Okay, Marco, you knew he'd morph something dangerous. That still fits the plan.
Of course, I hadn't known he'd be nearly invisible.
135 26
I landed and demorphed well off the trail.
Strange to be here, so high up. It was quiet. A few birds sang. The breeze rustled the sparse tall grass. The trees sighed.
"All I need is a picnic," I said, wanting to hear the sound of my own voice. "Some chips. A ham sandwich."
Jake and Cassie, burned in Visser One's SUV.
Ax missing.
My mother. . .
I could run away. Leave town. Never come back. I had the powers. I could get by. I could go to Hollywood. Or France. Somewhere.
French Marco. I liked it. Were the Yeerks in
136 France? I didn't care. I wouldn't pay any attention to them.
"Oh, God," I moaned. I put my face in my hands.
«Marco! You are very badly located!»
My head snapped up. I looked around, confused, till I saw the northern harrier floating on the slight breeze.
"Ax?" I said, not that he could hear me.
«Marco, a column of Hork-Bajir and Taxxons is coming up the opposite side of this ridge. In approximately two of your minutes they will be able to see you.»
"They're not my minutes, you alien nitwit, they're everyone's minutes!"
But I was busy morphing. Not to osprey again. Wings were of diminishing usefulness now. But I still needed to be able to stay out in front of humans, Hork-Bajir, and whatever strange thing Visser Three had become.
Time for the goat.
Ax had floated lower. He kept to the air, but he could hear me now.
«l discern that the arrival of these additional forces so early in the plan may have created an imbalance that will affect our plans in a negative way,» Ax said.
"Gee, do you think?!" I yelled.
«We need reinforcements.»
137 "You know some private army you can call, 'cause if you do, now would be the time!" I yelled.
It was sarcastic. I didn't expect him to take me seriously. But before I could object, Ax had caught the breeze and was heading downhill, letting gravity give him speed.
"What the... What are you doing?" I screamed.
Insane! I'd found Ax and lost him within a minute!
"Okay, okay, get a grip," I told myself shakily. "Get a grip. Okay. Figure it out. Back to Rachel and Tobias and Visser One. The only thing to do. Morph. Come on, Marco, focus!"
I focused on the memory of the big mountain goat, asleep in its safe little zoo habitat.
Stupid, but I was ticked at that goat.
Morphing is never logical, never neat and clean and orderly. The changes don't necessarily start at the head and move on to the toes, though they can. And this time, they did.
Sprooot!
Two sharp, daggerlike black horns sprouted from the top of my head.
I felt an itchiness on my face. I raised my hand and felt a long, rather soft white beard beneath my chin.
The five toes on each of my feet melded together
138 to form two big padded toes, toes that could spread to help the mountain goat keep its balance on snowy, rocky slopes.
White fur began to grow up my legs, which were becoming the stocky, sturdy back legs of the goat. Over the soft, fluffy fur grew coarser hair, protection against wind and rain.
Suddenly, I tipped forward. I fell on my hands, now also split hooves with rough pads underneath.
Screeeesh!
My small human shoulders heaved upward into the powerful, shaggy shoulders of the almost three-hundred-pound male mountain goat.
I felt the mountain goat's mind merge within my own. But I wasn't interested in fighting it. The goat wanted to climb, and so did I.
I bounded off across the sparse, rocky soil. Up, up, straight up.
The power in my legs was incredible! I wasn't climbing against the pull of gravity. Gravity was irrelevant! It didn't exist!
Up through the trees. Leaping easily, playfully over boulders that would have taken a human five minutes to clamber cautiously over.
My legs were pile drivers. I was on pogo sticks, just bouncing, bounding, springing, practically flying.
I spotted and smelled the Hork-Bajir as they
139 crested the ridge, but who cared? They'd never get me. This mountain was mine. These rocks belonged to me!
Up and up, pulling effortlessly away from the Hork-Bajir, I drew level with Visser One and my two friends. They had deployed ropes and pitons now. Visser One was being pushed and hauled like a sack of potatoes.
