I said.
The others stole along the perimeter single file, an absurd and unlikely circus troupe. I circled above. No one hiding in the bushes. No snipers posted on the roof.
I stepped around her. My rear legs weakened.
Then I saw the bodies. Human bodies. Maybe half a dozen. Male and female. Suited to look like gas company workers.
Sprawled now every which way. They were alive — barely. They’d obviously been on the losing end of one very fierce battle. None seemed conscious.
Yeerk slugs wriggled and writhed helplessly on the floor.
Marco added.
I moved forward, stepping carefully over the bodies with my four legs. I heard a police siren wail in the distance and I knew. I knew they were coming here. Maybe real cops. Maybe Controller-cops. It didn’t matter. No time either way. We had to get out.
But I kept going. I kept going because before the siren wailed, I’d heard a noise. A sound of life farther on in the building.
I didn’t turn back. I moved into the guts of the building, where compressors and pumps that once hummed smoothly sat silent and immobile.
I followed the sound. There was a door to what looked like a little office. I peered in.
And then I saw her, sitting with her elbows on a table, her head in her hands.
Cassie. Crying.
She had turned off the gas and saved our lives. She had done this.
With delicate Andalite arms, I tried to lift her from the chair. She stood but was limp in my arms.
Her sobs stopped. Halting half-gasps took their place. She turned in my arms, turned so that she stood and faced me. Her eyes, red and wet, stared up at mine. Salt streaks dried on her face.
“No,” she said. “It will never be okay.”
It was the next day. The sun beat down. And produced columns of rising hot air. I must have gone twelve minutes without flapping a wing. Rachel, too. Nature was giving us a free ride.
We were way up. So high. You can’t even see prey from that height. But what’s cool is that we weren’t the only birds up there. I guess true hawks need to get away, too, sometimes.
Why? I don’t know. Maybe they need the perspective. Maybe they need to feel that they’re not tied to the world of their meadow. Maybe they’re pushing the boundaries, seeing how high they can sail before the air gets too thin.
Or maybe they don’t know why they do anything.
I thought of the sinkhole where Bobby nearly drowned. The dirt flat where his father gripped him lovingly.
I spotted the pumping station as we descended. It was roped off by caution tape. Still buzzing with cops and investigators.
I thought of the last second in which I’d seen Taylor, blown through the tunnel, Barbie doll hair streaming. Her image remained but her voice was gone. Maybe just for now, maybe forever. Too soon to tell.
The cove is the closest thing to a secret beach that we know about. It’s all jutting rocks and twenty-foot drops to the sea, so it’s not too popular with the regular beach crowd. You practically have to be a bird to get to it.
Rachel demorphed and I morphed to my human self. The sun was warm. The air was salty. We were together.
“There was no way we could have known,” she said, sensing my mood, knowing where my mind was. “We were acting on the best information we had.”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Did you talk to Cassie? Did she tell you what happened?”
“Yeah. Jake took her home last night, but I stopped by this morning.”
“Well?”
“She contacted Tidwell because Jake said she could warn him. While we were digging the tunnel, Cassie talked to the Yeerk peace faction. Guess what Tidwell told her?”
I raised my eyebrows.
“Tidwell and all the peacenik Yeerks try to feed at the same time. They try to show up at the Yeerk pool together so they can exchange information and make plans.”
“We know that,” I interrupted.
“Right. But we didn’t know that they’d reorganized their feeding schedule. We didn’t know that they’d rescheduled so they’d predominate on Saturday afternoons.”
There was a long pause as I calculated just what that meant.
“Somehow Visser Three got the news? He was going to kill off all his opposition in one day! The Andalite bandits. The Yeerk peace faction. Two groups, one plan.”
“Yeah. And Cassie thinks he wanted more than our lives,” she said. “She thinks Visser Three planned to pin the atrocity on the peace faction. That he was going to weaken them by frying all their hosts, then discredit them by making it look like they were responsible for arranging the gas explosion and for engineering massive loss of Yeerk life.”
“That sounds like the visser we know and love.”
“And if he sacrificed some innocent Yeerks along the way,” Rachel continued, “it would be a small price for a plan that would also, thanks to Taylor, annihilate us.”
“So Taylor was working with Visser Three all along. She pretended to be against him to get us to cooperate.” I took a deep breath over the pain in my chest. “After all the clues! All the gut feelings! I don’t believe I didn’t see more clearly. I should have looked at the bigger picture …”
“Hey. No matter what you think, Tobias, Taylor’s not your responsibility. Besides, how often is it possible to see the big picture, really?” Rachel said. “Things happen fast. You just have to make the best decision you can and then go for it. You know what? I’d do the same thing again, if I had to.”
“How can you say that?”
