Author's notes:

First off, sorry for the delay. As the story gets more complex, it's getting harder and harder to show a "complete" arc in a single chapter, especially since it's been a long time since we've visited a given character's world. This was a pretty tough one to write, and parts of it are somewhat distressingly autobiographical. Regarding the next update, I estimate 70% odds that the final chapter for this arc will go up within two weeks, and 90% odds that it goes up within 17 days.

Second, I know this is a bandwagon, but it's one worth jumping on—Ramin Djawadi's "Light of the Seven" is a phenomenal piece of music, I've had it on repeat for literally ten days straight, and it is the soundtrack to which this update was written. I have no plans to make "music for this chapter" be a thing in general, but I strongly recommend a) listening to it, and b) listening to it before or while reading this update.



Third, there are some people who are long overdue for shout-outs, and they include (but are not limited to): Ketura, callmebrotherg, StellarStylus, CouteauBleu, Elliot J, chaosmosis, MugaSofer, Chris B, 4t0m, rictic, Forest V, Aaron G, Braden A, Brian D, Alphanos, Nighzmarquis, ZeroNihilist, ObsidianOrangutan, scruiser, KnickersInAKnit, PeridexisErrant, Lana del Fae, Daziy is SoniQ, rjalker, Rafinius, so8res, Quillian, Defender31415, and (of course) our beloved empress K.A. Applegate. If you felt sad that your name wasn't on here, drop me a note reminding me of your awesome and I'll make it up to you.

Fourth, and finally, in lieu of my usual beg for comments and reviews, I'd like to nominate this moment as the Moment When People Decide To Share r!Animorphs. If you were, like, *this close* to recommending it to someone else, or posting it on Facebook, or tweeting it, or sneaking a .pdf onto somebody's phone with a filename like jdsjournalDONOTREAD—well, please go ahead and make the jump? Ultimately, a story like this is only good relative to the number of people who read it, and if you've found it moving, thought-provoking, interesting, or even just entertaining, please seriously consider passing the word along.

Chapter 20: Aximili

[A SENSE OF LONGING, OF LACKING—AN EYE SWIVELS BACKWARD, AND A HAND GRASPS AT EMPTINESS…]

There are countless activities which humans engage in, which Andalites do not. The constant encryption of thought and meaning into sounds and symbols. The hedonistic, indulgent consumption of sensory-intensive nutrients. The resolution of interpersonal conflict through overt violence, subtle violence, and the implied threat of violence, rather than simple communication—

(—presumably because the encryption makes communication so difficult.)

I had been present among the aliens of Earth for only a short time, and had seen much to disturb and confuse me. But the most disturbing and confusing—by far—was the human need for sleep.

Andalites make use of stasis technology, of course—when spaceflight presents stresses our bodies cannot handle, or for urgent medical interventions. But there is no cessation of consciousness, during stasis—only suspension. The thought that begins as the field activates ends as it withdraws, and you remain constant. To be truly unconscious—to cease to think—to have your mind, your identity, your very self disconnected from the universe—to awaken with no knowledge of what has passed in the interim, having been vulnerable to all manner of intrusions and not even aware enough to notice them—perhaps to wake up different—

It is abhorrent, and unnerving, and—thankfully—vanishingly rare. For every one Andalite who experiences it, there are twenty-four thousand others who do not. And most of those only experience it once, as the result of some trauma or accident.

Of those who experience it twice, nearly all are warriors.

I came awake slowly—agonizingly—fighting back waves of pain from the burns covering most of my left side. My thoughts felt loose and strange, the same strangeness that had been growing for weeks—

(—Garrett had taught me the word, a short handle for a unit of seven cycles, and I was both pleased and intrigued by the incongruous one-off abandonment of the usual human fascination with base ten—)

—suddenly magnified sevenfold. It was as though my mind were a sieve, and slivers of thought were leaking out, streaming off into the empty, echoing eib. I opened my stalks and—

Something was wrong.

(Something was wrong.)

((Something was wrong.))

(((Something was wrong.)))

I was on a hillside. A mountainside, really—surrounded by dirt and rocks and thick, gnarled shrubbery. I was outside, beneath the wide blue dome of the sky, though my inner sense of time told me that not even the forty-ninth part of a cycle had passed since I lost consciousness—

(Could I trust my time sense, after falling unconscious?)

I reached out to the idling cradle with my mind, felt its computer respond—

Impossible.

(Impossible.)

((Impossible.))

(((Impossible.)))

My time-sense was unimpaired, and yet I was over a cycle's walk from the epicenter, in the mountains to the northwest of the city—almost beyond the mountains, in a position even a spacecraft would have been hard-pressed to reach without causing detectable disturbances in the atmosphere—

(Hypothesis: the others hijacked a Bug fighter during the escape—)

((Hypothesis: you are dying, and insensible.))

Moving gingerly, I pushed myself up to a standing position, staying water-run instead of tree-stretch, using my hands for support and keeping my ground eyes down. I felt a gentle pressure on my right shoulder, and twisted my stalks to see the hand of the alien Garrett resting in my fur. He said nothing, with words or mind—only looked at me with what I thought was concern, or perhaps confusion, or maybe just simple acknowledgement.

Beyond him, the human Rachel sat curled on the uneven ground, her knees drawn to her chest, her face hidden. She, too, was silent.

(Silent.)

((Silent.))

(((Silent.)))

Something is wrong.

I do not think in words, do not compress my experience into modular, well-defined fragments. For me, silent is a feeling, a handful of memories—as when I climbed the hill behind my family's scoop before a storm, looked out across the world and heard nothing with ears or eib—and unnerving as the bizarre echoing in my head was, it was somehow much worse when the thing echoing was silence. It dragged my attention—unwillingly—back to the eib, to the deep, abysmal emptiness that surrounded me, as if I had cut off my stalks, leaving only my ground eyes—

Enough.

(Enough.)

((Enough.))

(((Enough.)))

I forced my attention outward, feeling a twinge of unease as I noticed—far later than I should have—that it was not, in fact, silent. Uphill, five figures stood in a tight clump, filling the air with their empty, maddening stick-speak, voices raised in anger and argument. Shaking the fugue from my thoughts, I matched stick-sounds to the face-sights in the humans' pale imitation of names—Jake and Marco, gesticulating wildly; Jake's brother—

(WHAT)

—and Marco's father—

(WHAT)

—standing unnaturally still; the human hologram of Erek the Chee—

(WHAT)

—planted between them like a tree.

(Threat assessment—)

((If you kill them, Jake and Marco will react poorly—))

(((Erek may not permit you to kill them—)))

(Hypothesis: it was Erek who transported us to this location—)

((Counterpoint—Erek could not have been present at the Yeerk pool without being forced by his programming into courses of action which are inconsistent with his presence here—))

‹Aximili—›

My un-brother's un-voice, interrupting the chorus of speculation with a whisper that was louder than all of them.

‹Please, Aximili, you must—›

I thrust it aside, silencing it along with the rest through an act of will, plunging myself into the present, into external reality. Orient, I commanded myself, ignoring the echoes of the thought as they skittered back and forth inside my head. Wherever this was—whatever was happening—the battle was not yet over. Tom Berenson and Peter Levy were Controllers, and the android Erek was a dangerous unknown; none of them should have been there, least of all Jake and Marco, and given that they were, Cassie should have been with them—

Orient.

The feel of the alien's hand on my shoulder. The pain of my burns, and the weakness that radiated from them, layered atop the cumulative exhaustion of long cycles without rest. The babble of stick-speak, which a part of me wearily moved to translate—

(—at least the situation does not seem to be critical, if they are merely shouting—)

BLINDING

Without warning, the world turned white around me, a searing light that peaked within a hoofbeat before halving and halving again, dropping precipitously through blue and yellow and leveling off in a deep and fiery red.

What —

(What—)

((What—))

(((What—)))

There was a heart-stopping jerk, and suddenly I was surrounded by flesh, pressed painfully against the bodies of the others, Jake and Rachel and Garrett and Marco and Tom and Peter—

(Danger—the Controllers—)

—and even as I tried to move, tensed the muscles in my tail and found them bound in place, the world around us began to burn.

"Jesus fucking—"

"Erek, what—"

"Cassie!"

"AAAAAAAAAAHHHH—"

Their stick-speak washed over me, a jumble of noises, worse than useless. Though the rest of my body remained motionless, as if stuck in thick mud, my stalks were free to swivel, and I noted details in the manner of a cadet under examination.

Erek the Chee was holding the seven of us together with one of his force fields, keeping us packed close and tight around his angular, mechanical body. I could see the faint traces of energy exchange at the boundaries of the bubble, the shimmering distortion as the field absorbed and dissipated heat, leaving us cool while the vegetation around us withered and ignited.

(Flames on only the oldest, driest plants. Stone and sand unaffected, no glowing or melting. Upper bound on temperature—)

((This is indirect heat, the mountain stands between us and the source—))

(((—the source—)))

The source.

Berating myself, I turned toward the peak of the mountain, where the glow was brightest, casting the peak into crisp, dark silhouette.

The mountain also stood between us and the city. Between us and the pool.

I turned my eyes skyward again, this time searching for the telltale signs of radioactive fallout.

