Was that a warning shot? Or just bad aim?
A gang of Taxxons flowed down the alley and followed her inside. I picked up a piece of metal and swung it like a thug, trying to show I was ready to fight. They snarled, but amazingly, they ran right by.
One thing was clear. They were after the woman.
I flung open the thick metal door and ran into the mottled darkness. Light filtered through a partially blown off roof and illuminated velvety curtains, a stage, an orchestra pit — a vast space lined with rows of seats and tiers of balconies. I moved down the carpeted aisle, hoisted myself onto the stage littered with broken flats.
TSEEEW! TSEEEW!
Dracon fire lit the air. A 500-pound mass of Taxxon meat fell from the grid, whistling past a wall of ropes and rigging.
WHUMP.
It shook the floor. An exploded balloon. And boy, did it stink.
The woman streaked behind a drop painted with a scenic country setting. There was a red barn and green pasture. Horses and farm animals grazed in the background.
But no sooner had she disappeared than …
TSEEEW!
She burned a Dracon hole in the faded canvas landscape and vaulted through. Chasing after her were three of the fastest Taxxons I’d ever seen. She stumbled, running backward, firing her weapon again and again. But the discharges grew weaker and weaker, pathetic slaps in the face to the hulking Taxxons.
And I was weaponless!
I looked up at row upon row of heavy lights. I wondered …
I ran into the wings, where the myriad ropes converge in neat rows anchored by stacks of steel weights.
I threw open the latch that fixed a rope to its stack of anchors.
Whooooosh!
An ethereal cloth backdrop came billowing down, deftly covering the predators and the prey below.
Not happening.
The Taxxons continued to surge forward until at last, the woman’s faulty weapon wouldn’t fire anymore. She hurled it at the closest Taxxon, but it was like a toy in his mouth. It was swallowed up without hesitation.
I frantically disconnected rope after rope. The racing whine of pulleys filled my ears as a whole batten of heavy stage lights came crashing to the floor. And then another. And another.
I let myself look. Three bloated Taxxons were pinned to the floor, writhing. Still caught under the delicate scrim net.
I ran to the woman. Her arm was being crushed by a now-limp Taxxon. Her body was washed in a puddle of vile drool. She flinched as I neared her, still ready to fight.
I bent low and freed her arm. She finally seemed to understand that I wasn’t going to hurt her.
Our eyes met.
“Cassie.”
I wanted to hug her. Tell her everything was okay. That she was brave. That we would make it out alive.
But her eyes were like a wall or a mask. I searched them for the peace and sensitivity they used to hold.
Neither was there.
Her lips curled into a fake smile, a very un-Cassie-like look. And she finally spoke.
“So. You’re not dead.”
I answered with a smile, the kind of look I’d have given her if we were back in the world I knew.
“This city’s been doing all it can to kill me. But no, I’m not dead. I’ve been alone. Where are the others? How … how did you get here?”
She didn’t answer, but swung her legs over the stage apron, heaved a sigh, and dropped into the orchestra pit. I followed her down, where she stooped in a corner and uncovered a stashed case.
“Cassie, what’s going on?” It wasn’t like her to ignore me. She didn’t even look up. “I got into bed, just last night, I think,” I continued. “I was at home, living with my family. We’d just come back from our last messed-up mission. Remember? I wake up this morning and I’m freakin’ twenty-five years old. With a beard and no memory of the decade in between. Is this Crayak? The Ellimist?”
“I haven’t thought of those names in years,” she said. Her tone was not nostalgic. She was rummaging through the case, I guessed for bandages to fix a splint to her arm. The case was filled with first-aid supplies, five or six handheld Dracons, another purple suit, emergency food rations, and …
She turned her head just in time to see my eyes widen.
Spools of blast cord. Blocks of plastic explosives. Detonators. Dynamite. A crazy mix of low- and high-tech destructive potential.
“I take it you’re not with the EF?” she said.
I shook my head.
“The Evolutionist Front. The Yeerk rebel group? You know, the so-called Insurrectionists, dedicated to turning away from parasitism and toward the use of artificially created symbiotes?”
