«Here come Erek and Marco,» Tobias announced at last.
I glanced out the barn door. Erek and Marco, walking side by side, fast. If you saw Erek you'd think he was just a normal kid. He looks kind of like Jake, actually, only a little shorter.
But Erek's an android. Part of a race called the Chee. And what you see when you look at him, that's just a hologram. Under the hologram Erek looks a little like a robot dog walking on its hind legs.
"This is a change," Erek said. "I'm usually the one giving you guys some bad news."
"You want bad news?" Rachel said. "Ax is no better, and we can't figure out how to get into the Yeerk pool."
"Do you know anything about Andalite physiology?" I asked Erek.
He shrugged. Or at least caused his holographic self to shrug. "Nothing."
"Are any of your people surgeons?" I asked.
Erek shook his head. "The guy who plays my father? He was a doctor back in fifteenth-century France. He knows nothing useful, trust me."
"Erek, does the Yeerk pool have toilets?" Marco demanded suddenly.
40 "Marco, not the time," Jake muttered.
"Marco," Rachel warned, "be useful, or shut up."
"Come on. It's practically like a city down there," Marco continued. "They must have a place for the human hosts to take a leak or get a drink of water," he insisted.
"Sinks, toilets. They've got the works, sure," Erek answered.
The Chee are heavily programmed against violence. But that doesn't mean they don't hate the Yeerks. And they are the best spies you can imagine.
"That means they have plumbing. Pipes. And that also means we have a way into the Yeerk pool," Marco announced. "We morph into something small, something that can swim. Climb in one of our toilets, have Erek give us a flush, swim a little, and come out in one of the Yeerk sinks or toilets."
"Oh, yeah, that should work," Rachel said. "What are you, nuts?"
«The water pressure would be pretty hard to swim against,» Tobias commented.
Jake lifted his head. "Not if we started from the water tower. Then we'd go with the pressure all the way." He started to sound a little excited. His eyes glittered. "Erek, can you tap into the city water department computers? Combine it
41 with . . ." Jake sighed and wiped his mouth. "Combine it, with, um, with all you know about the Yeerk pool and . . . you know ..."
"And give you a map? Directions?" Erek nodded. "I can give you directions to any sink or toilet in the place." He pointed at the computer my father and I use to keep records on the animals. "Mind?"
"There's no modem," I said.
Erek smiled. "Not necessary. I can be a modem."
Marco shot a triumphant glance at Rachel. "See? Still think my idea is nuts?" His face darkened. "Wait a minute. It is nuts. What's the matter with me? Am I insane?"
«Do we have a morph that could work?» Tobias asked.
"Maybe cockroach," I answered.
Jake shook his head. "There's a lot of pipe between the water tower and the Yeerk pool. I know they don't need to breathe much, but they do need to breathe eventually."
Tobias said, «l have an idea. Eels. They have them in tubs behind the bait shop. They're thin. And they're pretty fast, I think. Tasty.»
When I made a face, he said, «Hey, you think it's easy catching a mouse every day?»
"Eels? Do it," Jake ordered. A second later, Tobias was gone.
42 "Come on, Erek. We'll show you Ax's stall where we want you to do the hologram," Marco said.
Ax was asleep. He shuffled his feet in the hay as we crowded around the low stall door, but he didn't wake up. I did a quick temperature check on him.
Ninety-five point seven. Not much of a drop. Good. He wasn't close to the crisis point yet.
"I think the best thing is for me to stay in the stall with Ax," Erek said. "I can project a hologram around us both."
He slipped into the stall and closed the door behind him. A moment later, it was like he and Ax had disappeared. The stall looked completely empty.
I leaned my head over the stall door. The air shimmered around me, then Erek and Ax appeared.
"Thanks for doing this, Erek," I said.
"No prob," he answered.
"Don't you want a book to read in there?" I asked. "It's going to be boring."
"I have several thousand books stored in my brain. Sometimes I pass the time by seeing how many I can read and comprehend at the same time."
"Ooookay. Forget I asked."
