Текст книги "Animorphs - 15 - The Escape"

Автор книги: Katherine Alice Applegate

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 6 страниц)

Something was happening to my back. I felt

something growing there, getting larger. It was building itself out of my melting bones.

I reached behind me with my still-human fingers and touched something triangular. I was growing a dorsal fin!

I felt the inside of my mouth itching. Itching amazingly, almost like teething pain.

Shark's teeth were filling my mouth.

Then . , .

"Hey, wuss, get outta the pool!"

There was a loud splash, then another. I spun around. Two heads coming toward me. Two sets of powerful arms churning the water.

Drake and Woo. Two total jerks. Two abject, total bullies. They were also great divers for the school team. At least Drake was. Woo was a complete burnout. He had the I.Q. of cheese.

"Get out of the pool, punk!" Woo said.

"Don't make us kick your butt, Marco-roni," Drake added.

I should have been afraid of them. But I was only afraid they might dive beneath the surface. If they went down there they'd see that I wasn't exactly normal. But from the surface they'd probably just think my ultra-long legs and toes were a distortion.

I started to reverse the morph. I'd been an idiot! I'd left myself open for something like this. Jake would kill me. If he found out. I demorphed as fast as I could. I felt my toes lose contact with the pool bottom.

Then Woo lay back in the water, raised one leg, and kicked me square in the chest with his foot.

I didn't see it coming. Couldn't dodge the blow.

"Ooomph!" The air burst from my lungs. I clutched at my chest.

"Told you to step off," Drake said. "Now we're going to have to stomp you for not having any respect. Unless you want to get your skinny hinder out of the pool."

Drake was giving me a chance to get away. All I had to do was turn around and leave. That was it.

"Yeah, run home to your mommy, Marco-roni," Woo said.

"He can't," Drake said, with a touch of normal humanity in his voice.

"His mom's dead."

"Oh, boo hoo," Woo sneered. "Oh, boo hoo, boo hoo." He made a little gesture like he was wiping tears out of his eyes. "His mother probably just ran off with some dude."

All I had to do was walk away. And all I did was to stare at Woo's throat.

I could see the arteries there. The ones that were pulsating on either side of Woo's Adam's apple.

"What are you looking at?" Woo demanded. "You're dead, man, eyeballing me like that."

But I noticed that Woo didn't move toward me. I wanted him to move toward me. I wanted him to.

"What's the matter with his eyes?" Drake asked. "Look at his eyes, man."

"Marco?" It was Jake's voice.

I saw the expression on Woo's face change. He was looking past me now. I heard footsteps on the tile.

"What's up, Marco?" Jake asked, trying to sound casual.

"Ah, isn't that sweet?" Drake said. "Big Jake is here to rescue little Marco-roni."

I swung my heard fiercely toward Jake. I grimaced, baring my teeth. "I thon't neeth you help."

The shark's teeth that filled my mouth distorted my speech. I saw Jake's eyes flare in surprise. Then wary concern.

"Let it go, Marco," Jake said.

I turned back toward Woo. I could still see the pulsing blood just below the skin of Woo's neck. It would be so easy . . .

"He dithed my mom," I said.

"He's not the one responsible for your mother," Jake said. "Don't punish him for the sins of someone else."

I don't know what the two bullies thought of this exchange. I just know they stayed silent. Woo's eyes kept darting from me to Jake. He was confused and worried. Bullies aren't used to hearing their victims talking and acting like they have all the power. Or maybe he didn't like the way I was still staring at his neck.

"Save it for the real bad guys, Marco," Jake said.

I let the rest of my shark morph go. I felt the itching in my mouth as my normal teeth replaced the killing shark teeth.

I climbed out of the pool.

"What's the matter with you?" Jake demanded once we were out of there.

I shrugged and forced a smile. "Not a thing, Jake. I guess Woo just looked a little like a fish to me. He look like a fish to you? He does to me."

Not even slightly funny. But it was the best I could do. Jake gave me a long look.

"Maybe you'd better sit out this next mission, Marco."

I laughed. "Jake, you'd have to kill me to keep me away from that island."

Zlaturday morning, we flew out to the same narrow beach on Royan Island. Now that we knew for sure that the Yeerks were there, just under the water, we were very careful.

But Jake still had time to pull me aside over by a scraggly, twisted tree and ask me if I was all right.

"Sure. Why wouldn't I be all right?"

"Because if you were all right, you'd be busy telling everyone how insane this is and how we're all gonna die. You're weirding everyone out, being so tense."

