“What is this place?” I asked. “Are you the group Cassie told me about? Are you free?”
“Yes. So Cassie sent you?”
“Well, no. I mean, I don’t know. I just fell through a hole in the floor and …”
“The floor doesn’t open up for just anyone. Cassie must want you to learn. You see, all our young adults are in the EF. We’re the ones they’ve saved so far. We elders, and the children that we raise and teach.” She pointed back at the tree. It must have been art week because each child had a painting of his own creation in his hands. The canvases were small, but intricate. One student at a time explained his work while the others listened.
“These are the first healthy kids I’ve seen since I’ve been here.”
The woman nodded and squeezed my arm.
“It’s a sad story, to be sure. I’ll tell you.” She lowered her voice a notch. “The Yeerks raise children in large warehouses back in the city. Controllers like the ones you saw are picked at random to procreate. When children are born, they enter one of the wamps, or warehouses, where they are held from birth to age fifteen. Their lives are controlled though their brains are left uninfested. Children are seen as weak and unworthy host bodies.
“During this captivity,” she continued, “they’re pumped full of vitamin supplements so the host bodies will grow strong. They’re run on treadmills so they’ll be fit to fight and to produce. When instinct leads them to indulge in moments of uncontrolled, regular childhood, they are punished. If they try to educate themselves, they are punished. Yeerks want minds as powerless as possible. So they raise children in a joyless, lifeless world where they wait for the day of infestation. The EF fights to free them. When they are freed, which is far more seldom than I can bear to think, they come here.”
“These kids don’t seem traumatized at all,” I said. “They seem completely normal.”
“We’ve been lucky that way. Very few have been broken down beyond repair. This is a place of joy. It helps that we don’t talk about the wamps unless we must. We live simply. We teach and cultivate. We hope.”
She turned back to the class in progress, then back to me.
“Would you like to see more?”
I nodded. I felt it was important to see how things worked here. I felt that I was here because I was supposed to be.
I walked over to the tree.
“Are you from the EF?” A kid’s voice. I looked down at one of the lower, swooping branches and saw a blond, rosy-cheeked boy. Maybe eight or nine. He spoke like he hoped I was with the EF because that would make me a quasi-celebrity and someone worth showing his artwork to.
“Um, I guess so,” I said. “Yeah. I’m working with the EF. My name’s Jake.”
“My name’s Justice. The elders insist on giving us these funny ‘concept’ names. Like, that’s Liberty over there.” He pointed to a girl on a high branch. “And that’s Storm.” As he explained this, he rolled his eyes a little, indicating that to him, all adults seem a bit goofy.
I smiled and knelt down to get closer to his level.
“You want to see my painting?” he said. “My friends think I’m better at art than they are. The elders say I have a gift.”
“Well, then, I’d better have a look.”
Justice handed his canvas to me.
“What do you think?”
The image was divided diagonally, from the lower left corner to upper right. Below that line was an expressionist nightmare. A dark, angular city. Jutting, steel-gray towers rising through a bloodred mist. A fog from which arms and screaming, agonized faces reached in vain for a sky they couldn’t see.
Above the diagonal demarcation was a different world. A cloudless, blue-skied landscape. In the sky hovered a hot-air balloon, stark-white, like a sun. Extending from the balloon’s gondola, crossing over from the joyful sky to the dismal, urban abyss was a rope.
A cord, thin as thread.
On this rope were people, traveling upward, pinned to the thread like clothes on a laundry line.
And as they crossed the border between darkness and light, faces stiff with frustration and rage softened. There were no smiles, but there were expressions of hope.
“Do you like it, Jake?”
“It’s great,” I said. He smiled. “You’re really good at drawing. Is that how you got here? Did you escape up the rope?”
“Not you too,” he said with mild frustration. “The elders are always telling me I paint allegories, whatever they are! I’m working out my aggression and fears, they say. But I’m just painting what I want to.”
“Okay.”
“Do you get to fly Bug fighters?”
“Nope.”
“But you get to plan attacks, right? And lead rebels? And free slaves?”
“I guess so.”
“That’s what I want to do. I’m gonna free all the friends I had to leave behind. They’re prisoners and I’m gonna save them.”
I wondered how I should answer, how I could explain to him, without destroying his spirit. “War doesn’t always let you save the people you know,” I said. “You might end up being assigned to a mission that saves people far away from here. People you don’t know. Other people’s friends.”
He shook his head.
