The Message

by K. A. Applegate

  They were at the limits of my sight when they struck. They ripped into the injured shark with wild, uncontrolled fury.

  The last shark turned from the battle and went after them. Robbed of his meal of whale meat, he would feast on his brother instead.

  Jake asked.

  I said.

  Rachel said. She sounded tired. I guess I did, too. I felt exhausted and drained. The fight had probably only lasted two minutes from beginning to end. But it had been a long two minutes.

 

  he said.

  I looked for him. He was drifting in the water, almost motionless, twenty yards away. We all swam over, crowding around him.

  Then I saw the wound. I think I would have screamed, if I could have. His tail had almost been bitten off. It was hanging by a few jagged threads. It was useless.

  We were miles out in the ocean. And Marco could not hope to swim back.

  CHAPTER 12

  He’s going to die if we don’t do something,> Rachel cried.

  Jake asked.

 

  Jake said urgently.

  But I wasn’t feeling at all like an expert. I was feeling like a fool. This was all my fault. It had been my decision to go ahead. I was the one.

  Marco moaned.

  Tobias called down.

  Jake answered tersely. Marco cried.

  I yelled.

  Rachel argued.

  Rachel asked bluntly. Jake said.

 

  He was drifting off. I said.

  We formed a circle around him, the three of us, with Tobias drifting overhead and the big humpback resting alongside.

  Then Marco began to change. Arms sprouted from his flippers. His face flattened down, with his wide, grinning dolphin mouth shortening to form Marco’s own lips. His skin turned pink and his morphing suit appeared.

  His shattered, injured tail split in two. Legs formed from the halves, toes appeared. Human toes. At the end of human legs.

 

  “Yeah, I did it. And now I’m drowning!”

  I said, swimming beside him.

  He wrapped his arms over my back, and I held him up to the air.

  Then I noticed something strange. It was like the ocean floor was rising to meet me.

  No. It was the humpback. He had dived beneath us, and was rising slowly, slowly to the surface.

  Rachel yelled.

  But at that moment the most incredible part of an incredible day happened.

  My mind, human, dolphin, both minds, opened up like a flower opening to the sun.

  And a silent, but somehow huge, voice filled my head. It spoke no words. It simply filled every corner of my mind with a simple emotion.

  Gratitude.

  The whale was telling me that it was grateful. We had saved it. Now it would save our schoolmate.

  I told Rachel and Jake.

  Rachel agreed, sounding amazed.

  The humpback rose beneath a sputtering Marco. The broad leathery back lifted him up. And when I looked again, I saw Marco, sitting nervously on what could have been a small island, high and dry above the choppy waves.

  Tobias fluttered down and rested beside him.

  The whale called me to him.

  Listen, little one, he commanded, in a silent voice that seemed to fill the universe.

  I listened. I listened to his wordless voice in my head. I felt like it went on forever.

  Tobias said later it was only ten minutes. But during that ten minutes, I was lost to the world. I was being shown a small part of the whale’s thoughts.

  He had lived eighty migrations. He had many mates, many mothers, who had died in their turn. His children traveled the oceans of the world.

  He had survived many battles, traveled to the far southern ice and the far northern ice. He remembered the days when men hunted his kind from ships that belched smoke.

  He remembered the songs of the many fathers who had gone before. As others would remember his song.

  But in all he had seen and all he had known, he had never seen one of the little ones become a human.

  Marco, I realized. He means Marco. And little ones? Is that what the whales call dolphins?

  We are not truly … little ones.

  No. You are something new in the sea. But not the only new thing.

  I wasn’t sure what he was telling me. He spoke only in feelings, in a sort of poetry of emotion, without words. Part of it was in song. Part of it I could only sense the same way I could sense echolocation.

  Something new?

  He showed me a picture, a memory. It was a broad, grassy plain, with trees and a small stream. All of it underwater. And across the grass ran an animal that was part deer, part scorpion, part almost human.

  Where is it? I asked him in a language of squeaks and clicks and mind-to-mind feeling.

  And he told me.

  Suddenly I woke up. That’s how it felt, anyway. The whale released me. It was like coming out of a dream.

  Jake asked.

  I said.

  Jake reported.

  I said, still lost in images from a mind larger and older and so utterly strange.

  Tobias reported.

  I heard Marco say something, but he was speaking normally now, not in thought-speak, so it was hard to make it out with my ears under the water.

  I stuck my head up and saw him begin to resume his dolphin shape.

  Halfway through, he slipped off the side of the whale and back into the water. His fins formed. His beak.

  And his tail. Perfect and healthy and undamaged.

  We headed for shore, tired but alive.