I just stared at him. "You're telling me it's more relaxing for everyone if I act like we're all going to die?"

"It's what they expect from you," Jake said.

"Well, I'll try harder to be entertaining," I said sarcastically.

Jake rolled his eyes. Then he took a quick, cautious glance around. The others were all down on the sand, trying not to notice that Jake and I were having some big heart-to-heart.

Great. Rachel probably thought I was scared and Jake had to give me a pep talk. I still stung from that crack of hers about my being scared of sharks.

"Look, Marco, we're going into a possible battle down there," Jake said, jerking his head toward the water. "Maybe it's time you told the others what's going on with you."

"Nothing is going on with me."

"Marco, your mother is down there."

I flinched. I had been trying really hard not to think about that fact.

"How is it going to help the others if I tell them maybe I have my own problems going on here?"

Jake looked surprised. "Marco, I wasn't thinking about it helping the others. I thought it might help you."

I shook my head violently. "No. It doesn't help me to have people pitying me. You know? I went through like a year of pity after my mom died. After she supposedly died. I don't like pity.

Pity makes you feel small and weak. I'd rather have someone hate me than pity me."

Jake sighed. "No one hates you."

"But they would pity me."

Jake didn't have an answer to that.

"Hey, are we doing this?" Rachel called over to us. "Or are you two going to stand there all day yapping?"

"We are doing this," I said forcefully. "But I'll tell you right now, this whole thing is insane. Insane! Morphing sharks to infiltrate some underwater Yeerk complex? What has happened to our lives?"

As Jake and I walked back to the others I muttered, "Happy now?"

"Okay," Jake said to everyone. "Ready?"

"I've been ready," Rachel grumbled.

"Everyone remember, this is a new morph," Cassie pointed out. "New instincts to deal with. Be prepared."

See, when you first morph an animal, that animal consciousness can run right over your human mind. It can seize control. And you can't always tell which morphs will be bad. Probably the worst ever were ants.

We waded into the water. All except Tobias, who once again rode on Rachel's shoulder. Four humans, a bird, and an Andalite.

"We're a scruffy, weird-looking bunch, aren't we?" I said.

"And short," Rachel said with a sweetly poisoned smile. "Or at least some of us are."

"We'll all have the same-sized dorsal fin in a few minutes, Mighty Xena," I said to her.

Rachel laughed. She pretends to hate it when I call her Xena: Warrior Princess. But I know she's flattered by it.

"Hey, Tobias," I said. "You realize there are no mice underwater, right?"

See, I was doing my job. Playing my part within the group. Teasing.

Joking. Exaggerating. That was my role. Like Jake had pointed out: A Marco not making jokes just worries people.

I waded into the surf. It was rougher than it had been the week before.

Two and three foot waves were crashing and boiling around me. The sky was darker, grayer.

I tried to put all my problems out of my mind. I tried to wash away the image of my mother. I remembered her two different ways. As the mom I'd always known. And now, as Visser One, the Controller who had arranged to let us escape from captivity in the Yeerk Pool ship, just to embarrass her nemesis, Visser Three.

I tried to shove both images aside. But as I felt the morph begin, I thought, I'm coming to

save you, Mom. And I also thought, I'm coming to destroy you, Visser One.

The morph began differently than it had during my partial morph in the pool. This time it was my skin that changed first.

Dolphins have skin like gray rubber or latex. Sharks have skin like fine-grained sandpaper. Shark skin can leave human skin bloody just by rubbing against it. It's actually made up of millions of denticles.

Those are tiny, mutated teeth. Sharks are coated with tiny teeth.

As I watched, my tanned arms turned gray. My legs turned gray. My chest and shoulders, all gray.

My feet were twisting together weirdly, as if they were a pair of straws I was braiding. When a wave rolled into me, I lost balance and went backward into the water.

My hand scraped along the bottom. When I looked at it, I realized I'd cut myself on a shell. A few drops of my own blood dribbled into the saltwater.

But I had other things to worry about. Besides, when I demorphed, the cut would be gone.

When I tried to stand back up, I realized my legs were gone. I had a tail now, made of gracefully swooping triangles.

Everything on a shark is triangles. Two elongated, joined triangles make the tail. Triangles form the dorsal fins. And hard white serrated triangles fill the mouth with the weapons of destruction.

I used my arms to windmill the water and keep my head up. In flashes between waves I saw the others. A hideous Rachel, with a shark mouth and blond hair; an awesome Ax, with Andalite stalk eyes rising from the bulging hammer's head; Tobias, with feathers melting into gray sandpaper. Not even Cassie could make this morph pretty.

