“You’re just in time for this afternoon’s group efficiency workshop,” piped up another of the humans. “Peer Communication Skills — Conquest through Companionship.”
“Never miss one,” I stated positively.
The lift doors opened onto a vast room. A sea of short, shiny, stainless steel cubicles shone under glaring lights. I followed the taller human into a large open area with metal stools, most already occupied. A holographic short film played at the front of the room. It depicted an Andalite-Controller passing the cubicle of a Hork-Bajir-Controller.
the Andalite said. The Hork-Bajir didn’t respond, just kept working.
The holo paused at that frame and a female Andalite at the front of the room asked the assembled group,
That’s a tough one, lady, I thought. But I’ll go out on a limb here and guess that it’s free will.
I turned on my heels and wound through the paths between cubicle walls. I had no idea where I was going, but I pretended I did. Almost everyone smiled as I passed. One guy even slapped my back and said, “Hey, Essak. Ready for the big night?”
The big night. What was that about? The guy in the hovercraft had asked me about a launch.
Were the Yeerks firing this moon ray tonight?!
Find your desk, Jake. I looked at my badge. Sector 5-682. The cubicles had number plates: 679, 680, 681.
I stood over the computer monitor assigned to me. A model of the Chrysler Building spire rotated and twisted its way across the screen. It was framed by strings of numbers that changed as the model turned.
It was just like that dream where you show up for the final exam in some class, and it suddenly hits you that you haven’t studied at all. In fact, you haven’t been to the class at all and now you have to pass the test.
I looked around. Everyone else had silver probes hung on their ears. There was one on my desk. It looked like a tape dispenser, but I picked it off the console and fit it to my ear. Looked at the monitor. And suddenly …
Whoa! The 3-D model flashed! The image was uncontrollable. Unstoppable! My brain was panicking, racing. I tried to mask the monitor from view so that my cubicle neighbors wouldn’t sound the impostor alarm.
Then, I realized …
I controlled the movement. The screen reflected whatever command my mind issued. Under other circumstances, this would have been extremely cool. Slow, I ordered, easy. My mind relaxed and so did the images. I made the screen flip through pictures at a normal speed.
I was just about to breathe a sigh of relief when I felt eyes staring at me. I looked up.
There was a communal workstation directly in front of my cubicle. I’d passed through it on my way. Noticed focused, hardworking aliens of various species, studying their own screens, consulting other screens.
Now, they’d stopped working.
“Boss?” a Hork-Bajir huskily. “You okay, boss?”
Oh, my God. These guys were working for me and they’d seen my screen wig out! Did they know I was a phony, a fake, an infiltrator? Could they tell?
I moved to shuffle papers on my desk, to look occupied and cover up my ignorance, but there weren’t any papers to shuffle. “Yup,” I said casually. I tinkered with my earpiece and frowned down at my screen, seriouslike. “I was just, you know, giving the old mind a rest.”
After a few seconds, I glanced back at the communal workstation, hoping my crew had returned to business and forgotten everything they’d just seen me do.
But when I looked at my crew, I saw … my crew …
Seats just moments ago occupied by busy Controllers — healthy, breathing, living Controllers — now held …
I blinked just to make sure.
Oh, yeah.
The seats held the raw, bloody, dismembered bodies of enemies I had faced in battle. My past was staring back at me.
You have to understand that I really didn’t think what I was seeing was real. And yet, under the harsh fluorescent lights, there was no mistaking that the corpses were there.
A Hork-Bajir corpse rose out of a chair. His mauled body had been ripped apart by the claws of my tiger morph. How could he stand?! He wasn’t even breathing! His muscles were decomposing! And yet he staggered out from behind the console and started toward me.
He stretched his arm forward, extended his wrist blade and reached … reached for me! A growling rumbled in a voice box that wasn’t there. Tiger jaws had ripped it out.
I turned to run. I was crazy. I was nuts!