She shoved a Dracon into my hand and took two for herself. And then I glimpsed an emergency Kandrona particle emitter as she closed the case.
“You’re a Controller?”
She laughed. “What else would I be? My Yeerk’s name is Niss. We’re in the EF together. We cooperate to fight the Council. I led the team responsible for the blast this morning. That’s why the Taxxons like me so much. The damage will set them back, even though we didn’t hit the …”
“What!” An uncontrollable wave of nausea knotted my chest. It was like hearing my dad confess to being a drug pusher or a murderer. It was an impossibility. “Cassie, what are you saying? You engineered a blast that must have killed hundreds of refugees, the very people the EF is trying to help? That makes you a terrorist! How can you possibly justify that?”
“In a war, Jake, anything is justified.” She spoke with an unnerving confidence. “I’m not a kid anymore. I’m not concerned with the nonsense I used to be.”
“Like life and peace? You think that’s nonsense now! Don’t you remember our last mission — the Ragsin Building battle? The comedown? You needed to talk when we got out and I turned you away. Just didn’t want to deal with it. I was an idiot that night, Cassie. You were on target with your doubts, just like you always were. You have to realize that.”
She laughed dismissively. “You’re talking about a different lifetime, Jake. There were so many missions back then. All just a pitiful blur of youthful idealism. You don’t get it, do you? I’m saying that I finally understand war.”
The way she was speaking, the way she was sort of talking down to me, made me feel like I was about as important to her as a screw in the stage floor.
Was there really no connection between us? Was my friend so changed?
“The Taxxons own the subway,” I said. “The Orff rule the streets. Cassie, if you look around, it’s obvious that somehow we lost our chance to win this war.”
“The war is not lost!” she hissed. Her eyes were on fire. She looked ready to attack me.
But then her eyes moved to the badge on my chest and all at once her anger vanished. Her face relaxed, then brightened. Her expression changed so quickly it was frightening.
“You’re a planetary engineer? Working on the Chrysler Building project!” Suddenly, I was the most interesting thing in the theater. I didn’t know what to say. She moved toward me. Her uninjured arm gripped my arm. Her voice was intense, almost obsessed.
“Jake, the Yeerks want the moon. They want to make it a small, Kandrona-radiating sun. If they succeed, it means an Earth bathed in Kandrona rays for the rest of eternity! It’ll be something the EF could never touch and never disable. No one could.”
I felt like a customer subjected to an intricate and manipulative sales pitch. The deal-maker was just around the corner, I could feel it. And I knew it somehow involved me.
“Your job brings you closer to the moon-ray technology than anyone in the EF. You know that shell over the Chrysler Building? The Yeerks have been working under there for months, fine-tuning the energy beam that will ignite the moon. The targeting has to be precise. Absolutely precise. The Yeerks need the beam to fire exactly the way you and your team have calculated, or else …”
She was animated. Her eyes glistened as she stood bef
ore me. There was the spark I knew. Only it wasn’t love of people or animals that put it there. It was thoughts of sabotage, terrorism, strategy.
And now she was drawing me into it, too.
I brought my fingers to the badge her eyes still fixed on. I yanked it off, breaking her trance.
“Tell me right now! How did we get here? Where are the others? How were you captured? Is this even real?”
Her enthusiasm settled. The fake smile reappeared. She didn’t want to answer my questions, but if she wanted my help, she had to.
“If you really don’t remember, I’ll tell you,” she said. “You won’t like the answer.” She laughed again a little. Less ruthless, more rueful, she looked me in the eyes. “How was I captured? I was betrayed, Jake. By you.”
My heart stopped.
“Me!”
“Well, you were a Controller by then, of course. You can thank Tom for that.”
“My brother?”
She nodded. “The Yeerk in Tom’s head finally put it all together. Clues, maybe. Carelessness. I don’t know. But he suspected you of being an ‘Andalite bandit’ and then one night, he was sure. He planned his attack so well that when it came, you didn’t stand a chance.”
