Текст книги "Animorphs - 11 - The Forgotten"

Автор книги: Katherine Alice Applegate

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Yep. The shoulder design that makes it possible to swing from branch to branch makes it possible to throw a spear.

Very possible.

I threw.

The spear hit home! It sank into the flesh of the Lerdethak, delivering the poisons of the rain forest into the deadly alien creature.

But I had used up all my luck. A tentacle whipped toward me.

Like a snapped high-tension wire, it wrapped itself around my neck, and...

8:19 P.m.

I misjudged the distance to the ground, hit it too hard, and rolled over, a tangle of wings and talons.

"Nice landing." Tobias said with a laugh.

"Are you okay?" Cassie asked me. She rushed over and picked me up. Then she set me back down because I was starting to demorph. And I was getting heavier pretty quickly.

"What the ..." I demanded. I almost had a heart attack. I was back! Back, behind the motel. Back, getting ready to go to the Safeway.

Was it a flashback? One of the visions?

No, it was lasting too long. This was real. I was behind the motel. Getting ready to morph and go check out the Safeway.

I looked at my watch. Could it be? "What time is it?" I asked Ax.

"Eight-nineteen." he said.

Eight-nineteen. Of course. I knew the time. At eight-nineteen, I had felt strange – uneasy about making the decision to go into the grocery store. But I had made the decision to go ahead. And from that decision, everything else had followed.

The Sario Rip. The disaster in the rain forest.

"Cassie? Have you ever been to the Amazon?" I asked.

"What? No. Of course not," she said.

It hadn't happened. At least not to this Cassie.

It was still something that was going to happen. Unless I changed the time line.

"Are we doing this or what?" Rachel demanded impatiently.

"Come on, Jake, are we doing this or what?"

I grinned. I laughed. I'm afraid I flat out giggled. "Or what, Rachel. Definitely "or what." We are out of here!"

It was a day later before I finally got a chance to talk to Ax alone. I told him everything. He thought I was nuts until I said the words Sario Rip. Then he knew.

"This is all very amazing." he said as we walked through the woods. The good old, familiar woods. The woods without killer ants and piranhas and jaguars and snakes and natives with poison spears. "I have no memory of any of this."

"Yeah, it was pretty amazing," I said. "I made so many wrong moves, I screwed everything up. The computer. . . letting us walk into a trap. . . . I mean, we were pretty much doomed.

Then it was like I got a second chance to keep it from happening. But I don't even know how. You ... I mean, that other you, or however you want to say it, thought we had to recreate the Sario Rip in order to undo it."

Ax nodded. "Yes, I suppose that would have worked. And there was only one other way."

I stopped him. "You never told me about any other way."

"No, I wouldn't have." Ax said. "I don't know it for sure ...

but there is a theory."

"I thought there might be," I said dryly.

"It is impossible for one person to be in two places at once.

In theory. So if you . . . eliminate . . . one of the two, well, the consciousness snaps back together. I think what happened, Prince Jake, is that you died."

I felt a chill run up my spine.

"But even as you died in the rain forest, you were still alive here. So your mind snapped back. Then you undid the time line, so none of it ever really happened. You would find you cannot morph the jaguar or the monkey, because you never really acquired those animals."

He made an Andalite smile, which just involves the eyes, since they have no mouths.

"They teach this stuff in your schools, huh?"

"Yes."

"And you didn't pay much attention to this lesson, huh?"

"True."

"I can see why," I said. "This time travel stuff will make your head explode."

"Exactly." Ax agreed. "And on that day, there was this game .

. . and this female . . ."

We walked a while farther. "It was a disaster down there, Ax.

I blew it. The only reason we're all still alive is that in the end, I got lucky."

"Maybe that is true, Prince Jake. But my brother Elfangor once told me, "It's a leader's job to be lucky." Sometimes, success is just luck."

I nodded. It didn't make me feel any better. "Elfangor's luck ran out."

"Yes. We must hope yours does not, Prince Jake."

I laughed. "Don't call me Prince.""

"Yes, Prince Jake."

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