*Author's note: Minor update to AU rules in chapter 3. Thought-speak while in morph now set with a range of ~300 yards (~275 meters) instead of ~100, to more closely match canon e.g. Tobias providing aerial surveillance.

Chapter 04: Cassie

I want to say that I never asked for any of this. That I wish it could all go back to the way it was.

Both of my parents are veterinarians, you know. I'm going to be one too, someday. I've been dealing with death since I was a toddler. Looking it right in the face, in all its ugly, sad, unfair detail. More than Marco, more than Jake, more than Tobias and Rachel, I knew what was coming if we decided to fight in this war. And while I maybe didn't understand exactly how horrible it would be, I understood how little I understood. I could see the gap where that awful knowledge would go. And I want to say I'd give up anything to stop myself from learning it.

But if I'm honest with myself—really, truly honest—then I can't. Because even knowing what was coming, I was happy. Happy in a way I'd never thought I'd be. Happy in a way I'm not sure I could ever decide to give up.

And I'd definitely asked for it. Prayed for it. Wished for it a thousand times over.

I don't know what that says about me, as a person. Probably not much. I mean, everybody's got something they'd give it all up for, right? Everybody's got a price.

If I really had time to think about it—if some genie showed up and said, you can stop this war right now, and all you have to do is give up the morphing power—well, I'd probably make the right decision.

But it hurts to know how bitter I'd be. To know that, deep down inside, I'm not that good of a person. That the kind, caring, empathetic face I show the world is only half the story, and if I cared just a little bit less, I might sacrifice the freedom of the whole human race, just so that I could feel the wind in my mane, hear the thunder of my hooves as I raced across the fields beyond my family's property.

So fast.

I'd never felt so fast. So strong. So capable. Peppermint's body—my body—was a thousand pounds of lean, liquid muscle. I felt like I could run for days, like I could kick a hole through concrete, like I could leap tall buildings in a single bound. For the first time in my life, I was starting to understand what it was like to be Rachel, out there on the gymnastics floor. I was the embodiment of power.

And yet, at the same time, I was at peace. There was no anger in the horse's mind. No ego, no malice. She was happy to be running, happy to rest, happy to nibble at the grass in the cool morning sunshine. She was content just to live, with nothing to prove and no battles to win.

I would have stayed that way forever, if I could have.

‹Cassie!› came the voice in my head. ‹Cassie, if that's you, don't screw around. I'm not going to rat you out to Jake. But I need to talk to you right now. We are in crisis mode as of twenty minutes ago.›

I slowed to a trot and looked up at the sky, unable to stop myself from tossing my head. A single bird of prey was arrowing across the blue, its wings pumping like a sparrow's, its flight unnaturally straight. ‹It's me,› I said, feeling my human heart sink behind the curtain of Peppermint's calm.

‹Barn. Demorph. Now. I'll watch out for your parents.›

I dragged the overalls out from the cabinet where they'd been sitting for months, the fabric stiff and crusted with mud and poop from half a dozen species. "Sorry," I said, as I handed them over the stall door.

"Doesn't matter," Marco replied. His voice was tight, his sentences clipped. Throwing the overalls on, he emerged from the stall without the slightest hint of self-consciousness, stopping right in front of me and looking straight into my eyes. "Cassie. I'm about to make you freak, okay? I'm going to say some words, and you're going to want to freak. But you can't freak, okay? We do not have time for freaking right now. I need you to promise that you'll hold it together even after I've given you a really, really good reason not to."

I opened my mouth, then closed it again and swallowed. Suddenly the barn felt hot and airless. "Why are you here, Marco?" I asked slowly. "Why are you here instead of Jake or Rachel? Why are you talking to me instead of to Jake or Rachel?"

Marco reached out and put a hand on each of my shoulders. "Promise, Cassie. Say the words."

And that's when I felt it. Felt the first glimmers of understanding as the world disappeared out from under me.

Don't act like you didn't see this coming, girl, said the only part of me that wasn't reeling. It was always going to be too soon—you know that. No such thing as right on time. Not with something like this.

I tried to take a deep breath, but I could only get about half of one. "I promise," I croaked, not sure why he thought it would make a difference.

"Melissa Chapman and her parents are dead."