She continued. “You, Marco, and Ax were taken immediately, in my barn. Rachel was killed outright. They caught me the next day. Only Tobias escaped.”
A tightness constricted my throat. Rachel dead?! There was a time when I’d encouraged her recklessness. I’d put her, more than any of the others, in dangerous spots. And Tobias? With a hawk’s life span, he’d be dead by now.
Cassie told me all of this matter-of-factly, like I should know the story. Like I should have known that this, all of it, was because of me …
“Move!”
TSEEEW!
The black metal music stands in front of me vaporized.
“Get down!”
TSEEEW!
Cassie returned fire, striking the Taxxon. He keeled over, falling forward, falling right over the rail above the orchestra pit! Flailing fifteen feet to the floor. Crash! Writhing in agony at our feet.
He was badly wounded, but he’d live. Maybe Cassie’d shot him in the hind quarters on purpose, so he’d survive. All we had to do was run.
I opened the access door to the crawlspace under the stage.
“Cassie, come on!” She ducked in. I followed.
But then she stopped. She turned. She aimed right past me, back through the door.
TSEEEW!
A second hole sizzled through the Taxxon’s vital organs, coldly finishing him off.
I looked at Cassie, searched her for an answer, tried to understand eyes ablaze with ruthlessness.
“They’re just dogs,” she said. “The Orffs’ unofficial police squad let loose to catch us so-called terrorists. The Orff don’t mind too much if Taxxon hunger gets out of control and they eat us instead of bringing us to the station. An eye for an eye, I say.”
I wondered if maybe this was Niss talking. The Yeerk, and not Cassie.
“Come on!” she yelled.
I followed her.
We burst into the street. Ran away from the sound of sirens and hover ships and a still-chaotic crime scene.
Every hundred yards, Cassie turned back to return fire. The Taxxons finally fell off and we stopped at a smashed-up storefront. An old newsstand.
Sweating and panting, I glanced at the racks. The sunburned, wind-tattered cover of an old Sports Illustrated caught my eye. I picked it up.
“My dad …” I said with surprise. “He just got this issue in the mail!” Cassie looked at the date.
“Yeah,” she said flatly, “it’s been about ten years. The Yeerk conquest concluded in a matter of weeks after we were captured. Turns out we were more than a thorn in the side of the Empire. We’d actually started to shift the balance.”
And then I’d blown it.
I’d gotten careless and cocky and ruthless myself. I’d been too ready to use the others, especially Rachel.
“The others,” I said. “Where are they now?”
Cassie paused next to a ratty pile of romance novels. “Ax became a high-ranking Controller. From what I heard, he was the key player in the Yeerk attack on his home world. The Andalite planet was decimated. Millions died. Tens of thousands of Andalites were taken. EF leadership thinks there are some still free in deep space, but I can’t imagine … ”
I sank to the floor beside a stack of yellowed New York Times dated three weeks from the night I fell into bed in spandex bike shorts.
“Tobias became a leader of sorts. Anti-Yeerk.”
“Does he — did he — know about Rachel?”
“Yes. As for Marco.” Her voice turned colder. “Marco’s Visser Two now, in charge of Earth. He’s done things … terrible things.”
This wasn’t real. I couldn’t be hearing this. I didn’t believe it.
“The Visser Three you remember was made head of the Council. The supreme Yeerk leader. Emperor.”
No. Cassie’s Yeerk was feeding me lies. She was wearing me down. She knew … she knew from Cassie’s memory what would get to me, what could make me snap.
But I wouldn’t snap! I wasn’t crazy. My friends weren’t … No. My friends … No!
Suddenly, I was running down an empty street. I didn’t care that I had nowhere to go. I’d just keep running and running until I collapsed. “Free or die,” I repeated to myself. “Free or die!”
“Free or … ”
“Stop it!”
Cassie cut in front of me and pushed me against the wall. Only then did I feel my face streaked with tears. My eyes blurred. My chest heaving.
