LAST BUT NOT LEAST: the "CouteauBleu interlude," Interlude 10, has finally been updated and polished into its final form. You won't lose much if you skip the reread (no major plot changes) but I do believe it's stronger than it was, thanks to Couteau's help.

By the way, I know I don't really deserve it, since the updates have been super spotty, but if you have the time to leave a comment or a review, I'd particularly appreciate it this month. If you model me as feeling pretty much exactly like [the tone of this chapter], you won't be far off. As always, your words are a treasure (including the negative ones, so long as they're constructive), and they keep me going.

I'm on vacation for the next eight days, though, so there's a chance I'll actually manage to squeeze in one or two updates before December 31st. Next chapter is Marco, followed by Rachel.

Hello, everyone. Sorry it's been so long between updates—work at CFAR has continued to be time-consuming, and in addition I've started an ambitious group house, published a set of 30 rationality essays on the new LessWrong, started official work on my kids' rationality bootcamp thanks to a grant from CEA, and generally been running around in need of a Time Turner, a clone, and a Time Turner for the clone.

Chapter Text

Chapter 31: Jake

‹I—what—Jake?›

I felt the ripple of shock pass through her, the scrambling confusion like slipping on ice.

‹Jake—is that you?›

‹Yes,› I answered.

Her disorientation deepened as she reached for her muscles, her eyes, and found the way blocked, her body still and unresponsive. I said nothing, an odd reluctance tugging at the back of my mind, an unsympathetic unwillingness to help as she struggled to put together the pieces.

‹Wha—where am—what’s going—what?›

‹You’re a morph, Cassie.›

I watched as the words produced a rush of understanding, followed—as always—by a spike of sickly fear.

Here it comes.

‹Am I—›

‹Yes,› I said bluntly.

I was being callous, cruel—noticed myself being cruel, and yet had no energy to spare to walk it back. Inside our shared head, the copy of Cassie withered, buckling beneath the weight of the revelation. I felt her despair as it welled up, thick and sticky and black—watched the frantic tumble of her thoughts as she searched desperately for words that she would allow herself to hear, to think, to say.

But on my end—

Only impatience.

Not the kind of impatience that motivates you to speed things along. Not the kind that makes you want to help. The kind that’s made up mostly of judgment, of annoyance—of waiting for the other person to screw up, to justify the contempt you’re already feeling. We’d been here fifty-four times before, the two of us, and the cut scene—

The cut scene just wasn’t doing anything for me anymore.

‹My parents—›

‹We don’t know,› I said, cutting her off again. ‹Supposedly in Washington. But they were dropped off by Visser Three, as bait, and we don’t know what shape they’re in, and we can’t afford to go get them out.›

She flinched—shrank—curled inward on herself like a kicked puppy, and even through my exhaustion I felt myself responding, felt a flicker of sympathy and remorse—

Oh, please.

The voice was Marco’s—Marco at his coldest, Marco as I imagined him when I thought about the future, about what he would be like if this went on for another year, the last shreds of humanity burned away, leaving only a skeleton of iron resolve.

It was there to protect me, that voice. To remind me that it made no difference, in the end. That whether I helped or not, comforted her or not—whether she recovered from the blows I was giving her or just collapsed entirely—that either way, this version of Cassie had less than an hour to live. Then I would shove her back, like I always did—back down into oblivion, into nothingness, into un-being.

I had done it before, after all. Fifty-four times, since that first night after Ventura. And after fifty-four times—it would have horrified me, if someone had told me six months ago, but after fifty-four times—

There was a part of me that was curious.

That wanted to see.

How she would react.

To see if anything would be different, if I said nothing. If I wasn’t kind. Wanted to see how she would make sense of it—how she would fit it into her eternal, unchanging impression of me.

I wouldn’t have done it just from curiosity. Or at least, that’s what I told myself. But I was so very, very tired, and with every morph she seemed less and less like a real person, and in the end, it was just—easier—not to care. I hated myself for it, but it was a token, halfhearted hatred, too thin to use as fuel.

‹Was it bad?› she asked quietly.

I could feel her rallying, under the surface—twisting out from under the pain, looking for something else to latch onto, something to distract herself.

‹It was quick,› I said. ‹There was a mission—to the Yeerk pool. And—›

I imagined explaining it all over again, as I had so many times before—the god, the meteor, the Bug fighter, the broadcast—

‹—there was a fire. You went back to try to save some of the people in the cages. And then the Yeerks blew everything up.›

She was firming up, as the words sank in. Recovering. Straightening. Hardening. A ray of quiet pride cut through the despair, bright and golden, and her shock began to melt as a low glow of warmth and concern kindled underneath.

‹Is everyone else—›

I broke in, cutting her off. ‹Cassie, I need to ask you something.›

The shift was instantaneous, frictionless, total. It was too fast for words, but if there had been words—

Jake is hurting, some part of her had decided. Must be hurting, or I wouldn’t be so short, so brusque, so cold.

I was hurting, the copy of Cassie thought, and that meant she had a job to do.

‹What’s up, buttercup?› she asked, her tone a deliberate balance between casual and concerned.

And just like that, we were back on script. Back to the Cassie of yesteryear, the Cassie who never grew, never changed. A Cassie who’d never made it to the mesa, who hadn’t lived long enough to choke on the ashes of Ventura, who didn’t remember slaughtering a bear just because she couldn’t keep it all inside any longer. A Cassie who honestly thought she might be a terrible person because once in a while she only did the right thing reluctantly.