They climbed the easier path. I took a much harder way. A way with no trail, with scrappy miniature trees blocking my way, with no visible footholds, with tumbling gravel and crumbling rocks.
I went the way that no human climber, no expert rock climber armed with every piece of equipment could have climbed in under half a day.
It was an escalator to me.
My eyes spotted every minuscule crevice. My hooves caught every crack. I hauled three hundred pounds of goat up a sheer wall so easily that I might have been Tinkerbell floating upward on magic dust.
I passed Visser One.
Rachel spotted me.
«Marco?»
«Who else?»
«Yeah. Good luck, okay?»
«No problem-o, Xena,» I said.
140 27
I waited atop the mountain, alone. King of the world.
From the peak, the back side of the mountain extended almost flat toward the west. All I saw was a long slope that extended perhaps a quarter of a mile before seeming to be broken by the spine of a ridge.
We had come up the east face. A nearly sheer drop. The southeast and northeast were no better - sheer cliffs.
A fatal fall in three directions.
A fatal fall for a human. Or human-Controller.
Nothing that looked remotely like a hidden valley. Nothing that looked remotely like a secret Hork-Bajir colony.
141 But then, that was to be expected.
My mother's face appeared very suddenly above the rocks to the east. She was being pushed up from beneath. She clambered up, clearly exhausted.
For a while she just lay flat on her back, gasping and coughing. Rachel and Tobias rose up behind her.
Then she rolled over and with sheer willpower made her body stand.
Once again I felt that strange pride. Even with Rachel and Tobias to help, it was an amazing accomplishment climbing this peak.
A fitting end. The last exertion, the last effort.
So easy for me now. I could throw my three hundred pounds forward, lower my head, slam into her, send her flying, arms windmilling helplessly as she fell and fell and fell . . .
The Visser would die.
His helpless host, my mother, as well.
"Andalite?" she panted.
«0f course,» I said. Be so careful, Marco, I warned myself. This was to be Jake's role. He was to talk to her. She can't know who you are.
But what did it matter now? It was over. It would end here.
It would matter because knowing at last that we had tricked her, she might call my name. She might say "Marco."
142 "Marco! Don't let them kill me, Marco!"
I shuddered.
I was lost. Her life would end here. So would mine, I now knew. How could I live? How could I live, knowing?
"Well, Andalite or human, or whatever you are behind that morph, you'd better know one thing: My loyal forces fill the sky! Betray me and you'll be blasted apart!"
«We have a deal,» 1 said blandly. «Visser Three will soon join us. He will be alone, or nearly alone.»
"The Hork-Bajir colony. I don't see any colony!"
«Erek,» I said privately, «l hope you're here, dude.» Then, in open thought-speak, «Not to get all Prince of Egypt on you, but... Behold!»
The ground of the western slope shimmered. Then it disappeared. Visser One actually jumped ba
ck. The valley appeared just before her feet.
"Hork-Bajir home," Rachel said, still playing her part.
Below us, beneath impossibly steep cliff walls, a lush valley teemed with free Hork-Bajir.
I watched the sick, eager smile spread across my mother's beautiful face as Visser One peered into the valley below.
Several young Hork-Bajir swung through the trees, playing a game of tag. Adult Hork-Bajir
144 stripped bark from the trunks of the tall pines. I counted at least forty or fifty Hork-Bajir going about their daily routine.
«0kay, we fulfilled our end of the bargain,» I muttered. «Now it's up to Visser Three.»
She smiled, right at me. "I know you. I know you, don't I?"
«l am an Andalite warrior. That's all you need to know.»
"No. Andalites don't make jokes. Let alone human popular culture references. No, you're a human. And . . ." She searched her memory, rolling her eyes up. "Someone I knew, once. Long ago, maybe. But someone I knew."
143
CHAPTER 28
I froze. Stiff. Still.
I wanted her to say my name.
I'd given myself away. Deliberately. I wanted her to say my name. I wanted her to call out to me, to say, "Marco, I love you, I miss you, I'm still your-"
Oh, God, I had messed up. The plan, I'd ruined it, just to hear her say my name. I'd been fooling myself. I couldn't do it.