Total insanity was twisting my brain!
But when I tried to move, my path was blocked by a Leeran’s stocky form, its pebbly, slimy skin run dry.
“Ahh!” Its webbed feet had been severed by a shark’s teeth. My shark morph’s teeth. Only thin, fibrous ligaments kept the feet moving with the body. The large, luminous, Leeran eyes were lifeless.
And yet he shuffled toward me, and I felt him say my name.
Jake, he chanted. Jake, Jake, Jake, Jake, Jake.
I stiffened and backed into my cubicle. I could smell them now. Their decay and rot. Death, pressing nearer and nearer!
Behind the Hork-Bajir, a Taxxon’s jelly eyes gaped and a three-foot tongue dangled limp from its open mouth. A tiger slash had flayed it from neck to belly. Its innards oozed. Flies swarmed at the opening. Maggots churned in the wound. Lobsterlike Taxxon claws clacked like castanets as it strained and reached for me.
Jake, Jake, Jake, Jake.
The chanting continued. The smells, the growling, the buzzing flies, the blood …
“No,” I breathed. It’s a vision. This is your past … haunting you … This isn’t real!
Not real!
I needed to climb over the cubicle wall. They were coming!
Jake, Jake, Jake, Jake.
I put a hand on the partition and tried to pull myself over it, but I had no strength.
A rat appeared between the corpses’ slow-moving feet. Running blindly, frantically. Bumping into dismembered alien parts. Recoiling, then starting out again. I knew it was David. The kid we turned into an Animorph. The kid who betrayed us. One bad decision after another. Trapped and helpless because of me …
Corpses had crowded into my cubicle! The Leeran’s tentacles brushed my arm!
“No!”
The Taxxon’s claws closed over my fingers!
A raw, blood-dipped Hork-Bajir claw pressed against my cheek.
I closed my eyes. My heart pounded.
The rat scampered up my leg and sank its teeth into my skin.
“Nooo!”
The bodies of the enemies I’d destroyed …
“No, No, NOOOOO!”
“KEEEEEEEE-row!”
I opened my eyes and the cubicle had disappeared. I was tumbling through the air, spinning, plummeting out of control! I was in wild free fall next to a Howler.
“KEEEEEE-row!”
Another mind-splitting cry! The planet floor was racing up! The Howler was clawing the air, screaming in rage. Screaming! Because I’d led him off the ledge.
Rat teeth sliced my skin. Webbed fingers slapped at my face. A Taxxon tongue covered me with spit. Hork-Bajir blades began to slice …
The ground, racing up!
“KEEEEEEEE-row!”
I couldn’t take anymore. Too much! Too much!
“AHH! AHH! AHH!” I screamed and screamed and screamed.
Then, instantly, all went silent.
I gasped and jumped up from where I lay, sweating and cowering against the cool cubicle wall.
Confused, out of my mind, I stared ahead.
“Boss?”
I jerked my head toward the communal workstation. Normal Controllers sat behind the console, a Hork-Bajir and a Taxxon among them.
They looked at me in alarmed disbelief.
I felt like I always did when I woke from a nightmare. Startled, a little embarrassed, but mostly
just grateful that even this reality was less than the terror of the dream.
There was a bustling down the hall.
Orff and Hork-Bajir steamed through the maze of cubicles. Security was heading straight for me.
Leading them, storming fast and angrily, was a stone-faced human, tall and sturdily built. I felt I should know this person.
There was something familiar …
“Get him!” he roared. The guards moved as one.
It couldn’t be true. Yet it was true. This wasn’t another nightmare vision. It was real!
The man who was ordering a security force to apprehend me was the man who’d played catch with me as a child, who’d taught me how to swim. The man who had changed my diapers.
My friend. My role model.
My father.
Magically clear, steel-strong Orff fingers clutched my arms as my father approached. He looked just as I remembered him. Salt-and-pepper hair receding slightly. A vertical wrinkle forged above his nose. He hadn’t aged a day. How was that possible?