There was a complicated half second, during which the world unexploded, started to celebrate, then took a hammer blow that left it cracked and listing. Amazingly, I felt myself keeping my promise, and my hands were steady as they gently lifted Marco's off my shoulders. "How?" I asked, my voice level.

Oh, my God. You don't even care, do you? It wasn't Jake or Rachel, so no big deal?

"Car accident. Head-on collision, late last night. This morning, technically."

"How did you—I mean, where did you—"

"I've had the news going nonstop since Friday, and I've been checking the internet every half hour, just in case. It was on Channel Eight a few minutes ago—seven AM round-up."

"Oh, my God," I said. "Do you think Rachel—"

"I don't know," Marco interrupted. "Probably not. But that's going to be Jake's job, okay? That's why I'm here. There's something else you have to do, and it has to be today."

I could feel my thoughts starting to spin as shock, relief, and self-hatred settled in and began chasing one another. "Does Jake know yet?" I asked.

"No. I'm going to his house next, and we're going to go to Rachel's together. But you, Cassie"—he shifted, and I felt his hands slip into mine—"you've got to go to the Gardens."

"What? Why?"

"This is the Yeerks, Cassie. Or at least, we have to assume it's them, nothing else makes sense. All three Chapmans, in a car wreck at two in the morning? And whatever they're up to, it's not good news for us."

"But why—"

"Think, Cassie. This weekend, we don't go because of the news, next weekend we don't go because of the funeral. Two weeks until we get anything bigger than a badger? No go. Things are accelerating, and we haven't even started moving yet."

"But I—"

"You're the only one who can pull it off, Cassie. Tell them—tell them you don't want to think about it, you can't handle talking about it, you just—want to be with the animals for a day. Just one day. They'll give it to you. They'll let you go anywhere in the zoo, today, probably places they wouldn't even let you go normally. You'll be able to acquire any animal you need, and then we can copy them off you. You can—you can use this."

Something must have been happening to my face, because Marco quailed, his jaw trembling as he let go of my hands and took a step back. "I know," he said. "I know, okay? And if it makes you feel any better, I knew that Jake—that you—"

He stopped, took a breath, and started over, not quite managing to look me in the eye. "If Jake were here, I'd explain it to him, and when I was finished, he'd ask you to do it. He'd ask you, and you'd hate him, you'd hate him for being the one to say the words, but you'd do it because you see, don't you? You know it's the right move. So I figured—figured I'd save you both the trouble." He gave a hollow little laugh. "After all, it's not like our friendship was going anywhere special. Sorry."

And that's when I realized that Marco didn't know me. That he'd seen the squirrels and sparrows and overalls, and thought he'd understood. That just like Jake, he'd missed the difference between the face I showed the world—the person I wished I was—and the girl I really was, deep down inside.

If a genie offered the choice to Marco, he'd make the right move in a heartbeat. I wanted to hate him for that, a little. But I couldn't, so I just hated myself instead.

"I'll do it," I said, my voice still steady. "And Marco—"

He raised his eyes and looked into mine. "Yeah?"

"You don't have to say sorry."

Large bulldozer morphs—elephant, rhino, gorilla, grizzly, Canadian moose.

Check.

Agile combat morphs—tiger, gray wolf, kangaroo, Burmese python, chimpanzee, cassowary.

Check.

Utility morphs—black mamba, Australian ghost bat, great horned owl, great snipe, Brazilian huntsman spider, star-nosed mole, beaver, ferret, otter, skunk, polar bear, cheetah, bottle-nosed dolphin, tiger shark, dormouse, housefly, cockroach, ant.

Check.

Marco had started to give me a list, but I'd shut him down pretty fast. He may be smart, but this was my world. I knew every last inch of the animal kingdom.

The saltwater crocodile could generate over three thousand pounds of bite pressure per square inch, enough to chew through steel pipe like it was beef jerky.

The sting of the tarantula hawk—a kind of hornet—hurt so badly that for the first three minutes, people usually couldn't even stop screaming.

The loggerhead sea turtle could hold its breath underwater the entire time we were morphed.

There was a reason I wanted to be a vet.

But there was also a reason that Mom came home looking like a zombie half the time. Working with animals was hot, sweaty, exhausting stuff. Over the course of the day, I'd gone through practically every exhibit, talked to nearly every handler. I'd been on my feet for almost eleven hours, racing back and forth as I tried to catch each animal during feeding time or daily checkup, and I'd spent at least ten or fifteen minutes helping out with most of them. I was beat.

