The Helmacrons were enormous compared to my shark morph.
And armed. But I was going to stop them from shooting if it was the last thing I did.
All of these thoughts passed in about one second.
I turned my flattened rudder of a head and began to swim. The excellent shark sense of smell told me one of the Helmacrons was to my left.
Jake shouted.
Powering through a forest of tissue strands, an ocean of blood. Hunting for the Helmacrons!
Tissue!
Turn — left!
the Helmacron shouted.
No!
Frantically I fought the current. Pushed and strained with my tail, my flippers. Struggled for every paltry inch.
And meanwhile, the walls around me closed in as Marco’s heart prepared to beat.
Tissue!
Turn — another left!
Push, push, push!
The shark was exhausted. And the Helmacron smell was only the faintest bit stronger.
THUMP!
The first part of Marco’s heartbeat.
The heartbeat that might be his last.
Marco
“What’s wrong with Buster?” A voice, just outside the door. Female. Maybe the photographer’s mother, sister, aunt.
Buster?
Oh, come on. This dog was no Buster.
Bruiser, maybe. Fang, Killer, Psycho. But not Buster.
Buster’s bloodshot eyes were on me. Blocking the window. My only escape.
I could hide under the bed. Except the metal frame was only about six inches off the ground. No way.
The door handle turned.
I jumped for the closet and crashed into the flimsy sliding doors. Great. The woman in the hall had to hear that. Too late to run. What the heck had I been thinking!
I closed the doors behind me, scooted down onto a pile of sweaty-smelling clothes, backed toward the corner.
“ARFARFARFARFARF!”
Whooosh! Buster’s head was a wedge, shoving open one of the sliding doors. He bounded into the closet and went for my ankle.
“Rrrrooo — ARFARFARFARFARF!”
A strange rage filled me. I lifted the shoe.
A very low voice in my head said: Dangerous dog. Be afraid.
No.
“Buster! Good dog!”
Buster turned toward the sound of his master. A split second hesitation before biting off my head. That gave me just long enough to decide.
Morph — or get caught.
Morph — or get chewed up like a Milk-Bone.
Yeah, I’d promised Jake I wouldn’t morph. But I hadn’t heard from my so-called friends in hours and hours. For all I knew they could be dead.
A little voice in my head, that intangible but incredibly annoying thing called a conscience, was concerned. Marco, it said, can’t you see something is wrong with you? With what you’re doing? Where’s your compassion? It’s just a dumb dog, doing what he’s supposed to do. And your friends, their lives are valuable.
Roach, I answered.
I felt the changes begin at the same time I heard footsteps crossing the room.
Each morph is different. I’d gone roach plenty of times before. But each experience is completely unique.
This time, my skin hardened first.
Then, vision pixilated. Compound roach eyes, with about two thousand lenses, ballooned up out of my eye sockets.
Two thousand Busters.
Two thousand sets of snapping teeth.
Four legs exploded out of my sides and I fell forward. My arms fused to my sides, then reemerged as delicate wings.
Buster tilted his head and moaned as I shrank down to the size of a quarter.
Don’t eat me, I warned him silently. I have enough problems already.
My antennae twitched as the roach’s amazing sense of smell surged to life. Roaches can smell anything. The closet smelled of sweat and dog pee and laundry detergent.
Buster took a step back and moaned again.
The closet door burst open.
“Oh — sick!” someone yelled. “I’m going to sue that filthy landlord! Honey, bring a shoe! I just caught the world’s biggest roach!”
Then came the change I had been waiting for.
With a sickening lurch, my innards began to twist and change.
someone yelled in my head.
Cassie shouted.
Ah, so now I could hear them all. Must be in morph.
Ax said unnecessarily.
Rachel screamed.
Jake shouted.
My friends were still alive.
And they sounded terrified.
Good for them.
Rachel
An inch.
One more inch and a Helmacron would be down to three legs. I pumped my tail hard. Opened my mouth to bite. Then —
THUMP!
I was yanked away from the Helmacron. Spun, head over tail. Another aperture — this one on the opposite side of the chamber — rapidly opened. It grew from a crack, to a hole, to a chasm.
Blood started to flow out of the chamber, sweeping all of us along with it.
Jake shouted.
I answered.
I strained. Tried with every cell to resist the sucking of the current. And still I lost ground.
Ax called.
And then —
The chamber all around me began to shift and blur! The forest of tissue melted like heated wax.
But the changes continued. The chamber surrounding us shrank down, down, down. Half the size it was. Half that. Then half that. Smaller, smaller, smaller.
The rootlike tissues came unglued. Bounced like loose electrical cables, and then sucked up into the walls.
SLOOONG!
The walls separating this chamber of the heart from the next stretched like a rubber band and exploded. The red blood faded to rose, then pink, then white.
Air! Would we still have air without the red blood cells? I gasped and found I could still breathe.
The noise was deafening. I wanted to cover my ears, but I had no ears, no hands.