(In the back of my head, Marco’s laughter echoed, dark and empty and cold as deep space.)

I could still see her fear and hurt, writhing beneath the surface like a live electrical wire, but they were under control now. Deprioritized. Set aside, along with her confusion and disorientation. The mere fact of it set my teeth on edge, started a slow boil in my blood, and it took a long moment for me to understand why—

That was how she’d gotten herself killed in the first place.

Not by being generically stupid, but by actively not thinking. By retreating from reality, running backwards from a thorny, confusing, impossible situation until she found something simple and straightforward—something unambiguously good, according to her own private moral code. By dodging the hard question, and replacing it with something clear and actionable, even at the cost of her own life—

I hated it. Hated her, in that moment—for abandoning us, for deserting, for cheating and tagging out while we still needed her. For leaving us to deal with the real problems, while she went off and satisfied some selfish need to feel good about herself, for putting herself first—

You mean like when a certain fearless leader charged straight ahead into the Yeerk pool and got himself killed?

‹…Jake?›

‹There’s a meeting,› I said abruptly. ‹In about four hours. Out in the desert. President Tyagi, and Telor, they’re planning to make a deal—›

‹Who?›

I felt a surge of hot anger, drowned it in a wave of ice. ‹The next highest Yeerk under Visser Three,› I lied, reaching for the simplest possible explanation. ‹They’re maybe interested in—in mutinying, and there’s a decent chance we might be able to strike a deal—›

I faltered, unable to get my thoughts into an order that the copy of Cassie would understand. Essak and Marco’s dad, Temrash and Ax, the kid David and his dead father, the missions Tobias had been running to Tyagi and Paul Evans and Thàn Suoros, the Andalite Chancellor’s threat and the President’s plan to turn the war cold again—at the cost of humanity’s independence—and our half-dozen half-baked ideas on how to assassinate Visser Three—

Hell, this version of Cassie didn’t even know about the Chee.

‹There are a lot of moving parts,› I said. ‹Point is, we have a shot at peace—›

—Cassie’s heart swelled with emotion, and I felt a corresponding wash of disdain, followed by an echo of self-recrimination that managed to be just a little bit too small—

‹—real, actual peace, but only if the Yeerks don’t betray Tyagi, and Tyagi doesn’t betray the Yeerks, and the Andalites listen to reason, and Visser Three isn’t somehow in the loop and ready to take us all down. And even with all of that, it at least means setting up a voluntary infestation program, and might eventually mean going to war with the Andalites instead.›

‹Wh—I mean, I don’t—›

I sighed and said it all again with different words, filling in more of the background as I held back my rising—and utterly unfair—irritation.

Why are you even going through the motions here? my imaginary Marco asked. It’s not like it’s going to change anything.

Shut up, I whispered—as if there really was a Marco there, as if I wasn’t just talking to myself. I didn’t know why I was doing this—didn’t have the energy it took to justify myself, not even to myself. I’d been acting on instinct, following a sense that I just needed to hear—

—something—

‹I don’t understand,› Cassie said finally, once I had finished explaining. ‹What is it you—I mean, what were you wanting to ask?›

If it had been the real Cassie—or any real human, for that matter—I might have hesitated, tried to put things in a good light, to find words that wouldn’t make me look stupid or silly or naïve. But in this case—

Fuck it.

‹We’re thinking of betraying everybody before they can betray us first,› I said. ‹I was—curious, I guess—what you thought of that.›

There was a stunned and hollow silence, as if the words had been a slap.

‹Why?› she asked slowly, her felt sense a dark swirl of confusion and dismay.

‹Uh. Since it looks pretty much impossible that nobody’s going to try to pull something sneaky—›

‹No,› she said, cutting me off, and in the ripple of her emotions I read her real question—not why betrayal but rather why are you asking ME?

‹Oh,› I said. ‹Uh. Well.›

There was another long silence.

‹Is this—a thing you do?› she asked, her voice excruciatingly, infuriatingly gentle. ‹Do you—um—wake me up for this sort of thing? Like, a lot?›

‹No,› I said, holding myself back from gritting our teeth. ‹This is the first time, actually.›

‹Well,› she continued, still soft. ‹Um. Don’t you already—I mean, don’t you know what I’d say?›

And then, still in words, still every bit as audible though not actually directed at me—

Does he just need to hear somebody say it?

‹You don’t understand,› I said. ‹That’s not—you don’t know how bad it’s gotten—›

‹Then why are you asking me?› she shot back—still gently, but with a hint of rebuke in her tone, a tiny glint of steel. ‹What if I say no? Will that make any difference?›

It was a good question.

It was also one I didn’t know how to answer.

‹No,› she said, after the longest silence yet. ‹No, Jake. You can’t just—that’s not how you—how we—›

She broke off, unable to find the right words, the thought continuing in a jumble of impulses and images that churned beneath the surface.