And it was going to take days for me to transfer all these morphs to the others.

Mom was quiet on the car ride home. I think she wasn't quite sure what to make of my "reaction." Melissa and I hadn't been close—we really only knew each other through Rachel—but this was the first time one of my classmates had passed away. Knowing Mom, she was sitting on top of a big, heaping pile of parental wisdom, and was just holding back until I gave her some sort of signal that I was ready to hear it.

It was going to be a while, though. The last thing I wanted to do was listen to empty reassurances about God's plan, and everything turning out all right in the end. I'd spent most of the day thinking about it, and Marco was right—this had to be the Yeerks, and it couldn't mean anything good.

I leaned my head against the window and let my eyes flutter shut, the lights of the freeway tracing dim patterns on the back of my eyelids. I felt my mother's hand reach over to pat me on the shoulder, then slide up to rub the back of my neck.

Tzzzzzzz-ZAP.

There was a sound, a touch of pressure, and suddenly my entire body went limp, sagging into the handle of the passenger side door.

What—

My eyes were still closed, behind lids that might as well have been welded shut, for all I was able to move them. I tried to speak, and my jaw refused to respond, my tongue lying dead inside my mouth. Even my breathing was shallow and irregular, the contraction of my diaphragm sluggish and weak.

Paralyzed.

My mother had touched me, and now I was paralyzed.

Which meant that—

No.

No no no no NO.

I felt the car swerve just a little, the way it did whenever Mom checked the GPS or looked at her phone. There was a soft click, and then something hot and wet touched my neck.

Oh, no, oh God please no—

I could feel myself slipping into a kind of mad panic as the hot wetness slowly began to climb upward, feeling its way along my jawline. I scrabbled frantically inside my head, trying with every last scrap of willpower to move my hand, my head, to open my mouth and scream.

They knew.

They had taken my mother, and now they were taking me.

"Welcome back, Eldar three-two-seven," came my mother's voice, sudden and cold. "Orders have changed since you went into stasis. The fleet is delayed, and there is a new protocol—free spread is suspended, and no one is to travel alone."

I felt a sliver of warmth edge its way into my ear, and realized with horror that the Yeerk inside my mother was talking to me—was leaving orders in my memory, knowing that its partner would dig through my brain and find them.

"I will provide you with fourteen of our siblings," she continued. "This host shares sleeping quarters with its mate; you will not be needed during conversion. Stand by as a backup, and prepare to take the human Jake—my host indicates he is the most appropriate primary counterpart for your body. Pass him eleven, and the following command: he is to convert his household, give each member two spares, and await further instructions. You and I, along with Onu Two-nine-nine, are to make arrangements to defend the animal collections against Andalite incursion. The Visser predicts that the Andalites will attempt to acquire Earth morphs, if they have not already."

The sliver of warmth became a needle, threading deep into my ear, probing, pushing further than anything I'd ever felt. Then the needle thickened into a river of fire as the body of the Yeerk surged forward, tearing its way into my brain.

I felt my frantic desperation reach a peak, felt the last shreds of my composure shatter as the pressure disappeared and the Yeerk vanished into my head. The implants! I screamed silently. They were supposed to kill it!

There was a spasm of not-quite-pain, a flash of not-quite-light and a deafening not-quite-roar. Something touched me at every point of consciousness simultaneously, a groping, questing finger poking every thought and feeling and memory at once. I heard a voice, sensed a presence, felt my eyes open at someone else's command—

Then there was a flash of actual pain, a searing, electric jolt, and everything seemed to dissolve. For a moment, I saw double, thought double, felt double, and then—

Then everything was quiet.

My eyes were open, though my body was still slumped awkwardly into the space between the seat and the door. The car was still gliding smoothly down the freeway, the alien gripping the wheel with my mother's hands.

Hardly daring to breathe, I tried closing one eyelid—my right one, the one she couldn't see.

It worked.

It worked, and I had done it.

The Yeerk was dead. Elfangor's implant had done its job, and the paralysis was wearing off.

I could still feel the panic gripping me, the nauseating horror that threatened to close my throat and send my heart bursting through my ribcage. Any minute now, my mother would realize that something had gone wrong. She had some kind of stunner, and spare Yeerks somewhere—did she have a communicator? Some kind of panic button? Was there some code word I was supposed to give?

