Текст книги "Animorphs - 10 - The Android"

Автор книги: Katherine Alice Applegate

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But it could happen."

Jake and I thought about this for a while. About a spaceship "disintegrating" some big wad of our mass. It was not a pretty picture.

"Hey, Ax?" Jake said.

"You know how we wanted you to be honest with us? To tell us everything you know?"

"Yes, Prince Jake."

"Small change. In the future, don't tell us things that will scare us silly just as we're going into possible battle."

"A big wad of Marco in Zero-space." I muttered. "Like hanging your butt out of a car window, waiting for a truck to come along and sideswipe it off."

Just at that moment, I topped the crest of the ridge.

Tall pines nearly scraped my belly. And there, spread out before me, sparkling in the sun, was a large lake nestled between the surrounding hills and mountains.

"0kay, boys." Jake said. "This is where I peel off. Just one final word. I know spiders eat bugs, so do not, I repeat, do not, eat any flies. I'll have enough to worry about in fly morph."

"Remind me again."

I said. "Why are we doing this instead of staying home and sleeping in late?"

"We're saving the world."

Jake said.

"0h, yeah. Great. My mass is hanging out in the Zero-space highway and I'm about to become Spiderman. I knew there had to be a pretty good reason."

here were probably two hundred people around the lake below us – boys, girls, older people. Some were swimming.

Some were water-skiing. Some were grilling burgers and hot dogs over charcoal fires. A lot were just milling around and talking and laughing.

You'd swear it was some kind of big community picnic. From the air they all looked so normal.

And probably most of the people below us were normal. But a lot of them were Controllers. And one of them was Erek, who was certainly not normal.

We stayed well back from the lakeshore and dropped down into the trees. We came to rest on the ground, inside a cluster of tall bushes.

My osprey vision and osprey hearing had revealed no one within a hundred yards. But I was tingling with nervousness, just the same.

"Shall we demorph?" Ax asked.

"Not yet. Tobias said he would swing back over, once we were on the ground."

So we waited there, looking a bit weird, two birds of prey just hanging out inside a bunch of bushes at the edge of the forest. I could hear the whine of power boats out on the water, and closer, little snatches of human laughter.

"0kay, guys."

Tobias's thought-speak voice suddenly spoke in my head. "Looks clear to me. You've got a guy and a girl maybe a hundred yards off. But I think they're making out, so they should be busy for a while."

I quickly began to demorph. One of the limitations on morphing is that you can't just morph straight from one form to another. You always have to return to your own body in between.

In Ax's case this meant returning to his An-dalite form. That had to make him nervous. There were dozens of Controllers just a few hundred feet away. Yeerks might overlook one kid sneaking around. They wouldn't overlook an An-dalite.

"Are you ready to morph again?" Ax asked me, once we were back in our normal bodies.

"I'll neverbe ready to morph a spider," I said. My teeth were chattering, and it wasn't cold.

"I have to morph." Ax said.

"I can't stay here in Andalite form."

"Yeah, yeah, I know. I know. Okay.

Okay, I'm going to do this. But I'm going to keep my eyes closed."

I focused my mind on the spider. But I lost concentration, mostly because even the image of that wolf spider grossed me out. Then Ax started to change.

I knew still couldn't just stand there and watch. I knew I had to morph.

"It can't be any worse than morphing a fly, right? Or an ant?" I asked no one. Not that I wanted to think about the ant morph. We'd had a very, very, very bad time in ant morph.

I closed my eyes and focused again. This time I kept my concentration.

I felt myself starting to shrink. Shrinking is always a little weird, but now I was also thinking about some big, disgusting balloon of Marco mass suddenly bulging out into Zero-space.

Whatever Zero-space was.

I could feel myself getting smaller. I could feel very strange things happening inside me: sudden feelings of emptiness where organs were simply disappearing.

And there was a distracting squishy sound that came up my spine and through my skull.

The sound of bones turning to marrow, and of marrow sort of oozing away.

I wouldn't be needing any bones, I guess.

I kept my eyes tightly shut, not wanting to see what was happening. And I held on to my fears with a death grip of determination. I mean, if there's anything worse than being a spider, it's being some disgusting mix of half human, half spider.

But then . . .

POP! POP! POP! I could see! I tried to close my eyes, but no! I didn't have eyelids. It's very hard to close your eyes when you don't have eyelids.

Eyes were popping open in my forehead.

Eyes were erupting out of my head like zits.