That’s not what we stand for, I imagined her saying, as I ran the feelings through my little black box. If we don’t even give them a chance—if we teach them that all they can expect from us is treachery and betrayal—

‹We can’t afford to be the idealists here, Cassie,› I bit out. ‹The Visser blew up Ventura. The whole county. Half a million people, dead. And now the Andalites are threatening to blow up the whole planet—›

‹But isn’t this about stopping that?› she said. ‹Didn’t you say the Yeerks are the only ones who might be able to stop it?›

‹Unless we take out Visser Three—›

‹Without their help?›

‹We can’t trust them to help, he’s their boss, he could be behind the whole thing—›

‹But the President—›

‹She’s not—›

‹—you said this is the very first peace talk—›

‹You don’t—›

‹—do we really want to be the reason it doesn’t work—›

‹Enough!› I snapped, and then—

—reflexively, before I could stop myself, before I could even think about what I was doing—

—I made her be quiet. Used the Yeerkish morph interface to pinch off the flow of thoughts and words and slam down a wall of silence.

Her raw shock echoed through the link between us, surprise so great that there wasn’t even room for outrage. I felt a surge of shame so thick that it was like my stomach was trying to turn itself inside out—

I crushed it. There was no time for shame. No time for guilt. No time for anything but answers.

‹You don’t understand,› I repeated, as I loosened my grip on her mind. ‹I didn’t—you don’t—it’s not just—›

I sputtered to a halt. I didn’t have the words. Didn’t have the words to make her see, to convey the magnitude of the situation—the astronomical stakes, the paralyzing uncertainty, the confusing, conflicting tangle of constraints. I could see in her thoughts that I had explained it wrong, all wrong—that she still believed the answer was simple, was obvious. That she didn’t—

—that she couldn’t—

—understand the true and terrible cost of failure. That it was too big for her to grasp, this girl who had never really seen war. That she was retreating from it, falling back on Sunday school certainty.

‹I think I do understand, Jake,› she said quietly. ‹I think I get it every bit as much as you do, and you just don’t want to hear what I have to say.›

‹You haven’t seen it, Cassie,› I ground out, even as the Marco in my head whispered that it was hopeless, that I was wasting my time, that there was no point in trying to convey what couldn’t be conveyed. ‹The people screaming in their cages—›

Uh, wait a second. You don’t actually remember that, either, Jake—

‹—the dust blotting out the sun, the blood that still sticks to your hands even after you demorph. You haven’t been there when it’s kill or be killed—›

‹That’s what morals are for, Jake,› she cut in. ‹They’re there because it’s easy to talk yourself into it. Because it’s easy to lose perspective, to make excuses, to do things that—things that can’t—that lead to everything falling apart. That’s why we have rules of engagement, and war crime tribunals, and Geneva conventions—›

‹They killed my parents, Cassie. My parents, and my grandparents, and my aunt and uncle, and everybody we went to school with—›

‹I watched them take my mother and father,› she countered. ‹But that’s the point. You can’t be like them, Jake. You can’t just look and think, oh, it’d sure be convenient if we screwed them over just this once, like it’s just this one time and then you can pretend it never happened, like there aren’t any consequences—›

‹Cassie—›

‹No, Jake! Look at what you just did to me! You just—you just Controlled me, Jake! What does that say about—I mean, what could possibly justify—›

She broke off again, some internal censor kicking in as she noticed herself ramping up, burning hotter than her personal set of rules said that she was allowed to burn.

‹It’s not about what you do, once, Jake,› she said, her voice suddenly quiet and razor-edged. ‹It’s about what kind of person you are—what kind of person you let yourself be. You can’t just—you don’t get to say well, this one’s okay, because reasons. If you do that, you’re deciding that that’s the kind of person you are. That that’s the kind of war you want to fight—the kind of war where there can’t be any peace treaty, because—because—because—›

She broke off again, all heat and pressure with no outlet—so much pressure that even through the layer of my control our fists were clenched and trembling. ‹Is that really the sort of call you want to make, Jake?› she asked. ‹Is that really the sort of call you’re qualified to make?›

I said nothing, the sick, oily tension of my uncertainty mingling with the fire of her conviction until my vision started to swim and I thought I might throw up. I could hear the truth in her words, in a distant, muffled sort of way—the way they would have sounded to me six months ago, clear and obvious and sensible, the lines bright and sharp.

But at the same time—

We had three weeks.

We had three weeks, and only the slimmest of chances, and Cassie—

—this Cassie—

—she just didn’t understand.

Couldn’t understand.

And she never, ever would.

‹Jake?› she asked, as the silence stretched on.

I still didn’t answer. I could feel myself tearing in two. The Jake that I was—the Jake that I wanted to be—and the Jake that I needed to be. The one who could actually do what it took to win.

Like bringing Cassie back from the dead just to abuse her? asked Marco, who seemed to have switched sides. I mean, as long as she’s not going to remember it—

‹Jake, say something.›

I looked down at my hands—forced Cassie’s eyes to look down at Cassie’s hands—smooth and slender and dark, with thick calluses from handling shovels and cages and clippers and rope.

I’d held those hands, twice. Once on the night Elfangor died, and once in the lifetime before that—shyly, in the dark of a movie theater, where Rachel and Marco wouldn’t be able to see.

I’d worn those hands fifty-five times, now.

But I’d only ever held them twice.

‹Jake—›

‹I’m sorry, Cassie,› I whispered, as I focused my mind. ‹For—for all of it. I’m sorry, and—›

I swallowed.

You owe her that much.

‹Jake, wait—›

‹—goodbye.›

* * *

The men are walking. They are fifty feet apart, for dispersal. Their walk is slow, for they are dead weary, as you can tell even when looking at them from behind. Every line and sag of their bodies speaks their inhuman exhaustion.

‹Almost there,› Marco whispered.

‹Roger,› I replied.

