Cassie’s prison.
A stunning yellow light electrified the massive peak. The needle rod planted at the top began to pulse.
Then suddenly, right before my eyes … the giant metallic gargoyle eagles that jutted from the corners of the spire’s base seemed to ignite!
The moon ray was energizing.
An emerald-green glow was growing within the eagles, emanating, gaining intensity.
Shafts of green sprang from the eagle heads, like controlled lightning. Rose up and up, converging at the spire’s needle tip!
A pyramid of green with an axis of gold, all of it sizzling energy!
I pulled in my two-foot wings and began the dive. Thirty, forty, fifty miles an hour. The Chrysler Building my prey.
I plummeted through cold air, faster and faster. Eighty, ninety … a feathered bullet. A dark streak in the night.
And then, a detail.
A human form! A woman, perched on a narrow ledge a thousand feet from the ground, one of the giant gargoyles anchored just beneath her feet! She was facing out, away from the building, her wrists strapped to the masonry wall, her face strained as she fought to break free.
She twisted.
Her desperate plea filled my head.
How could she answer in thought-speak? How could she even see me? No time to wonder.
The building was racing toward me. The green beams were growing wider and wider, expanding toward Cassie’s perch. They’d fry her! In seconds, she’d be toast.
she screamed.
Razor talons could tear away Cassie’s bonds. Free, she could take cover from the beams. She could survive.
Indecision slowed my thoughts, and my descent.
The Chrysler Building glowed brighter and brighter. The air vibrated with turbulence. The ray seemed desperate to activate. An endless supply of Kandrona. An Earth forever Yeerk.
One well-placed impact — a five-pound falcon traveling at top speed — and the whole operation might fail. Two lives given to save millions more. To save Earth’s future …
Cassie yanked at the living bonds that held her wrists. She fought them, bit them, banged them against the wall. All she could do until suddenly …
She was free!
And then she leaped forward. Jumped from the brick ledge to the base of the gargoyle, perilously close to the raging green shaft. Slammed her weight onto the eagle. It quaked minutely, but it was enough. The light dimmed!
I cheered. The spire’s color weakened from blinding white to dull yellow.
Before I could respond, a panel hissed open behind her. Strong, nearly invisible Orff arms enveloped her.
She was dragged inside. And the panel shut.
Except for a crack.
A scarlet slit. The only entrance to the Yeerk fortress.
I braked hard against the incredible force of a full dive. The narrow vertical opening approached too fast. I’d miscalculated.
The only solution, maybe, was a fierce bank. One wing tip stretched at the ground, the other to the sky. I flattened my body. Braced for impact.
Whhhhumppppppfffff.
My hollow bird bones were crushed as momentum forced the falcon’s too-large body through the slit.
Wham!
I smacked a marble wall. Dropped to the cool stone floor.
Stay conscious, Jake. My body was shattered, unresponsive. Blackness closed in, blurring my vision.
Feebly, I looked back at the narrow slit. Was I hallucinating? Perched atop the gargoyle-eagle, was a real bird. A red-tailed hawk. Eyes on me.
The strong voice pulled me back.
My human form. Human …
Miraculously, splintered bones began to fuse and grow. Fly, kill, eat, protect. The raptor’s calming elemental instincts were forgotten by the confused human mind.
The same strong voice.
I got up. I followed the sound of Cassie’s kicks against the corridor. The building vibrated as the moon ray powered up again.
So little time.
I remorphed as I ran, bounding silently toward a red panel at the end of the hall on big Siberian paws.
Ka-blam!
I slammed the barrier and the half-inch-thick alloy easily folded. The door ripped from its track and revealed an immense chamber aglow with computer screens.
Four armed Orff on high platforms.
Two rows of Hork-Bajir.
And a voice raging from above.
“You again!”
It was Marco, glaring down from a pedestal hovering high in the center of the room, enclosed by a semicircular control panel fused to the base.
A large holographic display at the front of the room showed an image of the moon.