I almost lost it right then. I would have screamed if I'd had a voice any longer. But I was already half spider. And I was staring at Ax as he underwent a change very similar to my own.

I was watching him with vision that was half human and half the shattered, broken-mirror vision of the spider's compound eyes.

Something horrifying was growing from the place on Ax's face where a mouth should have been. Something huge and bulging and foul. Two monstrous, swollen things like . . . like nothing I'd ever seen before. They were jaws, but huge and outsized. From the end of each one, a wicked, curved fang grew.

Sometimes you really, really need eyelids. There are definitely some things you don't want to have to see.

I knew the same thing was happening to me. My bulging jaw parts grew till they entered my own distorted field of vision.

Fortunately, I didn't have to worry too long about the jaws. See, I became distracted when legs suddenly exploded from my chest.

SPROOOT! Four new legs, two on each side, just shot out of me, like I was a tube of toothpaste someone had stomped. They sprouted all Gumby-unformed, then began to form joints. Way too many joints.

My human legs and arms were changing to match these first spider legs. I fell forward, no longer able to stand erect.

It wasn't much of a fall. I was already pretty small. The pine needles beneath me already seemed to be as big around as a human finger.

Not that I had any fingers left to compare with.

All the while, new eyes kept opening suddenly where eyes absolutely did not belong. Some were compound eyes. Some weren't.

Then, as if the extra legs, and the mix "n"

match eyes, and the huge jaw-and-fang combo weren't enough, some new leglike things came sprouting out of my ... well, out of where my neck used to be. They were like extra legs, only they weren't. I had no idea what they were. But they moved. Much later, I found out they're called pedipalps.

A sort of cross between a mouth part and a leg.

My head was swelling, compared to the rest of my body. It was gigantic ... in a small way. My entire body was now divided into two big chunks: a sort of bulging head and an even bulgier body.

I was almost entirely spider now. The pine needles that had seemed as big as fingers were now as big as two-by-fours.

As the last touch, strangely soft hairs began to grow from everywhere on my body.

It was the hair that seemed to trigger the awakening of the spider brain.

The wolf spider has good eyes for a spider. But it's all the thousands of tiny hairs that really get the spider brain's attention. They sense every subtle clue in the wind. Every minor movement in every direction.

And all of a sudden it felt like the whole world was moving: leaves, pine needles, the dirt beneath my claw-tipped eight legs, bugs in the dirt, moles under the ground, birds in the air.

All of it seemed to be hardwired into the hairs that covered my spider body.

With all that sensory overload, the spider brain woke up. I had been afraid it would be like the brain of an ant: a mindless machine. Or that it would be the terrified, fearful, panic-stricken mind of a prey animal.

But oh, no. Definitely no.

They didn't call it a wolf spider for nothing.

This guy was tiny, no more than two inches from the end of one outstretched leg to the end of the farthest back leg. A toddler could easily crush him underfoot.

But I guess it isn't size alone that makes a predator, because as soon as I felt the edge of that spider brain I knew this boy was trouble.

The wolf spider was a killer.

Hunger.

That was pretty much what the spider mind had to say: hunger, it was hungry. It wanted to hunt.

It wanted to kill. It wanted to eat up a few nice juicy bugs. It was hungry.

Did I mention hunger? And it didn't care what kind of bug. Could be beetles, could be grasshoppers, could be crickets, could be a big mean mantis. The spider didn't care. It ruled the world of bugs.

It was to bugs what a lion is to a herd of antelopes. It was a shark among guppies.

They could run from the wolf spider, but they couldn't hide.

Motion! Something moved, left to right across my field of vision, and I was after it like a dog af ter a rabbit.

Eight legs powered up and I blew across the forest floor like a drag racer firing out of the start ing gate.

The world was weird to my eight spider eyes. I saw colors no human ever saw. It was like when you mess with the color and tint knobs on the TV.

Things that should have been brown were blue, and green was red, or whatever. From some an gles the pictures were almost clear, but a second later everything would shatter into bits and I'd be watching a million tiny monitors at once.

I never could make logical sense out of it.

But mostly what I saw was movement. I was very, very interested in movement. My eyes and every hair on my disgusting little body were about spotting movement.

And when the right thing moved, my body just answered all on its own.

It was a rush, as they used to say in my dad's day. A charge. It was like tapping into the main pipe of adrenaline. It was electric. It was nuclear.