“With me, it’s about instinct. I knew we had to dig that tunnel. Turns out I was right, but for the wrong reasons. If we hadn’t gotten involved with Taylor, Cassie wouldn’t have known about the plan, wouldn’t have talked to Tidwell, wouldn’t have worried about us. But she did. And it opened up a course of events that couldn’t have occurred otherwise. It ended up saving the Yeerk peace faction. It was a good investment.”
“Cassie battled a bunch of humans. Alone. You’re saying that’s a good thing?”
“Of course not,” Rachel said emphatically. “But it was the lesser of two evils.”
I sat down on a rock slab. The waves crashed. The wind whipped. Rachel sat down next to me.
Maybe I was weak, but at least I was free. My choices were my own. No matter what.
Was it over for Taylor? Did she blow through the hole in the Yeerk pool dome? Lodge in a crevice of the tunnel till the gas pressure died? Catch a crag of rock and hang on? Did she live? Would Taylor-the-girl ever live again?
Would I ever stop caring?
“You never really know how some things will turn out,” I said. A twig blew across the surface of a rock, swept along by the wind. I reached out to catch it. Rachel moved to stop it, too. Our hands collided gently. I took her hand. The twig blew pas
t us, and fell into a crack.
“Yeah,” she answered, smiling. “There’s no real point in worrying about what you might have done. The past is the past, Tobias. Let it go.”
The author wishes to thank Ellen Geroux for her help in preparing this manuscript.
I swooped low.
This had to be it. Plane at the far gate. Two Marine guards, trying to look casual. Well, as casual as you can get wearing combat boots and a pistol strapped to your chest.
An armored truck rumbled toward the plane. The driver stopped, showed one of the guards a clipboard, then backed up to the cargo hold. The rear of the truck opened. Two guys in hooded yellow coveralls climbed out. Pulled oxygen masks over their faces and unlatched the plane’s cargo door.
Okay. These guys definitely weren’t unloading souvenirs from Disneyland. If somebody was transporting a chunk of Bug fighter wreckage, it had to be on this plane.
I caught a thermal and rose above the airport. A baggage cart trundled across the tarmac. A jet screamed in for a landing. Guys in jumpsuits and headsets scrambled around, trying to keep the 747’s from mowing down the commuter planes.
And everywhere I looked — seagulls. On the roof, on the tarmac, against the fence. Seagulls are perfect cover. Part of the landscape, just like pigeons. Nobody even notices them. My own seagull morph blended right in.
Unfortunately, Jake, Rachel, Marco, and Ax blended right in, too.
I spotted a lone gull flitting back and forth beside a hangar at the far end of the runway. Beyond it, a red-tailed hawk sat perched on a chain-link fence.
No answer. I didn’t really expect one. Thought-speak is sort of like a radio signal, and the hawk was too far away to get decent reception.
I pulled my wings back and soared toward the hawk — then banked and wheeled around.
A long black car shot from the hangar and sped toward the guarded plane. It swung around the Marines and screeched to a sideways stop in front of the armored truck, blocking it in. The car doors opened, and four men in suits got out.
I circled, flying as low as I could without drawing attention to myself. Below me, the oxygen-masked guys were loading a crate from the cargo hold onto the armored truck.
The suits strode across the tarmac. The leader, a tall guy with a bald spot, headed directly for the crate, the other three suits close on his heels.
“Sir. Step away from the vehicle.” The Marines weren’t quite as casual now. They planted their feet wide apart and reached for their pistols.
Bald Spot ignored them and poked his head inside the back of the armored truck. Either the guy was too stupid to be afraid of weird alien diseases, or he already knew the wreckage wasn’t dangerous. Which meant one thing.
He was a Controller.
“I repeat, step away from the vehicle.” The Marines unsnapped their holsters.
“Relax, boys.” Bald Spot left the truck and strolled toward the guards. Flashed a badge. “CIA. We’ll take over from here.”
The Marines didn’t budge. “We’re not leaving our post, sir. We have orders.”
“Well, you have new orders now” — Bald Spot squinted at the two black stripes on the Marine’s collar — “corporal.”
“With all due respect,” the corporal answered, sounding anything but respectful, “we don’t take orders from … civilians.”
The Controllers glanced at each other.
Bald Spot nodded. “Fine.” He slid his badge into his pocket. “We’ll have a Marine colonel here in a few minutes.”
Yeah. They would. A Yeerk-infested colonel who would destroy the Bug fighter wreckage before NASA or the news media had a chance to get to it.
I needed a diversion. Had to buy some time.
The guards glanced sideways at one another.
“Did you say something, sir?” the corporal called out.
Bald Spot turned. “You talking to me?”
“Yes, I am. I believe you called us wimps, sir.”
Bald Spot frowned and turned away again. “You’re hearing things, son.”
The Marines shook their heads.