How much time did I have?

I watched through watery eyes as we pulled off the freeway. We were coming up the back way, away from the suburbs, taking the long, empty, twisting road that wound its way through the woods and fields.

Come on, think of something, think think, she's going to notice, you have to do something, you have to—

Have to—

Have to—

To—

But there was nothing. My brain was spiraling, redlining, my thoughts going nowhere at a million miles per hour. I was trapped. Caught. Beaten.

—notoriously disinterested in unusable bodies—

They were going to kill me.

They were going to kill me!

Oh God oh God okay hang on come on what would Jake do what would Rachel—

I flinched away.

Marco—

No.

"Eldar three-two-seven, report. Are you experiencing trouble with your host?"

My body went rigid, my mind suddenly, completely blank.

"Command. Ispec one-four-two reporting. Possible trouble with conversion of my host's offspring. Currently in a car on Thistledown Road. Please track my position."

Lie, you're supposed to lie, you're supposed to LIE NOW, CASSIE—

But fear and uncertainty had me transfixed like a deer in the headlights. I couldn't think of anything, and so I remained silent and still as tears began to trickle down my cheeks.

"Eldar three-two-seven, I am immobilizing your host body. When you regain control, give formal confirmation."

Tzzzzzzz-ZAP.

This time, the paralysis only took me from the neck down, leaving my eyes open. I felt my body sag a little heavier against the door, my head knocking against the window as the car rumbled over bumps and cracks in the road. In another ten minutes, we'd be home, and then the Yeerk in my mother's head would take my father, too.

And then they'd go after Jake.

"Command. Ispec one-four-two. No response from Eldar. I suspect the offspring is unruly. Will not proceed to host home alone; awaiting assistance."

The car slowed, drifting, then shuddered to a halt as the tires left the asphalt and bounced into the grass and dirt of the shoulder. My mother turned off the car, and an eerie silence fell.

For a moment, the cacophony in my brain refused to follow suit, as panicked, useless thoughts continued to bounce back and forth inside my skull.

Slowly, though—oh, so slowly—a kind of clarity began to emerge, born of a helpless desperation that sucked everything else down and away.

My mother was caught.

I was caught.

My father was still free.

Not for long, though, whispered a small voice. It sounded an awful lot like Marco. Not if you don't get out of this car before the cavalry shows up.

But it was impossible. There was no way out.

Unless you break the rules.

I had almost thought of it, earlier, had flinched away reflexively before the idea could take hold. If I had hit my mother while we were still driving—hit her in the face or the throat, wrestled the wheel away from her and sent the car off the road—

It was the sort of thing Rachel would have done. It was the sort of thing Jake might have done, even. It was the obvious thing to do, once you took that tiny little step of admitting that my mother wasn't worth saving anymore.

But was that an admission I was willing to make?

Well, it doesn't matter now. You're paralyzed.

And it wasn't wearing off, either. The second shock had felt no different from the first, but it had already been at least two minutes, and my body was still dead, useless, utterly unresponsive.

My human body, anyway.

I felt my mouth go dry. If I morphed, would the new body be paralyzed, too? I couldn't think of any reason why it would be.

She'll just shock it again, though.

And there was no way that her weapon would fail to work on an Andalite body, which is what I'd have to morph if I wanted to maintain our cover.

Your cover is already blown. They're going to find out you're human about thirty seconds after they start torturing you.

If I was going to break all the rules…

Could her stunner take down an elephant?

Yeerk reinforcements were on the way. I didn't know how many, or whether they'd come in a car or from the sky. But either way, I couldn't have much time. Minutes, maybe. Maybe less.

One slim chance.

I began to morph, focusing with all my might on channeling the changes, keeping them subtle and invisible for as long as possible. I didn't even know if that was possible—so far, every time we'd morphed it had been random and horrible. But if sheer desperation made any difference…

I could feel the inside of my body shifting and rearranging, feel the changes straining against the boundary of my skin as I fought to control them, to hold them back. The half-numb paralysis began to fade as my own stunned nerves were replaced by new ones, my frozen muscles disappearing as the elephant's swelled in their places.

So far, I had managed to maintain my size and shape. I could feel the morphing tech resisting, growing sluggish as I pushed it further and further away from whatever default plan it usually followed. After thirty or forty seconds, it stopped entirely, unable to proceed in the face of my mental restrictions.

