The Other
Page 1
For Michael and Jake
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SNEAK PEEK
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
Who am I?
Marco.
Not Tuan or Kevin or Rasheed.
You know, “Hi, I’m Marco.”
If you yell out, “Hey, Marco!”, chances are good I’ll turn around. Respond. “What?”
You could also say that who I am is far more than a name. That who I am depends on your perspective. On where you’re standing when you yell out to me.
Like, if you’re standing out in the everyday world — in Red Lobster on all-you-can-eat shrimp night, on a downtown street corner, or in the mall — you’ll see that I’m a slighty less than tall, brown-haired kid. Come a little closer, like into my home, and you’ll see that I’m also a son. A friend. And, on a very rare day, a decent dog-sitter.
If, however, you’re standing in a very particular, very up-close-and-personal spot — like inside my head — you’ll see that I am, in addition, a few other, less ordinary things.
Defender of Earth. Civilization’s Last Chance for Survival.
Stuff like that.
Generally speaking, I make it a policy not to let people stand in that very up-close-and-personal spot. Superheroes tend to rack up a lot of dead friends and seriously damaged sidekicks.
That is one reason it’s not a good idea for you to know much more about me than my first name.
The other reason anonymity is a good thing: the Yeerks.
The Yeerks. If it weren’t for Elfangor, an Andalite war prince, I wouldn’t even know about the Yeerks, aliens from a far distant planet. Wouldn’t have been enlisted — me, four other kids, and another Andalite — to fight them. To try and stop their slow but constant infestation of Earth.
See, Yeerks are like slugs. On their own, they’re blind, deaf, and mute. But in the brain of a host body, they’ve got eyes and ears and mouths. They’re parasites, the Yeerks. Living off the minds and bodies of any creature they deem worth controlling. Gedds. Hork-Bajir. Humans.
And one — only one — Andalite.
Yeerks wriggle their way through the ear canal and into each nook and cranny of the brain. Open memories, raise hands, move legs. Once a Yeerk is in your head, you’re totally and completely at its mercy. Saying what it wants you to say. Going where it wants you to go. Listening, silently, as it mocks your every desire and dream. Watching, impotently, as it enlists your mother or father or best friend into a life of slavery.
The right to privacy? Gone. The privilege of freedom? Gone.
What Elfangor did was give us access to Andalite morphing technology. This is our weapon, the ability to absorb through touch the DNA of a living creature and then become that creature.
We morph to fight and to infiltrate. To spy on the Yeerk cover organization, The Sharing. And occasionally kick Yeerk butt.
We become whatever we need to become. Elephant or gorilla or grizzly. Tiger or wolf or cockroach. Cheetah or polar bear or even Hork-Bajir.
All of which makes that “who are you” question a whole lot more complicated for me than for say, about 99.9 percent of folks on this planet.
That remaining .1 percent — those would be my friends. The other Animorphs. Jake. Cassie. Rachel. Tobias, the guy who lives as a hawk. Ax, Elfangor’s younger brother.
Obviously, there are a lot of issues we have to deal with. Issues far too complex for the six of us to waste a lot of time thinking about. Or maybe we’ve become far too complex for them to matter too much anymore.
In almost every way you can imagine, we’ve pretty much been there. Done that and bought the T-shirt and poster. If anyone from Guardian or Prudential knew the truth about us, we’d never, ever get health insurance. Forget about life.
Me and my friends, we are the definition of extreme living.
We are the definition of high risk. We don’t need to sign up for a class at the local community college or pay some slick shrink 150 bucks an hour to tell us we’re not realizing our potential.
Our potentials have been realized up the wazoo.
See, this war comes down to life or death. Freedom or slavery. Dignity or abject humiliation.
Failure is not an option.
Bottom line — we’re here to serve. It’s not only about us. It’s about you, too.
That’s why, every once in a while, it’s real nice to be alone. Shut out the world and do something just for me. Something totally and completely self-indulgent and soul-numbing. Something that requires almost no effort, physical or intellectual.
The house was empty. Dad and Nora were at a PTA meeting. Euclid was spending the night at the vet, recovering from some minor doggie surgery. Jake and Rachel were off at a family thing. Cassie and her mom had gone to some big veterinary conference at The Gardens. And I guess Ax and Tobias were doing whatever red-tailed hawks and aliens do on an off night. I just knew I was blissfully alone.