The Marines rolled their eyes.
That got them. I could see the muscles of their faces knotting up. The corporal clenched and unclenched his fists.
“Suits,” he muttered. “Too bad I can’t leave my post.”
The other Marine, the one with only one stripe, shrugged. “Ignore them.”
Great. Marines with self-control.
The CIA guys were huddled beside their car, talking in low voices. Bald Spot pulled a cell phone out of his jacket.
I had to do something! Fast.
No answer. Where were they?
I scanned the scene. Below: two pumped-up Marines, four alien-infested CIA guys, and at least six guns between them. Above: an unarmed seagull.
Well, maybe not completely unarmed.
I flapped my wings to gain altitude. Bald Spot flipped open his cell phone. I zeroed in on my target. He punched some numbers. I dove. He pushed SEND, and I dropped my bomb.
Bird poop splatted over the phone and down one side of Bald Spot’s head.
“Aagghhhhhh!” He wiped at his face, then glared up into the sky. “Andalite!” he hissed as he hurled the phone to the pavement and pulled a pistol from his jacket.
Oooo-kaaay. Not exactly what I had in mind. I motored upward.
BAMBAMBAMBAM!
Bullets sailed past me. I searched for a place to hide. Something to shield me. Nothing. Empty tarmac and runway. I was a gleaming white target against clear blue sky.
BAMBAMBAMBAM!
I pumped my wings, darted up and back, trying to throw his aim off. It was all I could do. He wasn’t going to stop shooting. Until he hit me.
BAM!
One last shot. Then the bullets stopped. Silence. I spilled air from my wings and dove toward the runway.
“Drop your weapon, sir.”
The Marines! I thrust my wings forward and spiraled around. They were standing with legs outspread, gripping their pistols with both hands. The oxygen-masked guys dove inside the armored truck. Smart.
“Drop your weapon, sir,” the corporal repeated.
Bald Spot turned. “I don’t think so.” He extended his arm. “Here are your new orders, boys.”
Oh, God.
Ka-CHIK.
He cocked his pistol.
Ka-CHIK. Ka-CHIK. Ka-CHIK.
The other Controllers cocked their pistols.
For half a second Marines and Controllers stood frozen. Then —
BAM!
BAM! BAM!
Bullets flew. The Marines dove behind the plane’s landing gear. The Controllers dropped back behind their car.
Okay. Okay. Think, Cassie. You have to get them to stop shooting. You’ve got to keep them from killing each other.
BAM! BAM! BAM! Choooong. Kachooooong.
Bullets sprayed off metal. I swung around the tail of the plane, looking for cover. An engine roared to life at the next gate. A baggage cart, lurching toward the plane!
The cart kept coming, full speed. It careened past a food service truck and ricocheted off a cargo bin. Fishtailed around the nose of the plane. Skidded to a stop between the Marines and the Controllers.
BAM! BAM! Kachooooong.
The baggage cart quaked. Suitcases erupted.
“Rrrrrooooowwwwrrr!”
And a thousand pounds of grizzly bear exploded from the rubble.
About the Author
The Animor
phs series, written by Katherine (K. A.) Applegate with her husband, Michael Grant, has sold millions of copies worldwide, and alerted the world to the presence of the Yeerks. Katherine and Michael are also the authors of the bestselling Remnants and Everworld series. On her own, Katherine is the author of Home of the Brave, Crenshaw, Wishtree, and the Newbery Medal–winning The One and Only Ivan. Michael is the author of the Gone and Front Lines series.
The invasion has begun.
Catch up on Newbery Medal–winner K. A. Applegate’s world-conquering series.
#1: The Invasion
#2: The Visitor
#3: The Encounter
#4: The Message
#5: The Predator
#6: The Capture
#7: The Stranger
#8: The Alien
#9: The Secret
#10: The Android
#11: The Forgotten
#12: The Reaction
#13: The Change
#14: The Unknown
#15: The Escape
#16: The Warning
#17: The Underground
#18: The Decision
#19: The Departure
#20: The Discovery
#21: The Threat
#22: The Solution
#23: The Pretender
#24: The Suspicion
#25: The Extreme
#26: The Attack
#27: The Exposed
#28: The Experiment
#29: The Sickness
#30: The Reunion
#31: The Conspiracy
#32: The Separation
#33: The Illusion
#34: The Prophecy
#35: The Proposal
#36: The Mutation
#37: The Weakness
#38: The Arrival
#39: The Hidden
#40: The Other
#41: The Familiar
#42: The Journey
#43: The Test
#44: The Unexpected
#45: The Revelation
#46: The Deception
#47: The Resistance
#48: The Return
#49: The Diversion
#50: The Ultimate
#51: The Absolute
#52: The Sacrifice
#53: The Answer
#54: The Beginning
The Test Page 8