Displayed beside this moon view was a live image of the Chrysler Building. The spire glowed white-hot. Numbers beneath ticked away the seconds. 00:28. 00:27.
“Don’t even bother trying,” Marco boasted. “Neither of you can do anything to stop this.” He motioned to the wall of windows, where Cassie, bound and gagged, struggled in vain.
“In minutes, the moon will shine and strengthen only Yeerks. We will be all-powerful. Earth will be ours forever.”
A panel behind Cassie flew open, revealing a red night.
“And to celebrate, we’ve decided to throw a terrorist from the sky.”
I sprang.
“Get him!”
TSEEEWW! TSEEEWW!
Dracon fire electrified the floor under my paws. Waves of Hork-Bajir moved in from every direction. I was hit! Hard, sharp blades sliced my back and neck. No pain. Not yet. I wouldn’t let pain in. Not even as blood spewed from my cuts. Staining my fur. Coating my muzzle.
I fought back, wildly. Madly spilling purple-blue Hork-Bajir blood.
Five were down. A new wave rushed to catch me. No!
Propelled by hind legs like rockets, I sailed over the approaching attackers. Landed hard. Tumbled into two Orff.
“Get him, you morons!”
I slashed frantically. Sent their handheld Dracons flying like twigs in a hurricane.
I moved in to finish the job.
“Rrroooaaarrrr!”
The Orffs’ clear, soft neck tissue yielded to my fangs like soft butter to a knife. But the taste!
I withdrew. Gagged and spat.
The poisonous, toxic taste!
Before I could recover one of the Orff closed his arms around my neck. Two legs clamped around my sides. The third kicked wildly at my gut.
I bit into the other Orff’s leg, crushing arteries. Grinding leg bones in my jaw. Forcing myself to tolerate the taste.
He fell.
The one on my back increased his stranglehold. We were locked, Greco-Roman wrestlers who’d forgotten the rules.
The numbers beneath the hologram. 00:14. 00:13.
No!
Marco towered above, triumphant. Eyes fixed on the holograms. Fists clenched.
A scream!
Cassie! Hurled through the opening, into the red night!
BAAAM!
Violently, I rammed the Orff on my back against the wall.
BAAAM!
He struggled, resisted. Tried to choke me. Cut off my air.
BAAAM!
I smashed him again. His kicking slowed. His grip loosened.
He dropped to the floor, his green hearts spilling blood through severed vessels.
I looked at the window. Cassie.
And then, somehow, crazily … a hand reached up. Three fingers gripped the ledge. Cassie’s hand. She wasn’t gone! But in seconds she would tumble to her sixty-story death, a splattered heap for Taxxons to lick up.
In se
conds the moon ray would fire, shooting from the Chrysler Building cannon with perfect aim and precision.
Cassie’s hand.
The large, red button standing out on Marco’s control panel, shielded behind glass. The word ABORT etched on the cover.
Cassie …
The world …
I knew what I had to do. No time for indecision. I saw my goal.
Save what should be valued above all else.
I leaped.
00:05. 00:04.
INTERESTING CHOICE.
All was blackness when I heard the voice.
A strange voice. Old and young. Male and female. Echoing in my mind like distant thought-speak.
It was not the Ellimist. No. It was a voice I’d never heard.
THEY HAVE STRANGELY SEGMENTED MINDS: CONSCIOUS, UNCONSCIOUS, AND AN ABILITY TO RECONCILE BOTH. THEY WILL BEAR MORE STUDY, THESE HUMANS …
A bird’s song.
Bright sun on my face. Warmth.
I opened my eyes.
A wooden desk with a computer on it. Star Wars Episode I poster tacked to the wall. Schoolbooks heaped on the floor. Dirty clothes falling from the closet. Worn gym shoes. Reading light. Cotton sheets.
Downstairs, the smell of fresh waffles cooking. Dad. A woman talking about a doubles game. Mom.
My room. My house. My …
I leaped out of bed.