I blew across pine needles and fallen leaves and over patches of dirt and I kept that moving bug in my field of vision and I knew what I was doing, I mean, I knew I was Marco, a human in morph, and I knew I didn't really want to eat that racing bug, but man, I was too jazzed to stop.

The prey was running and I was the predator. I had evolved for hundreds of millions of years to do exactly this. When Tyrannosaurus rex was still millions of years away from even thinking about evolving, tiny arachnid hunters were killing and eating. The entire history of Homo sapiens from caveman to soccer mom was a blip in the history of spiders.

I was death on eight legs.

It was a beetle. That's what I was chasing. A big old beetle, much larger than I was.

Larger and slower. He grew in my distorted field of vision. He grew and grew and I powered on.

I wish I could explain why I kept on with the hunt. Sometimes the animal brain takes over for a while and sort of overwhelms the human mind. But that's not what was happening to me. I wasn't overwhelmed. I was just into it.

A last burst of speed! My front legs touched the beetle. He dodged left, but too slow.

I clambered right up on his back.

I positioned my jaws with their deadly fangs, and – "Marco. What are you doing?"

It was Ax. I scampered down off the beetle, feeling like I'd been caught doing something wrong. The beetle ran on, relieved to have escaped. If beetles can feel relief.

"Nothing. I was just letting the spider be a spider." It was a pretty good answer, I thought. "I guess its instincts kind of carried me away."

"Marco, I morphed the identical spider." Ax said.

I felt a wave of guilt and shame suddenly swell up inside me. "Ax, it was just a cockroach. Who cares? Come on, we have a job to do."

"Sometimes humans worry me." Ax said.

I didn't ask him what he meant.

Why had I gotten so into the hunt? Why hadn't I resisted the urge? I flashed on the rage I'd felt when I talked to Tom. Was that it? "I think it's this way." Ax said. He took the lead and I saw him moving in front of me, a spider scurrying effortlessly on his eight legs.

I fell in behind him. I was calm now. The incredible, insane rush of the chase was over. Now the spider was just a tool I was using.

Suddenly, from the sky . . . something fell toward me! It landed right between Ax and me. A grasshopper, three, four times our size. It looked like an elephant.

Then . . . thwap! It fired its huge hind legs and shot into the air. It disappeared as quickly as it had arrived.

We raced on through the forest, covering the two hundred feet between us and the edge of the party. I sensed the nearness of humans. I "heard" vibrations that might have been speech, but the voices were too garbled to make any sense out of.

"Hey, Marco, Ax, you guys around?"

It was Jake's thought-speak voice.

"Yes, Prince Jake."

Ax answered. "We are here."

"We're not pretty, but we're here." I added.

"Cool. I'm not exactly handsome myself. I'm in fly morph. Haven't found our boy Erek yet, though."

Something massive and slow appeared in the air above me. I scampered sideways. It landed slowly with a loud WHOOOMPHHH! A human foot. A shoe. Nike.

"You know, I'd been worrying someone might step on me." I said. "But humans are so slow."

"Be careful anyway."

Jake said. "let me know if you find Erek."

"I don't know how I'm supposed to recognize hm." I complained.

"These spider eyes aren't good at seeing distances. And human heads seem to be way up in the clouds, from where I'm crawling down here."

But Ax and I went on, skittering swiftly through a forest of huge, slow-moving legs and feet.

Then, right in front of me, I saw it.

It looked like a bare human foot. Except that I could see through the skin. Through the toenails. With my eight strange, distorted spider eyes I could see right through the electronic haze of the hologram.

I could see what was beneath the hologram.

I saw what looked like interlocking plates of steel and ivory. The "foot" had no toes. In fact, it wasn't shaped like a human foot. More like a paw.

It was not human. And everything in my tingling, buzzing, hyper, spider's senses told me it was not alive.

"Ax?"

"Yes, I see it."

"What is x?"

"I do not know."

"lt looks like a machine, almost. Like it's made out of metal."

"Yes." Ax said.

"I think your friend Erek may be an android."

android?"

"Yes. A robot. A machine made to seem like a life-form." Ax said, as though it was just the most common idea in the world.

"This is like something you know about, Ax?"

I asked, looking up at the thing called Erek.

"This is not a type of android I know." Ax said. "lt is not Andalite. I don't think it is Yeerk.

I don't know who ...

or what ...

it is."

My spider eyes could see the foot and most of the way up the leg. It was like looking at a double-exposure photograph. There was the out ward appearance of a human leg and, way up high, shorts. But beneath ail that there was this machine made of what seemed like steel and ivory.