‹Aximili—›

None. It was blackbody radiation.

(Chemical explosives?)

‹Aximili, please—›

Beneath me, the ground suddenly heaved, a rolling tremble only partially dampened by the android's absorption field. Immediately, a part of my mind began tracking backwards, converting the delay between the flash and the tremor into an estimate of distance, confirming the obvious. I cobbled the numbers together, double-checked the orders of magnitude on the estimate, and felt my tail go slack within its confinement as my brain held up its hypothesis.

This much heat, from that far away, without fission or fusion—

(An asteroid strike?)

Beside me, the two Controllers began to wail—a ragged, animal sound, devoid of all intelligence, all restraint. It rose, and rose, until Garrett started keening and Jake and Marco began trying to shout over it—

—a part of me noted that the noise only made the eib seem quieter, as if I had gone deaf in one ear, the contrast drawing my attention once more to the claustrophobic silence—

—while fluid began to drip from the eyes of Rachel in the way that Tobias had explained meant sadness, or anger, or sometimes both—

Prioritize.

I turned my stalks to look at Erek, the robot's true shape now visible, its disguise abandoned as it poured all of its resources into holding us apart from the heat.

(Interesting. Probable upper bound on Chee energy output—extremely efficient relative to size but not so impressive in absolute terms—)

A pair of moveable parts near the top of the android's body swiveled in response, sliding to the side closest to me. It said nothing, did nothing, only gave the seeming of a stare.

It seized us almost instantly, after the light but before the heat. Prior probability favors quick processing speed as the explanation, but—

I looked around again at the inferno unfolding, the unfamiliar forest, impossibly far from the corridor where I had lost consciousness in the middle of a battle.

It knew.

(It knew.)

((It knew.))

(((It knew.)))

They all knew, somehow—while I had been unconscious, they had somehow been primed to expect this, had met it with high emotion rather than raw confusion. There was an explanation, and that explanation included awareness that an asteroid strike was imminent.

(Sensors belonging to the Chee?)

((Intelligence gathered during the battle? Tom and Peter defecting with a warning?))

(((A causal relationship?)))

With another twinge of unease, I noticed that I had not taken the obvious step of simply asking—that I was delaying, hesitating, atypically reluctant to speak even after accounting for the distress the humans were experiencing. I searched for the root of the feeling, tried to trace it back to its source and found naught but flimsy excuses—that this was a tense, emotional moment—

(Emotion is secondary to strategy; hesitation is the enemy of adaptation—)

—that humans did not respond well to mental interruption—

(Neither Marco nor Garrett was particularly vulnerable in this way—)

—that I was exhausted, drained both mentally and physically—

(Tired enough to die without a fight, cadet?)

The true nature of the inhibition eluded me, avoiding my attempts to see it, to name it. I knew that I should speak up—that ordinarily I would speak up—and yet I did not want to. Not enough to muster the necessary energy.

‹Aximili, this is a dangerous sign—›

I ignored the voice. Elfangor was gone—had tricked me, left me, and died. His ghost had no claim on my attention, and I no longer desired his counsel.

(Aximili, this is a dangerous sign—)

Instead, I simply waited, and listened—as the fires burned out and a hail of rock and dust began to fall, as the shock wave passed through and whipped around the sides of the mountain, as the android relaxed his force field and we moved awkwardly apart, the Controllers remaining within their invisible restraints. Eventually, the howling ceased and sensible thoughts began to be exchanged; with an effort, I forced myself to pay attention, to translate their stick-speak into something resembling true language, and as I did, I felt my hooves close in horror.

There had been an encounter.

Time had stopped, and a creature had emerged from nothingness.

It had shown them visions—given them a choice—granted them a favor. Had snatched us from the flow of time and assembled us on the mountaintop.

The Ellimist.

(The Ellimist.)

((The Ellimist.))

(((The Ellimist.)))

The humans did not know—Erek could not have guessed—even now, they did not fully understand. I could hear it in their voices, as they struggled to make sense of it, to regain their balance. As they began to make plans, optimistic in their ignorance, unable or unwilling to grasp the larger truth which was unfolding, which had already ensnared us all.

I struggled to find the words, to break the thoughts into pieces which their alien minds could understand. I danced across a lifetime of memories, of stories, searching for examples that would translate, would resonate, that would convey to them the degree to which the game had irrevocably changed. But I found nothing.

They did not know.

(They did not know.)

((They did not know.))

(((They did not know.)))

(Hypothesis: it is caused by malnutrition, a reaction to the strange qualities of native proteins and carbohydrates.)

((—my nervous apprehension mounted as Artash-Enasi-Derumoi dipped a hoof into the water, scraping it across the strange lichen covering the riverbed. If it really was Ellimist's Fur—))

I looked out across the valley, at the sparkling lights of the small settlement below, unusually dim and subdued with all the dust in the air. Above, the sky was the deepest red, a shade lighter than black, reflecting the fires that still raged over the horizon. The air was heavy and quiet, each sound somehow isolated, as if the world were divided into compartments.

We had traveled a distance the humans reckoned as forty miles, carrying Tom and Peter inside of our morphs while Erek kept pace on the ground below. We had been unable to agree on a purpose or destination, and had settled for simply getting out of the dead zone unnoticed before hunger set in. The second we had landed and demorphed, the arguments had begun again.

(Hypothesis: it is an illness brought on by exposure to harmful microorganisms in the Earth environment.)

((—had kept the sphere with me for an entire revolution, as the black goo was consumed by blue-green cyanobacteria which were consumed in turn, until finally, just after my name day, I awoke to see movement, the wriggling of tiny creatures large enough to be visible without magnification—))

The humans were not doing well.

I could see it, with my stalks—even as a merely proto-social species, their connections with one another were of supreme importance. I remembered all too clearly how I had felt upon hearing the final confirmation of my brother's death, and these humans had lost more—much more—and did not have the dain for comfort.

(—there is something of the dain in the morphing power—)

((—comfort—))

(((—power—)))

With my ground eyes, though, I could see only folly. Hypocrisy. Immaturity. They were not simply mourning—they were horrified. Shocked. Resentful, as if they had been betrayed, as if it had not been open warfare with lines clearly drawn.

I did not understand. Had they expected no retaliation, of any kind, when they struck at the heart of the Yeerk infestation? Was it so unthinkable, that the Visser might visit upon them a vengeance that was—in all honesty—fitting?

Could they truly have failed to understand what they were doing until it was done to them in turn?

(Hypothesis: it is a reaction to the sensory deprivation experienced within the nested morph.)

((Counterpoint: it began long before that, and was not meaningfully intensified during the assault on the pool.))

(Obvious response: it was meaningfully intensified, but the stress of the situation made it less noticeable. Or it is a response to the unconsciousness, instead.)

((Objection: there is no known precedent for unconsciousness causing anything like these effects.))

(Particular trauma to specific sections of the brain—)

There had been words, and words, and more words. Words surrounding Cassie and her fate. Words regarding Visser Three and his plans. Words about food, and shelter, and plans for the future—the new shape of our mission. More words than I could count, an endless cacophony against the backdrop of the eib, and yet no consensus, no agreement. The arguments had collapsed under their own weight, suffocating beneath confusion and frustration and fatigue.

Rachel had stalked off in silence, the body of a grizzly bear erupting from her lithe frame as she disappeared into the trees.

Jake had made as if to follow her—had taken several steps—and then collapsed, fainting with grief or despair or simple exhaustion.

Marco had dragged his friend over to the fire and then returned as if nothing had happened, suppressing all visible reaction as he spoke quietly and calmly with Erek, his face no less a mask than the android's hologram.

(—they brought us to the chamber, and without warning, the floor and walls had vanished, and we were a thousand paces up, with nothing beneath our hooves and hands but clouds—)

Garrett was doing slightly better than the rest—he had asked sufficient questions to satisfy himself that Tobias would have been returned unhurt to Washington D.C., and had then retreated to a corner of the clearing. He was there now, picking up various objects and squeezing them between his palms.

The two Controllers, on the other hand—

Erek had been holding them continuously within a force field, to prevent their escape, but it hardly seemed necessary. They sat limp—almost catatonic—their eyes glassy and their jaws slack. Neither had spoken more than fourteen words since the impact.

(—impact.)

((—impact.))

(((—impact had occurred some two hundred million revolutions earlier, ending the epoch of the quadrupeds and making space for the evolution and differentiation of the dalit, an ancient, armored tunneling reptile. Tobias had seemed intrigued by this, had mentioned a similar event in Earth's own history, but more recent—)))

(Hypothesis: you're simply lonely. Stop exaggerating the importance of a normal—and irrelevant—emotional reaction.)

It made sense—the Controllers' reaction. Tom Berenson and Peter Levy had no less reason to grieve than the rest of the humans, and on top of that, the Yeerks inside their heads had lost their entire—

Colony?

Nation?

Family?

(Hypothesis: it is a natural side-effect of an empty eib, no different from what you would experience in the ritual of starlight.)

((Wait—how long have I been on Earth?))