I felt the teeth growing, replacing my own pathetic human teeth. And at the same time, my eyes were moving. They were rotating out to the sides of my head. I lost the ability to focus and kept trying to aim my eyes, to see in three dimensions like I can normally. But my eyes were moving too fast, too far. All I could see was a blur of water and eerie faces.

The hammerhead didn't grow out of the side of my head. It grew out of the front. Like pillars of flesh were growing beneath my eyeballs, then taking those eyes out to the side.

My arms shriveled and became sharp fins. I was entirely underwater now.

Just in time, my lungs collapsed into nothing and slits like open wounds formed where my neck had been.

I had gills. And shark's teeth. And I had shark's eyes.

But I still had not felt the shark's mind. Not until I was completely in the water and began to move. Only then did I feel the shark's mind, its instincts, come bubbling up through my own human awareness.

It was the movement that set it off. See, sharks cannot be still. If a shark stops moving, he dies. A shark is movement. Restless, relentless, eternal movement.

I felt my fear leave me.

I felt my anger leave as well.

My every emotion and feeling simply lifted away. And I was glad. Because now I was clear. Now I saw the world with perfect simplicity. Perfect understanding.

The world, you see, is nothing but prey. And I was nothing but hunger.

There was nothing else. No mother or father, no fear or joy, no worry.

Hunger. Prey. Hunger. Prey.

I turned away from the shore and swam out to sea. And then, I stopped.

The last vestiges of my human mind were swept aside.

The shark sensed blood.

Sharks had been swimming Earth's oceans for hundreds of millions of years already when the ancestors of Homo sapiens were still trying to figure out how to peel a banana.

People will tell you, "Oh, you don't need to be afraid of sharks. They have more reason to fear humans than humans have to fear sharks."

True. Humans kill far more sharks than sharks kill humans. Will that fact make you feel any better if a shark chomps you in two at the waist?

Probably not.

Sharks are killing machines. Mostly they kill fish. In some parts of the world they kill seals. They kill dolphins. They kill whales, when they can manage it. And they kill humans. At least some species do: the great white, the tiger shark . . . and the hammerhead.

This was the killing machine I had become. Utterly without fear. Utterly without emotion. A mind with no room for anything else but killing.

There was nothing playful, like you'd find with a lion. Nothing in the shark that cared about family or children. No sense of belonging. Just a solitary creature of sharp, cutting triangles. A restless, ever-moving thing, ever questing after blood.

A mind as cold, as sharp, as deadly as a polished-steel knife blade.

That was the mind that gathered my confused human consciousness up and swept it along in the endless search for something to kill and eat.

The shark turned toward the scent of blood. My long tail pushed lazily at the water. My hammerhead worked like a diving plane to let me turn this way and that. My vision was surprisingly good. Almost as good as human vision.

I could hear. And I could feel other senses that were unlike anything human. When fish passed close by, I felt a tingling from their electrical current. And at some deep, hard-to-grasp level, I realized I could sense the very magnetic field of planet Earth. I knew north and south without knowing the words.

But mostly, I could smell. I could smell the water as I sucked it in, relentlessly sampling. And right now, I could smell blood.

I was aware of the others nearby. I knew they were sharks like me. But I didn't care. I was on the trail of blood.

I followed the scent of the blood. No more than a few drops of blood, a thin, wispy trail diluted in billions of gallons of surging seawater, but I smelled it.

I followed the scent through the water. If the scent was stronger in my left nostril, I veered left. If it was stronger on my right, I veered right. It would lead me to prey. It would lead me to food. The blood trail had come from very close by! I could sense it, and a cold excitement seized me.

Blood! A wounded animal! Prey!

But as I turned and turned again, circling back toward more shallow water, I became frustrated. Where was it? Where was the bleeding creature? Where was my prey?

The others circled nearby. One of them brushed against me, sandpaper on sandpaper. They were seeking it, too. The bleeding prey whose scent filled our heads.

Where was it?

The shark brain was confused, uncertain. And in that moment of confusion and uncertainty, the

steel mind of the shark left a slight crack. Enough of a crack.

Enough for my human brain to call up the picture of a human hand, bleeding from a small cut.

My hand! My hand. The human named Marco.

"0h, my God!" I yelled in thought-speak. "lt was me! It's my blood!

That's my own blood!"

The others didn't care. They continued to turn in ever tighter circles, looking, searching, marauding for the source of the blood.

"Jake! Jake! Shake it off, man. The shark has you. Jake, come on, man.

