy as the acquiring trance swept over me, and then it passed. The shape in my hand began to swell, the layer of blood and viscera thinning as the gray ooze began to turn pink, and I set it down gently on the ground.

“Good luck,” I whispered, glancing around to confirm that the Yeerk was well-hidden and that there was no one in sight.

And then I left.

It was odd, but the first thing I noticed was how clumsy my body felt—my steps heavy and uncoordinated, my heart thudding too fast and my breath coming too slow. It was like getting out of a new car and into an old clunker, or crossing the line from buzzed to drunk. It suddenly made sense—not just intellectually but on a visceral level—that Ax had only been able to pull through thanks to Temrash’s help.

What the fuck WAS that, though?

The swift and casual betrayal, the absolute disrespect for anything like my wants, my priorities, my personal sovereignty—and then the almost nonchalant reversal, as if it hadn’t even been a big deal, as if it wasn’t even afraid that I might carry a grudge—

Alien. The Yeerks were truly alien, for all that they could pass as human.

Approaching the corner of a building, I slowed, my breath burning in my throat. I could still hear gunfire, both human and Yeerk, along with the occasional scream and the crackle of burning buildings.

Okay. What ARE you doing?

The resistance fighters. If I could get through to them, convince them to call off the attack—

They may not actually be resistance fighters, remember.

Still. It was worth a shot. If I could get close enough to broadcast to them in thought-speak, without them knowing where the words were coming from—

In the back of my head, I felt a tickle of doubt, an echo of Ax’s suspicion, of Temrash’s accusation. Are you planning on getting out of this alive?

No. Of course not. I wanted to, but at this point, I was in so deep, buried under so many mistakes, so many bad decisions…

But there was still a chance that I could purchase something with my life. For the first time, I understood how Cassie must have felt, there in the pool, looking around at all the death and horror.

If I had to die, I at least wanted to accomplish something in the process.

I took another careful look around the corner. Still no one.

In the weeks of waiting, while Marco and the others convalesced, I had snuck into a couple of zoos to flesh out my arsenal. I didn’t have anything that could survive Dracon fire, but when it came to being swift and maneuverable—

The Brazilian free-tailed bat was about the size of a triple-A battery, less than half an ounce and not even two inches long. But in 2009, scientists had discovered that it could fly as fast as one hundred miles per hour, in short bursts, while still being able to dodge branches and catch flies. If anything could get through a war zone, it was that.

I focused my mind again, sending the tiny Chee object into Z-space along with the rest of my body. I felt the familiar sensation of falling as I shrank, the not-quite-itch of bristly brown fur bursting out of my skin, the blurring of vision as my eyes and brain switched from human to bat.

Get to the pool, get to Telor, try to save something. Anything.

A minute and a half later, the morph was complete. Propping myself up with my leathery wings, I leapt into the air and began to fly, staying low to the ground and close to cover.

It wasn’t hard to find my way to the pool. Starting at the courtyard where I’d first emerged was a wide path of destruction cutting straight across the complex, scorched buildings and shattered concrete and bodies lying left and right. There were eerily few people around.

Everyone’s inside, maybe?

Up ahead, the pool itself was a smaller stadium within the larger complex, still hundreds of feet across in its own right, the kind with a dome-shaped roof that splits open and a boxy, fortress-like entrance on one side. There was fighting going on around the doors, with what looked like resistance fighters holding the entrance and facility guards trying to break through.

The doors looked like they had been blasted and battered by fire from both directions, and the lobby beyond was a mess of shattered glass and twisted metal. There was plenty of room for me to zip past the fighting and slip inside—

As long as I didn’t get shot.

Here we go.

I dropped all the way to the floor, skimming the concrete with my chest a mere inch or two off the ground. At a hundred miles an hour, it took less than two seconds to weave my way through the smoke and past the shouts and sounds of gunfire. Banking, I flared my wings and rose as high as I could, rocketing up toward the ceiling in the cavernous entrance chamber.

There was no one inside except the handful of fighters facing outward, none of whom seemed to have noticed me. Turning again, I swooped down and into the central hallway, echolocating to get a sense of what was ahead of me in the darkness.

Up ahead, a set of double doors, blasted open as if by explosives. A dozen paces beyond that, another set, and then another, and then—

I climbed upward again, settling into a tiny crack in the ceiling just past the last set of open doors.

