“Dude,” I said. “How dumb is it to live the rest of your life in a body that makes girls scream in terror? Your dating life is so over before it’s even begun.”
“Marco, man, come on,” Jake pleaded. “We need you.”
“Yeah, we haven’t had a good laugh all day.”
Who knows what finally reached him? Cassie’s gentle coaching. Tobias’s too-real fear. Jake’s pleading. My pathetic wisecracks. Maybe even Ax’s cold countdown. I’m not even sure any of our puny voices, thought-speak or not, got through.
All I know is that the hairy leg near me began to puff outward. Growing, growing — until it was a roach-colored wall. We ran to keep from getting squashed.
Ax pointed the Dracon beam.
The Helmacrons’ marble eyes all turned to face Marco.
Then —
A rumbling of sound.
Ax informed us.
“Marco. Man! You are in serious doo-doo.” Jake tried to sound serious, but he didn’t.
“Ax, he probably can’t hear my voice, so ask him where we are!” I said. Then I smacked Marco on his growing human arm. Ridiculous. All less than an inch of me.
“ARFARFARFARFARF!” Cujo, in the hallway.
Then, a rumbling of sound. A massive human voice.
There was no way I could hear or understand Marco’s words, but I bet he said something like this: “Oh, man. I’m getting it from both sides! Everybody’s always blaming me! This whole thing is Rachel’s fault. If she hadn’t hit me in the first place, I wouldn’t have fallen and hit my head …”
“Ax, tell Marco to stop whining and thank us for saving him from a life under the kitchen sink!”
Ax did. Here’s what I know Marco said: “Remind me to send flowers after I save your sorry butts.”
Marco morphed a gull.
We clung to him. The five of us, and our five prisoners.
Marco explained to us where we were as he bird-walked out of the closet, hopped up onto the desk, and grabbed the camera with his beak. Then, we flew through the open window and headed toward Cassie’s barn.
Now that he was in morph, Marco could engage in two-way communication with Ax and Tobias.
“How’d you get away?” Cassie asked, via Ax.
“Please tell me you’re not going to be imitating the Helmacrons for the next two months,” Jake said.
Had we actually missed this guy? Hard to believe.
“Yeah, and we’ll talk later about your brilliant decision to disobey orders.” Jake. “I just know you had a good reason.”
“I wonder what’s on that film,” I said.
Jake frowned. “We’ll never know. Developing it is too risky. We’ll burn it as soon as we get to the barn.”
We did.
Marco had hidden the Helmacron ship in the freezer, along with the blue box. Ax hooked everything up and forced the protesting Helmacrons to unshrink us.
Relief.
Then we let them power up their ship and take off.
“Promise us you’ll never come back to Earth,” Jake said as the Helmacrons hovered in front of the barn door.
At the same time, I noticed the blue box beginning to elevate. I couldn’t see the Helmacrons minuscule tractor beam, but I knew it was there.
Marco and I both jumped to grab the box. I snagged it. We even managed not to hit our heads together.
Cassie stowed the blue box somewhere safe. Again, for security, she didn’t tell us where. Then we all headed home for a little quality time with our parents. I had piles of homework. I was researching the Salem witch-hunts on the Internet when I flashed on that strange spiky thing we saw in Marco’s bloodstream.
Ten minutes later I found it on the Web site from the Centers for Disease Control.
A sketchy line drawing of the spiky thing.
A rabies virus.
The dog bite Marco had told us about …
What I read about rabies didn’t make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
Rabies is not a pretty disease. Get it and you have two choices: Start a series of injections within three days. Or die. Die after going awfully, violently insane.
Bottom line: If Marco hadn’t morphed, to roach or anything else, he’d be dying. He wouldn’t have known he had rabies so he wouldn’t have started the treatment in time. When he’d morphed in the kid’s closet, almost twelve hours had already gone by.
Other bottom line: It was clear to me that Marco had morphed not to upset Jake or to save his own skinny butt. Not to betray us or because he valued his own life over ours.
He’d morphed because the disease had already begun to twist his mind and distort his judgment. He’d morphed against direct orders because he was slowly going insane.
This was good news. Marco wasn’t dying and with this interesting piece of information I could get him off the hook with Jake and the others.
I reached for the phone. Stopped.
Smirked. Maybe in the morning.
The author wishes to thank Emily Costello for her help in preparing this manuscript.
My name is Tobias. Still a freak of nature. Part human. Part bird. Confused? Don’t worry, it gets better.
I am flying over the forest. The air is thick. A storm is approaching. It is only early afternoon, but the sky is growing black as the front moves in on the city. A towering wall of rain, wind, and cumulus clouds.
I had to find food before the storm. I was hungry. But then, I’m always looking for food. That’s life for a bird of prey. Hunger.
A shrew stepped out from its burrow. It loitered nervously, sniffing the moisture. We had the same thought, me and the shrew. Hunker down against nature’s wrath, but fill your belly first.
I was higher on the food chain. I tucked into a dive.
My wings pressed tight to my body. Air whistled past. Mountains, forest, and sky. All a blur, a flashing streak. Everything but the shrew, shifting agitatedly, chomping on a seed . . .
My talons struck, embedded, and squeezed. Drained life instantly.