An earthquake, a tornado, a volcano, a tidal wave, a monsoon!
SLLLURPPPP!
Jake shouted,
Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong!
I screamed. An enormous nightmare glob of pulsing organ bulged out in front of me. Then it did a fast-forward shrivel and disappeared.
Tobias shouted.
What looked like a femur poked into the chamber and caught me on the head. I spun, knocking into Jake and one of the Helmacrons.
Cassie urged.
Seconds later —
Poof! The hurricane was over. Marco’s morph was complete.
Marco called with a laugh.
Jake said shakily.
We were squashed together in a tiny space filled with bluish-white liquid. The walls surrounding us were smooth — and they were squeezing together. Another trash compactor, only dollhouse-sized.
Ax said.
Marco said nastily.
Tobias replied.
I snapped.
O
kay, so Marco had good reason to feel the way he did. Five of his friends up his nose, Dracon beams blasting his stomach lining, yada, yada, yada. But, come on. He sounded like a spoiled two-year-old.
Marco was often annoying but never stupid.
Jake demanded.
Jake, to us.
Then, from a jumble of alien parts, a Helmacron shouted.
And before any of us — Jake or Cassie, Ax or Tobias, before even I — could do anything to stop them …
The Helmacrons fired in unison.
Tseeew!
Tseeew!
Tseeew!
Tseeew!
Tseeew!
I screamed.
And then … silence.
Cassie cried.
Nothing.
Cassie cried again. A wrenching sound, horrified, full of pain.
Jake said, his voice strangely flat.
Next I heard Tobias’s voice.
“Neep! Neep! Neep!” A cheer went up from the Helmacrons.
A strange coldness swept through me. Not sadness. Not exactly. In a way, I was prepared for this. We had been through so many missions, so much danger. That one of us should die seemed … inevitable. Unavoidable.
And then —
Fury.
A wave of fury like a kick to the gut.
I wanted those Helmacrons dead.
Rachel
O Majestic Leader, Humans are a race of fools! We told them time and time again that Helmacrons do not surrender! And yet they delude themselves, believing that we would deal with them simply because we have suffered minor injury! Does it not make you laugh, and prove that we are the only fit rulers of the universe?
— From the log of the Helmacron Males
“Neep! Neep! Ne — Aggggghhhh!”
I attacked while the Helmacrons were still cheering Marco’s death. I bit clear though a Helmacron’s leg with my powerful shark jaw.
The Helmacron jerked. He didn’t lose his balance, but I felt something heavy fall near me.
I shouted.
Tobias said.
I said savagely.
Jake shouted.
Cassie said quietly.
Ax said.
Jake said bitterly.
the Helmacron cried.
another Helmacron shouted.
Cassie shouted.
I said.
Cassie said.
I said.
Whoooosssh!
A pillow of air escaped from Marco’s lung.
Jake yelled.
Tobias shouted.
By then, the other four Helmacrons had lost a limb. Been forced to drop their weapons. Quieted down some. And when they realized we were now armed — well, they were suddenly interested in dealing.
one of the Helmacron males said.
Jake prompted.
Jake said.
I said angrily.
Cassie said.
Jake said.
I shouted.
Jake said coldly.
I added.
The Helmacrons blustered and complained. But they agreed to surrender and unshrink us. They didn’t really have a choice.
In the lungs we demorphed. Tobias to hawk. Ax to Andalite. The rest of us to human.
And then, we marched out of the body. Out through what Cassie later called spiracles, or the breathing holes on either side of a cockroach’s body. We kept the Helmacrons under guard like prisoners of war. We moved fast, anxious to abandon the corpse. A corpse that was all that was left of Marco.
Zombielike, I walked. Looked straight ahead. Didn’t talk. Too busy processing.
Marco, my fellow warrior and, yeah, even friend … gone forever. Killed. Not by the Yeerks, as we all half-expected to be, but by a race of tiny egomaniacs.
There was no justice, poetic or otherwise, in that.
Rachel
“This isn’t the barn,” Cassie said.
Wherever we were, it was dark and vast. At least it seemed that way. Then again, we weren’t much bigger than bacteria.
“Does anyone see the Helmacron ship?” Jake asked.
Tobias said.
Ax said.
“Duh.”
“Ax, just guard the Helmacrons,” Jake said.
Ax held a Dracon beam on our little band of gimpy, marble-eyed prisoners. His tail hovered above his head, ready to strike.
“Tobias?” Jake said.
Tobias said wearily. With difficulty, he gained some altitude and was lost in the darkness.
Jake shook his head. “Somehow I imagined we’d come out in the barn and the Helmacron ship would just be there.”
“Where did Marco go? He was supposed to stay put,” I complained. Then felt bad for complaining.
Ax said.
“Now there’s a happy thought.”
Cassie laughed grimly. “I wonder how long it will be before humans invent an antishrinking ray.”