It was thousands of interlocked plates, almost like the chain mail armor knights used to wear.

Each of the individual links was roughly triangular in shape. The "ivory" segments were a little larger than the segments that looked like steel.

The robot . . . android . . . whatever it was, was smaller than the human Erek. The leg I was looking at was oddly constructed. More like a stretched-out dog leg than a human leg.

The robot leg, along with its holographic projection of a human foot, lifted off, as Erek went on his way.

"Jake?" I called.

"Yeah? Hey, I think I see our guy. There's this person . . . it's hard with fly senses, but I see this person who is kind of shimmering all over, and it's like there's something hiding underneath all the shimmering light."

"Yep. That's hm." I confirmed.

"Wait a minute! There's another one!"

"Whatl"

"Another one of them."

Jake answered. "I just buzzed right past him. There are two of these things."

"0kay, northings have gotten com" I started to say.

FWAP! FWAP! FWAP! FWAP! A hurricane of wind! The ground in front of me exploded as two big taloned feet landed in the dirt.

A shadow over my head! I ran.

Two big black triangles came down from the sky above me. They dug in, just in front of me! Just behind me! Like a power shovel, the two triangles closed together. I was inside. I was in darkness. Total darkness. Some big, muscular thing was crushing me, squeezing me.

I couldn't breathe. I couldn't see. I was being squeezed and pummeled.

And then I realized . . .

I was being swallowed.

"AAAAAHHHHH!" I yelled.

There are two kinds of thought-speak. Private, which is like whispering right in one person's ear, and public, which is like yelling.

I was yell ing.

Every person near that lake heard me. Normal humans, who probably wondered, "What was that?"

And Controllers, who knew it was thought-speak.

But I didn't care. I was being swallowed.

"Marco!" Jake yelled.

"What's happening?"

"Marco! Everyone can hear y!" Ax warned.

I tried to control my panic. I was being swallowed, but I wasn't dead yet.

"Something . . . something just grabbed me!" I said, aiming my thought-speak at Jake and Ax only.

"I think it was a bird." Ax said. "I saw it. Very big and black. It flew off."

My spider legs were crushed against my side.

Two of them were broken. The hairs all over my body were blind. My eyes were blind. There wasn't enough air even for my spider body to live on.

I was being forced down the gullet of a bird, flying through the air, and seconds away from suffocating.

"Tobias?" I cried desperately. "Can you hear me?"

"Marco? What's happening?"

Tobias answered. His reply came from far off.

"A bird ate me. Black bird.

We're flying. Can you see . . . his Help!"

"Marco, there are a dozen big crows flying. I can't tell which one."

I felt my mind beginning to fade. The spider was dying.

What would happen if the spider died? I wondered, as my attention drifted away.

What would happen to the big wad of Marco mass in Z-space? That thought did it. I was outta there.

Morph out! I tried to form a mental picture of my own real self. A mental picture of a human named Marco. But it was all confused. My mind was dying, and as it sank it called up a thousand images.

Images of wolves and giant ants and gorillas. Images of all the animals I had been, all the minds I had lived in.

I couldn't grab that human image and hold onto it. But then, floating up in my disintegrating consciousness, came the image of my mother.

I guess that's not a surprise. They say dying soldiers on the battlefield often call out for their mothers with their dying breaths. And I guess that's what I was doing, too.

But this was my real mother. The way she'd been when she was truly alive. Not the Controller. Not the Controller known as Visser One, but my own real mom.

She was smiling at me. She was much taller than me, but she bent down to pick me up. I flew, up in the air, up to her face. She kissed me.

"You are going to grow up to be so cute," she said.

"My little Marco."

Marco. The human boy. I saw myself clearly then, like I was looking through her eyes at the little toddler I'd been. Not the Animorph Marco, but the little kid Marco.

Suddenly . . .

The pressure was growing. Growing. I was squeezed from all sides. I felt muscle tensing to restrain me, but then, the muscle weakened and quivered.

A ripping, tearing sound! Light! Light! I was demorphing. Demorphing and growing. I had burst through the throat of the crow! And now, I was falling! "Marco!" Tobias yelled.

Muddy, distorted vision showed me the crow falling alongside me.

I was falling. Falling through the air, a vile mix of crippled spider and emerging human.

I was the size of a baseball, I guess, and getting bigger. I hate to even think of what I looked like. I know I wasn't pretty.