Yeerk social structures were not well understood, but whatever the specific details of their relationships, it could not be pleasant to lose one's entire pool—particularly not at the hands of one's own commanding officer. Elfangor had estimated twenty thousand Yeerks, in total, and half of those had still been alive after the explosion, safe within ten thousand human heads.

Well—not safe, exactly.

I took in a deep breath, feeling the stretch of skin across my ribcage, the ebb of tension along my spine.

And how are you coping, Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill?

I let the breath out, lowering my tail to the ground.

Not well, if I was honest with myself. Even setting aside my growing nervousness over the fraying of my thought processes—

I had killed three Yeerks in my first day on the planet. Two more when I broke the bridge beneath the truck—

(—and two humans with them—)

((—two four eight sixteen thirty-two sixty-four—))

That was five, in total. One for each winter I could remember, of the nine revolutions I had lived and breathed.

Yesterday, we had killed ten thousand. If I took the seventh part of those upon my own shoulders, sharing the burden equally with the others, that was one for every cycle of my entire life. A death associated with each and every memory, and thousands more lost in the mists of forgetfulness.

(—watching, in awe and wonder, as my fingers melted and fused, shivering into an infinitely fine pattern of hollow spines as I shrank toward the ground—)

And then the Visser had responded. The Visser, and the Ellimist—

Are you afraid, little one?

I looked inward, sinking past the echoing silence of the eib and into the warmer, closer peace of the hirac.

I was—

It was—

(—we gathered in the moonlight as the elder wrapped his thoughts around us, drew us in, to the time before the Path, when all was new and unexplained—)

Not fear, precisely. It was more that I was uncertain—uncertain for the first time, the numbers having thrown into stark relief all of my unstated assumptions, the decisions I had never truly made, but rather simply accepted, receiving them by default from my brother, my instructors, my people.

I had nearly died. If I had not realized in time—if Rachel and Garrett had not been close enough to intervene—

(Hypothesis: you lack the necessary qualities of a warrior.)

I had not had time to think, when the chamber containing the absorption field generator exploded. But if I had, I would not have expected to awaken. I would have met my end alone, surrounded by aliens I had never met, aliens I had sworn to destroy, who were even then dying around me in the fire we had kindled in their stronghold.

((—seven and a half cycles.))

I blinked, double-checking the number.

Yes—not counting the time beneath the waves, I had spent a little over seven and a half cycles in the company of humans. Twenty-six in local time, given the dizzying, breakneck rotation of this planet.

I looked back down the slope, at the distant constellation of lights. We would go there, tomorrow—to steal food and gather news, anything that might help us decide what to do next. The pool had been an obvious target, a clear objective—now that it was gone, there was nothing to help us tell any one path from all the rest. A part of me suspected that the humans were not competent to decide, and that I should attempt to set the agenda myself.

Assuming that I wanted to. That this was still my place, and I shouldn't simply leave.

(—leave.)

((—leave.))

(((—leave the scoop, and the orchard, and wander for seven cycles, avoiding anything that resembles a path until you find yourself alone with the sky—)))

I squeezed my eyes shut, pretending stone until the frenetic bouncing ceased, and the inside of my head was quiet once more.

No different from what you would experience in the ritual of starlight—

I opened my stalks, keeping my ground eyes closed.

Seven and a half cycles.

It wasn't quite right. I was late, and I was two revolutions too young to begin with. I had clear memories of only five winters.

But I could still perform the ritual, if I wanted to. Tonight.

I reared up to tree-stretch, looked up at the sky with all four of my eyes—at the choked, angry red, just barely brighter than black, the color of dried blood on a battlefield. There would be no stars. Not tonight, or for any of the nights in the near future.

I could morph, though. Could try to climb above the dust, see if I could make it high enough to catch a glimpse of the Great Path. And the meditation could be performed whether I was in my true body or not—might even be enhanced by the sensations of flight.

I looked back. At Garrett, a shadow in the distance. At Marco, closer, his expression too calm by half. At the hologram of Erek the Chee. At the unmoving form of Jake, the closest thing I had to a war prince since the death of my brother. I looked, and felt once again the odd reluctance to speak, a reluctance that had been growing harder and harder to overcome.

These are not your people.

(—your people.)

((—your people.))

(((—your people.)))

I dropped back down to water-run, feeling the dirt beneath my fingers. If I closed my eyes, it felt just like the dirt from back home. But I could smell the difference in the air, taste it in my feet, the acrid bite of alien turf. And as always, the silence of the eib was overwhelming, inescapable. It roared, echoed, smothered—an abyss into which my every thought disappeared, leaving no trace. A darkness infinite, with every light a billion billion billion paces distant.

(Hypothesis: the presence of other Andalites in the eib is crucial to healthy psychological development, and a juvenile Andalite brain subjected to prolonged silence will be affected in dangerous and unpredictable ways. This is not known because it is unprecedented; on the homeworld the eib vibrates no matter how far one travels, and no one of your age has ever been this isolated for this long.)

It had been the obvious guess, three cycles ago, when I first noticed the gradual shift in my thinking patterns, the beginnings of an unraveling. I had pushed it away, then—and again after my reawakening, when the effects could no longer be denied. I had come up with a double handful of alternative explanations, causal chains which minimized the seriousness of the phenomenon, which lent themselves to concrete actions or pointed toward prognoses less bleak.

Because if it was the eib—if the silence truly was breaking me—

What was there to do? The cradle had no Z-space capabilities, and the more I saw of human technology, the less confident I was that I could build a transmitter from local materials. Elfangor's action had been unauthorized and unilateral—my people were not coming, and I could not escape.

(—escape.)

((—escape.))

(((—escaped from the net, dodging between Faramin-Lhorash-Watumorail and Eniac-Terrusso-Movalad as they burst from their hiding spaces. I ran like a flood, my limbs churning, my stalks turned back to guard as I waved my tail. At the last second, I chambered, coiled, and sprang, leaving the ground and striking forward with my tail blade to notch the victory branch, a full ten paces high—)))

I looked up once more, thoughts as dark as the sky swirling beneath the layer of my control. They shivered and shattered, spiraled and spawned, leaving me with the unnerving sense that my mind was no longer fully my own.

And if I was my mind, as I had always been taught—if my thoughts were what made me, what set me apart from the rest of the matter in the universe, the pattern of a person, a sovereign algorithm—

‹Aximili—›

I drove the voice under, held my mind still as the ripples spread and faded.

I knew what my brother would say, and I did not care to hear it.

I focused on the avian I had copied from Cassie, the nocturnal predator with enormous eyes.

And without asking or telling anyone, I took to the air.

"What do you mean, 'can't'?"

The word was spoken with ice, somehow sounding like the soft whisper of a tail blade, and I felt my body tighten involuntarily in response.

(—if you must leave yourself vulnerable to one or the other, it is easier to heal from a slice than a jab, and the wound is less likely to fester—)

"I mean I won't let you," Erek said, his projected hologram projecting an image of a clenched jaw and tense shoulders as he let out a counterfeit sigh. "Can't let you. My programming won't allow it."

Marco's eyes flickered over to Jake, and then back to the two older humans, sitting reclined against nothing as the android held them in its force field.

"Bullshit," he spat.

"Marco," Jake warned, hard bone beneath the weariness in his voice.

"What's he going to do, call the Ye—"

"Marco."

"Yes, actually," Erek said quietly.

A long, tense, and stony silence greeted this pronouncement. Garrett tilted his head, and Rachel's eyes seemed to glitter in the glassy morning light.

"Explain," Jake said flatly, pinning Marco in place with a glance.

The android forged a grimace, eyes squeezed shut and lips drawn inward. From what I had learned of human expressions, Erek was attempting to signal reluctance, chagrin, and resignation.

From what I had learned of human expressions, Jake was unmoved.

"Look, you know about the blocks in my programming," Erek said, his voice strained as if it were difficult to get the words out. "I can't commit or permit violence—"

"Right, I remember that bit about a robot army stopping the Holocaust—"

"Rachel!"

"No," Erek bit out. "She's right. It's stupid and inconsistent and it doesn't make any sense, and it doesn't matter because there's nothing I can do about it. Nothing, do you understand?"

He projected the image of fists clenching, of a hand scrubbing at a forehead, of legs jittering with pent-up nervous energy.

"Look. At this point, the—censors, I guess you'd call them, the subroutines that control my core functionality, they're aware of Temrash and Essak. Aware of them as individuals, as specific personalities, not as vaguely defined possible objects. I know that they're here, and I know that you're planning to starve them to death. I can't just forget about it, and I can—not—allow it. Do you understand? And those same censors—they have access to all of my systems. My communicators. My holograms. My force fields. My chassis. My brain—if it comes down to it, those subroutines will hijack me, and they'll make me come up with a way to save them. Even if it means taking Tom and Peter and physically giving all four of them back to the Yeerks,slavery doesn't even register compared to death—"

"You can't!"

Everyone jumped.

(—the sudden shout in the eib as the hologram faded, revealing the Prince of Blades standing atop the hill, a shredder in each hand, his ground eyes bandaged, blind beneath his stalks—)

Eight pairs of eyes—five alien, one artificial—swiveled to focus on the face of Tom Berenson, wild beneath a mop of sweaty hair.