Get on top of it. Cassie! Rachel. Ax. Tobias. All of you. It's the shark instincts. Fight them. That was my blood."

It took a few minutes before we were all back to being ourselves. Tobias dealt with it easiest. I guess that's not a surprise. He's a predator normally. Maybe the shark mind and the hawk mind aren't so different.

Ax handled it well, too. Not that Andalites are sharklike. It was mostly that he'd morphed a shark already.

"Yikes," Cassie said, laughing nervously. "Kind of single-minded, aren't they?"

"No one else bleed," Rachel said. "l'll be hungry for hours." We were a little shaken up. We'd gotten cocky

about being able to control animal morphs. But the shark was different. I think at some level, at the most basic survival level, that primitive shark brain was actually superior to our own human brain.

It knew what it wanted. And there is a terrible strength in knowing what you want and having no doubts.

We swam around the island, back toward the holographically concealed underwater facility. This time we expected to be able to pass right by the supersharks who had almost taken us out when we'd been in dolphin morph.

We swam right through what looked exactly like seabed, right up to the facility. With dead shark eyes I stared through the portholes. The one that opened onto a busy cubicle area. And the other one. The one that looked into a more private room.

The guard sharks swam right past and around us, never paying the slightest attention.

"That was easy," Rachel said. "Let's go ahead and do this."

"Don't forget: The Leerans are psychic at close range," Ax warned.

"Whatever we do, we have to stay clear of them." This was the point where I'd normally make a joke. But just then I saw a woman entering the

private office. She was distorted by the convex glass, by the water, and by my own water-oriented shark's eyes.

But I knew her.

And I forgot to find something funny to say.

"l low what?" Tobias wondered. "We got past the guard sharks."

"Now I guess we go take a look inside," Jake said. He didn't sound too enthusiastic about the idea.

"Two of the three big hatches are open," Rachel observed. "Eenie, meenie, minie, moe?"

"Heads or tails?" I suggested.

"0ne potato, two potato?" Cassie said.

"What do these things mean?" Ax asked.

"These are highly advanced human methods for making choices," I said.

"How about the middle door?"

"Middle door," Jake agreed.

We swam toward the middle door. From a distance it was big. Up close it was even bigger. It was obviously big enough for the submarine to enter through.

From the outside the tunnel inside looked dark, but once away from the filtered green sunlight from above, we could see that there were lights on inside the tunnel.

We swam around, taking our time and trying to look casual. The open door and short tunnel led to a rectangular pool. A boat dock, obviously.

Probably used by the submarine. There were other hammerheads there, too.

But still they ignored us.

I rose to the surface, letting my dorsal fin slice its way into the air.

I rolled to one side, and raised my left eye above the water. Shark eyes are not made for seeing through atmosphere, but I could still see well enough. I saw a wall of corrugated steel that formed the rectangular boat dock we were in. But other than that I could only look straight up at the rafters overhead.

"We're not going to see much more staying in shark morph," Rachel said.

"We need to get out and look around."

"As what?" Jake asked. "We'd need something that fit in here. Something these Controllers wouldn't notice. But something with decent senses."

"F!ies," Cassie suggested. "Everyone except Tobias has a fly morph."

"0h, great. I get left out again," Tobias complained.

"l think the bad guys might notice a red-tailed hawk flying around in their underwater facility I said. "Although there are probably rats infesting this place, too, so the Controllers may appreciate your being here to eat their pests."

"We'd have to morph back to human under-water Jake pointed out. "Then morph to fly. All without drowning."

Scr-EET! Scr-EET! Scr-EET!

"What's that?"

"An alarm! Oh, man. They know we're here!"

Suddenly a rush of hammerheads was coming straight for us. I saw them first as dark shadows in the water. They loomed larger and larger. We turned to face them. But it was impossible. There had to be fifty of them!

On they came, whipping the water with their long tails.

Then . . . they swam past. They kept swimming for the far end of the dock. And now we could distinctly hear the sound of a mechanized door opening.

WHRRREEEEEEE!

"Those are definitely not normal sharks," Cassiesaid.

"Let's follow them," Rachel said. "They may lead us where we need to go."

"Yeah, or they might lead us right into where they make the new Oscar Mayer Shark-meat Lunchables," I said. "Hammerhead slices, American cheese, crackers, and a cookie."

We went after the sharks. We followed them to the far end of the dock. A new door had opened. There was actually a line of sharks waiting to get in. The pathway narrowed till soon we were single file.