The pool complex was brightly lit, by the kind of portable spotlights they had on school picture day. It was full of people, but there was none of the frenetic chaos of the battle outside. Instead, there was a mass of what looked like civilians sitting in a crush off to one side, guarded by a handful of fighters, while a dozen others guarded the entrance and another dozen—

What?

They were standing around the edge of the pool, evenly spaced, each wearing what looked like a high-tech version of one of those backpack leaf blowers, with a long tube stuck down into the pool—

CRACK.

The world around me seemed to explode, a vast concussive impact knocking me insensible as the piece of plastic I’d been holding onto broke off and fell. I tried to spread my wings—felt them both unfurl only partway—tumbled downward and just barely managed to curve my way out over the water and under the long pier—

CH-CH-CH. CH-CH-CH.

More explosions, tiny spouts of water that were nevertheless many times larger than my own body, and I realized that I was being shot at.

Fluttering madly, I managed to rise up and into the corrugated metal of the pier, crawling into a dark space where the support pillar met the flat platform. <Stop!> I shouted. <Don’t shoot!>

<Unidentified intruder,> came a thought-speak voice, cold and clipped and professional. <Demorph immediately or we will deploy lethal force.>

What the fuck do you call BULLETS if not lethal goddamn force—

<Stop,> I repeated. <I’m not—I’m not with them,> I said.

They saw you fly in, they were watching the door, of course they were watching the door—

<I repeat, demorph now or we will open fire. You have ten seconds to comply.>

I still didn’t know if they were resistance fighters or Visser Three shock troops, if they were there to kill Telor or for some other reason entirely—

It looked like they were sucking Telor out of the water.

<Don’t shoot,> I said. <I’ll—I’m complying. Hang on.>

Okay. I had maybe twenty seconds before they figured out I was lying—

<Telor,> I said, keeping the thought-speak beam narrow and tight. <This is Tobias, Tobias of the Animorphs. Uh. I’m—>

I broke off, struggling for words.

Ten seconds.

<I’m here, inside the facility, I can see what they’re doing to you. Is it—are you—can you make some kind of splash? If you want me to try to stop them?>

I waited—

The surface of the water swelled, and broke, and then was still again.

<I’m coming out,> I said, sending my thoughts wide. <Don’t shoot.>

Flopping and fumbling, I emerged from under the pier and managed to loop around and collapse on top of it. Lights fixed on me from four different directions, and I began to demorph out of the bat’s broken body.

What are you going to do, what are you going to do, have to do SOMETHING, what—

<It’s me,> I said, trying to inject some confidence and authority into my tone. <Tobias.>

Either they really were resistance fighters, in which case that might buy me something, or I was already fucked and it didn’t matter.

<Uh huh,> came a skeptical-sounding voice. <What are you doing here, then?>

<We’ve been keeping an eye on the pool, obviously,> I lied. And with the other half of my brain—

<Telor. They’ve caught me. I’m going to do what I can, but I don’t know if—ah. Anyway. Also, Temrash of Aftran is alive. I came here to try to bring him to you, but we got caught up in the battle. I’ll try to—>

I felt the shift as the morph passed halfway and my ability to thought-speak disappeared. Propping myself up on slowly thickening arms, I looked down along the pier to see a pair of armed fighters with guns held level and steady, pointed right at my face.

<How do we know you’re not Controlled?> the voice asked in my brain.

“How do I know you’re not Controlled?” I shot back. “I hear they’ve captured a good few of you, and I’m the one with earplugs.”

The voice said something else in response, but I didn’t hear it. I was distracted by the sudden feel of something small and hard in my hand, the invisible object the Chee had given me emerging again from Z-space.

If all of this was orchestrated—if all the coincidences really are on purpose—

I squeezed the device, twisted it, turned it over in my hand, poked it from every angle.

Nothing.

So much for miracles.

<—your feet, slowly, and walk toward us.>

I turned, pushing myself up to a standing position, refocusing my attention on my morph armor and trying to send the object away again as quickly as I could.

<Hands out where we can see them.>

I spread my hands, palms up and fingers open, as I felt the tingle of transformation sweep up my arms and the weight of the invisible object disappeared.

“What are you doing with Telor?” I asked, as I walked slowly forward.

<Wouldn’t you and the Yeerk Empire like to know.>

“You know Telor isn’t your enemy, right?” I said, raising my voice so that it carried throughout the chamber. “Visser Three is your enemy. He’s the one that’s been pitting all of us against each other. Telor is a pawn, just like the people of Ventura were pawns.”