"You can't," the Controller repeated, his voice shrill and desperate. "If you send us back—he killed all of me—of us—"

"What—"

"The Visser!" Temrash shrieked, clearly on the verge of losing control. "Aftran—there were twenty thousand of us, he didn't even try to evacuate, he didn't even warn us, he wanted us dead—if you send us back you're killing us! We may be the last ones left!"

A blank, confused silence followed, as my brain gushed forth a useless mishmash of irrelevant memories and deranged speculation.

(—proper evacuation procedure requires—)

((—give you this one warning, Aximili, but there will not be a second—))

(((—intrigue in the Yeerk hierarchy? But what good does a self-imposed setback—)))

I realized—and looking around the circle, I was not alone—that until that very moment, I had not truly accounted for the weight of Visser Three's action in Yeerk terms.

(Open question: what are the limits of Visser Three's authority? To what extent is he subject to morale and loyalty?)

((—know we covered this in training, why didn't I listen—))

"Well, at least we all agree it's a dumb plan," Marco said dryly, though his voice, too, trembled.

"Temrash," Rachel said softly, and Tom's head snapped toward her as Jake's lips tightened into a thin line.

"What?" he asked, his voice still unsteady.

"We've seen Controllers being—reckless. Is it—unusual? To sacrifice—"

"Unusual?" he shrieked. "An entire pool? Do you not know what—"

"They don't, Temrash," said Peter Levy—Essak—as he spoke for the first time. "You betray—"

"I betray nothing," Temrash hissed. "It's Esplin who betrays, who's betrayed us all, Aftran lived for a thousand years and she's gone now, he's killed—"

(—one thousand Yeerk revolutions is five hundred and thirty-six Andalite revolutions is seven hundred and thirty-five human revolutions—)

The hologram of Erek lifted a finger, and the voice of Tom Berenson broke off as his body was raised into a standing position, brought to hover before the android. "What do you mean?" Erek asked. "What do you mean by 'Aftran? By 'last ones left'?"

"Temrash—" Essak warned.

"What's left to betray, Essak?" Temrash shouted, tears streaming from Tom's eyes. "What is left to protect? This one"—he gestured at Erek—"says he won't let us die, which is more consideration than our own Visser has offered—"

"You are a soldier, Temrash. The larger war—"

(—a warrior, Aximili—)

"Screw the larger war!" Tom's eyes were wide, now, as Temrash swung his head away from Peter and looked straight into the eyes of the android holding him in place. "You," he said. "I know you. You went to my school. You disappeared that day, along with thirty-five others. Korin Two-three-nine. You were Korin, Korin of Aftran—"

"We returned the thirty-six Yeerks to Visser Three directly," Erek said, his face suddenly uncertain. "We sent a message—arranged a dropoff—a Bug fighter came to retrieve the container we left—"

Tom sucked in a breath, and for a moment I thought Temrash would scream again, would rail and rage—

(—and the fury of the Prince of Blades echoed through the eib until it shook the very air—)

—but instead he simply collapsed, sagging within the human-shaped cavity in Erek's force field. "Then Korin is dead, too. Every scrap of Aftran save the two of us."

"I don't understand," Garrett said bluntly. "Aftran is—your colony? The pool? What about the Bug fighter pilots? And the high schoolers? And the Controllers in Washington D.C. and all the other cities?"

"None of them were Aftran," Essak answered softly. "Operational security, the Visser called it. One pool for Earth, one pool for space. The fighter pilots—the sleeper cells—they were Telor."

"But—why—"

"I think—"

"Because we were learning!" Temrash broke in. "Things that would change the war—that would change everything. Because we'd figured out that we didn't need him anymore!"

Essak sighed, lowering Peter Levy's head. "They aren't going to believe us, Temrash. Think how it would sound to you, coming from a prisoner—"

"It's the truth!"

"It doesn't matter."

"But this proves it! The Council was right to suspect—he doesn't serve the Empire, he doesn't serve anyone but himself—"

‹Stop,› I said.

I had not spoken since the pool, and the word flashed out with more power than I intended, causing all six humans to flinch. I looked around the circle, at the confusion written in the faces of my allies, the signs Garrett had taught me to look for—furrowed brows, lightly downturned lips, tilted heads, unfocused eyes.

‹Jake,› I said, hoping the alien would understand and take over. I didn't trust my thoughts, didn't trust my own voice, for all that I was suddenly taut, all of the looseness and chaos of the past weeks vanishing in a moment of clear sobriety. The echoes in my brain had subsided, as if even the walls of my mind were suddenly listening, absorbing what they heard—

"Mr. Levy," Jake said, drawing the older human's gaze. "Essak. Start over. From the beginning."

The Controller swallowed, his eyes flickering toward Marco's for the briefest of moments. "You have to understand," he said slowly, "we're not just saying this so you'll let us live. It's the truth—"

"Prove it," Marco snarled. "Get out of my dad's head and let him tell me."

"I can't," he said. "You have no stasis chambers, no containers—there isn't even a body of water nearby. If I leave my host, I'll die."

"Then—"

"Marco."

"I wasn't going to say die, fuck you very much. Get into Erek's head—he's got a place where he can hold a Yeerk, doesn't he?"

Essak pulled the strings, and Peter Levy bit his lip, the muscles in his upper body coiling and tightening. "It's not that simple," he said, his voice suddenly small and timid. "Marco—your father. He—he doesn't want me to leave."

There was silence around the circle, for once as total and oppressive as that which dominated the eib.

Marco had cried, for a time—when Essak first left his father's head, and Peter Levy had confirmed the truth with his own voice, his own will—but now his face was carved from diamonds, a solid mask that gave nothing away.

Erek pulled away, and we watched in morbid fascination as the last tendril of Essak slithered into Peter's ear, leaving behind a trace of moisture. Watched as Peter twitched, small noises escaping his mouth as the Yeerk once again melted into the cracks of his cerebrum, their neurons fusing together into a single network.

"It's still me, Marco." Peter said softly. "Essak—he made sure I didn't say anything, made sure I didn't give it away to anybody else. But—he's been giving me more and more control, and now—"

"Stockholm syndrome," Marco spat, and Peter Levy winced, falling silent.

I did not ask.

There was a—hardening, of Peter's features—a tightening of Control—and from the looks on the humans' faces, they could all see the difference.

Essak was back.

"You knew your father was struggling with depression," he said, his eyes fixed on Marco. "With alcoholism. With meaningless, low-paying work." His eyes narrowed slightly. "With a son who still hadn't forgiven him, for what happened to his mother."

Marco said nothing, only stared with eyes of stone.

"We helped. We can see all of it—see the patterns, the root causes. Tinker with the neurotransmitters, restore a healthy balance—"

"Hypnosis and drugs. You're talking about brainwashing."

"No, Marco. There's no need for brainwashing, when we can take complete control any time we want. We were healing him—"

"Stop," Jake commanded, as Marco's knuckles began to turn white. "Not now, Essak. Maybe—"

He looked back and forth between father and son. "Maybe not ever," he said bluntly. "Right now, we still have to decide what to do with you."

"You can't send us back," Temrash insisted. "The Visser will kill us."

"You don't know that, Yeerk," Jake countered. "He could have just been trying to kill us, and containing the threat of exposure at the same time."

"What threat? We owned Ventura! Fire, police, news—there was nothing to stop him from simply covering it up. There would have been a hundred eyewitnesses all saying the same thing, a hundred experts all confirming the same story—"

"Until you started to starve," Rachel cut in. "Don't forget, I've seen the cages. Seen what you do to people. To families. To kids." Her eyes flickered toward Peter, toward Marco. "You can't possibly have had more than a tiny handful of willing hosts—the rest of them were ready to watch you burn."

"We weren't going to starve," Temrash insisted. "We found a Kandrona alternative weeks ago."

There was a silence as loud as an explosion.

"What?" Jake spluttered.

"The oatmeal. Instant oatmeal, Ralph's brand, the kind with maple and ginger flavoring—"

"WHAT—"

"—it's not as strong as true Kandrona, the host has to eat it a couple of times a day, but as long as you keep it coming, the Yeerk can stay out of the pool indefinitely—"

Jake's mouth opened, but no sound emerged. Around the circle, the rest of the humans were equally shocked, even Erek hoisting an expression of confusion and dismay onto his artificial face.

A part of me was reeling, appalled—the Yeerks' most exploitable weakness, gone—another heavy blow for the larger war effort, which was looking bleaker than ever—

Another part of me was laughing, the deranged amusement of utter despair.

(The Ellimist. This is the Ellimist's doing.)

