I was down, buried under mad fur. I was down, slashed at, punched, hammered, clawed. My legs were in the air, helpless!

  I drew my legs close and shifted my weight. Got my legs under me. I lifted myself and the two lions. I shook myself violently and threw off the lion who’d been on my face. I aimed a blow at her but she was too fast.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw the polar bear demorphing. It’s the only way when your morph body is dying: demorph and fast. Die in morph and you’re dead. Period.

  But I was missing something. Something nagged at me.

  Jake yelled.

  The cape buffalo butted me in the hindquarters and spun me around. The lion on my back was reaching around like it was trying to strangle me, digging busy claws into the folds of loose skin around my throat.

  The second lion charged gamely, leaped and sank its teeth into my left haunch.

  Had to take down the Yeerk with the polar bear morph. Had to stop him remorphing. I’d been lucky once, experience had told. But I couldn’t count on a second easy win against a polar bear.

  I tried to stagger forward, but the buffalo had done some damage now. My hindquarters were numb and weak. He was hitting me with short, sharp blows, like a boxer rabbit-punching. He’d figured out that he couldn’t really wind up and deliver a killing blow.

 

  Jake’s voice was far away. Strange.

  The slick floor that handicapped the buffalo now worked against me, too. I couldn’t get enough traction with my blood-slicked pads.

  Had to get the Yeerk with the polar bear morph. He was demorphed now. Ready to start morphing and come back rejuvenated.

  So heavy. Floor all covered in blood. Wow, they were really bleeding.

  My front right leg suddenly buckled. It was a pail of ice water in my face, a sudden realization.

  My blood. That was my blood on the floor.

  White fur began to ripple across the morphing Yeerk.

  a voice cried.

  No, he’s a bear, I thought.

  A flash of movement, so fast it was a blur. Something in my eyes! Burning. I couldn’t see. That’s okay, okay, bears can’t see all that well anyway, I had … I had …

  A cobra, some distant, strange, analytical part of my brain noted. Tom’s morph: a cobra. The venom was in my eyes.

  I couldn’t think. Couldn’t see.

  Demorph.

  No. Bear. The lions on me.

  Weak. Strange to be the bear and be weak. Strange.

  I realized I was no longer standing. I was flat on the floor. I heard my own slow breathing. I should be panting.

  Something striking at my face again and again. The cobra. Couldn’t even see him.

  I had failed. Tom. Alive.

  he said.

  Tobias cried.

  I pleaded.

 

  He didn’t understand.

 

 

 

  I jerked my paw, claws extended toward my face.

  Tom shrieked. I couldn’t see him. But I felt something squirming. Like a worm on a fishhook. The snake was impaled on my claws.

  Tom cried in outrage.

  I brought my paw to my mouth.

  I said vaguely.

  the Yeerk screamed with Tom’s mouth.

  I bit down on the snake.

  I lay there in suspended animation.

  I felt myself floating.

  The bear was melting. Old grizzly bear, my friend. Good old bear.

  I demorphed. The snake was still in my mouth. Motionless.

  I demorphed.

  I was Rachel again, the human Rachel, alive, unhurt. I could have bounded up and gone off to the mall to shop. But I didn’t kid myself. I didn’t hope.

  I spit the snake out.

  I was surrounded on all sides. I was only a weak human girl now. The polar bear loomed over me, his strength the equal of my own grizzly, but now I was just me, just Rachel.

  I could see the viewscreen. I could see my best friend Cassie. Jake. Marco, funny Marco. Ax.

  Tobias.

  He had morphed. He was his human self once more. He’d done that for me. And because he was crying. I understood. Humans cry, hawks don’t.

  “I love you,” I said to the screen.

  And oh, god, how could so much regret and so much sweetness and so much sadness all be present in that single moment. I was already dead and missing my unlived life. I was already dead and Tobias was mourning.

  I tried to smile. For him.

  The polar bear said,

  Then he killed me with a single blow.

  Time stopped.

  He came to me. The Ellimist.

  The puppet master come to watch my final act. It figured. He was in his saintly old man guise. As fake as every­thing else about him. The all-powerful weakling. The mighty manipulator.

  “You,” I said accusingly.

  “Yes.”

  “Who are you?” I demanded. “Who are you to play games with us? You appear, you disappear, you use us, who are you, what are you?”

  And then, for what seemed a very long time, the Ellimist told me. I saw. I understood.