  I felt strange, leaving the whale. But when we were a mile away, I heard his song—slow, mournful, haunting notes.

  Jake wondered.

  I smiled inwardly. And of course, since I was a dolphin at the moment, I smiled outwardly, too.

  I explained. Marco asked.

 

 

  CHAPTER 13

  The next day I went to see Marco at his home.

  He and his dad live in a garden apartment complex. One of the older ones, on the far side of the big neighborho
od where Jake and Rachel both live. I’d only been over there a couple of times. I think Marco is kind of embarrassed because he doesn’t have much money.

  He used to live in a house just down the street from Jake. But that was when his mother was still alive, and before his father had a breakdown and quit his job.

  I knocked on the door. From inside I heard Marco’s voice. “Dad, there’s someone at the door. Put on your bathrobe, okay?”

  There was a delay, and then the door opened. Marco looked annoyed.

  “Cassie. What are you doing here?”

  “I wanted to talk to you.”

  “To me? What about?”

  “About yesterday,” I said.

  He hesitated. “Look, I’m spending the day with my dad, okay? We’re thinking maybe we’ll … you know, do something together.”

  “That’s good,” I said. Over Marco’s shoulder I could see his father. He was wearing a bathrobe and sitting on the couch. He was staring at the TV. That was normal for any dad, I guess, on a weekend morning. But I had the feeling that Marco’s dad was always sitting right there in front of the TV.

  “Look, Marco, I just want to talk for a minute. Can I come in?”

  “No, no,” he said hastily. He stepped outside onto the concrete breezeway. Down below us was a swimming pool. It was drained and closed. Leaves covered the bottom.

  “Marco, I wanted to talk to you about yesterday.”

  “What about it?”

  “You could have been killed. It would have been my fault. This whole mission was my idea. Jake asked me if we should do it and I said yes.”

  Marco rolled his eyes. “That’s it? Look, it wasn’t your fault. It’s this whole thing we’re doing, this whole Animorph thing. I mean, it’s been dangerous right from the start. It’s insanely dangerous. What else is new?”

  I shrugged. “What’s new, I guess, is that the other times it was always someone else’s idea.”

  “Oh, I get it. You don’t like responsibility?”

  I winced. Was that it? Was I afraid of taking responsibility? “I don’t want to get my friends killed.”

  “And let me assure you your friends don’t want to get killed, either,” Marco said with a laugh. “I am completely opposed to getting killed.” He grew serious, even sad. “But you know what? Sometimes bad things happen. That’s the way it is.”

  I leaned against the rail, looking down at the dismal empty pool. “I see things die all the time,” I said. “Animals, I mean. Sometimes you can’t save them. Sometimes we even have to put them down — end their suffering. But my dad makes those decisions. Not me. He’s the vet. I’m just his assistant.”

  “Look, here I am, all alive,” Marco said, tapping his chest. “Get over it. I didn’t have to go. It was my choice.”

  “Were you scared?”

  For a while he didn’t answer. He just came over and leaned on the railing beside me. “I’m scared all the time now, Cassie,” he said at last. “I’m scared to fight the Yeerks, and I’m scared of what will happen if I don’t. I look at Tobias, and what happened to him scares me to death. What if I get stuck in morph someday? And most of all, I am scared of … of him.”

  I didn’t have to ask who Marco meant by him. Visser Three.

  “That first time, in the construction site, when he killed … when he murdered the Andalite.” Marco made a twisted smile. “I see that in my head every day. And the Yeerk pool.” He shook his head. “That’s something I would like to forget, too.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “There has been a lot of fear.”

  “So was I afraid yesterday? Bet on it. I was scared plenty. It was like, man, it’s not bad enough we have to fight Hork-Bajir and Taxxons and Visser Three, we also have to fight sharks? Sharks?” He laughed, and hearing him brought the laughter out of me.

  We both just stood there and giggled like idiots for a while. It was that laughter you get after something really tense has happened. Relief laughter. “We’re still alive” laughter.

  “Um, by the way, I was going to wait and tell everyone at the same time,” Marco said, “but I think we have a problem.”

  “What problem?”

  “It was in the newspaper this morning—two stories. One is about this guy who is going to be looking for some supposedly lost treasure ship off the coast. The other was this story about some big marine biologist guy who has a ship and is going to be doing some underwater exploration off our coast.”

  “Yes? So?”

  “So, all of a sudden our nearby ocean seems to be very interesting to people. Treasure hunters and an underwater exploration? At the same time?”

  “Controllers? “

  He nodded. “I think so. I think it’s all a cover story to explain why two ships will be out there with lots of divers in the water. I think it’s them, all right. And I think they’re looking for the same thing you’re looking for.”