Wonder what it’s like? Dig your fingernails into a too-ripe peach. Rip sections off with your teeth. Gulp them without chewing. The kill is something like that.
I downed the shrew and lifted off.
I don’t think about the kill anymore. I’m hawk and human. I’ll explain later. Just try to understand that the hawk must feed the human. It has to happen.
I don’t think about it anymore.
That’s a lie.
“You vile little bird! Do you realize what you’ve done? Do you realize what you’ve become? You’re trapped! You have to live out your life as a bird!”
Her name was Taylor. My Yeerk torturer. Her voice screeching. Bruising my ears. Tormenting me after every kill. Other t
imes, too. Still, after all this time . . .
THWOK! THWOK! THWOK! THWOK!
A helicopter! Hovering low over the trees, dispersing terrified crows in all directions. If I were a true hawk, I’d have cleared out with the other birds. Instead, I circled around and flapped toward the turbulence.
My friends, the Animorphs, the ones who fight the Yeerk invasion of Earth, say that since my capture, I live too much of life in my head. They must be right. I’d almost missed everything.
Not just the helicopter. The humans below, streaming across rough forest floor, the tires of their ATV’s scoring the soil. The searchlights streaking the trees in the daytime darkness, making rabbits and deer dart in alarm.
I flew to the nearest ranger station. It was ringed by squad cars and TV news vans. I swooped down, closer to the action. Landed on a low branch. A blond woman in a raincoat held a microphone close to her lips and swatted wind-whipped hair away from her face.
“Bobby McIntire,” she shouted above the noise of the vehicles, “missing now for two full days since he wandered away from his camping party. Hope that he’ll be found alive is fading. But it’s not just a race against time and the weather.” Lightning struck the sky above her, imparting urgency to her words. “Little Bobby is deaf and can’t hear the desperate calls of rescuers. Kelly King,” she concluded, looking skyward, “reporting live.” She held a frozen, concerned expression until the producer gave her the all clear.
“I will break you.” It was Taylor’s voice again, whispering in my mind. “You can’t win.”
I set a course for the storm front. A strange thing to do, to turn toward the lightning. To fly into the line of rain, the thunderclaps, the wind.
But it made me feel like Lindbergh over the Atlantic. Fearless and strong. Maybe even a little heroic.
I wanted those feelings.
See, it wasn’t long ago that the Yeerks captured me. A crazed and insane human-Controller made my life a hell for several excruciating hours. I survived. I even thought the torture was over. I didn’t realize that torture doesn’t end when you’re freed.
People think it does. People who’ve never been through torture think that when the physical injuries heal, you’re healed, too. They’re wrong.
Torture plays tricks on your mind. “You’re weak and scared,” it says. “You think you’re in control? Hah!” it says. “Doubt yourself. Worry, and question, and fear,” it tells you.
Pain can be very convincing.
Sometime during my capture, my mind was assaulted with memories, images of all the times I’ve been weak. Or think I might have been . . .
Like my first time at the Yeerk pool.
My mind flashed back to it now, to the scene at Yeerk Central, that echoing underground dome with a sludgy pool churning at its core. The Yeerk pool. That’s where the Yeerks do their dirtiest dirty work, where parasitic, sluglike aliens dunk your head in the muck and force one of their kind through your ear.
The Yeerks squeeze your brain and wring out your freedom. They control all thoughts and movements. They silence your howls and screams of grief until you are nothing but a slave. A stupid puppet. An unwilling soldier of the Yeerk Empire. A threat to all humanity.
But you’ve probably heard about all this by now. Right?
Tha-BOOM! Boom!
A thunderclap roared and half brought me back to the present. The other half of me was still at the Yeerk pool that first, horrible time. Clinging to the rock face, praying for camouflage, searching the colossal cavern for a way to escape. A way to get past Visser Three’s men.
How long since I’d morphed to red-tailed hawk? An hour and fifty minutes? An hour and fifty-five?
How long?!
The others had escaped already. The other Animorphs, I mean. They’d dodged the visser’s fireball gauntlet. They’d slipped out to safety, back through the janitor’s closet, back into the school. Rachel, Cassie, Marco, Jake.
Had I missed the deadline? Had I been more than two hours in morph?
Couldn’t have. Can’t have. No. I’d be trapped forever. A bird.
Independent, free, alone.
Forever.
Images of the human life I’d led till then flooded my mind. The images were dark. My apathetic aunt. My alcoholic uncle.
Then, something brighter, something powerful surged through my mind. Something else. Shoring me up. Drawing me in. A wave of . . .
What? What had I felt then, at that moment, with the seconds ticking down? With the deadline chasing me . . .
Weakness or strength?
“You’ll never know,” Taylor said. “You won’t know who or what you are when I’m done with you.”
Bobby McIntire needed to be found.
I let a fading thermal lift me into the atmosphere.
My name is Tobias. I’m a human. I’m a hawk. If you want to find something in the forest, you’d do well to ask me.
There’s nothing I don’t see.
About the Author
The Animorphs 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
Text copyright © 2000 by Katherine Applegate
Cover illustration by David B. Mattingly
Art Direction/Design by Karen Hudson/Ursula Albano
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc. SCHOLASTIC, ANIMORPHS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompil
ed, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
e-ISBN 978-1-338-21773-5
First edition, June 2000
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