Just the right side, maybe. Where she can't see.

Hardly daring to breathe, I slowly started morphing again, my half-human heart thudding in my chest as the fingers on my right hand shrank and my wrist thickened until it was as big around as a coffee cup. I felt my right foot grow snug inside my shoe, felt wiry hairs sprout across the whole right side of my body.

And still my mother said nothing. Just sat in unnatural silence. I wondered if the Yeerk was talking to her—if my mother was even awake, beneath the Yeerk's infestation.

For a second time, the morphing process ground to a halt. I was now the circus freak of the century, half girl and half elephant, my smooth, dark skin transitioning to cracked gray along the line that ran from my nose to my navel.

I took a deep, quiet breath, the air moving strangely inside my patchwork lungs. If I was right, I could finish the morph in just a little over thirty seconds. And then—

What?

THEN what, Cassie?

Every choice was intolerable. I couldn't hit my mother, couldn't risk accidentally killing her. Couldn't abandon her to the Yeerks. Couldn't stay with her, to be captured and tortured. Couldn't take her with me—if she had stunners, a radio, and over a dozen spare Yeerks, she was bound to have some kind of tracking device.

No matter what I chose, I'd be unable to live with myself.

Dad. You can still save Dad.

Squeezing my eyes shut, I focused once more.

I'm sorry, Mom.

The change in size was shockingly swift, as if the morphing technology were making up for lost time. There was an almost immediate tearing sound as my shoes and clothes were reduced to tatters, and a startled "What—" from my mother, followed by the sound of her door opening. Barely a second later, the car split open like a baked potato, the glass and metal slicing into my flesh as a ten-ton African bush elephant erupted from my thirteen-year-old frame.

"The girl!" I heard my mother shriek, as I rolled away from the wreckage and struggled to my feet, the last of my bones still stretching and grinding into place. "Cassie Withers, my host's daughter! She just morphed into an elephant!"

There was a sound, a kind of TSSEWWWW, and pain like hot knives sliced across my legs, causing one of them to buckle underneath me. I screamed in pain, the sound coming out as a trumpeted shriek.

Holding my injured leg in the air, I limped clumsily in a circle, looking for my mother. She was about twenty feet away from the ruins of our car, a strange weapon in her outstretched hand. She was frozen in place, her entire body trembling, her expression flickering back and forth between rage and determination. She looked the same way Tobias had, when he'd been caught in Elfangor's tractor beam—like some invisible force had rooted her to the spot.

It's Mom, I realized, and the shock was so great that even in elephant form my jaw dropped. She's fighting the Yeerk!

I didn't think. Didn't consider the consequences. I just acted, instinctively, making the only choice my conscience would allow. Stepping forward, I knocked the weapon out of her hand with my trunk and lifted her up into the air.

I was taking her with me. In three days, she'd be free.

I'd gone only a couple of steps, though, before I heard a familiar, electric sound, and suddenly my trunk went numb and limp, my mother's body tumbling toward the asphalt below. She twisted in midair, trying to get her feet underneath her, and landed at an angle on one leg with a sickening crack.

‹No!› I shouted, unable to stop myself. Even in the dim glow of the moonlight, I could see blood seeping through her khakis around the sharp, unnatural bend in the middle of her shin. I shook my massive head, hoping that the stunner had only delivered a momentary shock, but no—the trunk was paralyzed, every bit as useless as my human body had been.

My mother's face contorted again as she and the Yeerk continued to battle behind her eyes. She'd gone past trembling and now looked like she was having a full-blown seizure.

"Cassie!" she screamed, her voice strained as if she were lifting a thousand pounds. "Run! Get Walter—aaaaaaaghhryour daughter is dead, fool! And you are next!"

I stood, still and horrified, as my mother suddenly stopped twitching, the tension draining from her body. "Finally," she muttered, the word loud and clear in my elephant ears. She turned her eyes on me, and they blazed with an alien menace. "They always try. Sometimes they even succeed, for a time. But they all learn in the end."

Pale and sweating, she pushed herself up to a sitting position. "So, Andalite," she said, her voice dripping with hatred. "I see that Seerow's work has continued. Morphing in mere seconds, and without returning to your true form in between. And after holding human form for an entire day! Visser Three will be exceptionally interested in learning how you accomplished that."