43 I pulled my head out of the stall. I took a closer look at the hologram protecting Ax and Erek. No wrinkle or ripple or shadow to make my dad suspicious.
Unless he tried to go inside.
He won't, I told myself. He'd be too busy taking care of all the sick animals in cages to go poking around in an empty stall. I hoped.
"I just had a thought," Marco said.
"I'll buy you a card to commemorate the moment." Rachel, of course.
Marco didn't bother with a comeback. "If Ax goes into delirious mode, he could go running into town with underpants on his head or something. Erek won't be able to stop him."
He was right. The Chee aren't programmed for violence. Any kind of violence.
I looked at Jake. When stuff like this comes up, we all pretty much look at Jake.
Jake dropped his head back and closed his eyes for a long moment. Then he made his decision. "We've got to risk it. If something goes wrong at the Yeerk pool, it might take all of us to fight our way out."
I heard the flap of wings. Something oily slithered down my shoulder, then plopped onto the barn floor.
«Sorry,» Tobias apologized. «l dropped that
44 thing eight times on the way back. Lost the other one completely.»
"Hence slippery as an eel," Marco joked. "By the way, what with this being a crisis and all, I'm not even going to mention the sheer, bizarre, utter stupidity of taking a long ride through the city water supply. . . . But, just for the record, this is insane!"
He picked up the eel and held it for a moment, absorbing its DNA. Then he handed it to Rachel. When she was finished, she handed it to Jake. He held it briefly, focusing, then passed it to me.
"Did you get it already?" I asked Tobias.
«Yeah,» he said. «Eels. Why don't I just keep my mouth shut? Slimy little thing. Looks like a Yeerk.»
I glanced around the group. "I feel like we're missing someone," I said.
Then it hit me. Really hit me.
Ax. We'd be doing this mission without Ax.
45 An hour later Jake, Rachel, Marco, and I were treading water inside the water tower that sits in a corner of the mall parking lot, shivering in the cold water.
You've seen the water towers I'm talking about: usually painted sky-blue. Steel. Four long legs and a big steel tank on top.
It was not high-tech. Basically they pump water up into the tower, and gravity lets it run down to homes and businesses and the girls' bathrooms at schools.
It was dark in the tank. Like being in a big swimming pool on the darkest night. Creepy. Except that this was the easy part.
46 I kept repeating Erek's instructions. The precise number of large pipes, water mains, we'd pass by on left and right. The elbow turns. The main we had to turn into. Then the downward elbow, the smaller turnoffs, and finally the long vertical drop that would signal we were descending to the Yeerk pool.
It was too much detail. Ax would have remembered it all. But Ax wasn't with us.
"Okay, remember, the pipes are just a road. Lots of turns and twists, but if we follow Erek's instructions we'll come out in a pipe that feeds directly into the Yeerk pool. The tap is almost always open. The Yeerk pool sludge is largely composed of water." Jake was trying to keep everyone calm. But he didn't sound too calm himself.
"Somehow I'm gonna end up getting flushed," Marco said grimly. "There is going to be flushing involved."
"Let's just do this!" Rachel yelled impatiently. She sounded cold. I co
uld barely see her in the faint light from the access door we'd left open.
I turned my attention to the eel DNA inside me. The sound of my teeth chattering distracted me a little.
Then the sound changed. It became higher and lighter. That's because my teeth were chang-
47 ing, multiplying, growing longer and thinner and razor sharp.
Morphing is totally unpredictable. It's not like your body starts changing with the top of your head and goes on down to your toes. Or that your whole body changes all together, like a movie in slow motion.
It's grosser than that. Weirder. Stuff pops out. Like the long, narrow fin that had appeared all the way down Jake's back.
Other stuff disappears. Like Rachel's blond hair, which just got sucked into her head like a whole bunch of spaghetti into a very hungry mouth.
Popping and shrinking is only part of the deal. My eyes shrank and rolled down to the tip of my nose. My nose and chin stretched out, out, out around my new needle teeth. My forehead collapsed.