“I’ll save my friends first. Then I’ll save other people’s friends.” He jumped suddenly and grabbed hold of my arm, pulling me toward the trunk of the massive tree.
“You’re gonna be late,” he said. “I want you to stay, but you’re gonna be late.” He pressed his small hand on a depression in the thick, corrugated bark and a door appeared. It opened for me and I let Justice push me through it, but then I turned back.
When I did, there was just the trunk of an oak.
No door, no free humans.
I was back in the city.
In Bryant Park, awash in shadows from a nearly full, rising moon. Gnarled branches on leafless trees spread like outstretched hands. Hands warning of danger. Pleading with me to be careful.
Gravel crunched beneath my boots as I crossed to the New York Public Library. My mind hummed with confusion as I tried to make sense of the place I’d just been, the free humans I’d just met.
I’d decided a while back to give up analyzing what was happening to me and why. I’d figured that sanity depended on accepting the reality I saw, this dream or nightmare or vision. But that didn’t mean there weren’t times when all I wanted were answers — definite, concrete answers.
I listened for the sound of Orff footfalls. For the feel of spying eyes tracking me.
Nothing. I’d lost them.
I’d done as Rachel had said.
Up white marble steps.
“TSSEEERRR.”
A raptor’s cry cut the night. Then beating wings and the creaking of ancient bones.
“Tobias!”
Feathers brushed my face as a hawk shot past. So close this time! I blinked and …
Gone! Absorbed by the night.
“Tobias?” There was no answer.
So I turned and opened the massive, brass-handled door. I raced up moonlit stairs, boots pounding in the vast emptiness.
A wood-paneled corridor led to the stacks, to endless rows of high, book-lined shelves. A gloomy, moody maze. A musty, unlived-in smell. Silent as a tomb.
Reading obviously wasn’t big with the Empire.
I walked along the main corridor, looking down each aisle. Rachel said I’d know.
I was in the beginning of the “E” section when I passed an aisle that seemed to extend farther than the rest. I turned into the book-lined tunnel, heart thumping, and began to run.
Suddenly, the bookshelves ended. I skidded to a halt next to a row of dark-stained wooden tables. And then a hundred lights switched on and splashed light across the surfaces of a hundred desks, illuminating a huge reading room.
A strapping Andalite, coarse blue fur drawn tight over battle-ready muscles, swiveled graceful stalk eyes to rest on me.
&nbs
p;
The thought-speak voice was mind-filling. Gentle and tough. Wise, inspiring, terrifying.
Familiar.
He looked just as he did the night his spacecraft crashed in the construction site. The night my life changed forever.
By comparison, my voice sounded puny and forlorn, swallowed up by the vaulted chamber.
“Elfangor.”
The Andalite shifted on his hooves and trotted nearer, his stature breathtaking. He was powerful and well-proportioned.
I’d seen Elfangor murdered with my own eyes, yet there he stood. Could he be leader of the EF? Mastermind of a terrorist campaign against Yeerk control? I was incredulous, but, at this point, anything seemed possible.
“The EF is certainly a force to be reckoned with,” I said.
“Action is the surest path to change. No question there.”
“What I want is to go home.”
Elfangor was an awesome presence. I’d be lying to say he didn’t intimidate me some. But I was a leader, too. I saw the fight for Earth as more mine now than his. I wanted to be respectful of him, but in my view he’d made a giant mistake with the terrorist campaign. I had to call him on it.
“No. I want to go home so I can keep all this from happening in the first place. If this is the future, I want to go back. I can stop the Yeerks without sacrificing my friends. Without botching the war, and bumbling into your brand of terrorism and half-freedoms. I can stop them before we sacrifice the very things we’re fighting for!”
Elfangor laughed in my mind.
“You don’t have to give up your principles to win. Isn’t there always an alternative to sacrifice if you just keep your mind clear, and step back, and see it and …”
The repetition stung. How did he know I was just talking big? It was like he was inside my head, rifling through my personal file of fears and mistakes …
Now I was angry.
“It’s all your fault,” I said suddenly, surprising myself. “I always thought of you as a hero, Elfangor. A leader. But the truth is you couldn’t see another way out. You sentenced us to hardship, pain, and suffering. We were kids. You made us question every value we ever learned. You had no right to heap that weight on us, huge and impossible. You used us!”
The voice changed as he said my name. Suddenly, he didn’t sound like Elfangor anymore. The Andalite arrogance was gone, leaving only the voice of a man. A human. Familiar and unfamiliar.
the new voice said.
“Tobias.”
Of course.
