Just the picture of Cassie running to me, and our arms and lips and . . .
142 I demorphed back to human. And when I had my own mouth again, I said, "You were too late, Crayak. Something got through to the Howlers' collective memory."
"What?" he demanded.
"Love."
143
We were no longer with Crayak. We were back in that weird, n-dimensional space where inside was outside and nothing made any sense at all.
Still, it was good to be away from Crayak.
Good to be alive.
"You did well," the Ellimist said.
"Did well? Did well?" Marco echoed. "We kicked butt on the meanest gang in the galaxy, whupped Crayak the Big Nasty, saved the Iskoort, which I'm still not sure was a good thing, and planted a little sensitivity time bomb in the Howlers, and that's it? 'Job well done,' and 'Oh, by the way, here's your insides to look at again as we zip through inside-out world'?"
144 "What would you like?" the Ellimist asked reasonably.
"I don't know. How about a reward or something?"
"How about telling us what we accomplished, if anything?" I said.
"Yeah," Rachel agreed. "How about that?"
Suddenly, without any warning, we were back in Cassie's barn. Right where we'd been the instant before the Ellimist had whisked us off to the Iskoort planet.
"What did you accomplish? No one knows the future. Not for certain. But it is now more likely than it was before that three hundred years from now the Yeerks will encounter the Iskoort. They will realize that they are related. And the Yeerks will see that there is a better way."
«That's it?» Tobias asked. «Three centuries from now? How does that help us?»
"It doesn't," the Ellimist said. "But within six months Crayak will send a Howler force to annihilate a race called the Sharf Den. Instead of slaughtering the Sharf Den, the Howlers will try something different." The Ellimist winked. "They will attempt to kiss them. Crayak will have lost his shock troops. And the Sharf Den will . . . well, no one knows the future for certain. Oh, however, you may be sure that Guide is now a very, very rich Iskoort."
145 With a laugh of pure pleasure, the Ellimist was gone.
«l really hate when he does that,» Tobias said.
"Okay, that does it, we're never inviting him over again," Marco said.
It was good winning one. A big one.
And that night, when I fell asleep, the eye of Crayak was no longer in my dreams.
Instead I dreamed about Cassie. But in my dreams I also saw that Howler, falling and falling beside me. Falling still, as I spread my wings and split my fate from his.
Marco's always saying you choose how to see the world. That you can look at what's funny and cool, or you can focus on all the things that aren't.
So I tried to follow Marco's advice. I tried to turn my dreams to Cassie.
But even looking into her eyes, I still saw that doomed Howler falling.
146 Don't miss
Animorphs
#27 The Exposed
I've mentioned that morphs get weird? That things don't happen in some nice, neat, gradual way? Well, this morph was ridiculous.
I was growing, growing, growing! My skin had turned leathery graphite-gray. There was a blowhole in the back of my neck. My head was monstrous and out of proportion.
But the rest of me was still Rachel. I had a head the size of Iowa. And about an acre of floating blonde hair.
«0h, man!» Marco groaned. «0h, I didn't need to see this! Rachel, you have pores as big as potholes!»
«This is ridiculous,» Jake complained. «l am tangled in your hair!»
«She's sinking!» Ax said. «Her buoyancy has not adjusted. She has dense human tissues.»
«l do not,» I said, vaguely offended. But he was right: I was sinking.
147 And if I didn't finish morphing, I was going to drown. Probably sink to the bottom and float past the Pemalite ship. A big, drowned, female Gulliver.
That got me back on track. . . .
I bobbed to the surface. My blowhole inhaled. My lungs filled.
I felt the water ripple as the dolphins surged and danced.
I sensed their joy and felt a deep, thousand-generation-old kinship with my lithe, sleek brethren.
I drew a deep breath, expanding my lungs to their full capacity, and dove, arching my dorsal hump and flipping my triangular fluke into the air.
I fired off a blast of pulsed clicks and received a "picture" of everything around me. Like a black-and-white sketch that traced across my mind and was erased like an Etch-A-Sketch.
I was echolocating. I had natural sonar.
I "saw" the dolphins and they "saw" me.
And then another large creature was moving toward me.
«Rachel, I sure hope that's you,» Tobias called.
Oh. Right.
The whale brain wasn't hard to control.
The thing was, I hadn't even tried.
148 I'd liked the calm confidence. The absence of fear.
«It's definitely me,» I said, rolling and powering my gigantic, muscled body up, up, up toward dim light like a runaway train.
Another train rushed beside me. We raced to the barrier between sky and sea.
«Yah-HAH!» Tobias shouted as we exploded the barrier and erupted into the sky. Our massive heads surged into the crisp air, water shimmering down around us.
«0kay, that was cool,» Jake said.
«l wanna be a sperm whale,» Marco whined.
«l don't think so,» Jake said. «Tick-tock. We need to stay on track here.»
«Just need to suck some air,» I said.
I exhaled, spouting spray and drawing in enough air to last to maximum dive capacity. Passages in my massive head filled with water and, all automatically, the waxy deposits of spermaceti cooled the water and sent me plunging.
Into giant squid territory. I hoped.
Where the atmospheric pressure could squeeze every last molecule of air from a human body.
«Ready, Rachel?» Tobias asked.
«Ready,» I said, sighing and shivering deep in my soul. The whale might not be scared. I was.
K. A. Applegate, The Attack
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