WHAMMMMM! I hit the ground. I bounced. I hit the ground again.

I lay there, not knowing where I was, or what I was. But I knew one thing for sure. I was going to demorph. I was getting OUT OF THAT MORPH! If I'd had a mouth, I would have started screaming and never stopped. But my mouth reappeared late.

Four of my spider legs withered and disappeared. My remaining legs became human arms and legs. My tiny claws became toes. My fangs and jaws became teeth and lips.

My eight spider eyes shut down one after another, leaving only two. And slowly, those two eyes became fully human.

I looked up through human eyes at a blue sky. At the high branches of trees looming above me.

And then, I looked up into the face of my former schoolmate, Erek.

Erek the android.

Marco?" Erek said. "Didn't you used to have longer hair?"

The hair thing again. Anyway, to my human eyes Erek looked completely, one hundred percent human. I knew it wasn't true, but even so, it was almost impossible not to believe the holographic projection that surrounded the android.

Could I remorph into something powerful enough to ...

to make sure he wouldn't be a problem? Probably not. There were Controllers all around the area. All he had to do was yell for help.

Just then, a girl came running up. She looked down at me, then at Erek.

"Who is this?" the girl asked.

"His name is Marco," Erek said calmly. "You know the "Andalite bandits" Chapman is always talking about? The ones who use Andalite morph-+ technology to carry on a guerrilla war?"

"Of course," she said.

Erek pointed down at me. "I think this human is one of them."

There it was: the end. The end of our existence as Animorphs. We'd always known that if the Yeerks ever discovered our true identities, or even that we were humans, they would wipe us out within a matter of days.

I felt sick. Sick with fear for myself, and for the others. I'd blown it. I'd given away our great secret.

Erek jerked his head toward the girl. "This is my friend Jenny."

I was not pleased to meet her.

I heard the sound of people rushing through bushes.

"Nothing over here," Erek said loudly. "Jenny hurt her ankle. I'll help her. Keep searching. I think I heard something over there."

Erek must have noticed the extremely shocked and puzzled expression on my face. He grinned.

"There are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.""

"Shakespeare?" I said, amazed.

"Yes.

Hamlet.

I saw the very first performance."

"But ... but that would have been like centuries ago."

Erek nodded. "Do you know where I live?"

I nodded, with my head still down in the dirt.

"Morph into something small enough to escape from here,"

Erek suggested. "Come to see me at my house, you and your friends. We have a lot to talk about."

For some stupid reason I said, "You're not human. We know you're an android."

"And you're not an Andalite bandit," Erek said.

"How do I know I can trust you?"

Erek shrugged. "I could turn you in, right now.

I'd be Visser Three's new best friend. Even the Visser knows how to reward those who carry out his orders well."

"Maybe you want to catch all of us at once,"

I said. Don't ask me why I was arguing with him.

Maybe it was the humiliating position I was in.

Maybe I felt like I had to act tough since I was on my back in the dirt, wearing severely unattractive clothing.

Erek squatted down. "Marco, if I gave you to Visser Three, he would get the names of all your friends from you. I know you're a brave person. You'd have to be, to do all you and your friends have done. But you are not brave enough to survive the Visser's torture. You would tell."

I took a couple of seconds to think about that. He was right, of course. I had a healthy respect for the kind of torture Visser Three could inflict.

"We'll be there," I said. "I guess we don't have a choice. You have us by the ... you have us cold."

Erek shook his head. "It's not like that. It will be a meeting of allies, Marco. You see, we, too, fight the Yeerks."

My dad made chicken for dinner that night. I'd spent the afternoon with my friends, debating the mess with Erek. We'd gone round and round, but in the end we knew we would show up for the meeting. We had no choice, really.

Barbecued chicken, skin-on mashed potatoes, roasted corn on the cob. This was the absolute height of my father's cooking ability. So I had to eat it. I had to.

But man, there is something about popping out through the throat of a bird that totally destroys your appetite for dead bird.

"How is it?" my dad asked.

"Great," I answered.

We were on the deck in our backyard. It was a house like the house we'd lived in long ago when we were a complete family. After my mom's "death" – that's still how I thought about it– my dad had spiraled down for a long time. He'd lost his job. We'd moved out of the house and ended up living in a pretty terrible apartment on the edge of a bad part of town.

It was okay, really. I mean, having a lot of stuff and a nice house is cool, but it wasn't being poor that bothered me. It was being alone. My father had been off in some world of his own for a long time. I'd been the one who had to cook and clean and all that.