I lay back on the living room couch. Stretched like a lazy old cat. Reached for the remote on the coffee table.
Nothing good on the tube. Perfect. I channel-surfed, past SpongeBob SquarePants and a minor league baseball game. Past Two Fat Ladies on the food channel. Past a documentary on beetles.
Ah! Unsolved Mysteries. Cool. The Loch Ness Monster. Bigfoot. Aliens from outer space …
Mr. Fake-Spooky Host looked wide-eyed into the camera. “When we come back after these messages, we’ll continue our in-depth investigation of legendary creatures with an amateur video made just weeks ago, right here in …”
I hit the mute button and waited. Hummed some Kid Rock. Yawned. Bit a hangnail. Seven commercials later, the show was back.
And then the world fell apart.
It was just a blue blur moving across the screen. Not much more than that. A small piece of videotape taken with an unsteady hand in terrible light conditions.
But it was enough.
My foolproof danger alarm went off. Loud.
“Could this be proof positive of the existence of the magical unicorn of medieval lore?” the host intoned. “Or could this strange blue creature be the mighty centaur of Greek mythology? Let’s take another look.”
I hit the power button and the screen went gray.
One look had been more than enough.
The image was blurred but unmistakable.
Andalite!
I scaled the stairs to my bedroom two at a time.
This was bad. Really bad. A serious breach in security. The beginning of our end …
A good bazillion citizens of the United States of America, and who knew how many people in how many other countries, had just gotten their first glimpse of a bona fide alien.
Eighty, maybe ninety percent of those viewers would be excited for about thirty seconds — at least until the next silly monster after the next silly commercial.
Ten, maybe twenty percent of those viewers would recognize the blue blur for what it was. Not a unicorn or a centaur.
An Andalite. Here. On Earth.
And it could only be Ax.
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Okay, Visser Three and every other Yeerk with a host knew of the “Andalite bandits.” The ones who formed the small but unrelenting resistance to the Yeerk movement.
But others — humans not controlled by Yeerks — didn’t know. And they couldn’t. Shouldn’t. It was too dangerous, too risky. Bad for Ax to be taken prisoner by the visser. Worse for him to be taken for study by the government.
Not everybody in “the agency” was as fair-minded as Scully or Mulder. Some were even Yeerks.
Ax would not be taken. I would make sure of that.
A thousand fears and anxieties ran through my head, almost as quickly as I ran up the steps and into my room.
I had to get control. Focus. Maintain that focus.
I went to the bed. Arranged the pillows under the blankets to look like a sleeping kid. So my dad and my stepmother wouldn’t know I was gone. Again.
I stripped down to my morphing suit. Tossed jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers into the pit that is my closet. Tore open the window. And began to morph.
The goal: rapid transportation.
PING! PING!
I winced. The beginning of talons, where my toes had been only a few seconds ago. I watched as the rest of my feet and ankles withered, shrunk, and suddenly became the bird’s incredibly strong, gripping feet. Three long fleshless talons facing front, one facing back.
No way those feet could support my thick human legs. I was going down.
THUMP!
I was definitely down. But I’d fallen on my back. I lifted my head and watched as my legs blackened and shriveled up into my body like two sticks of beef jerky being sucked up by a gnarly old cowboy.
Right then I vowed never ever to eat a Slim Jim again.
In spite of what you might think, morphing doesn’t hurt. It’s just disgusting.
But still, I watched. As if I could hurry the process by witnessing it. Fingers — curling into my palm. Tanned human flesh lightening to gray and then disappearing under a flat, three-dimensional tattoo of feathers. Then arms sprouting feathers in a fury. At the same time, arm bones shrinking, hollowing, reshaping. Becoming wings.
My mouth and nose melded together, hardened to form a curved and deadly beak.
Internal organs? I felt approximately twenty-five feet of human intestines smoosh and squish down to a bird’s tiny digestive tract. My slow and steady human heart surge into the manic, pulsing heart of the bird of prey.
No longer human. No longer tall enough to see the unopened notebooks scattered over the desk. The handful of empty bubble gum wrappers I should probably throw away. Close enough to the carpet to see boulders of cookie crumbs and single strands of curly poodle hair. Ugh.