On their shoulders and backs they carry heavy steel tripods, machine-gun barrels, leaden boxes of ammunition. Their feet seem to sink into the ground from the overload they are bearing. They don’t slouch. It is the terrible deliberation of each step that spells out their appalling tiredness.

‹Any word from Tobias?› I asked.

‹Not since we went out of range. Checked messages just a minute ago; ship hasn’t moved.›

‹Time?›

‹Six fifty-seven.›

Their faces are black and unshaven. They are young men, but the grime and whiskers and exhaustion make them look middle-aged. In their eyes as they pass is not hatred, not excitement, not despair, not the tonic of their victory—there is just the simple expression of being here, as though they had been doing this forever, and nothing else.

It was a quote I had read in sixth grade, doing research on World War II for Mrs. Nease’s social studies class. I’d gone back to find it, on one of our foraging missions into some nameless suburb—had given up my chance to shower and gone to the library instead, crawling through the internet until I dug it up again. I’d flipped the librarian a stolen quarter to print it out, only to realize—when she handed it to me—that I had already memorized it, the words settling into my soul like they’d always belonged there, like a part of me had been carved out to make room for them.

‹Ax here. Car on the horizon, over.›

‹You sure?› Marco asked. ‹I don’t—ah, wait, never mind, they’re gearing up.›

For four days and nights they have fought hard, eaten little, washed none, and slept hardly at all. Their nights have been violent with attack, fright, butchery, and their days sleepless and miserable with the crash of artillery.

I shifted in place, fluttering my wings for balance as my legs slipped on the vast ivory surface beneath me. ‹Kodep,› I said, keeping the band of thought-speak narrow. ‹Can you see them?›

Bzzzzzz.

The ivory plane vibrated once in response, nearly sending me into the air in a panic as the dragonfly’s instincts kicked in, screaming for me to take wing and escape.

‹Are the rest of your people in position?›

Bzzzzzz.

The line moves on, but it never ends. They are just guys from Broadway and Main Street, but you wouldn’t remember them. They are too far away now. They are too tired. Their world can never be known to you, but if you could see them just once, just for an instant, you would know that no matter how hard people work back home they are not keeping pace with these infantrymen in Tunisia.

‹How much time left?› I asked, switching back to Marco and Ax.

‹Marco here. Maybe a minute? They’re in a big SUV, coming in offroad, over.›

‹Tyagi and co?›

‹Chill,› Marco said. ‹Not moving, not tense, not surprised. Bet they’ve been tracking that car for the past ten miles.›

Meanwhile, the Yeerks have probably been scanning every square inch of this whole desert for the past ten hours.

They had no ships nearby, except for the one parked five miles over the horizon—Tobias had been tracking their movements on Thàn’s Marauder’s Map for the past three hours. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t be watching from space, through the cold, cloudless morning sky.

Telor and Tyagi had set the rendezvous point just outside of Copper City, in an empty and featureless patch of nowhere about forty miles away from the base. There’d been no safe way to check out the site in advance, but Google Maps had shown nothing but dust, shrubs, and the occasional mound of shattered rock. It was as exposed as you could get, with no cover or shelter of any kind—whoever fired the first shot would be the winner.

Dammit, Cassie.

I shifted again, my double set of gossamer wings tense, trying to make sense of the madhouse mosaic of the dragonfly’s vision. I could see blues, browns, and drab, dry greens; the colossal outlines of humans and vehicles nearby; a multifaceted shimmering haze that was how the dragonfly perceived Kodep’s hologram.

No, Erek had said, when I called him at five that morning. There’s nothing we can do about another asteroid. Is—uh—is this a hypothetical question?

‹They’ve stopped,› Marco reported. ‹Getting out now. Looks like four of them, one staying in the car.›

I could see them, sort of—three dark, organic shapes splitting off from a larger black polygon, the image reflected ten thousand times from ten thousand slightly different angles. It wasn’t the sort of thing the dragonfly’s vision was built for, though—they were too far, too large, and too slow-moving for a system optimized for catching flies in midflight.

‹Ax?› I asked.

‹One moment, Prince Jake.›

There was a pause, and then the dragonfly’s vision shimmered and faded, a double-doubled and over-overlapped picture gradually cohering on top of it—the view from Ax’s four Andalite eyes. I could see bits and pieces of his blue-furred body, and Marco’s gorilla morph standing next to the image of his father, and—further out—the President’s entourage, backed by a single tank and a widely spaced line of uniformed men and women.

‹Can you see and hear, Prince Jake?›

‹Yeah,› I said, as the three human figures approached to within half a dozen yards and stopped, their hands held out and open. ‹Thanks.›

“President Tyagi,” said the figure in the center, her words echoing strangely as I heard them both through Ax’s ears and through the antennae of the dragonfly.

The multilayered image shifted as Ax swiveled one eye toward the President, who stood with her hands clasped behind her back, three steps in front of an arc of Secret Service agents.

“Greetings,” said the President, her tone clipped, polite, and precise. “We thank you for agreeing to this meeting, and for the trust inherent in your physical presence. How may I address you?”

“I am Dragar six-three-two of Telor,” said the woman. “‘Dragar’ is an appropriate shortening.”

“And your human host, Dragar?”

The briefest of pauses. “Her name is Elaine Gallagher.”

“Is she a willing host, Dragar?”

A longer pause, and tenser.

“No, President Tyagi, she is not.”