My bones liquefied, and my body caved in on itself until it was pencil-thin. Arms collapsing into my sides. Legs withering away completely.
I felt a tickly, itchy feeling as a long fin sprouted all the way down my back and gills opened up behind my mouth.
Teeny-tiny scales popped up all over my new body like goose pimples. Then an oily, slippery goop drenched me, oozing from my own body.
48 «Everybody done? Then let's book. Straight out the hole in the bottom,» Jake ordered.
I caught a flash of movement to my right. Food. Live food!
Zip! Chomp!
«Hey! That would be my tail! Whoever just bit me, get a grip,» Tobias complained.
Man, for a scrawny little thing with a pencil body, eels are aggressive. The eel's instincts were telling me to bite anything that moved and ask questions later.
And eat. I wanted live food.
Then . . . Chomp! Sharp teeth bit into my midsection.
«0kay, everyone stop biting!» I yelled, including me!»
I clamped down on the eel brain, pushing the simple, screaming instincts away. No biting, I told myself. No biting.
But then, something moved and . . .
No! I stopped myself in the nick of time.
«l am one mad little worm,» Rachel said with a laugh. «This eel has serious attitude.»
«Let's just go,» Jake said.
I began to move with a fluid, shimmying motion. Muscles stretched on one side, tightened on the other. My body went left, right, left, right. My tail whipped back and forth.
Down and down. Maybe just thirty feet to a
50 human, but a long dive to an eel the length of someone's finger.
And, as we descended, I began to feel the current. We were at the bottom of a huge sink. We were going out through the drain. The water began to rotate, a tornado!
Around, around, faster and faster!
Then, suddenly . . .
WOOOOSH!
Straight down at a million miles an hour!
49
Down!
Down through the hole, down a massive pipe, jet-black blankness all around. Nothing to see or smell or feel but the sensation of speed, of falling forever.
«Now this is a water slide,» Rachel said, laughing a bit hysterically.
I pulled some water into my mouth and pumped it over my gills. Had to remember to breathe.
I whipped my body back and forth as hard as I could. We were going fast. But I wanted to go faster. Otherwise I was just a projectile, unable to keep my head forward and tail back.
51 Suddenly, we were horizontal. But the speed didn't lessen. We were rocketing! Tearing along the pipe, blind, aware of nothing . . .
No, not quite nothing. There was sound. Rushing water boiling around every slight imperfection in the pipe. And ahead . . . ahead a different sound. Louder. Water -
«PIPE!» I yelled.
We had a millisecond to react. We were at the pipe. The current yanked at my body and pulled it to the right. I fought it with all the sinewy strength of the eel's body.
Then, we were past the water main.
«That was the first one,» Jake said. Everyone stay sharp. A lot more coming up.»
We always heard them, but always almost too late. It was harrowing. A wrong turn and there would be no telling where we'd come out.
We had two hours in morph. If we ended up in some dead end, without an open faucet we'd be trapped inside the pipe. Trapped. Unable to de-morph. Unable to get out.
We would spend the rest of our lives as eels.
«Don't think about it,» I told myself. But I guess I said it in thought-speak because Tobias asked, «Don't think about what?»
«Don't think about the fact that we could all end up trapped in a water supply tube heading to
52 some toilet in some abandoned building that no one ever flushes,» Marco said. «Shhh! Don't think about it!»
«Turn coming up,» Jake said. «Right turn. Then pass a left and take another right almost immediately. Then pass two and go left. We'll be there in a few seconds and the whole sequence will only take about three seconds. Don't think, don't talk, just react.»
Jake was in the lead. I was right behind him. Tobias right behind me, then Marco and Rachel.
Suddenly . . .
Turn! Pass! Right! Pass! Pass!
«Aaahhh!» Jake yelled.
I ran into him, his tail was flailing madly. He'd been sucked into the wrong pipe.
He was flailing, trying to back out, no time to turn . . .
Chomp!
I made a blind lunge. My razor teeth closed on tail.
«Hangon!» I yelled.
I felt Tobias pressing against me from behind.
«Tobias! Grab me!»