  But I also knew he would not save me. That he couldn’t under the arcane rules of his millennia-long war with Crayak.

  The Ellimist was there to honor me, and I guess that was nice of him. Wasn’t going to help me much.

  I wanted so much to live. I wanted so much to stay and not to leave. In a moment no answer would matter to me, but just the same, I wanted to know what I guess any dying person wants to know.

  “Answer this, Ellimist: Did I … did I make a difference? My life, and my … my death … was I worth it? Did my life really matter?”

  “Yes,” he said. “You were brave. You were strong. You were good. You mattered.”

  “Yeah. Okay, then. Okay, then.”

  I wondered if —

  Jake

  No one moved.

  I don’t think anyone even breathed.

  Toby, the leader of the free Hork-Bajir, burst onto the bridge. She was scarred and bloody.

  I heard her words.

  Toby asked.

  She noticed Tobias. She’d only seen him in human morph a few times. Toby is named for Tobias. The free Hork-Bajir see Tobias as their liberator. And Toby, the Hork-Bajir seer, was named in his honor.

  On the screen I saw the Blade ship slowly picking up speed and pulling away. They didn’t fire at us.

  Tom was dead.

  And I wondered how I was ever going to explain it. I had ordered my cousin to execute my brother. How would I ever explain that?

  All these years I’d fought to keep us all alive, to stop the Yeerks, always with the hope that someday I would save my brother, that he would come back, that he’d be Tom again. That was why I’d enlisted in the war to begin with. I was going to save Tom.

  Tom was dead. The Yeerk in his head was dead.

  And Rachel.

  And how many others?

  General Doubleday’s soldiers who had provided the suicidal diversionary attack on the ground.

  The auxiliary Animorphs who had gone with them to trick the enemy.

  How many of Toby’s people?

  Seventeen thousand Yeerks, frozen. Flushed into space.

  Plus.

  Plus.

  All at my command.

  Toby pressed.

  Visser One said, but the fight had gone out of him.

  Tom was dead. Rachel was dead. How would I explain this to my parents?

  Silly to think of that right then. Silly and stupid.

  Toby urged.

  Cassie said softly.

  Toby absorbed that, then said,

  Still I couldn’t say anything. How did I explain …

  Marco was still in gorilla morph. He said,

  Ax said.

  Marco shot back.

  Cassie came to me and sort of leaned into me, as close to a hug as we could get right then. I was afraid she would say something sympathetic, I was afraid she would comfort me, and if she had I think that would have been it, I think my brain would have just shut down because all the pain would have suddenly been real and deep inside me.

  Cassie said,

  The right thing to say. Cassie was good at that. I noted the effect on me, observed my reaction from a million miles away.

  I sighed. Okay. Yeah. I still had a job. Do the job.

  Cassie said.

  Yeah. It could all wait.

  I took a deep breath.

 

  Toby left with a last, curious glance at Tobias. Me, I couldn’t look at Tobias. I didn’t care if he saw the way I avoided his eyes, I didn’t care, I couldn’t look at him.

  I wish to god Tobias had just come after me. Right then. I would have welcomed it.

  Instead I focused on Visser One. How had this happened? How had he survived and Tom died? How did he still live? How could that be the result?

  Visser One said.

  I said.

  “What do you mean, no more killing?” Tobias demanded, breaking his ringing silence at last. He stabbed a finger at the visser. “He’s the one responsible for all this!”

  I said softly.

  Visser One mocked.

 

 

 

 

 

  Cassie asked.

  I snapped.

  Cassie hesitated, looked down, then turned to go.

  I began to demorph, then stopped myself. The visser was still a dangerous foe with a bottomless grab bag of powerful morphs at his command.

  I spoke to Ax in private thought-speak. His tail blade flashed and caught the visser unprepared, a flat-side smack against his temple. His host body, the long-enslaved Andalite war prince called Alloran, slumped unconscious.

 

 

  Marco said.

  I said.

  Ax hesitated. He turned his main eyes to me even as his stalk eyes remained focused on the visser.

  He wasn’t fighting me, just asking for dispensation. The repetition of the word prince signaled his willingness.

  I began to demorph, moving from tiger to human, from thought-speak to spoken word.

 

  “Yeah. Now, I have to go see about Toby and then I’ll be back. I want to see one slug in a jar and a ticked-off Andalite on screen when I get back.”