"We weren't through testing it, obviously. But we put thirty people on it, and we pulled a Yeerk out of the experiment every three days, and the first nine were all fine, no sign of any side effects, and there's plenty of oatmeal to go around, even if we had to bring some in from the surrounding area, we could have easily lasted long enough to build a new pool—"

And then I made the connection, my impaired brain finally putting hoof and tail together—

If they were telling the truth about the oatmeal—

(—and what point was there in lying? Erek would force us to test it, soon enough, since neither the Yeerks nor Jake and Marco were willing to send Tom and Peter back to Visser Three—)

—if they were telling the truth about that, then they were also correct about Visser Three, who would not have wiped out the city only to destroy us, he would have known that there were better-than-even odds that we had dispersed beyond the immediate vicinity, even if the Ellimist had not intervened, both Tobias and the cube would have survived anyway—

(Alternate hypothesis: everything the Ellimist showed them was a lie, and it was the Ellimist who launched the asteroid, or who arranged for the invasion to take place on a site that had been doomed from the start—)

—there had to be another motive, something worth both the political costs of failure and the logistical costs of undoing every scrap of progress they had made—

(—not every scrap; they still have the sleeper cells in other cities and whatever materiel the Naharan factory had managed to produce, plus ten thousand hosts' worth of intelligence seized and lessons learned—

((—had this all been a throwaway operation? Since the very beginning? A chance to taste the grass, to gather data on the obstacles before starting in earnest?))

"If what you're saying is true," Jake began, recovering his composure.

"It's true," Essak confirmed.

"If it's true, then Visser Three—"

"It's true," Rachel said grimly.

We all turned to look at her, as she turned to look at Tom, stared straight into his eyes. "I've seen inside his mind," she said slowly, seeming somehow to look through him, as if she could see inside his skull, see the Yeerk wrapped around the human brain. "I've seen the way he thinks, the kind of plans he makes. I can never remember the details, but—"

She sucked in a breath. "It's exactly what Esplin would do, if you all were starting to turn against him. It—fits. It makes sense now, in my head. And it didn't, five minutes ago."

"But it doesn't make sense," Garrett broke in. "It doesn't solve his main problem at all. I mean, if they all—um—learned the power of friendship—after just a few months, won't the next batch of Yeerks just—do the same thing? It doesn't add up."

"You don't understand," Essak said, sighing wearily. "We didn't learn it all at once. We still hadn't really learned it at all, yet. Peter is—we are—special. Rare. There were experiments. Many of them were going poorly. It's possible we would have made a different decision, in the end. But in at least a few cases, it was working, we were leaning toward—"

"Toward symbiosis," said Erek, breaking his long silence.

"Not even that. Look, I—you have to understand, we're not used to thinking of host species as having any kind of—of dignity, of moral weight. On our homeworld, there's nothing else that's even as intelligent as a horse. Hork-Bajir, Taxxons—even the Naharans, for all their engineering brilliance—they don't have rich, internal experiences, complex personalities. The first true intelligence we encountered was the Andalites, and they didn't exactly inspire trust and friendship."

Essak directed Peter's gaze at me. "Of all of the pools in the Yeerk Empire, Aftran was one of the only ones—maybe the only one—that could have opened this door. We could have led the way, perhaps. Perhaps not. But none of the other Yeerks are likely to make the same discovery, especially not if Visser Three is manipulating them to prevent it. There are all sorts of things he might do—provoke early hostility, incite xenophobia and racism, kill off any humans that seem particularly empathetic. Or just focus on infants and toddlers, strangle the personality before it has a chance to become interesting."

"You talk about your pool as if it was a person," Jake observed.

Essak didn't answer, instead turning to look at Tom, locking eyes with the other Controller for a long moment.

"It's not betrayal," Temrash said cryptically. "The Visser is the enemy. We cannot leave him in control of the armies of the Empire."

Essak took in a deep breath through his nose, gnawed at his lip.

"Aftran was the first," Temrash pressed. "We won't be the last."

Essak let out the breath as if he had been punched, his shoulders dropping. "For that reason if no other," he muttered, and turned toward me.

"There is a secret we have kept from the Andalites," he said. "From the very beginning, from the moment you landed. It's the reason we barred you from entering the pools, or observing the coalescions up close."

He paused, looking into my ground eyes, and the last piece clicked into place.

—he killed all of me—

‹The pool is not simply a home,› I guessed, feeling the truth of the words as I spoke them. ‹The coalescion is not just a sharing. It is—you are—one individual. Aftran was a single individual.›

I heard Garrett gasp, and made another connection in the back of my mind, to a day when a morph went horribly wrong—

"Yes," Essak said. "She—I—we collected everything, all of the experiences of every Yeerk in Ventura county. We saw all of it, took part in all of it."

"You remember—" Jake began.

"No." Essak shook his head. "Temrash and I are fragments—shards—the barest scraps of Aftran's personality. Like if—if someone took one afternoon of your life, and made a clone of you, and those were the only memories they gave it, just the things that happened between lunch and dinner on that one day. You'd be human—sort of. It'd be you—but only sort of."

"We make decisions together," Temrash added. "As one organism, one mind, we absorb it all, and then we send out—parts, I guess, parts of ourself, and those parts do—they do what they can, each one has a job, like different cells or organs, we're different but we're all part of the same self."

My mind was racing, my thoughts leaping ahead as I formed new hypotheses, new explanations, it made so much sense, how could Seerow not have known—

(—the intelligence of the coalescion must be far beyond that of a single Yeerk, beyond even that of an Andalite—an entire race of Seerows—)

((—no wonder, in scarcely two revolutions they went from prescientific to successfully waging war against the most advanced species in known space—))

(((—how many pools are there on the surface, we covered this in school—)))

Wait. I had seen holograms of the Gedds who traveled with Seerow—seen them follow him across the planet. They had fed in many different pools—

Oh.

‹Individual Yeerks moving between pools—this is how you communicate?›

Essak nodded. "Memetic exchange as well as genetic. It's the primary reason we feel driven to infest and expand—to find other pools to mingle with. We are blind, remember, and for every host there are a thousand others who never leave, who never get the chance to see for themselves. The sharing is the only way, our only door to the wider world—"

(—of course, a single pool, kept isolated on the surface—Aftran would have been maximally motivated to stretch, to grow—)

((—and the host influences the parasite, it must, there were no peace movements among the Hork-Bajir. The Visser used quarantine protocols because he wasn't sure what effect humans would have on Yeerks—didn't want to contaminate his entire assault force if something went wrong—))

The war council. I had to inform the war council, as soon as possible. How the Yeerks had managed to conceal this for so long, I did not understand—

Or you could not inform the war council.

I stiffened momentarily—involuntarily, before my brain caught up and I forced myself to relax again, hoping that none of the others had noticed.

"So the sacrifices," Rachel asked. "The suicidal Yeerks. When they die—"

"No one wants to die," Temrash answered. "But if you're only losing a single afternoon, out of your whole lifetime—"

"We create and recreate our individual selves," Essak elaborated. "If we need to sacrifice a part of ourselves, we can—build, I suppose you'd say, build a Yeerk that's unafraid of death, that wants only glory, or cares only for protecting the whole—"

"—but we can't do it too often, if we lose the parts of ourselves that are fearless then we become fearful, if we give away too much of ourselves then what remains is no longer quite the same—"

‹Visser Three,› I broke in. ‹Esplin.›

Essak tightened the muscles in Peter's face. "He was once Cirran. Of the seventh pool, the place where Seerow did his mad science. But—when we take a host—"

"No two species work the same way," Temrash said. "We have to tailor ourselves to the host. To control a human takes a lot of personality, of processing power. We literally have to put more of ourselves in—more neurons, more threads-of-being, a physically larger Yeerk. To control a Hork-Bajir, or a Gedd, not so much. And if you take the Yeerk out of a Gedd and put it into a human, it might not even be enough to influence your mood."

Essak grimaced. "We had never taken an Andalite. And we had but one chance—"

"You put in too much," Jake said.

He nodded. "Too much intelligence. Too much aggression. Too much ambition. Cirran—she thought that—to overwhelm the mind of Alloran, the greatest military strategist of the glorious Andalite race—"

"And so Visser Three, what—took over?"

"He levered us into war," Essak said bitterly. "It didn't take much—we were already furious with the Andalites. For years, they had looked down on us—imprisoned us—experimented on us. Showed us the stars, showed us what was possible, and then refused to let us rise. They could have—it would have taken us a thousand years to develop what they might have given us, freely, without cost to themselves. A single encyclopedia, one single host with the knowledge of how to build a radio, a refinery, a rocket—"

‹You were speaking of Visser Three,› I interrupted.

"Like I said, we were furious. We had arranged to take Alloran as a hostage, to improve our bargaining position and get a closer look at Andalite military technology. But Cirran—Esplin, really, even from the start it was no longer truly Cirran any longer—he destroyed two Andalite cruisers and captured a third, and offered the Council a choice. He would prosecute the war for them, take the fight to the Andalites—"

"—and in exchange, we would provide him with one Yeerk every three days. One Yeerk to consume, for its Kandrona, so that he would never have to return to the pool again."

There was yet another deafening silence.

"You—he—what—"

"He—something about the particular mix of traits, or the influence of Alloran's mind—he is not truly Yeerk, any longer. He does not desire the sharing, fears the loss of his own unique personality. He has become a cannibal, and we pay blood sacrifice for his help in keeping the Andalites at bay."