"l'm starting to think Marco was right," Tobias said. "This sure feels like some kind of shark slaughterhouses

"l don't think so," Cassie said. "l'll bet this is something more medical. Besides, we'd smell blood if the other sharks were getting hurt."

"Unless they're getting boiled alive," I said. "Boiled and canned, and in one process. Then it's Chicken of the Sea shark meat." Suddenly I heard Cassie yell, "Ahhh!"

She was right in front of me. And before I could react, I knew why she had yelled. Steel claws reached out from each side and grabbed me just behind my hammer head. The claws held me tightly, but not painfully. I was drawn upward till I was vertical. I was out of the water. My gills gasped in the air. My body writhed in panic.

I saw a line of us. A conveyor belt of hammerhead sharks, all hanging vertically. There were

human-Controllers and Hork-Bajir manning equipment boards and looking totally uninterested.

We turned a corner into a second room and up rose a robot arm festooned with tools whose purpose I couldn't even guess. The robot arm arced toward the shark two spaces ahead of Cassie. From out of nowhere a long, thick needle appeared. It plunged into the back of the shark's head.

"What the ... We have to get outta here!" I cried.

But there was no time. The conveyor belt kept moving. Too fast!

The robot arm moved with machine precision. It plunged the needle into the back of Cassie's head.

"lt's okay," Cassie managed to gasp. "l think it was just an immunization. Maybe."

But what came next was not okay. The robot arm hesitated. It popped out a sort of meta! detector or something and moved it over Cassie's shark head. Then it extruded a drill.

Not like a dental drill. Like a drill you'd use to make holes in wood.

The drill bit spun and it plunged.

"What was that?!" Cassie cried in alarm.

The drill bit withdrew. But a bright steel probe lanced into the hole.

In it poked, then

withdrew. A wisp of smoke curled away from the hole as it was cauterized by a green laser beam.

"Cassie! Are you okay?" Jake yelled.

"Uh . . . yeah. I guess so."

And then it was my turn. There was a sharp prick of pain, but sharks don't care about pain.

The drill withdrew. And seconds later, I was dropped into saltwater. In fact, I quickly realized, I was back in the same boat dock I'd been in before. There were other hammerheads all around me. My friends were being dropped practically on top of me.

"What was thata\ about?" Tobias asked.

"They injected us all with something," Cassie said. "Right into our brains. But... oh. Oh! Aaaarrggghhh!"

It hit me a few seconds later. How can I describe the pain? You know how I said sharks don't care about pain? Well, this wasn't any pain that any shark had endured. I felt my brain exploding. Like some mad animal was trapped inside my head and trying to claw its way out.

I screamed. "Aaaahhhhh! Oh, oh, oh! Stop it!"

And then, through the water, a sound reverberated. Like a WHOOO-WHOOO-WHOOO.

The pain stopped. In its place came a wave of pleasure. It was like the taste of prey in my shark mouth: the ultimate shark pleasure.

"What is happening?" Ax demanded.

"l don't know, but it's kind of nice."

Then, the weirdest thing ... I felt the shark mind, that simple killing-machine mind, seem to open up. The shark mind looked out through its eyes, and for the first time ever, noticed things that had nothing to do with finding prey.

The shark eyes noticed the pattern of the corrugated steel that formed the dock. The shark sense of smell took note of scents like oil and rust and seaweed that had nothing to do with killing and eating.

"This sounds insane," I said, "but I think this shark is getting srnarter."

"Like the sharks that attacked us," Rachel agreed.

"My shark brain just wondered," Cassie said, sounding amazed. "lt wondered whether there would be prey later."

"That sounds sharklike," Jake said.

"No!" Cassie yelled excitedly. "Sharks don't "wonder." Sharks can't even form the concept of a future, let alone wonder about it. It's completely impossible!"

"So what does it mean?" Tobias asked.

Cassie answered. "!t's the Yeerks. They've altered these brains. That's why the sharks were able to work together the other time. The Yeerks are mutating these shark brains. We just got the first treatments

"Why?" Rachel wondered.

Ax said, "There's only one reason to alter the physiology of these brains. To make it possible for the Yeerks to enter them. The natural shark brain is too small, too simplistic for the Yeerks to control. They are mutating the sharks to make them capable of being made into Controllers. They will need to add ear canals as well. So that the Yeerks can enter and leave the brain."

"A new version of Hork-Bajir," I said. "That's it! The Yeerks want water-going Hork-Bajir. They need dangerous, tough, deadly shock-troops that can go where Hork-Bajir can't: in the water. What better soldier than a s/7a/7r-Controller, if you need troops in an underwater environment?"