President Tyagi gestured, and Ax’s eye swiveled further as one of the uniformed soldiers stepped forward, his hands empty, his expression resolute.

“This is Corporal Kelly Autry,” the President said. “He has volunteered to become your host, and to travel with you back to your ship, as a gesture of goodwill and an official representative of the human species. In exchange, we request the release of Elaine Gallagher, who we would like to send home.” She paused, and her glance flickered to the other two Controllers. “My apologies to the rest of you,” she continued, her tone softer. “But we must start somewhere.”

There was another pause, this time one of naked shock—even through the disorienting cross-eyed haze of Ax’s secondhand vision, I could see the dropped jaws, the raised eyebrows, the incredulous sidelong looks.

‹Did you know about this?› Marco asked.

‹No.›

“Corporal Autry is carrying no weapons, surveillance devices, or other clandestine technology,” the President continued. “He is in good health, and has not been ill in the past six months. He is fit, intelligent, and possessed of several skills we suspect the Telor coalescion will find useful. We would like—”

She broke off again.

“—we would appreciate seeing him returned to us, in three months’ time, so that we may learn from his experience. We would offer you a replacement host at that time, if such were still necessary. But we recognize that you may not be prepared to make such a promise, or authorized to do so, and so we do not require it.”

The silence continued, the three Controllers exchanging wordless glances as the rest of us held our breaths.

‹Ax—› I began.

‹We are not sure, Prince Jake. We suspect that Dragar’s answer will be yes. It is a compelling offer. But if Telor is executing a conservative strategy—›

“I accept,” Dragar said, the words cutting through the tense stillness. “On behalf of Telor, and as a commensurate gesture of goodwill.”

‹A plague?› Marco wondered silently. ‹Some kind of biological warfare?›

I didn’t answer.

President Tyagi nodded, waving the corporal forward. “Does Elaine Gallagher require restraint?” she asked, as both Dragar and the corporal knelt together in the dust. “Or perhaps medical attention?”

Dragar was silent for a moment, as if conversing with its host. “She will not require restraint,” the alien said finally. “She will likely benefit from therapeutic assistance, but is otherwise in good health.”

The President nodded, and without another word Dragar reached out, pulling the corporal’s head close until their ears were pressed together. There was yet another long pause, and then the corporal winced, and then—

With sudden, shocking force, Elaine Gallagher shoved the soldier away from her, hard enough that both of them went sprawling in the dirt. The soldiers and Secret Service agents stiffened—

“Hold,” said President Tyagi, her voice calm.

They held.

Scrambling backwards on all fours, Elaine Gallagher let out a long, wordless shriek that tapered off into a series of staccato sobs, her entire body shaking as she gasped for breath. Rolling over onto her side, she made as if to rise to her feet before her trembling, unsteady limbs collapsed beneath her—tried again a second time and collapsed a second time—

‹Jesus,› Marco whispered.

—until finally, on her third try, she managed to stand, her eyes squeezed shut, her body swaying as if she might faint at any second. A few steps away, Corporal Autry had also stood and was watching impassively, his body still and controlled, his expression flat and empty.

“Elaine?” President Tyagi asked, her voice still calm but with an extra layer of gentleness.

The woman didn’t respond, a thick, heavy keening still tearing its way out of her throat. She seemed to be holding herself together through sheer force of will, her fists clenched and shaking, the muscles and sinew in her neck standing out in sharp relief.

“Elaine—can you hear me?”

Nothing.

‹Jake? Should we—should we do something?›

I didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer, unable to close my eyes to Ax’s projection, my mind frozen in sudden horror as a memory forced its way to the surface, a night of confusion and anger and a dome of soft, white light—

Tom.

My brother.

I’d left my brother like that for hours.

For hours, on the night that Ax became a Controller—left him alone in limbo, trapped inside of Erek’s force field while I dealt with the others. While I did my duty, attended to the things that mattered.

“Elaine—”

Had Tom screamed like that? Had he sagged like that? Collapsed—fainted, maybe—the walls of Erek’s prison holding him upright—

“Certo. Whitener.”

I tried to claw my way out from under the memory as two Secret Service agents stepped forward, tried to regain my composure as they took Elaine Gallagher gently by the elbows—as she screamed and thrashed and tried to run, only to stumble and fall—as they grabbed her more firmly under each arm, pushed her into the back of one of the waiting cars where the sound of her sobbing became muffled and distant.

That’s what I’m afraid of, Cassie had said. Weeks ago—weeks that felt like years. Not a morph, but the real Cassie, just before she’d given me my first and only kiss.

That’s what I’m afraid of. Not that we’ll wake up one day and realize that we’ve crossed all the lines, but that we’ll look back and we won’t even see any lines—that we won’t know what all the fuss was about in the first place, because every choice we made was justified.

I felt queasy even inside the dragonfly morph, some echo of human sensation mapping itself onto the insect’s tiny body. I could see that I wasn’t alone, as Ax’s stalk eyes swept across the circle—could see the twisted expressions, the averted eyes—

“Shall we begin again?”

The voice was eerily familiar, somehow instantly recognizable as the same entity that had previously spoken with Elaine Gallagher’s mouth. I shifted on Kodep’s shoulder as Ax’s main eyes refocused on the former soldier, one stalk remaining on Tyagi while the other continued its constant scan.