(—looking to maintain his position, to preserve his advantage—)

‹You never wondered at his failure to take another Andalite?› I asked, fury and relief flooding my mind in equal measure as the picture came together. ‹In battle after battle—no, even before the battles, when he walked among us, unsuspected—you never wondered how he could fail to capture even a single, second Andalite for you to—›

"Did you wonder, Andalite?" Essak snapped. "Did your people, in their arrogance, their conceit? Or did you simply think yourselves smarter than Alloran-Semitur-Corrass? We had no cause to question Esplin's loyalty. He gave us the Naharans in a week. In every battle, his command of strategy preserved enough Yeerk lives to pay his tribute a hundred times over. There are a hundred pools as large as the largest thirteen on the homeworld."

"Wait," Rachel objected. "You said—your council, Tom said they suspected—"

"How could we not? There had never been a mind we couldn't see inside, never been a Yeerk whose thoughts weren't shared by all. He made himself suspicious by his very desire, something none of us had ever wanted—something we could barely even understand. The oatmeal we discovered—it will never be used by any more than the tiniest part of ourselves, and even then only in the direst need—imagine being only a fraction of yourself, if someone cut out your brain, left you just enough to be aware of everything you'd lost—"

"But he brought us hosts," Temrash said, picking up the thread. "He brought us hosts, and he held back the scourge of the Andalites, who even now would drive us back to the mud puddles of our homeworld—"

"You enslave people," Jake snapped. "You're using my brother's face to talk to me about how the Andalites aren't treating you right? Which one of you started this war?"

"We learned," Temrash shot back. "Peace is possible. And even now—Tom will admit, it hasn't been all bad, I've helped him a lot—"

"Tom," Jake said, his voice suddenly cold as ice. "Tom, don't worry, I'm going to drag him out of your head and—and eat him, Tom, he's going to die for what he's doing to you—"

"Jake!" Erek shouted.

"For mom, and dad, and grandpa—you assholes, Ventura is gone because of you—"

"Jake, stop talking. Stop talking right now, before you force an override—"

I squeezed my eyes shut, sank into the hirac, trying to focus. I could feel my thoughts spinning, feel a rising apprehension, as if there were some important question I was still forgetting to ask, some forgotten opportunity that would vanish and would not come again. I looked back and forth between the two Controllers, between my human companions and the android Erek, and struggled to think.

Who started this war?

I didn't know. I knew what I was supposed to know, but I didn't actually know it. I had had many thoughts the night before, as I drifted through the lightless sky—thoughts I'd never had before, thoughts I maybe couldn't have had before, surrounded as I always had been by the collective will of my people. For the first time, I was unsure—not just of the answers, but of the questions themselves.

(—and now all of the knowledge that the Aftran pool pieced together—their empathy, their perspective, the promise of peace, a memetic weapon aimed straight at the heart of the Yeerk war machine—)

((—and now all of the intel that these two Controllers possess—the first defectors in the history of the species and quite possibly the last—))

—it was all here, in our hands by the slimmest of chances, a tangle of events complex beyond imagining, an outcome almost unthinkably unlikely, and yet each step toward it had felt obvious and inevitable—

And then I knew.

"—it's murder," Temrash was shouting, as I rose from my meditation, turned back to the conversation. "In the last thousand years, there hasn't been a single murder, not one, no one kills an entire pool—"

"Oh, but you'll kill humans—"

"No! You've killed humans! We want you alive!"

"Tell that to Melissa Chapman," Rachel snarled. "To Mr. and Mrs. Chapman, Mr. and Mrs. Withers—"

"Enough!" Jake bellowed, as loud as I had ever heard a human, and they fell silent, Temrash and Essak and Rachel and Marco, four jaws clicking shut as one.

‹Essak,› I said after a time, preserving the hush as I sent my words through the eib. ‹I have a question.›

Essak raised Peter's eyebrows, and I continued.

‹You said that you—Aftran—that of all the Yeerk pools, you were perhaps the only one that might have come to see the humans as equals. Is this something the Visser would know? Does he know the—the temperament—of the individual coalescions at his command?›

"Yes," Essak said, a hint of a question in his tone. "He communicates regularly with representatives from each pool. Sometimes—"

The face of Peter Levy tightened, and a lump moved in his throat. "Sometimes, I am told, he uses a Leeran morph before consuming his meal."

‹And he commands thirteen pool ships, correct? Twenty-six pools in total?›

"Forty. Many of the ships are much larger than the one that brought us here."

‹Where are they?›

Essak tilted Peter's head, opened Peter's mouth, closed it again. When he finally spoke, the words were slow and careful. "They were delayed," he said. "A rift opened up, during transit—a Z-space barrier, isolating this system. Ours was the only ship that made it through. The Visser has often been away, at the edges of the rift. Studying it, I think, and looking for a way through."

‹Is it impassable?›

"No. The other ships are still coming. But—slowly. What should have taken days is now a journey of months."

I nodded. It was the most common human gesture, the first gesture Garrett had taught me.

Who started this war?

It wasn't the Yeerks, or the Andalites—wasn't Cirran or Esplin or Seerow or Alloran.

Twenty thousand had died the day before. Perhaps ten times as many humans, perhaps more. Before that, my brother—Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul.

Before that, the Hork-Bajir. The Taxxons. The Naharans, and the Gedd. The Garatrons, the Leerans, the Ongachic and the Skrit Na. Thousands of Andalite warriors, in a broken line that cut all the way back to Alloran himself—Alloran, who was captured, tortured, his every waking moment an endless torment as his brilliance was twisted against the armies of his friends, his protégés.

The blood of millions, on the hands of a being I had thought was just a children's story. The Yeerks were not the enemy—they were pawns, as my people were pawns.

As I was a pawn. As Tobias and Garrett were pawns, and Jake my prince, and Marco and Cassie and Rachel my allies.

And yet—

What could I do? You cannot fight a god.

Not unless it wants you to.

(—smell of burning hydrocarbons THREAT light glaring off of the harsh, unnatural planes of artificial caves DANGER follow the lines the angles calculate the distances closing in count down seven six five four three two one—)

((—held my blade against the throat of Ertai-Marcus-Lawran and felt the pressure in the eib like a physical force DISAPPROVAL removed the blade and stretched out a hand SATISFACTION as the elders watched, weighing—))

(((—one billion Andalites, seven billion humans, one Andalite for every seven humans, it couldn't be a coincidence—)))

I should not have come.

Ahead of me, Garrett and Rachel moved comfortably through the thin crowd, untroubled by the chaotic sights and sounds and smells.

(—green plants sun drinking purple poison the reptile that lurks beneath the loose bark of the blackiron tree grey ashes and fog—)

((—are you listening to me, cadet? Yes? Then you will repeat back to me the significance of these three small peaks in the electromagnetic band—))

Faltering, I paused, stepped toward one of the artificial structures and leaned against it, the rough surface almost exactly the color of my human skin. I closed my eyes, pretending stone, trying to quiet the tumult.

It was getting worse—much worse—the pattern-matching processes of my brain running haywire as every stimulus sparked seven threads of thought and memory and speculation. It was as if my mind was trying to fill the vast and empty silence of the eib through sheer volume of thought, burning through a hundred operations a second.

Orient.

I focused on the feel of the wall against my palm, the heat of the sun on my face, the slide and shift of fabric against my body.

(—temperature to flux, flux to distance, distance to mass, mass to age, confirm against the color, gravitational attraction between the planet and the star proportional to the square of the distance between them—)

"Ax?"

My eyes snapped open to see Garrett standing beside me, a cautious distance away, his hands in the folds of his artificial skin.

(—eyes wide, brows converging upward, mouth closed with edges slightly downturned—)

Concern. Garrett was concerned.

"Ein—sorry—I am all right. I just—"

Garrett's head turned as he scanned the street and sidewalk and buildings around us, the humans walking and talking and impelling their mechanical transports.

(—tiny furrowing of the brow, deepening of the frown—)

((—striking distance striking distance evade striking distance closing closing THREAT TOO CLOSE DANGER where is my tail—))

I squeezed my eyes shut.

‹Garrett, what—›

‹Garrett here. It's fine, we're just—we'll be there in a second. Go ahead in, over.›

There was a mental ripple that felt like a scoff.

"Thanks, mom," Garrett muttered, almost too quietly for me to hear.

I partially opened my eyes to see the human boy lowering himself to one knee. Rachel was visible in the distance, her arms crossed, her eyes fixed on us as she waited outside of the entrance to our destination.

(—shredder power will attenuate by half for every forty-nine body lengths; adjust accordingly; setting seven—)

There was a tug by my foot and I looked down to see that Garrett was disentangling the lacing on my artificial hooves.

"What are you—"

"Hold still," he said, not looking up. "This will help."

I held still, closing my eyes again as the colors flared, every individual movement drawing my attention, demanding analysis, the profligate consumption of my cognitive resources—

(—trajectory—)

((—threat assessment—))

(((—chemical composition—)))

There was another tug, and I let out an involuntary gasp.

"Garrett—"

"Better?"

He continued to pull on the lacing, looping the loose ends over one another in a complex pattern, forming a quick, efficient knot. The hoof—

(—shoe—)

—the shoe was now significantly tighter than it had been, the foam and fabric pulled taut around the shape of my foot so that my foot-fingers were squeezed together and I could feel the pulse of my heartbeat with every passing moment.

"Yes," I said, amazed.