  I left the bridge, trotted to catch up with Toby and followed her to engineering where the signs of a severe battle were evident. Hork-Bajir bodies were stacked in the corridor. Their blood was every­where. Impossible to be sure which were free Hork-Bajir, our allies, and which had died still enslaved to the Yeerks.

  Toby’s people controlled the doorway into engineering where the dispirited Yeerks had taken refuge.

  “Do they have a spokesman?” I asked.

  Toby yelled, “Sub-Visser Seventy-four, the Animorph leader Jake is here.”

  A battered-looking Hork-Bajir female stepped into view. I looked her up and down, putting on my hard act. “We have the ship. We have Visser One. You’re not in much of a position to make demands.”

  The sub-visser showed nothing. “Human, you cannot frighten us. We have no hope left and that gives us strength. We will not die of Kandrona starvation — better to die here, now, in battle. We’ll kill some more of your people before we do.”

  I nodded. “Fair enough. You want amnesty, access to Kandrona rays, and morphing technology? You’d accept permanent morphing and relocation?”

  “As opposed to slow death by starvation or even a quick death now? Yes.”

  “I don’t have the morphing cube. But I pledge to use all my influence to gain agreement from the Andalites when they come.”

  She stood there, straight, almost at attention for a while, then slumped. “It has come to this after all.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. The onboard Yeerk pool needs to be refilled. Send some of your people under Toby’s supervision to handle that. Then you’ll be escorted to the pool in groups of six. You’ll exit your host bodies.”

  “And be helpless again,” the Yeerk said bitterly.

  “I keep my word,” I said.

  I started to leave then stopped. “Toby? I’m sorry about Jara Hamee. He was …”

  “He was the first of the free Hork-Bajir,” Toby said fiercely. “He was the father of his people. And he was my father.”

  I started back for the bridge.

  Cassie

  Rachel dead? How could that be? How could that be real?

  She’d been my best friend forever. Teased me about my clothes as I teased her about her obsessive shopping. How long ago had that been? A hundred years?

  She’d wanted to be a gymnast but thought she was probably too tall ever to be really good. And of course all that was in the past, too.

  She had this way of seeming untouched by what went on around her. Unaffected. Above. She was a person who could walk through a car wash and come out dry. She could move through a mosh pit and never be jostled. She could wear a white dress to dig in the mud and somehow never get a spot on her.

  But the war had touched her. She’d changed, and she’d known she was changing. The war had revealed a hidden part of her soul. She alone, of all of us, she alone liked it. Loved it, even. She had enjoyed the fight.

  Sometimes I imagined her as a Viking. Or as a knight on a quest. That’s what she was: a joyful warrior.

  And she had died fighting against impossible odds.

  Like a hole inside me. Like someone had taken a knife and carved a hole in my chest. Like I might cave in, be swallowed up and disappear in that hole.

  Beautiful Rachel.

  Poor Tom.

  And now, all of us, the survivors. The victim-perpetrators.

  I found Erek. I simply walked through the Yeerk ship calling out in thought-speak. A wolf prowling strangely empty, silent corridors.

  He appeared before me. He’s an android, one of a long-lived species called the Chee. Their creators, the Pemalites, are extinct, but the pacific instincts of the Pemalites live on in these magnificent thinking machines.

  Erek is at least five thousand years old, and the person we knew by that name was really just a holographic projection that disguised the machine beneath the illusion.

  I demorphed.

  “Hi, Erek.”

  “Hi, Cassie.” He smiled sadly. “Jake sent you.”

  I nodded.

  “I see. He feels guilty.”

  “No. Not guilty.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Then what? He used me, blackmailed me, manipulated my programming to get me to break through the security grid and take control of this ship.”

  “You drained the Dracon beams.”

  “What did Jake expect me to do? I had given him control when he needed it. I wasn’t going to enable him to kill.”

  “The Blade ship got away. Rachel … Jake had Rachel with Tom. Rachel and Tom are both … and the ship got away anyway. Thanks to you.”

  The Erek hologram disappeared. He was an android now, a thing of steel and ivory vaguely in the shape of a dog walking erect. “And I’m supposed to feel regret because Jake ordered his cousin to kill his brother and I didn’t allow him to massacre everyone else on the Blade ship?”

  That made me mad and I guess I showed it.

  “So, you, too, huh Cassie?”

  “Jake did what he had to do.”

  “Did he? Someone flushed the Yeerk pool into space. Did he have to do that, too? They were unhosted Yeerks. They were harmless.”

 

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