“Certainly, Dragar,” said the President, her own voice exactly as it had been. “Forgive me for being direct, but we are all exposed and events proceed without us. The United States has two proposals for you. The first is the return of Essak nine-seven-four, late of Aftran, together with Peter Levy, who wishes to continue as Essak’s host. In exchange, we request an open, secure, and reliable line of communication with the Telor coalescion.”

The former soldier’s gaze flickered toward me—toward Ax, really—before returning to the President. “And what about Temrash?” Dragar asked.

‹Small steps first,› Ax said, his thought-speak carrying with it a sense of broadness, a raised voice that everyone present could hear. ‹Let humans and Yeerks prove themselves capable of meeting one another before we attempt to close the rift between Yeerk and Andalite. For now, it is enough that Temrash and I share one mind and one purpose.›

Dragar pursed its new lips, furrowed its new brow, and spoke again. “The line of communication must be three-way,” it declared, with Corporal Kelly Autry’s voice. “Telor will agree to discussion with the human race, provided that we may also have access to Temrash.”

‹Prince Jake?› Ax asked privately.

‹Agree.›

‹Agreed,› Ax echoed aloud.

“Agreed,” said President Tyagi.

“Agreed,” said Dragar.

The view shifted again as Ax turned his eyes toward the shape of Marco’s father. That shape moved forward, the ivory plate beneath my dragonfly body vibrating with each step it took.

‹Last chance to bail, Fearless Leader,› Marco whispered.

I said nothing.

Through Ax’s eyes, I watched as Mr. Levy stopped in front of the trio of Controllers, holding still while they scanned him with a number of different devices. To the dragonfly’s eyes, it looked as if the giant figures were wielding a set of enormous rayguns, the beams scattering across the shimmer of Kodep’s hologram, creating wild, kaleidoscopic auroras. I felt a desire to hold my breath, though the dragonfly had no lungs to let me—if the Chee technology wasn’t able to stand up to the inspection—

“You are Essak of Aftran?” Dragar asked.

Once again, there was a peculiar echo as I heard the same sounds through both my own senses and Ax’s mental projection.

“Yes,” said Kodep, speaking in Mr. Levy’s voice.

“From the southern reaches of Madra?”

“Northern,” Kodep said, and from the outside I watched as he shaped his hologram into a wry, sad smile. “You do not trust me, Dragar?”

“Would you, Essak?” Dragar asked.

“No, I suppose not.”

The two other Controllers finished their scan and stepped back, each giving a quick nod.

‹It seems Erek was correct in his appraisal of Yeerk scanning technology,› said probably-Ax.

‹First hurdle,› answered probably-Marco.

I felt my own tension loosen, but not by much—

“From mud and water,” said Dragar, followed by an expectant pause.

“The glow of life,” answered Kodep.

“On the backs of the khala mats—”

“—rode the seeds of Rukh, until their arrival in the home of the Gedd.”

“The memory of flight—”

“—a lie of Baros, for which insult did Odric scatter them across the salt plain.”

“We departed Gara in an armada of three, and made our first rendezvous—”

“—eleven cycles later, with Khyne, Pet, under Visser Eleven, in a nebula on the edge of the Grasskan Nightfall.”

I listened as Ax—as Temrash, really—fed the Chee answers, as the android echoed them with robotic efficiency, projecting Mr. Levy’s voice a mere tenth of a second behind the stream of thought-speak. I felt the urge to let out a sigh of relief, and rustled the dragonfly’s wings instead—

That could have gone very differently.

“Well,” Dragar said, after maybe the ninth exchange. “If you are a spy of the Visser, we are in any case already doomed.” Stepping aside, the Controller gestured at the black SUV, and Kodep moved forward, climbing into the back. There was a terrifying cascade of vibrations underneath me as the android settled into an empty seat, followed by a sharp change in pressure as the door shut, and then the world was dark.

“The car will return for us once Essak is safe,” Dragar explained, as the SUV started up and began to back away. “And in the meantime—your second proposal?”

“We have become aware of a threat to the Earth’s population,” the President said. “A specific threat, from the Andalite war council. It’s in the best interests of both Yeerk and human to avert it, and we are unable to do anything about it without Yeerk intervention. In exchange…help, we are…pared to offer—”

‹Marco here,› said Marco, as the distance increased and the clarity of Ax’s vision began to break down. ‹You’re headed right for where Tobias said the ship was waiting. Good luck, buddy. Try not to die, o—›

The thought cut off abruptly as the SUV passed out of range.

‹You too,› I whispered. Uselessly, but it still felt important to say it.

Now comes the hard part.

It was all fast—too fast, like running through the woods in the dark, waiting for a root or branch to trip you up, knock you out. We’d gone around in circles for the better part of three hours, that morning—demorphing and remorphing under cover, shivering in the desert cold, each of us alone in our hiding space, unable to see or hear the others except inside our own heads.

We’d been searching for a plan—any plan—that seemed like it might be able to stretch to cover all of the possibilities. There were strategies that made sense if Telor was planning to betray Tyagi right away, and ones that made sense if Telor was planning to string us along first, and ones that made sense if Tyagi was planning to throw us under the bus, and ones that made sense if everybody was actually being honest, and ones that made sense if Visser Three was waiting to ambush us all—

(Those mostly consisted of don’t be there.)