I was an osprey. The animal that had become one of my earliest morphs. Not a bird with the greatest night vision but vision a heck of a lot better than a human’s. Vision good enough to get me where I was going.
Ax’s scoop.
I hopped up onto the windowsill. Glanced sharply around with beady eyes to be certain the house wasn’t being watched. And flapped into the night air.
Ax was at “home.”
And he had company perched on a nearby branch.
I didn’t answer. Tobias has been big on rhetorical questions lately.
Besides, at the moment, I didn’t have any of what Ax would call “mouthparts.”
But I did have eyes. Ax’s TV was on. But not on the station I’d been watching.
As soon as my lips were formed I looked directly at Tobias. Then at Ax. “Our buddy Ax here is a star,” I said brightly, brushing dried-out pine needles off my bike shorts, wincing when a sharp stone bit into my tender human foot.
I told them what I’d seen. When I’d finished, there was silence.
It was Tobias who spoke first.
Ax hesitated. Turned his main stalk eyes to look behind him, toward the deeper woods.
That was not what I wanted to hear.
Tobias said.
“D’ya think? Really?” I said, rolling my eyes. “Okay. Listen. We don’t have time to wait around for the rerun or to send a check to the station in order to buy a copy. We just can’t risk waiting.”
“Did I miss something? ’Cause I’m definitely not understanding you.”
Ax stepped back from his small pile of equipment. With a remote, he fast-forwarded through the thirty-minute show until he reached the segment.
All twenty seconds of it.
Ax froze the final frame.
More silence. This time, I broke it.
“Is it you, Ax?”
Ax briefly focused all four eyes on the screen before sweeping those on stalks around the perimeter of the scoop. Wary now.
Ax did. To me it still didn’t make any difference.
It could have been Ax.
It could have been any Andalite.
But the only other Andalite we knew of on Earth was Visser Three. No way would he ever be careless enough to allow himself to be caught on film. Besides, he was never without a phalanx of bodyguards.
Unless … unless he wanted to be seen by thousands of couch potatoes. But why?
“Ax-man. Is there any way to fine-tune the image?” I asked.
Tobias swooped off his perch and landed, gracefully, a few feet from the television screen.
“So it’s the visser,” I said. “Well, that’s a little beyond weird.”
Ax pulled his shoulders back.
“Alrighty then. Who?”
There was disbelief in Ax’s voice. Something else, too. More than his normal, well, arrogant tone. It sounded like disgust.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“Yeah,” I agreed, looking back to the hazy image on the screen. “The Yeerks get ahold of him, they’ve got another morphing Andalite on the team. Not good.”
“So, Ax, how do you really, really feel about this guy? Let me take a wild guess.” It sounded nasty. I meant it to.
“Which means wherever he is, we get to him first. Unless we’re too late. Which I’m not even going to think about.”
Ax
made a sound that was way close to a snort.
I grinned. Folded my arms across my chest. “No, Ax. It wasn’t meant to be ‘humorous.’ What’s with you? What’s your problem with this guy?”
Tobias interrupted,
I took a deep breath. Gave my hair a good yank, straight up. Spoke. “Yeah. It’s time to find us an Andalite. Oh,” I said, looking blandly at Ax. “Let’s not forget one other possibility here. In spite of the famous-throughout-the-galaxy Andalite honor, this guy could, as we know, quite possibly be a traitor. The whole videotape thing might be a trap for us unsuspecting, bighearted humans, who respond to creatures less fortunate than us with empathy and kindness.”
Tobias led us to the clearing that he was pretty sure was the same place the Andalite had been caught on tape.
Something about the slope of the field and a pine tree partially destroyed by lightning had given him a clue. If Ax is our personal clock, Tobias is our personal cartographer and wilderness guide.
Maybe we should have tried to contact the others first. Waited until morning. But we didn’t. Didn’t even discuss the possibility of delay. It was starting to get dark. So, I went owl for some serious night vision capability and we were off on what was intended to be a simple reconnaissance mission.
We circled above the clearing, Tobias, the most experienced flyer, swooping as close to the ground as he dared. Alert to every movement. Every twitching blade of grass and swiftly disappearing tail of mouse or vole or whatever skanky creatures run around after bedtime.
But there was nothing. If anyone, man or beast, had made tracks there in the last few days, they’d since been swallowed by the ground, which was still damp from the previous night’s heavy rain.
No evidence of foul play.