I hardly dared to breathe. A moment before, I had been frozen with indecision, unable to force myself to abandon my mother in the middle of the street with a broken ankle and an alien wrapped around her brain. But now, I was just confused.

It still thought I was an Andalite?

"Impressive, that you found the zookeeper's family so quickly. We were sure we had gotten to them first. Perhaps you landed before the battle? A reconnaissance mission, to infiltrate and observe? I wonder how many of you there are."

Was it a trick? A lie, to keep me off balance until it could report back to—

Oh.

Of course.

It was already reporting back to the Yeerk command. It wasn't just stalling—its communicator had been on the whole time. That's why it was monologuing like some cheesy cartoon villain.

Which meant it probably really did think I was an Andalite.

"I congratulate you on your mimicry, by the way. As good as any Yeerk. I have looked back through my host's memories, and she did not suspect a thing."

Somewhere in the back of my head, Marco was laughing. It all made sense, as long as you started with all the wrong assumptions. I remembered Elfangor's coldness, his arrogance, his reluctance. His willingness to slaughter us all, just to prevent us from becoming pawns in his war with the Yeerks.

Humanity wasn't a player in this war. We were inventory. Cattle. Beneath consideration. If you saw a cow firing a rocket launcher, you wouldn't think, Who gave that cow a rocket launcher? You'd think, How'd they make such a good cow costume?

A huge breakthrough in morphing technology was impossible. A human with the ability to morph was, to a Yeerk, inconceivable.

It was a miraculous, glorious, incredibly lucky mistake. And with a sinking feeling, I realized I knew exactly how to capitalize on it.

All I had to do was break my mother's heart, and abandon her to her fate. Save myself, and walk away.

Not just yourself. You can still save Dad.

‹Your host is as blind and stupid as the rest of her backward species,› I said, pouring as much contempt and derision into the words as I could. ‹We took her daughter weeks ago, and she never even noticed.›

I turned away from my home and began limping back the way we'd come as the Yeerk threw back my mother's head and laughed.

Ten minutes in a car at fifty-five miles per hour meant my house was about nine miles away by road. It would take an elephant hours to cover that distance even without an injured leg. As soon as I had hobbled out of sight, I demorphed and remorphed.

The European great snipe can travel over four thousand miles nonstop, at an average speed of sixty miles per hour, crossing whole continents in days. And if I ignored the road and cut across the forest, I could be home in no time.

How long had I lingered with my mother? It had to have been at least a couple of minutes, plus three or four more in the car. Add in the time it had taken me to change form, and it had been over ten minutes since the Yeerk's first request for backup. Maybe seven or eight since she'd reported my morphing.

I didn't know how long it took the Yeerks to mobilize. If they'd gone straight for the house, I might already be too late. But there was a chance that my misdirection had worked—that they believed I'd gone the other way. A true Andalite would have no interest in the last member of the Withers family.

I rose into the air, my wings pumping seven times per second as I arrowed straight toward my house. I stayed low and close to the treetops, eyes alert for any sign of Bug fighters sliding across the field of stars.

If I'd had human eyes, I wouldn't have been able to see through the tears. The words too soon, too soon kept running through my head, a ringtone on repeat.

Could I have saved my mother?

Probably not. But then, I hadn't really even tried. The Yeerk had paralyzed my trunk, and I'd dropped her, and then I'd simply given up. Just like I'd given up in the car, when I'd refused to let myself consider running us off the road.

Because I was afraid. Because I wasn't clever. Because I didn't want to be clever—not if being clever meant being like Marco or Rachel. I didn't want to have to choose between my father's life and my mother's, or between both their lives and my own. I didn't want to be the sort of person who could calmly consider killing their own mother, even to save the whole planet.

Because that's what I should have done, I knew. That's what the Yeerks would have expected, what any real Andalite would have done. From their perspective, my mother was just another tool, and by leaving her behind, I'd missed my chance to deny the Yeerks an important resource.

I might have just blown our cover anyway.

But what was the point, if that was how we had to fight? What would we be saving, if we gave up our humanity to win? If we became cold and dark and unfeeling, just to survive?