«It's okay, Marco,» a gentle voice said. But not my mom. Rachel. «It's okay, man. It's okay.»
Then, everything happened at once.
Above the lip of the mountaintop he rose, grotesque, half sky-blue, half the color of bare rock.
145 Visser Three climbed up.
«Well, well, well,» he said. «What's this? Visser One perched on the edge of a free Hork-Bajir colony? Chatting amiably with two free Hork-Bajir and, unless I miss my guess, an Andalite?»
She spun to face him. No fear. "It's over, you incompetent fraud! My loyal ships are above us."
«So are mine,» Visser Three hissed. «And they will blow your ships from the sky!»
"So typical of you. You think only of brute violence. Fool. My ships are making a sensor record. They have recorded this valley, this colony of free Hork-Bajir! What do you think the Council of Thirteen will say when they see it?"
Visser Three showed no emotion. Most likely he couldn't.
Visser One reached into her backpack. Out came not a weapon but what looked a bit like a cell phone.
"This is Visser One," she said. "Attack!"
«Yes, by all means, attack me,» Visser Three said with a laugh. «My ships, too, are making a sensor record. A record of the traitor, the former Visser One firing on loyal Yeerks!»
Suddenly, the sky overhead seemed to part, like a cloth being torn at the seam, and there appeared a ship like none I had ever seen.
Huge! Larger than Visser Three's Blade ship.
146 It had eight pods arranged around a central, cylindrical core. Four massive engines bunched at the rear, blazing blue fire.
«A Nova-class Empire ship?» Visser Three gasped.
Just then, streaking out of the west, came a stream of smaller ships, Visser Three's Bug fighters. Visser One whirled to watch them, a swarm moving quickly across the back of the mountain range. Among them, a giant battle-ax: the Blade ship of Visser Three.
The squadrons flew low over the colony.
"Visser Three!" my mother yelled. "You are under arrest for criminal incompetence!"
«Traitor!» Visser Three roared.
He lunged, front claws snapping.
Visser One drew a Dracon beam.
Visser Three's Bug fighters sped toward Visser One's descending armada. The battle erupted. The sky was ripped by massive Dracon cannon firing, as Bug fighters and the Blade ship circled around Visser One's Empire ship.
Visser One fired.
Visser Three sliced.
«Aaaarrgghh!»
A sizzling hole appeared in Visser Three's color-shifting shell.
My mother screamed. She staggered and fell. Her clothes were stained red.
147 «NOOOO!» I cried. I leaped. Leaped at Visser Three, head down, horns ready.
«Marco! Stop!» Rachel cried. «It's the plan! It has to happen! It has to happen! She has to-»
«IMOOOOOO!» I slammed into the chameleon morph. It jerked back. Visser Three staggered. Three legs crumpled.
Visser One fired.
The shot missed Visser Three. It hit me.
Searing pain. There was a neat semicircle of flesh gone from my haunch. I staggered, blinded and disoriented by the pain.
"Destroy the colony! The colony!" my mother screamed into her communicator. "Don't fire on Visser Three's ships! The colony! Kill them all! Kill them all!"
«Pathetic attempt. You can't hope to conceal your treason,» Visser Three said.
TSEEEEEEW! TSEEEEEEW!
Dracon cannon were firing from the sky above. The Empire ship was blasting the ground. Firing at what they thought was a colony of free Hork-Bajir.
A hologram.
Erek the Chee had created the illusion. And now, as the Yeerks fired, he created the illusion of Hork-Bajir burning, falling, dying.
But the laws of physics could not be denied.
148 The massive Dracon energies were not descending deep into a valley. They were hitting the mountain peak, only a hundred feet from us.
CRRRRRRR-ACK!
The ground shuddered.
And suddenly, the ground was falling away. A crack in the very rock itself.
A huge fissure opened up.
I staggered to my feet, crippled by the pain of my wound.
The fissure had separated us. Visser Three, and now an army of rushing, eager Hork-Bajir-Controllers on one side. Rachel and Tobias trapped there with them.