“It was good luck that I met you, Jake. The job you have as planetary engineer is an incredible chance for the EF.” Cassie was intense and obsessed again. “The controlled burn of the moon the Empire is planning? We need to make it uncontrolled. The perfect targeting of the energy beam? We need it to be off. Exploding the moon will shower the earth with debris. It will knock out satellites, destroy spacecraft, disrupt the entire Yeerk social structure. It will create an opening for attack by the EF. Jake, do you hear me? It will be the opening the EF and free humans have been waiting for.”
Two of her words struck my ears like bells. “Free humans?”
“Yes. Small groups still survive in the countryside. Hunted groups of fugitives.”
“So, there’s hope?”
“I told you the war wasn’t lost. But it will be. All hope will be erased if this energy beam fires as the Yeerks want it to. Go to work.” She knew I’d help her. She knew she was my leader now. “Live the life your badge describes. Watch, listen, get information, scope things out. But don’t act until I contact you. I’ll send someone who works with me to give you instructions. We’ll need a code word.”
Reluctantly, I clipped my badge back onto my jumpsuit. “How about ‘peace’?” I said with a weak smile.
Cassie looked at me like I was a naive two-year-old. She reached out and touched my face tenderly. And for an instant, one sweet instant, the mask of hardness lifted. The girl I’d loved was looking back at me.
But she was gone as quickly as she’d come.
“It’s too late for peace, Jake. All that’s left now is to drive the invaders away by force. Make Earth too dangerous for them. How about a different code word? How about … ‘Animorphs’?”
I agreed and she was gone, leaving me with a Dracon beam in my hand and emptiness in my heart.
Was I on her side? I thought I wanted to be. She’d assumed I would be.
But she was so changed. Driven. Obsessed. Ultrafocused. She’d become a cog in the war machine. But then, who here wasn’t?
Was I a pawn in her mind? A mere tool?
I knew the answer.
But I didn’t care.
It might help me save her.
I boarded a shuttle that dropped me on an empty docking pad, cantilevered off the face of the building two hundred feet above the street. The
Chrysler Building’s Mylar wrap gleamed reddish-brown in the city’s frightening glow.
A powerful gust slapped me off balance and ripped at my hair as I stepped toward a heavy steel panel.
The panel began to rise.
How would I save our moon from transfiguration, from becoming a beacon of Yeerk strength, an irreversible enemy triumph? How could I obliterate the chance that Kandrona would forever taint Earth’s surface with its malignant rays?
If only I had clear-cut instructions, like: Infiltrate enemy science headquarters, corrupt the latest state-of-the-art Yeerk technology, blow up the moon. Hey, that even sounded vaguely familiar. We’d done stuff like that before, right? No problem.
But it wasn’t that simple. She said I had to wait.
Wait for orders from a Cassie I didn’t even know! Why was I letting it happen? No Animorph would ever take orders from a Yeerk. Hadn’t I made that a ground rule?
I stepped across the threshold. Second-guessing my decision to help Cassie. And third-guessing it, and fourth-guessing it.
The panel shut behind me, sealing out the immutable hum I’d come to know meant Yeerk business as usual. Small, triangular lights reddened the floor, pointing me toward a nearby gravity lift. With all the false confidence I could muster I entered the clear, semicircular enclosure, hovering in the air just outside the Mylar sheath. There were a half-dozen other riders. Two humans, an Andalite, and some pinkish creatures I’d never seen before.
the Andalite teased.
“Had to visit the clinic. Problems with my host. He has a rebellious history.”
“I hear you, man,” said a tall human male. “My host used to work for the ACLU and he just won’t shut up about how I’m infringing on his rights. I don’t want to worry you, but the pills don’t really work.”
The lift rushed upward with unsettling acceleration. I put a hand on the wall for balance and looked out over the corridor of death and wreckage carved by the explosion. The collapsed skyscraper still smoked and cindered.
the Andalite commented. He didn’t say who “they” were, but I knew he meant the EF. His voice was calm enough, the way you’d expect a member of the ruling class to sound when speaking of the oppressed. But his tone revealed more. Today’s explosion marked a turning point. In the mind of this Andalite-Controller, the EF had just crossed the line from nuisance to threat.