The Schwarzenegger thing was history. My hand was my hand again. I brushed my chin. No sandpaper. Just smooth.
I grabbed for the phone. I dialed the number. Pounded the keypads. My body ached in muscles I didn’t know I had.
Brrrrrrrr-ing.
Come on. Pick up.
Brrrrrrrr-ing.
Answer!
I wanted to hear a girl’s voice. Deep and young. Cheerful and wise.
My heart pounded.
Bright sun washed my body. I moved a hand across my chest and felt …
My badge! I yanked it off.
I looked.
My fingers clutched air. I opened my fist. Nothing.
Images still flashed through my head.
Dead Hork-Bajir towering above me.
Orff manacling my wrists.
David.
A mind-blowing explosion.
The Howler.
The strangely beautiful singing of children.
The stench of those condemned to death.
A Mylar sheath beating with the wind.
The scarred faces and mangled bodies of old friends.
Elfangor.
Lightning. Rain. Slipping …
Brr …
“Hello?”
Time stopped.
Everything got extremely quiet. Except for the pounding of my heart.
I knew now. I’d made a choice. I knew what I was made of. My limitations and priorities.
“It’s Jake,” I said.
No response.
“It’s Jake,” I said again, voice quaking like I’d never talked to her before.
As if this were the first call I’d ever made. The only call that mattered.
“Cassie, I just wanted to ask what I should have asked you yesterday. Are you okay?”
The author wishes to thank Ellen Geroux for her help in preparing this manuscript.
My name is Rachel.
And I was facing down a Controller in a purple-and-pink Dunkin’ Donuts uniform. He was holding a Dracon beam. Smirking. The little jerk.
Tseeew! Tseeew!
He fired at point-blank range. Hit me right between my three-foot-long tusks.
“HhhhREEEEEuuuhhh!” I roared in pain and anger. Mostly anger. Like a couple of Dracon beam blasts are enough to take down a thirteen-hundred-pound African elephant.
Yeah, an elephant. I can morph into animals whenever I want. I can also morph a cat and a cockroach and lots of other animals and bugs. Sounds like fun, right?
Wrong. Like, about one percent of the time it’s not seriously unpleasant. Mostly morphing is a weapon. A weapon in the most desperate battle ever fought by human beings.
Here’s the deal. Earth is under attack. The planet has been invaded by aliens called Yeerks. These guys aren’t into exploring strange new worlds. They’re into exploring strange new bodies. They’re parasites. Like lice or ringworm. Only intensely worse.
In their natural state, Yeerks are nothing but gray slugs. Until they infest a host body, enter the brain, sink down into the little crevices, and take complete control.
Once they have you, you can’t focus your own eyes, or draw your own breath, or decide when to pee. You are powerless. A slave of the most complete and hopeless kind.
You can still do one thing. Just one terrible thing: You can watch in horror as the Yeerk in your head lies to your family, betrays your friends, plots to take over your planet.
Frightening?
Oh, yeah. And it gets worse.
Me and my friends are all that actively stand between the Yeerks and their evil conquest of humanity. Just a group of five kids and a young alien.
We’re trying to hold on until help gets here from a few billion light-years away. See, the Yeerks have enemies. A race of amazingly advanced aliens called Andalites.
Andalites look like deer. If deer had blue-and-tan fur, humanoid arms, and scorpionlike tails tipped with wickedly sharp blades. Andalites also have two main eyes, on their face, and two on swiveling stalks that sprout from the top of their head. Beautiful and intelligent and cunning.
Not too long ago — who am I kidding, what seems like a lifetime ago — an Andalite ship got fried right above Earth. Torn out of the sky while battling the Yeerks. My friends and I saw it fall. Saw the dying Andalite war prince named Elfangor crawl from the wreckage. Listened, stunned and just a little freaked out, as he gave us the technology that allows us to morph. To acquire the DNA of any animal we touch and then to become that animal. But there was one rule we had to follow: Stay in morph for more than two hours and you stay there forever. Become what the Andalites call a nothlit. Stuck in your morph for the rest of your life. Someone who means a lot to me knows about this firsthand. He’d stayed in morph too long and now he lives his life as a red-tailed hawk. He did regain his morphing ability, but when he demorphs he’s not a human. He’s a bird. The sad part — at least for me — is that he seems to like his life the way it is now.