My throat tightened. My skin tingled. What? My mind seized on his words, pulled and prodded them. Turned and shook them.
Dead? Then how could I be free?!
“But I’m here!”
I looked down at my hand. Pink-tan flesh under the light of the reading lamp. Knuckles, nails, veins, bones. Alive. Real.
What was this?
“No! No, no, no! I’m not a scientist!”
“If I make the shot miss, the moon will explode and doom millions.”
“But what about Cassie? Marco has her!”
“Couldn’t you send someone else to save her? One of your people?” I pleaded, indignant at his dismissal of her life.
Tobias shrugged.
“I won’t let her die!”
I couldn’t answer that.
He turned abruptly and walked across the room.
I couldn’t accept it.
I ran out the same way I came in, as fast as my legs could carry me. Past row upon row of books and cavernous marble library halls built for a different world.
I burst out into a muggy cloud of night air, thick and hot. The leaves on the trees were full and lush. Leaves? Muggy air? Minutes ago I’d walked beneath barren branches, dormant as death. Now I raced past foliage rustling in the whirlwind currents from hovercraft overhead.
Reality was all wrong.
Cassie.
No mission was worth sacrificing her life.
I ran from Tobias. From Elfangor and Ax, from friends who’d ceased to care.
As leader of the Animorphs, I would put the mission first. The mission as a whole. But what was my mission?
What made the world worth more? Sheer volume? The future? The common good?
Detachment, you idiot.
The last battle we’d fought together … Marco and Rachel, inside … lose everyone or just two … a door closing … Securing their destiny …
Guilt tore at me with scratching, ripping claws.
I’d set the example. I was to blame for Cassie’s hardness and Tobias’s indifference.
I ran still faster. Down a dark, narrow backstreet. The smell of Taxxon filth invaded every corner of the city. Sweat poured down my face, mixing with burning, unstoppable tears.
“I’m sorry!” I shouted at the sky.
No one to hear.
Tobias was wrong about war. What good is it if people are forgotten along the way? If one girl in one million girls is scarred and hardened. Changed forever. What good? Only Yeerks freely give their own to see a job completed. I wasn’t a Yeerk.
I wasn’t.
TSEEEW!
A flash of heat. The scorch of Dracon fire on the bricks above my face.
Marco’s men!
Get away! I had to get above this nightmare town! I tore at my synthetic orange skin and tried to morph.
The physical changes began. I hadn’t lost the morphing power! Long human legs collapsed up into my rear. Elbows fused to my chest.
A downy undercoat sprouted across my skin. Stiff feathers shot outward from thinning arms. Hard cranial bones shifted, sculpting my heavy, roun
d human head into the falcon’s sleek form.
I flapped as hard as I could. Struggling through wet air.
Help Cassie, and I doom so many more. Kandrona for eternity. Help Cassie and mankind’s fate is sealed.
But I would have one more moment with Cassie by my side. We might make it. We could run.
But where could we go? And with a Kandrona sun, I couldn’t even starve the Yeerk out of her head …
Every detail of the city surged into focus with raptor sight. And the mind. Simple, but keen. Focused on the task. No swells of emotion. No unanswered questions.
The tears were gone.
Higher. Past walls of silver-green glass and rooftop landing pads. Glassed-in penthouses, beacons in the darkness, housed crowds of humans and Andalites gathered around sludgy pools. High-level Controllers cavorting and conspiring. The alien world’s hot tub equivalent. The Yeerk pool.
The air cooled and thinned as I rose higher still, until at last, the menacing Yeerk New York looked safe and small. Air began to slip past my tired wings. I was an insignificant dot in the sky. One free soul above a city of slaves. Millions that were mine to save.
Cassie.
Justice would save his friends first.
But Justice was a kid.
The lights of Yeerk and once-Andalite craft flitted over streets like crimson fireflies. Brooklyn. Queens. The Bronx. The suburbs. The string of distant cities beyond. All of it glowed a telling red. The East Coast megalopolis, to the horizon and beyond.
Yeerk. All of it. Yeerk.
My telescopic falcon eyes found the silhouette of a man at a desk, high in a skyscraper. In the world I used to know, he could have been anyone. Working late. With a wife and a family. A dog. A home.
Here he was a captive. One captive.
One life.
Two miles away was another building, not the tallest, but one that stood out, with a pointed, shining peak. Brighter than all the structures around it, with starbursts stacked to form a tall, elegant tip.
The Chrysler Building. Center of the invaders’ command. Instrument of Yeerk domination.