It was nice to have a house and a yard and a barbecue again. But it wasn't about the house. It was that my dad was my dad again.

I know that sounds corny, coming from me.

"Another piece?"

"Sure. Breast." I held out my plate and tried not to think about exploding crows, or the fact that I'd come very close to having beetle for lunch.

Sometimes my life was just too weird.

I had questions to ask my father, but I wanted them to sound natural. You know, like I was just making normal conversation.

"So, Dad. What are you doing at work lately?"

He shrugged and gave me a wink. "We're finishing up the observatory project. I still can't figure out what happened there. That software your friend No accidentally created just sort of disappeared."

My friend "No" was really Ax. There was a long story behind all that. You could probably ask our friendly neighborhood Andalite about it, but it wasn't a story I could tell my father.

"What'll you do then, after you get done at the observatory?" I asked, trying to seem totally casual by chomping on corn the whole time.

My dad's eyes flickered toward me, almost suspiciously. He shrugged. "A project I can't talk about for this company called Matcom."

I laughed, trying to stay very casual. "Building a better bomb?"

He didn't answer for a few seconds. Then, in a strange voice, he said, "I've never done weapons research."

I was actually surprised. "Why not?"

"You gonna eat that chicken or just tease it?"

He gave me a long look, like he was trying to decide if I was old enough to hear what he was going to say.

I picked up the chicken breast. Chicken wasn't crow, after all.

"It was your mom," he said.

I stopped eating.

"The last year, year and a half before . . . you know. Before. It was like this perfect time for us." He smiled at some picture only he could see. "We used to fight every now and then when you were younger, like most couples. But then it was as if all our problems were gone, settled. Maybe I had changed. Maybe she had. I don't know."

I felt cold fingers around my heart.

"It was the best time of my life," he said. "It was like we'd achieved some level of perfect peace and perfect love. But at the same time, there were these times when your mom would seem upset. Like she was struggling with some problem she wouldn't tell me about."

I had stopped breathing. I knew. I knew now when the change had been made. The perfect love my father was talking about was the Yeerk at work in my mother's head. The Yeerk wasn't interested in stupid little domestic battles. It wanted peace so that it could focus on deeper goals.

"Anyway, one day I woke up in the middle of the night. Your mom was sitting up in bed, wide awake. I knew she'd had a bad dream or something. But it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It was just. . ." He shook his head.

"It was so strange. She sounded like she was trapped in a deep well, and trying to call out to me."

There were tears in my eyes. I hoped my father wouldn't notice.

"She said, They won't take you if you stay away from the military." It didn't make any sense.

But the way she said it... like it was the hardest thing she'd ever said . . . like it was the most important thing she'd ever said."

I had some idea just how hard it had been for my mother to say that. Sometimes, when there is some terrible need, the human being crushed beneath the Yeerk can force its way out. It can seize control for a few desperate seconds.

They say the price the human host pays is terrible. The Yeerk has mental tortures it can carry on for weeks.

My mother, my real mother, had struck when the Yeerk was distracted, and for a few seconds regained control.

"Anyway," my dad said, "I know it was just your mom having a bad dream. But ever since then, whenever an opportunity came up to do defense work, I just got this bad feeling about it."

I couldn't even pretend to eat any more.

"Dad, are you thinking about taking on a military project now?"

He avoided my gaze. "There are some very exciting things going on with this Matcom. The thing they want me on isn't military in any way.

But... well, they do carry on some very secret work.

I guess some of what they do is probably military."

There it was. The reason Tom was trying to get me to bring my father to The Sharing. My father was working on some project that the Yeerks wanted to control.

My mother had warned him. It may have been the last words that she, the real, human woman, ever spoke to him.

He was going to ignore that warning, and now the Yeerks wanted him.

92 We had decided to meet with Erek at his house.

We had not decided to trust him completely.

Jake, Cassie, Ax, and I were going to the meeting.

Rachel and Tobias stayed outside as backup.

Rachel was all primed to use her grizzly bear morph if we called for help.

"I'll be within range of Ax's thought-speak,"

she said for the tenth time. "I can morph my bear in a minute and go through that door about ten seconds later."

"If you do that, try not to stomp over me in the process, okay?" I said.

I glanced up and saw Tobias swooping down to settle in the tree in Erek's yard.

I could joke about it, but the truth was, it did feel reassuring to know Rachel and Tobias were ready to be the cavalry.