But even though it seems futile, we’ve been fighting ever since.
Trying to hold on even though we’ve just about given up waiting for any more help out of the sky.
So here we are: Jake, our leader and my cousin; Cassie, my best friend; Marco, Jake’s best friend and a totally annoying — never mind; Tobias, a lost soul with the body of a bird; and Elfangor’s younger brother, Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill. We call him Ax.
Oh, there’s one important thing I forgot to mention: Yeerks feed on something called Kandrona rays.
The Yeerks’ need for Kandrona is the one flaw in their strategy. A weakness, an opening we can exploit. Every three days, thousands of Yeerks gather together at the enormous Yeerk pool complex built under our town.
Destroy the pool and the Yeerks will starve.
We just found out from our android allies, the Chee, that the Yeerks were beginning mass production of portable Kandronas. The heads of the Yeerk organization have had access to these for a while now. But mass production? That meant each and every Yeerk, no matter how low down on the corporate ladder, would be able to feed in the privacy of his or her own home as easily as you nuke a frozen pizza. The Yeerk pool would be obsolete. Our enemies would be rid of their only flaw.
We just couldn’t let it happen.
So we’d attacked their factory, a dingy old industrial building on the edge of town, windows painted black. The Yeerks had disguised it as a Dunkin’ Donuts bakery. The human-Controllers were even dressed in the ever-so-stylish polyester fast-food uniforms.
The Pepto-Bismol pink poly did not help my mood. Neither did the fact that we were way outnumbered.
Thirty human-Controllers were working on a crude assembly line in the back of the building. Four more were pretending to make donuts up front. There were at least a dozen guards.
I wrapped my trunk around a Controller’s waist, tossed my massive head, and let go.
“Ahhhhhhhh!” he yelled, as he went flying. Then —
THUMP!
I didn’t see where he landed.
“HhhhREEEEEuuuuhhh!” I trumpeted.
Jake, Cassie, Ax, and Tobias were back by the assembly line, on the other side of a false wall. I couldn’t see them but the elephant’s ears were picking up moans and roars and cries and Dracon beam blasts. Also, something that sounded like equipment smashing to the floor.
Marco was on my side of the wall, in gorilla morph. Three Controllers surrounded him. He lashed out with his ham-sized hands but the Controllers were slowly backing him against one of the three commercial ovens.
I shouted.
The Controllers had their backs to me. Didn’t see me coming.
I grabbed the middle one. Tossed.
“Aaaahhhhhhh!” he yelled.
Now they knew I was there.
The right one turned his handheld Dracon beam at me.
Too slow.
I grabbed him. Tossed.
“Nnnnnoooooo!” he shouted.
Marco moved forward. Knocked the Dracon beam out of the third Controller’s hand. Whacked him a solid gorilla punch to the jaw. The guy went down. And stayed there.
Marco and I looked around. Our part of the factory was littered with downed human-Controllers. Yeerks who wouldn’t be causing us any headaches for a long, long time.
Jake shouted.
I powered through the main entrance, taking most of the door frame with me. Three minutes to demorph or be stuck as an elephant for the rest of my life.
The others were right behind me. Ax in his own Andalite body. Jake moving fluidly in his tiger morph. Cassie as a wolf, fast and low. Tobias, the red-tailed hawk. And Marco, a gorilla, bringing up the rear.
We ran. Down the deserted alleyway where we’d left our outer clothing. The pavement was damp. Strange misty halos ringed the sodium-vapor lights way overhead.
Not a minute to spare. Crowded in around the stinking Dumpsters and piles of oily, wet rags, we stopped.