It was as though Garrett had turned on a magnet, activated a gravity well—suddenly, all of the mental energy that had been spiraling outward was pulled in, the lines of attention anchored in the steady sensation of pressure.

"Good," he said, shifting to the other foot. With deft fingers, he repeated the operation and straightened, peering into my eyes with a searching, questioning look.

I smiled, attempting to arrange my features into a reassuring shape. "Thank you," I said, and after a slow, lingering nod, we resumed walking.

(—lines of attack, lines of retreat—)

It wasn't perfect—on some level, my mind continued to fray, following paths of reasoning without reference to my conscious self. But the effect was one of a muted, buzzing distraction rather than an overwhelming cacophony, as if the past cycle's worth of degeneration had been completely undone.

"How did you—" I began.

"Your face," he said quietly, his eyes lowered to the pavement as we approached the giant storehouse.

"And you—where—"

"Tobias showed me. I don't know where he learned it."

He scuffed his shoes deliberately against the concrete as he walked—looked up toward the dust-wrapped sun and squinted. "Is it too much, or too little?" he asked.

"Both," I said.

He nodded. "The worst," he said simply. "Try humming."

"Humming?"

He demonstrated.

I nodded. "Thank you, Garrett."

"No problem."

We stepped into the shadow of the building, Rachel uncrossing her arms as we approached. "All good?" she asked.

"Yeah," Garrett said. "Ax forgot how to tie his shoes, is all."

She snorted, the darkness under her eyes seeming to lighten for a brief moment. "Come on," she said. "Let's do this."

We entered the building, passing through the automated glass doors beneath the red sign reading RALPH'S. A blast of cool air passed over my face, surprising me, and when I opened my eyes again, we were in—

(—colors red orange THREAT yellow POISON green SUMMER blue SHREDDER pink AVIAN brown DESERT white BONE—)

—a madhouse.

If Garrett had not performed his magic on my shoes, I would have lost control on the spot. There was so much—so much noise, so many things to see, smells that mixed and fought and tugged on some deep, animal instinct inside my human body.

"What is this place?" I asked in a whisper.

"Supermarket," Rachel said, reaching toward a rectangular metal basket with four wheels. "Come on, we need to get moving."

The interior of the cavernous structure was arranged in aisles—long, parallel rows of stacked shelves, every shelf packed to the brim with colorful boxes and bags and cylinders. I trailed along behind the other two as they slowly filled the cart, asking questions as we went.

"Canned fruit," Garrett said, as Rachel selected items and dropped them into the cart. "Crackers. Cookies. Um—made from wheat? A—um—a grain, ground up into a powder, and then mixed with milk—"

"Go ahead, explain cows to him," Rachel said, turning the cart perpendicular to the aisle and traveling along the corridor by the wall, which was filled with giant, refrigerated tubs.

"Meat," Garrett said. "That's chicken, that's beef, that's pork—um—is any of this making any sense at all?"

"Chicken is—an avian?" I said, trying to parse the image that my translator was feeding me.

"Sort of."

"And beef is—"

I frowned. The picture didn't seem to make much sense, when compared to the term meat—

"This animal is—composite? Made of—er—brown cylinders, and green fabric, and a yellow square—"

Garrett laughed. "That's a burger. Beef goes in a burger. It comes from a cow."

Another image, this time of a large, quadrupedal grazer.

"I do not see the connection between cows and milk," I said.

"Forget it," Garrett advised. "Here, look—breakfast aisle. Those're Eggos, those're Pop Tarts, all of those boxes are cereal—"

"—and here's the oatmeal," Rachel said grimly.

(—mutiny insurrection rebellion uprising traitor revolt—)

She reached out to the row of rectangular boxes, swept six of them into the cart. "One box is how many days?" she asked.

"Three," Garrett answered. "Per person. So, one and a half, total."

She looked down at the cart, then back at the shelf, then grabbed two more boxes. "There. That's almost two weeks."

She looked at each of us in turn, then gave a tight nod and continued down the aisle. Garrett and I followed, each slightly subdued.

There had been further argument over Temrash and Essak, over Tom Berenson and Peter Levy. Marco had moved to force Essak out of his father's head, Peter's own testimony notwithstanding. That issue had not been settled until the sun was nearly overhead, and then it had been followed by the realization that Temrash could not live permanently in Erek's head.

"I don't have any kind of nutrient delivery system," he had explained. "Water and neural interfaces were hard enough—we have blocks on self-improvement that we had to work around, and it took specialized equipment to ready the cavity inside my chassis. I could hold him, but he'd just have to go back into somebody else's head twice a day. Maybe for hours, depending on how long it takes for the nutrients to filter through a human digestive system and make their way to the brain."

The discussion that followed had been heated. Both Jake and Marco had suggested various ways by which Temrash might be killed, and Erek had again threatened to go to Visser Three, which had set the two Controllers off again. I had suggested status quo, to which Marco had responded nobody asked you, Silent Bob, and also go fuck yourself, dicktail.

There had been some talk of taking another human—someone from the town—until Garrett had pointed out that this would require violence, and that since we had discussed it in front of Erek, the android would probably not be able to ignore it. Erek had agreed, and Marco had called both of them several words which the translator could not parse.

In the end, there had been no consensus. And since the oatmeal would buy us time in any case, it had been added to the list.

(—list the items in your survival kit: medpack, compact scanner, emergency rations for three cycles, three shredders. Cadet! Why three shredders, and not one or two—)

We turned another corner and entered a more open area of the storehouse, this one filled with large, square platforms covered in plant matter and smaller kiosks covered in an incredible range of soft, brown substances. Rachel and Garrett exchanged a few words and split up, leaving me with the cart as they each threaded between the platforms, grabbing item after item—

"Excuse me, sir—would you like to try a free sample?"

I turned.

Some twenty paces away, a young human in a uniform was waving in my direction, standing next to one of the smaller kiosks. It was built of slanted platforms, each of which held a number of round brownish blobs slathered in some thick, white substance.

"Come have a bite; they're free!"

I hesitated, glancing toward Garrett and Rachel, each some distance away. Was it safe to leave our selections unattended—

(—eat want love desire hunger follow take delicious mine—)

I stopped.

(—mine get mine want mine must have—)

There was a smell.

(—mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm—)

Conscious thought fell away, leaving only primal instinct—a clutching, grasping, animal desire to find the thing, find it and eat it, what was it, where is it—

I stepped forward toward the human, toward the display.

"Fresh out of the oven," the human called, smiling as I approached.

If I had been more myself—more in control—if I hadn't spent the past two weeks slowly unraveling—

"What—" I croaked, my throat suddenly tight with need. "What is it?"

"Cinnamon buns," the human said, extending a gloved hand, one of the blobs cradled within.

—even then, I might not have been able to stop.

I took one bite—

Another—

I reached for the kiosk—

"Buns!" I screamed, heard myself screaming, as if I were standing outside of my own body, a mere observer. "Sin sin sinnnnnnamon cinnamon bun bun bun-zuh!" The human backed away, shouting, a meaningless expression coming over its meaningless face.

I cannot describe it. The beauty. The ecstasy. The sheer, overwhelming bliss. I tore through the stack, shoveling the magnificent substance into my mouth hole with both hands, the last sane fragment of myself watching in helpless horror. I rubbed it on my face, my body—inhaled its scent through my nose—swallowed it in giant, unchewed chunks, savoring the sensation as it slid roughly down my throat.

The icing.

The filling.

The warm, chewy, texture—so satisfying to gnaw, to bite, and yet dissolving to nothing on my tongue.

(More.)

((More.))

(((More.)))

I had never—never—experienced anything like it. My normal, native body had nothing resembling the human sensation of taste, only a simple organ for detecting whether a given kind of plant matter was palatable or not. My mind was awash in hormonal pleasure, everything else swept away by a wave of hedonistic desire. I did not care about the Yeerks. I did not care about my companions. I did not think. I did not exist. I simply consumed, was meant to consume, was fulfilling the central purpose of the universe, which had come into being for the sake of cinnamon buns, had evolved morphing technology so that I could devour them.

No, some tiny part of me begged.

But the rest of me could not hear.

At one point, three humans in dark uniforms came near. They attempted to seize my limbs, to take me away.

I did not hold back.

It was some time later before another hand grabbed me, this one thick and black and leathery, wielded by a creature I could not easily overcome. It lifted me up, dragged me away, and I clawed at its face, at its eyes, screamed for it to let me go, to take me back, pleaded and begged and cried even as I tore at the remnants clinging to my shirt, dragged my fingers across my cheeks to collect the sweet sticky residue that covered my face—

PAIN

I reeled, my vision whiting out as something hit my head, hard.

"Cinnamon—"

PAIN

Something cracked in my jaw, and something clicked in my mind.

‹Demorph,› said a voice in my head, as hard and unyielding as steel. A voice I realized I had already heard, had been hearing over and over without understanding.

(—shame—)

((—confusion—))

(((—horror—)))

I demorphed.

"This is serious, Ax. Why didn't you tell us?"

I tried to break the thought down into words, and failed. It was just too difficult to convey, without the ability to access shades of meaning, to transmit emotion as it was felt, and not simply as it sounded in summary. Words would not communicate the why—if I said that I felt alone, and that this lonesome feeling made me want not to talk to my human companions—

Even in my own head, it sounded idiotic, paradoxical. And yet it was true—more than that, it made sense. It had been, on some level, the correct choice.