“Dad …”
His face showed no response as his eyes tracked, sifting his memory.
“That’s right. Once upon a time, you were my host’s son. This is quite a coincidence in a city so big.”
My thoughts exactly.
It was a weird and unlikely coincidence. As an isolated event, maybe. I’m out of commission for ten years and when I tune in again, my dad’s there waiting to arrest me. Sure.
But combined with bumping into Cassie? With sighting Tobias? With learning that it was my carelessness that led to Rachel’s death?
Too much convergence. Too many life lines intersecting.
There had to be some other current at work here.
“You were late for work,” the Yeerk in my father’s head accused. “Late and in the vicinity of the explosion. You will be interrogated.”
The Orff squeezed my arms, nearly cutting off the blood flow.
This is a dream, I thought again. Or maybe I have a fever. I’ll wake up in a cold sweat, back in my room, back with a chance for victory …
“Move him!”
The guards pulled me forward. I leaned back.
Wake up, I screamed silently. Wake up!
I wanted it to be a dream. Willed it to be a fevered dream.
The Orffs’ blue lungs filled and collapsed, filled and collapsed. Their hearts contracted. Their blood coursed.
I rammed an elbow into a lung.
No response!
A flash of insight. What if their organs, those blatant, exposed, vulnerable organs, were decoys? By all biological laws, they should be. They could be drawing attention away from the body sections that mattered.
With a sweep of my leg I knocked one to the floor. He released my arm and I packed the hardest punch I’ve ever thrown at the clearest part of the other Orff’s chest. Just below the head, but above the heart. A section clear as air.
The sea-green glow in his eye faltered and flickered out. He moaned and fell, an unconscious heap. My father’s face flashed alarm.
“Take him!”
Two Hork-Bajir lunged. I turned and ran for the gravity lift, but six more Hork-Bajir came running from that direction. Roping me in! Closing off escape!
I was blocked. Surrounded. Helpless!
Unless …
I focused.
And the impossible began to happen.
Bands of color, stripes of orange and black inked my skin. Then fur erupted. Tiger muscles bulged, ripping my suit at its seams. My teeth enlarged and sharpened, becoming rows of pointed spears.
I was still able to morph.
The Yeerk force stared in horror, incredulous.
“He’s not Andalite! It’s impossible!”
Not so, boys.
I fell forward onto all fours and lunged. Slashed a Hork-Bajir leg. Rip! Slash! Rip!
Four were down. I turned on my father. He reached for the Dracon holstered on his hip.
His hand was on it. His eyes were on me.
One leap and I’d have him. One leap, and I could take him out.
My dad.
He lifted the beam from his belt. Started to bring it up.
One leap …
Take down my father?
WHAM!
From behind! A brutal blow. My head exploded. My legs, crumpling beneath me. And my vision …
Red, then black.
Slowly, very slowly, unconsciousness gave way to the numb daze of waking up.
My limbs were heavy. Utter exhaustion made me happy to be lying down. Don’t move. Don’t even open your eyes. Back to sleep. Yeah … go back to sleep, Jake.
Then suddenly, I remembered.
Panic knotted my stomach. I was back in human form!
How did I demorph?
Hideous red light reflected off a cool, smooth floor. It burned my eyes. Bare, seamless walls. A large room. And I was sprawled near the exit. A door frame with no door. I could go …
I staggered to my feet, scanned the hall outside for guards. No one. This was it. My lucky break. I rushed forward.
Kzzzzt!
It was like being slapped down by a steel plate. My face, knees, and fists had struck an invisible, electrified force. I raised my head, not sure of what had happened, anticipating a second strike.
Nothing. Just the opening, still crackling from impact.
I struggled to raise my limp body.
“Still putting up the big fight?” It was a deep, chiding voice. “After all these years?”