I climbed a little higher in the sky, fighting for altitude in the cold, dead air. The lights of my house were just barely visible, maybe a couple of miles away. I couldn't be sure, but there didn't seem to be any unusual activity. No extra cars in the driveway, no spacecraft hovering overhead.

Wait.

I rose higher, angling for a true bird's eye view.

There were no cars in the driveway at all. The harsh blue floodlights shone down on broken weeds and empty gravel.

I'd thought I was already flying as fast as possible, but somehow I managed an extra burst of effort, my muscles trembling as I pushed them to the limit. Dad was supposed to be home—he'd said he was staying home, all day, to keep an eye on the raccoon with the punctured lung, he wouldn't have left except—

I staggered in midflight, my wings losing their rhythm, dropping twenty feet before I could recover.

He wouldn't have left except for an emergency.

Like if Mom had called him to say that our car had been totaled on the way home.

I felt a scream start up in the back of my head, a long, wordless keen of anguish and dread. I'd left her there conscious, left her with her purse just a few feet away, with a cell phone and stunners and Yeerk reinforcements incoming—

I banked like a fighter jet, veering off course, turning back toward the winding road. Dad's beat-up old pickup was twenty years old; it could barely go forty miles per hour.

How long? How long ago did she call him?

I could head straight for the road and be there in thirty seconds, a mile and a half from the house. Or I could head back to my mother, get there in maybe three minutes, nine miles from the house. Or anything in between. I couldn't see the road itself from the air—the trees were too thick, the angle too shallow for headlights to shine through.

The scream in my head became an actual warbling cry, cutting the night air as I struck out for the middle, unable to decide. I tore across the sky, angling slightly downward for every last possible scrap of speed. ‹DAD!› I broadcast, just barely remembering to restrict my thoughts so that only he could hear. ‹DAD, STOP THE CAR! WHEREVER YOU ARE, STOP THE CAR NOW!›

Time seemed to slow as I raced toward the break in the forest, the distance stretching out in front of me. As I neared the road, I banked again, shooting past the treetops and zooming along the yellow lines like a missile, twice as fast as Peppermint had ever run.

Empty.

Empty.

Empty.

I tore around the curves, occasionally rising back over the treetops as I cut across the larger bends. I had hit the road about four miles away from where I'd left my mother, and now I was only two miles out.

Nothing.

I started to call out in thought-speak again, then realized with a shiver of fear just how deeply stupid I had been. If they'd already caught him, or if they caught him after he'd heard my desperate pleading—

Shut up and fly.

A mile and three quarters.

Nothing.

A mile and a half.

Nothing.

A mile and a quarter.

Nothing.

One mile away from where I had left my mother, the road curved into a long straightaway, and for a moment I thought I saw brakelights at the far end, disappearing around the next bend.

Please, I begged. I didn't know if I was talking to God, or to the universe, or just to myself. I didn't even have the words for what I wanted. Just please.

But the answer was no. As I came around the final turn and flitted up into the trees, I saw my father's truck, parked at an angle next to an ambulance, a fire engine, and two police cars, the lights still on and the driver's side door hanging open. My mother was on a stretcher, sitting upright as she talked to one of the police officers, and my father was on the ground, lying motionless as everyone else moved around him like he wasn't even there. There was a streak of slime on the side of his face, leading to his ear, glimmering blue and red in the wild, flickering light of the police cars. After a minute, he twitched, then stood up and walked over to the wreck, where four firefighters were cutting my mother's car into chunks with what looked like acetylene torches.

He didn't even glance at my mother.

Too soon, too soon.

It was always going to be too soon.

I don't know how I made it out of there. I don't remember where I went. I must have demorphed and remorphed at least once, because it was almost three in the morning by the time I found myself fluttering onto a branch outside of Jake's window.

‹Cassie? Is that you?›

There was an owl perched on the ridge of the roof. I hadn't even noticed it.

‹Jake,› I thought. I didn't have the strength to add any other words.

‹Tobias, actually. Thank God—Jake's been losing it. He's been looking for you all night. We thought—when you didn't come back to the barn, we weren't—›

‹The barn,› I interrupted. ‹You can't—›

I broke off, unable to say it, to force my brain to put together the thought. I wished I didn't have to put it together, that there were some way for Tobias to simply know. He should've known already—should have noticed that the world had stopped spinning.

‹It's my parents,› I said finally, knowing that nothing would ever be the same again. ‹They've been taken.›