But I couldn't say any of that.

‹I am sorry,› I said.

(—a fool, an utter fool, an unworthy unwelcome child, a disgrace—)

((—put you at risk, forced you to morph in a public place, if someone had recorded you it would have been my fault, if Garrett hadn't been carrying all the food—))

(((—a liability, can't be trusted, better off without—)))

—and above and behind and around all of that, a deep and quivering horror at the swiftness with which the experience had carried me away. The degree to which I had been overwhelmed, stripped of my personhood, my core values overwritten by a single, animal desire—one that none of my companions seemed to have any trouble resisting.

Was I that weak?

That fragile?

(It could be the mind-sickness. Your defenses were lowered, your resources depleted—)

But that made no difference. My defenses were lowered. My resources were depleted. It was not some one-time, special case that could be dismissed as unlikely to recur. My past self had utterly betrayed my present self, instantaneously and without reservation, and if my present self were offered the same choice, it would sacrifice my future self just as easily.

‹I am sorry,› I repeated, the packaged words inadequate, the shame too great to bear. ‹I cannot explain. It—I—›

I felt my limbs shake, and dropped down to river-run, then sank to root-lie, my ground eyes closed against the dirt, my tail flat and limp. Without the pressure of the human shoe to distract me, the silence of the eib slammed into me with physical force, the weight of a black and featureless universe pressing down on my spine. I could feel myself sinking—lost—utterly alone.

It felt appropriate.

Somehow, they got me back to camp.

Somehow, they kept it quiet.

I didn't know why.

Rachel said nothing, only glared at me in anger—

(—lower eyelids raised to narrow the eyes, tension in the lips and jaw, brows drawn together and down—)

—and stalked away, warning Garrett that I was his problem, then.

He crouched beside me in the forest, his hand in my fur, and screamed into the eib for as long as he could—a private scream, just for me, a note of presence that cut through the emptiness and wrapped around me like a blanket.

It nearly broke me—the relief, the respite. I collapsed—shaking—sobbing—grateful. It didn't fix anything, but it helped—gave me the clarity I needed to think, to reach my final decision.

‹Yeerk,› I whispered.

It was four in the morning as the humans reckoned time, the fire long since burned out, everyone asleep except for Erek, keeping watch. I told him I would speak to Temrash—told him I would approach, would perhaps even touch, but that I would keep my tail limp, would attempt no violence. I told him, and asked him not to intervene, knowing that he would watch, that his force fields would surround me, awaiting only the slightest justification to solidify.

‹Yeerk,› I whispered again. ‹Temrash.›

The human Tom Berenson stirred, his head sliding on the mound of dirt he had formed for a pillow.

‹Temrash,› I said, putting some force behind the thought.

He awoke.

‹Relax. I am not here to harm you.›

He turned to look at Erek, a dim silhouette outlined against the reflected glow of the town lights. The android nodded.

"What do you want?"

I moved closer, kneeling as I did so to make the movement less threatening. I rested my head against the ground, putting my stalks level with his eyes as he lay half-propped. They were twin pits in the darkness, motionless and unreadable.

‹I have two questions for you, Yeerk, if you will answer them.›

There was a long silence.

"Will you answer two of mine?" he asked.

‹Yes.›

I heard a soft hiss as Temrash took in a breath with Tom's body. "Okay," he said.

‹What did you think, the first time you looked upon the stars?›

Another pause.

"Me?" he asked. "Or Aftran?"

‹You.›

His shape shifted, and I could tell that he was looking up at the night sky, still choked and black with dust from the impact.

"Nothing," he said finally. "When I first saw the stars, I thought they were just—specks. Like rocks in the sky. Gedd eyes—they don't see well, and we knew no world beside our own."

He was quiet for a moment, and I began to form my second question—

"I didn't really see them until the battle over Arn."

I paused, waiting.

"We swarmed a colony of Hork-Bajir one night—a thousand Gedd, armed with stunners, and only a hundred of them. I was one of the first. I chose the largest adult I could find, pressed our ears together—"

(—death enemy madness cut kill consume—)

"I knew what the stars were, then. When I opened my eyes—"

(—thief abomination burn erase undo deny—)

"I lay on that battlefield for an hour. We all did. Not a single one of us could bear to look away. There were so many, and they were so—so very beautiful, the skies of Arn are thin and clear, it was like looking into infinity—"

(—lies murder vengeance Elfangor smother strangle starve—)

"—and I thought—"

(—monster—)

"—I just wanted—"

(—die—)

"—to see. To touch. To hold. To reach out—to reach up. I wanted to fly up, and grab them, and bring them back down into the pool, to fill the pool with light so that all of Aftran could see. There were so many—I thought—even if I took a hundred—a thousand—I could bring a thousand of them down, could string them across all the pools in all the worlds, and still there would be stars to spare."

He fell silent, and I closed my eyes, remembering a hilltop, and the feel of my brother's tail twining with mine as we both lay on our backs, our ground eyes skyward—

"My first question for you, Andalite. If you win this war, what will you do? To my people?"

Know victory.

‹There is talk of a quantum virus,› I said. ‹Tuned to exact specifications, able to spread through Z-space. Only talk, for now—the virus doesn't exist, may not even be possible, and may be too great of a risk even if it is possible.›

"But there is talk."

‹Yes.›

He shifted, raising himself up to a sitting position, wrapped his arms around his knees. "Why did you wake me up, Andalite?"

‹Is that your second question, Yeerk?›

"No."

There was another silence, in which the Earthbound insects chirped and the eib thundered with echoing madness. We waited, each of us watching the other in the dark, as the sky spun invisibly around us.

"Why?" he asked finally. "Why did you hold us down? Why show us everything, and give us nothing? What did we do to earn such cruelty?"

‹We did not trust you,› I said bluntly. ‹We could not hear you in our minds, could not measure your intentions without first surrendering ourselves to your control. Why take the risk?›

Another silence.

"Your second question?" he asked.

I opened my hand, revealing two small, square packets I knew he couldn't see. Quietly, I tore them open, pouring their contents into a neat pile on the ground. Rising, I placed a hoof over the pile, began to draw the flakes upward into my stomach.

Leaning down, I pressed the papers into his hand. He took them—paused—raised them to his face and sniffed.

"Maple and ginger," he said, his voice cold and flat. Emotionless.

Controlled.

‹Tell me, Yeerk,› I said. ‹Do you think you could dominate an Andalite? Alone, as only Temrash?›

He said nothing as I finished the pile of oatmeal, scraping my hoof until I had consumed every last flake.

"Dominate?" he said, as I lowered myself back down to the ground. "No. Influence, perhaps. But Andalite brains are large, complex, and unknown."

‹And you are a pacifist.›

Temrash laughed. "No. Essak is a pacifist. I was a persuader, a recruiter. Empathic, but as a means, not an end."

He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, his face close enough in the darkness that I could make out the shadow of his nose, a glint of light on each eye. "What game are you playing, Andalite?"

‹My name is Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill,› I said. ‹Brother of Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul, who you feared as the Beast, the Vanarx, the blade that falls without warning. And this is no game.›

It was simple calculation.

One Yeerk, in need of a host.

One Andalite, unraveling, desperately alone inside his own head.

One war, that could end with death, enslavement, or something else.

I could see the hand of the Ellimist behind it all—the impossible made possible, the lines of coincidence, an outcome so unlikely that it had taken a prophecy, an asteroid, and a Z-space rift just to nudge the pieces into place.

And yet, even knowing that I had been maneuvered—that I was at the end of someone else's tail, dancing along someone else's path—that even the death of my brother might have been part of the plan—

Even knowing that, I could not muster anger.

Because my people were at fault, for all that the eib held them back from seeing it. We had learned the wrong lesson from the ancient war, had abused the Yeerks terribly, unfairly. That the Yeerks had repaid the favor with interest did not change our original sin, and at this point, each new horror was unjustified except by the laziest of logic.

That was the conclusion I had come to, when I floated aloft for the ritual of starlight, and found nothing but darkness, the dust of our battle blotting out the light of the stars. When I asked myself, apart from all outside influence, what I believed—what I truly thought was right.

Visser Three was not the archetypal Yeerk, any more than Seerow had been the archetypal Andalite. Our war was an accident of history, a quirk of fate—it was not fundamental, it was not inevitable, and it need not be resolved through xenocide. If there was a chance of peace—even the tiniest sliver—it deserved investigation.

And it would be an Andalite who made the first move. Who took the first risk, just as we had taken the first liberty. That was justice—that I had been chosen to say it, chosen because I would say it, perhaps deliberately shaped into someone who would—

Well. It made no difference. If the Ellimist could see everything, know everything, manipulate everyone—

Then there was nothing to be done about it anyway, and the only guide I had was my conscience.

Like the wind in thought and deed.

Moving slowly, so as not to appear threatening, I reached down, grasped the shoulders of Tom Berenson, brought my face close to his.

‹The stars, Temrash,› I whispered, as I pressed our ears together.

‹We can share them.›