—but each one of them required rolling the dice on something, committing some kind of resource in an irreversible way. And without knowing which thing was most likely to go wrong, it was impossible to be sure which risk was the right risk to take. The sane thing to do would’ve been to disengage, to pull back and wait for more information, but with the looming pressure of the Andalite threat, we no longer had the luxury of being able to wait and see—

In the end, we’d failed to settle on anything at all. There had been no agreement, no clear consensus, no unity of purpose. There hadn’t been any anger, either—no pointless bickering or stupid misunderstandings. Just exhaustion, and demoralization, and frustration, and fear, none of which did anything to stop the clock from ticking forward.

And by the time the sun had started to brighten the horizon—

Well. It’s not like it made all that much difference whether I died today, or three weeks from now. One way or another, we had to do something, and we were well past the point where we could pretend like every plan was going to make sense, and every mission was going to be safe.

The men are walking. They are fifty feet apart, for dispersal. Their walk is slow, for they are dead weary, as you can tell even when looking at them from behind…

We rode in silence for maybe ten minutes, my mind going in circles, alternating between trying not to think about what would happen next and thinking of a hundred reasons why this was stupid, why it wouldn’t work, how I was going to get myself killed and everyone else with me—

The shuddering vibrations of the car slowed, then slowed, then slowed again—stopped, the door opening to let in the bright, unfiltered light of the morning sun. I fluttered my wings for balance as Kodep swung its legs out of the car—

Bzzzzzz. Bzzz-bzzz. Bzzzzzz.

Whatever dragonflies have instead of adrenaline, I was suddenly feeling a lot of it—that was the signal for Yeerk betrayal.

‹Here?› I asked, in private thought-speak.

Bzzzzzz-bzzzzzz.

‹Back at the rendezvous?›

Bzzzzzz.

‹Are we still go?›

Bzzzzzz.

A sudden clarity, as of marbles rolling down tracks, or LEGO blocks clicking into place. Kodep thought we could still get inside the Bug fighter, which meant that the Yeerks hadn’t cottoned on to our deception. And Kodep hadn’t given the sign that meant Visser Three, so—

‹They tried to take Tyagi?›

Bzzzzzz.

It had been one of the possibilities we’d considered, when we first tried working out how the rendezvous might go. If Telor believed in the Andalite threat, but didn’t think that the Yeerks could stop it—or didn’t think the Earth was worth the resources it would take to save, which amounted to the same thing—

According to Ax, human technology could make a big difference on the other warfronts, many of which were on non-industrialized planets, against an Andalite military that was stretched far too thin. Missiles, fighter jets, guns, computers—even things like chemical plants, metal refineries, manufacturing robots, hydroponic farms. There was a lot you could steal, if you had three weeks to do it and a fleet of Bug fighters and you didn’t much care about the consequences.

And Controller-Tyagi would be a big first step, even if the rest of the human race figured it out immediately. She had earplugs, but the Yeerks didn’t know that, and so—

‹What about Tobias? Any of the other ships moving yet?›

Bzzzzzz-bzzzzzz.

Which meant that our Bug fighter was meant to be the first line of offense.

Why only one? a distant part of me wondered. Are they—was that all they could spare, without catching Visser Three’s attention?

The light around me dimmed suddenly, and I pushed the thought aside, the air growing cooler as Kodep crossed the holographic boundary and entered into the Bug fighter’s hold. There was a loud clang as the door slammed shut, sending shivers down my antennae.

‹We’re in?› I asked.

Bzzzzzz, Kodep confirmed. And then—

Bzz-bzz-bzz.

Plan A.

Launching off of Kodep’s shoulder, I turned my nose downward and dropped straight toward the floor, already focusing on my human form as I landed beside the android’s steely three-toed claw. I felt a deeper, lower thrum as the Bug fighter powered up, the combined vibrations of engines and air resistance.

‹How much time do we have?› I asked, my body shooting upward in slow motion as the ten thousand windows of my vision began to blur and blend together. Through Kodep’s hologram, I could make out the form of two Hork-Bajir Controllers sitting on the other side of the narrow space, though I couldn’t quite tell where they were looking, or whether they were carrying weapons.

Bzzzzzz. Bzzzzzz. Bzzz.

That was cutting it close. We’d only have about a minute, once I was done demorphing…

‹What happened at the rendezvous?› I asked, as soon as my human hearing started to return.

“Not sure,” came Kodep’s voice—its normal voice, not its mimicry of Marco’s father. The field surrounding us would keep the sound from leaking out, just as the hologram was hiding my rapidly transforming body. “Beam weapon, possibly from space. Wide dispersal. One flash, and everybody was unconscious, Controllers included.”

Crap. ‹Are we not afraid that’s Visser Three?›

“There was a signal first. From Dragar, to orbit. Plus, Erek says Tobias says the Visser’s ship is still on Mars.”

Which didn’t exactly rule out his involvement. But it did at least buy us some breathing room, since there was no way he could get here from the other side of the solar system fast enough to make a difference.

“You guys okay?” I asked, as my proboscis melted away and reformed into human mouth parts.

“No damage to the Chee on site.”

“And this didn’t trip your violence prevention protocols?”

“No physical damage, no clear mortal threat.”

Like the cages in the Yeerk pool.

Straightening, I rolled my shoulders, feeling an itchy tingle as my wings folded down against my back and dissolved into skin and fabric. I was already sweating under my shirt, my heart pounding, adrenaline burning through my veins as I considered what I was about to do. I was in my own real, fragile body—without even the protection of morph armor, since there was no time for a second transformation.