Sharp pain as Tobias clamped down on my tail. But now I couldn't swim. Tobias had me, but Tobias couldn't hold us against the current.
«Get Cassie!» Marco snapped, having quickly grasped what had to be done.
54 Chomp! Chomp!
Don't ask me how they even found me, but they did. I was bleeding and vaguely in pain. But now it was three eels holding on to me.
I contracted my body in a sudden, one-sided jerk. Jake was yanked back out of the pipe and into the main current.
«Thanks,» Jake managed to say.
«0kay, which way now?» Tobias asked.
«Um ...!...» Jake hesitated. He sounded woozy. Really out of it. Had he been that scared?
Maybe so, but Jake had never failed to cope.
I got a flash of him sitting in the barn with his head in his hands. Then another flash of the way his eyes looked when Marco came up with his plan to get into the Yeerk pool. I'd thought his eyes glittered with excitement.
I would have slapped myself if I'd had hands.
Jake was sick.
53
«-L think Jake is sick. That's why he's so out of it. He's feverish.» I sent my thought-speak to Rachel, Tobias, and Marco. «And I'm afraid it may be what Ax has. If he starts having demorphing spasms -»
«He could get too big. He could get crushed in the pipes,» Rachel finished for me.
«That does it. We've got to get him out of here,» Marco said. «But how?»
«No. We're not aborting the mission,» Rachel shot back. «Marco and Cassie, you can deal with Jake. Tobias and I will go on.»
«What, you're the boss now?» Marco demanded.
55 «l can't remember if Erek said to take the third right after the second left or what,» Jake mumbled.
«lt's okay, Jake. It's okay,» I reassured him.
«Yeah, I'm in charge,» Rachel asserted. «Someone has to be.»
«Yeah, I'm going to happily follow some deranged violence junkie.»
«You don't want me to be leader? Fine. How about Cassie? Or Tobias?»
«Stop. Please just stop!» I exclaimed. «You're acting like Jake's dead or something. He's right here.»
I opened up the thought-speak to include Jake. «Ja
ke, I think you have the yamphut. What do you want us to do?»
There was a long moment of silence. «Jake? Did you hear me?» I finally asked.
«let's get out of here.»
«Shouldn't two of us go on?» Rachel argued.
«!...! don't... No. No. We all get out,» Jake ordered.
«How? We're lost!» Marco said.
«!...! don't . . .» Jake said woozily.
I felt a wave of sick dread. We were lost. Lost in pipes that stretched for miles. Jake out of commission. No one with an idea.
«lt's like air!» Tobias said suddenly.
«What?»
56 «Air currents,» he said. «Sometimes I fly at night. Back up in the canyons. You can't see the walls of the canyon, you can't see the opening of the canyon and it's hard to get enough altitude to-»
«The point?!» Marco snapped. «ls there a point?»
«The wind. It doesn't blow through canyon walls; it can only blow out through the opening. If you ride it, sooner or later, it'll take you out. Water is the same. Has to come out somewhere, right?»
«So what? We ride the current?» I asked.
«Yeah, yeah. We ride the current, going with the flow, wherever it's strongest. Simple.»
«Simple, this?» Marco muttered.
We rode. We had no concept of time. No idea where we were, how much time we had left in morph. We simply rode the current through blackness, swimming enough to keep control of our bodies.
Forever. It seemed like forever. Down. Up. Right. Left. With Jake quieter and quieter. Moving more slowly.
Then . . .
«Hear that?» Marco asked.
«Current is still strong,» Rachel said.
«Really loud, isn't -» I started to say, then a sudden vertical jerk and woooosh, down a curv-
57 ing, rough-walled pipe, a sudden crush of pressure and . . .
«Aaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!»
No pipe! I was hurtling through the air!
My eel eyes weren't good for much, but they could see the fire.
The fire that was everywhere!
«Aaaahhhh!» The others exploded from the end of the nozzle.
We were five eels. Blown from the end of a fire hose, arcing through the air toward a burning building.
58 Through the air!
The Sickeness Page 3