"Yes," Tobias agreed grimly. "And what worse nightmare for any peaceful species to face?"

"We have to find out more," Jake said. "lt's time to get out of the water and go look around in this place."

It was going to be hard and dangerous. We had to return to human form.

Then morph again. All in the water. Without being seen, or drowning.

I was relieved to be getting out of the shark morph. I hated sharks, I'd decided. I didn't want to be one anymore. Let alone a sort of super, self-aware, thinking shark.

I was happy when my legs reappeared. When my fins became hands, when my teeth ground and itched away and became the tiny, blunt, pitifully weak human teeth.

But I knew I'd never hold my breath clear into

a new morph. I poked my head above the surface and looked around with human eyes for the first time. The others popped up nearby. Tobias looked like a drowned rat. He stood on Rachel's head.

There was a dark ceiling high overhead. And I could hear machinery. But I saw no humans or Hork-Bajir or Taxxons standing around the dock. Maybe they were all busy back in that office room we'd seen through the portholes.

"Looks kind of empty," I whispered to Jake.

"Yeah. We'd better be careful, though. Morph here in the water. It won't be any problem for the fly, I don't think."

He was right. The water didn't bother the fly morph. Something else did.

I focused on the fly DNA within me, and I began to shrink. I had done the fly morph several times before, so I was prepared for the way the spiky legs grew out of my chest. The way all my internal organs melted away, replaced by simpler insect organs. The way my mouth and nose sprouted out to become a horrible, long proboscis.

I was in the water, breathing air from a bubble, when it began. I realized my head was exploding. And that was not just an expression.

"Aaaahhh! Aaaahhh!" I screamed. My head was still maybe two inches wide, almost entirely

fly, with only a few shreds of human left. But I stopped the morph instantly.

I stared around me with eyes more fly than human. The watery world was a shattered mirror of images. The fly's compound eyes saw with a thousand tiny, irregular, bewildering TV sets, each tuned to a slightly different channel. And because we were underwater, I saw even less than usual.

But then, by luck, Rachel drifted near. Just within range.

Seeing a morph is always horrifying. I mean, we get used to it, but it never stops being creepy beyond belief. And nothing is creepier than watching a human being turn into a fly. Trust me, that is enough fuel to keep you in nightmares the rest of your life.

But what I had just seen, floating past me in the water, was worse.

"Everyone, stop morphing! Stop now!" I yelled, just as the others all started groaning in agony.

"What is it?" Ax asked. "l am experiencing a terrible pain."

"l'm not surprised. Demorph! They put something in us."

"What are you talking about?" Rachel asked.

"l mean when the Yeerks drilled into us, they

left something inside! When we shrank to fly size, this thing, this whatever it is, was too big! Our fly bodies were smaller than the thing inside us. We'd have killed ourselves."

"What did it look like?" Tobias asked.

I surfaced again, human once more. "I couldn't tell. I just saw Rachel's head being all twisted and bulging from trying to shrink with this thing inside it!"

"Some kind of control device," Jake said. "I should have realized!

That's why we got drilled when the other sharks didn't. We didn't have the control device in our heads. The Yeerks are using it to control the sharks until all the treatments are done."

"That's what caused that surge of pleasure," Tobias said. "The Yeerks use that feeling to keep the sharks happy. To summon them and control them. Make them forget the pain of the brain mutation. It's tied to the underwater sounds they broadcasts

"So what do we do?" I asked.

"We get these things out of our heads!" Rachel yelled. "If we have to stomp every Yeerk in this facility!"

"Oh, good, the subtle approach," I sneered.

"Rachel may be right," Jake said. "We can't have this. Period. We cannot have Yeerk control

devices in our heads. We're underwater, with implants in our brains, and psychic Leeran aliens running around. This is seriously not cool."

"There may be hundreds of Controllers here," I pointed out. "We can't just get crazy and get away with it."

"No," Jake agreed. "But we need a distraction. Two teams: one to get to the controls of this place. The other to, as Marco said, get crazy and keep the Yeerks busy. Ax, Marco, and Tobias in the first group. Rachel, Cassie, and me to cause a distraction."

"Finally. We get to do something."

That was Rachel, of course.

Me, Ax, and Tobias. We couldn't morph anything small with the Yeerk control devices still implanted in our heads. Not bugs, anyway. So how we were supposed to go wandering around the underwater facility without being noticed?

"I think someone might notice a pair of wolves running around," I said.