<Quiet. If you really are Tobias, I’m sorry, but you know how it is.>

The two armed men backed up, giving me room to step off the pier, and split wide, gesturing for me to walk in between them, where they could cover me from two directions. A third fighter came close, patted me down.

Now would be a great time to THINK OF SOMETHING—

They hustled me off to one side, sitting me down a few dozen yards away from the rest of the civilian prisoners. One guard stood a few paces behind me, a gun pointed at my back.

Time passed. The gurgle and whir of the backpack leaf blower things grew higher and higher, and one by one the people carrying them stepped away from the pool, separated a large container from the rest of the machine, and began to morph away with it.

I looked around, fighting back a wave of helpless despair. I didn’t understand what was happening, didn’t understand what was going to happen, couldn’t make sense of anything that had occurred over the past twenty minutes or so. I couldn’t tell if what was happening was good for the Visser, or for the human resistance, or for the Ellimist; I couldn’t tell whether I was going to die, or be captured, or somehow manage to make it out alive.

I thought—

What, that this whole thing was going to revolve around you? Like you’re some kind of main character, and nothing anybody else does matters?

I bit my lip. I had thought that, sort of, but not without reason. The lottery, the strange timing of everything—

Yeah, well. Here you are, stuck in the middle of someone else’s plan. And you’re going to die, and that means Garrett’s going to have died for nothing—

I squashed down the voice. There still had to be something I could do.

<Don’t react.>

I managed not to flinch, but barely.

<It’s me, Ryen—Ryen with an ‘e.’ I was part of the group you recruited in Columbus, down on the waterfront.>

I turned my head from side to side, looking for the source of the voice.

<Listen, can you answer?>

I hesitated, but not for long. <Yes,> I broadcast.

<Okay. Well. Uh. I don’t know if this whole thing is a trap or not, but everything’s already pretty fucked, so I’m just going to take you at your word.>

<My word?>

<What you said, about Telor not being the enemy.>

<Ah.>

<All right. Well. I’m over here with all the other voluntaries. Uh. I’m a Controller. A volunteer.>

I blinked.

<I figured there needed to be at least one person close in to everything, and like you said, they were going to capture one of us eventually anyway. So I just—signed up.>

<Why are you telling me th—>

<Because Telor never got another morpher. Not one. All of the resistance people they captured, Visser Three took them all straight up into space. But Telor never screwed me over, see? They kept my secret. And they’ve been trying to find you—the core Animorphs. They’ve been looking for you for months.>

<What for?>

<I don’t know. But my Yeerk knows. She’s got something for you, something she wouldn’t even tell me. Something not even all of Telor knows. They’ve been—it’s been siloing itself, forgetting things on purpose, splitting up under the water. And I figure—look, I think they’re going to waste everybody in here. Either these guys, or Visser Three when he gets here later. I don’t think we’re getting out alive.>

I turned to look at the edge of the pool. There were only three of the suctioneers left, and meanwhile four other fighters were unspooling what looked a lot like dynamite around the edges of the pool.

<Anyway. I know this sounds nuts, but I think if—if you let her—you know. If I can get to you, if you can get out—she says it’s super important.>

<How will I—>

<Fuck, man, I don’t know. But I figure if any of us has a shot, it’s you, right? I mean, I’m just a retail salesman. And I thought at least—look, I think I can make a distraction happen. And if we can get to each other, even if it’s just for like twenty seconds—>

<Why don’t you leave?>

<I’m sure as shit going to try, if I get the chance. But first—I was thinking—once they get control again, it might be a lot easier to slip out if they aren’t looking for you.>

<What—>

And then I got it.

<You want to morph me?>

<Your call. But you should probably decide soon.>

I squeezed my eyes shut. Anybody who acquired me would have access to everything I knew—

But Visser Three already has that, pretty much. From before.

I couldn’t see any way it was more of a trap than what I was already stuck in.

But then again, my judgment had been pretty shitty lately.

I opened my eyes. One of the fighters was jogging over toward me, an older, military-looking man whose face I vaguely recognized.

Trust your instincts.

<Okay,> I said, beginning to demorph out of my armor. <Do it.>

<Tobias—>

The older man only got out a single word before suddenly wincing and grabbing his head, along with all the other fighters. At the same time, the cr