I was on the other side of the fissure. So was Visser One. My mother. We were alone.
She stood with her back to the cliff, raging.
"Too late, Visser Three! Too late to stop me!" Then, calling into her communicator, "Detach a fighter to get me off this rock!"
Rachel and Tobias were back against their own dead drop. Hork-Bajir hemmed them in, attacking relentlessly.
In seconds, it would be over.
All over. My plan. Done. Failed. Rachel and Tobias would die. Visser Three would live. And Visser One?
Out of the corner of my eye I saw a Bug fighter roaring out of the sky, rocketing down toward us.
149 I turned to face her. Visser One. The leader of the initial invasion of Earth.
She stared at me. She moved to aim the weapon at me.
I lowered my head and felt the power in my legs.
It would be a hundred-foot drop.
«l love you,» I whispered. And then, I lunged.
"The boy!" she whispered, amazed. "It's the boy!"
150 29
I lunged.
The Dracon beam moved. Her finger tightened.
Too slow. She was too slow. I would hit her a split second before she could fire. I would hit her with all the power I possessed and she would fly backward into emptiness and -
RRRRROOOOOAAAARRR!
A flash of orange and black. It appeared over the lip of the cliff.
So fast!
The tiger hit me. Claws retracted, it hit me in my side and knocked me off my feet.
Spinning, I saw the Dracon weapon aimed right at me, following me, ready to fire.
151 And then, from the sky a bird dropped, wings folded back, talons out. It slashed at Visser One's face.
"Aaaarrggh!" she cried.
She clutched at bloody tracks on her cheeks.
She staggered back.
«Mom!» I cried.
For a horrible long moment she teetered on the edge, fighting gravity. I leaped up, racing to grab her, pull her back, somehow, save her.
But the tiger wrapped a massive arm around me and held me down.
She fell. Disappeared from sight.
«No! No! No!» I cried.
«Hang on, Marco,» Jake said. «Hang on, man. Hang on, man.»
He held me that way, pinned down. The strength of his tiger morph made my own strength insignificant.
«Hang on, Marco. Hang on, man.»
Dimly, as though I was watching it on an out-of-focus TV, I was aware that battle raged on the opposite peak.
I knew that more Hork-Bajir had joined the battle. I knew that an Andalite was leading them. That they were pushing back the tide of the Visser's troops.
The free Hork-Bajir. Ax had brought them from the real colony, miles away.
152 In the sky a battle raged between the Empire ship and the Blade ship with its fighters. Not my problem anymore.
Nothing was my problem. All I had to do was listen to the voice in my head saying, «Hold on, Marco. Hold on, man. Hold on.»
153 30
I stayed in bed for most of the next week. Sick. At least that's what I told my dad.
I lay there staring at soap operas and Jerry Springer and old movies.
I didn't know how I'd gotten down off that mountain or made it home. I was gone during all that. Gone to a place in my head.
Jake came and saw me. He told me how Cassie had seen Visser Three's limo pulling in. They'd realized they were trapped. They'd gone at emergency speed back to roach morphs.
They figured nothing was going to kill a roach.
Cassie had been all the way into morph before Visser Three fried the car. Jake had only been
154 halfway morphed. He'd been hurt, burned, unconscious.
Cassie had stayed to care for him, bringing him back to consciousness at the last minute. Just in time to demorph.
Jake had been seconds away from a lifetime trapped as something half roach, half human.
I listened to what he had to say. Listened to how Visser Three had escaped. How the free Hork-Bajir had lost five of their people in the battle.
I didn't care.
He went away and I flipped the channels with my remote control.
Two more days passed and Rachel came to see me. She sat in my chair and put her feet up on my desk.
"There's no body," she announced.
"What?" I asked distractedly. I flipped through a dozen more channels.
"Visser One. Your mother. I searched. In eagle morph. There's no body."
I felt my insides tighten.
"The Yeerks cleaned up their mess. Destroyed the evidence."
She shook her head. "No. The Yeerks Draconed the corpses. There are burn marks all over that hill. But nothing down where your mother fell."