  I felt weak. The image the whale had given me surfaced in my mind. And the faint cry in my dreams, the cry for help.

  “I … I can’t ask anyone to go out there again,” I whispered. “This time we might not be so lucky.”

  Marco looked uncomfortable. “Cassie, you know how I feel about all this. I think we have to take care of ourselves first. And our own families.” He glanced back at his apartment door. “On the other hand … I guess after what the Andalite did for us, I wouldn’t feel like much of a human being if I didn’t try to save whoever is out there.”

  “I don’t know who’s out there,” I said. “I don’t know if it’s even real.”

  “But you think it’s an Andalite.”

  “I think it is. But Marco, I don’t know. If someone gets hurt … killed … just because I have these dreams—I can’t make that kind of decision.”

  “Yes, but can you decide to do nothing? That’s a decision, too.”

  I had to smile. “Marco, you know, for a guy who’s always joking around and being annoying, you’re awfully smart.”

  “Yeah, I know, but don’t tell anyone. It would destroy my image.”

  I started to walk away.

  “You know what was strange about yesterday?” Marco said.

  “What?”

  “The sharks. They were so totally deadly. I mean, we worry about Hork-Bajir and Taxxons and Visser Three. You kind of forget that right here on little old planet Earth there are creatures just as tough and dangerous. It would be funny if it wasn’t some alien that ended up getting us, but some normal Earth creature.”

  I didn’t think it was funny at all.

  Marco grinned at my stone face. “Okay, not funny ha-ha. More like funny weird.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Okay,” Jake said. “Here’s what we know. Or at least, what we think we know.”

  We were all at Rachel’s house again. It was a few hours after I had gone to see Marco. Tobias was perched on the windowsill. He didn’t feel all that comfortable being inside for long. He liked the feel of the wind and the open air.

  “First, we believe that somehow a surviving Andalite, or maybe more than one Andalite, is trapped out in the ocean.”

  “Hopefully Andalites can hold their breath for a really long time,” Marco joked.

  “Second, Cassie believes she can find this Andalite, thanks to the information from the whale.”

  Everyone kept a straight face for a few seconds. Then, all at once, everyone cracked up.

  “Information from a whale,” Marco repeated, giggling.

  Tobias asked.

  “Weird? Weird?” Marco crowed. “The talking bird wants to know if getting information on the location of an alien from a whale, that you’ve just saved from sharks, by turning into dolphins … You’re suggesting that’s weird?”

  Jake smiled. “Well, stay tuned. It just gets weirder. Cassie and I have been going over maps. She says the location we’re looking for is pretty far out to sea. Too far for us to swim and still have any time left of our tw
o-hour limit.”

  “Well, that’s the ball game, isn’t it?” Marco asked.

  Jake nodded at Rachel. “I was talking to Rachel earlier and she has an idea.”

  Rachel stood up. She’d been lounging on the bed. “We hop a ride on a ship. First we morph into something like a seagull.”

  Marco groaned. “I hate plans that begin with the words ‘first we morph.’ “

  “We morph into seagulls,” I said, picking up the plan we’d worked out. “Then we fly out into the shipping channel. We land on a tanker or a container ship or something that’s going the right direction. We morph back to human, rest up, let the ship get us closer, then jump over the side, morph to dolphin, and go the rest of the way.”

  “Oh, well, when you put it that way, it sounds so easy,” Marco sneered. “How about if we just walk over to Chapman’s house and tell him to call Visser Three to finish us off? It’s so much easier, and the results will be the same.”

  Jake sighed. “It is dangerous and risky, and there are about a hundred things that could go wrong. Plus, as Marco has told us, we have reason to think that Controllers will be out there, searching for the same thing we’re searching for.”

  “This idea just gets better and better,” Marco said.

  “Let’s put it to a vote,” Jake suggested.

  “I’m in,” Marco said instantly.

  A split second behind him, Rachel said her usual “I’m in.”

  Everyone stared openmouthed at Marco.

  “Just once I wanted to beat Rachel to it,” he explained.

  “Tobias?” Jake asked.

 

  “You had the dreams, just like Cassie,” Jake pointed out. “Do you think we should do this or not?”

  Tobias fixed his fierce glare on me.

  “Okay, looks like we go,” Jake said briskly. “Tomorrow. First thing in the morning. We can’t wait any longer. The longer we hold off, the greater the chance the Yeerks will beat us to it.”

  We left Rachel’s house. Marco split off in one direction. Tobias flew off to some unknown destination. Jake and I walked together for a while, even though it was out of his way.