I looked up. A broad, dark man paused in the doorway, then strode through the energy barrier. He was flanked by six Hork-Bajir and four heavily armed Orff. The Hork-Bajir fell off and took up locations by the entrance. The Orff kept their positions on either side of this person, who was clearly in charge.
He spoke.
“When they told me it was you, I didn’t believe it. I thought you’d been disposed of at the beginning. My host’s old comrade in arms. The former leader of that pathetic little gang, the Animorphs.”
The face was adult. Mid-twenties, like mine. Unmistakable anywhere, despite all that had changed. Despite the deep, angular battle scars that scored it.
I knew that face.
That cocky confidence. That swagger.
“Marco?”
“Just the parts of his mind I find useful,” came the reply. A voice at once familiar and alien.
“Not you, too, man.”
“Your old friend Marco’s serving the Empire now, if that’s what you mean. He finally understands how much better things can be when we all work together. One big happy family. Tell your old buddy, Marco.”
An odd expression contorted the man’s face. A face so shocked to find it could speak, that the mouth could barely form words.
There was stuttering. A long attempt to utter something.
“N-n-n … o.”
And then the mouth stopped abruptly, turning once again cold and hard. The Yeerk cut in. The Yeerk who’d stolen my best friend’s mind and made him a slave.
“What he means is that no one could be happier.”
“Marco would die before he’d choose to help you.”
“Evolutionist-Front nonsense. Everyone wants to help the Yeerks. It’s the informed choice, the ‘in’ thing to do. Life’s cool when you share your head.”
This Yeerk was trying hard to tap Marco’s humor, but it wasn’t working.
“You’ll want to join us, too. We’ve already got a new Yeerk lined up for you. Someone more cooperative with the Empire. He’ll help you think things through, help that anarchic brain of yours find peace. But first we’ve got some business to take care of.”
A new Yeerk? So he, too, thought I was already a Controller?
I knew I wasn’t. I knew it!
And yet when everybody thinks you’re something you’re not, when everyone tells you again and again who and what you are, it’s hard not to wonder, way in the back of your mind, if they aren’t somehow ri
ght.
“You were spotted on the street near the scene of the explosion. You were off duty without authorization. Then I hear you’re hanging with Gotham’s most wanted. I have to say it was that particular piece of evidence that sealed your fate.” A familiar smirk lit up the altered face. “Old Jake’s a terrorist.”
“I don’t know anything about the explosion. I was just on my way to work.”
“I anticipated you’d try to resist.”
Marco snapped his fingers and a Hork-Bajir swiftly disabled the energy barrier. Two Orff marched in, carrying Cassie. Her feet and hands were bound with living handcuffs. They handled her roughly, ignoring her broken arm.
Despite her injury, Cassie fought them like a madwoman. She spat in the big Cyclopean eye of an Orff. The orbiting pupil turned from bright yellow to beet-red. He threw her to the floor at Marco’s feet.
“Terrorist or not,” Marco said to me, “when you see what I can do to Cassie, you’ll do as I say.”
Cassie started to crawl away, but the Orff grabbed her again and dragged her to a corner of the room. They fastened her cuffs to brackets on the wall.
“I want to meet those people clever enough to bring down a building in the center of town, right under our noses,” Marco said, his calm unnerving. “I’d like you to introduce me to that group of individuals. If you’re willing, Jake, I think we might be able to keep things friendly.”
No. I was going to free Cassie. She needed help.
I was about to morph to tiger when she caught my eye. Her expression held me back. Its meaning was clear. Hold your ground, Jake, her eyes said. Tell him nothing. Keep your cool. If you try to free me, you’ll tell him too much.
So I didn’t morph. Instead I turned to Marco and said, “I told you, I don’t know anything about any group.”
Immediately, led in by two more Orff, came a gigantic Taxxon on a leash. Each Orff carried a long pointed pole with which they jabbed at the Taxxon, keeping it at bay.