The men are walking…

“Ready?” I asked.

“Ready,” Kodep confirmed.

In a kinder universe, I would have had a moment to gather my courage, but—

Taking a deep breath, I stepped forward, passing through the holographic boundary separating me from the two Hork-Bajir Controllers.

The reaction was instantaneous. “Rhapakat chi!” shouted one of them, as they both surged to their feet. “Mit ghotal humanimorph—”

“Peace!” I said, throwing up my hands. “I come in peace, no danger—”

It made no difference. The first Hork-Bajir lunged straight at me, arm blades flashing, while the second unlimbered a Dracon beam—

Time stopped.

A static charge filled the air, like the feeling on a hilltop during a lightning storm, every hair on my arms standing straight up. Beside me, Kodep stood naked and exposed, his true steel-and-ivory body visible as he poured all of his energy into maintaining the force field that had filled the tiny cabin. The two Hork-Bajir were frozen in place, one with its finger half an inch from a Dracon beam trigger, the other balanced impossibly on tiptoe, its knifelike arm blades pointed straight at my throat.

“What’s going—”

There was the sound of shoes on metal, and a human Controller came into view around the corner, weapon already in hand—

That’s three.

“Hey,” I shouted. “Hey! Pilot! If I come around the corner, are you going to shoot me?”

“Stay back!” came the shaky, panicked reply.

I stepped forward, past the statue of the human Controller, and stuck my hand around the corner, pulling it back an instant later—

A flash of red, too dim to cut through the metal of the hull but hot enough to pucker the skin of my nose and lips as I flinched backwards—

I smiled.

There was a strangled yelp, and then nothing.

That’s four.

“Can you hold all of them?” I asked.

“Yes,” Kodep answered, projecting a note of strain into its simulated voice.

“Did they get a message out to the mothership?”

“No.”

“And the autopilot?”

“No idea.”

I took in another breath—had it really only been like thirty seconds?—and stepped forward, blue fur already spreading like a stain across the skin of my arms. I wanted to shout, or laugh, or cry, or something—something to acknowledge the sheer thrill of what had just happened, the dice coming up seven, the pure dumb luck of an utterly undeserved victory. To celebrate the fact that I was alive, and free, instead of dead or shot or captured—that, as utterly insane as the idea had been, it had worked.

But instead, I just slid the seat back, making room for the Andalite body that was busy emerging from my smallish teenage frame. Beside me, the human pilot was frozen in place, his face tight with tension, his eyes darting back and forth, his hand still pointing a Dracon beam back into the hold.

It’s not about what you do, once, Jake, the copy of Cassie had said. It’s about what kind of person you are—what kind of person you let yourself be.

And she had been right.

What can we do to help? Erek had asked, when I called him that morning. When it became clear that we had no better options and no one else to ask for help—that even if the Visser had swayed them over to his side, we could at least trust them not to kill us, or put us in a situation where we were likely to be killed by someone else.

That depends, I’d answered. If we were to promise—to swear—to commit one hundred percent that no matter what, we wouldn’t use a Bug fighter for violence, even if it meant the difference between life and death—

Would you believe us?

* * *

“All right,” I said. “Let’s wake her up.”

We were cloaked and invisible, parked in a shallow depression between two anonymous hills in the middle of the Somali desert, a latitude and longitude pulled at random off of the internet. There were fifteen of us on board, crowded into the cramped metal hold—Kodep and I had left the Bug fighter’s crew back in California alongside Dragar and the other unconscious Controllers, and had scooped up Marco, Ax, Tyagi, a couple of Secret Service agents, and a couple of other Chee as a swarm of helicopters thundered toward us from Edwards Air Force Base. We’d grabbed the rest of the Animorphs on our way out—after Ax and Kodep swept the ship, disabling half a dozen secret transmitters and tracking devices, including two worn by the President—and were now as undetectable as we could possibly be, with only Serenity capable of tracking us.

‹Though I’m still confused by what this Thàn guy is saying,› Ax had grumbled. ‹If I’m understanding the theory right, it shouldn’t be possible to locate and triangulate with a single detector like that. Two maybe, but not one.›

We’d asked Kodep and Erek to revive Marco and Ax immediately, to discuss our options—most importantly, whether to bring Tyagi with us, or leave her in the desert, or something else. In the end, we’d decided to bring her along, since Edwards was no longer even remotely secret from the Yeerks, and since we’d needed to talk to her about what to do next.

“Roger,” said Erek, leaning over her unconscious form and stretching out a holographic hand.

Humanity had a hyperdrive, now—a trustworthy one, that was neither damaged from a crash nor a “gift” from Visser Three. That meant that we were no longer dependent on the Yeerks for protection, if we wanted to try for a MAD deterrent and we could manage to get the message through to the Andalites without their help.

(Though it would take some rules lawyering on what we’d meant by “Bug fighter” when we made our promise to the Chee, if we pulled out the hyperdrive and strapped it to a rock. Also, there was basically zero chance that Ax would actually let us go through with it, if the issue came up for real, though we could in theory get the coordinates out of the Elfangor morph.)

The Bug fighter also meant that we were mobile in general—Ax had checked its fuel reserves, and they were sufficient for something like two hundred trips around the world, in-atmosphere, or ten or fifteen loops around the solar system. That, plus the edge that Serenity gave us—

—provided we didn’t have to blow up Serenity ourselves to stop the government from tracking us, as Marco had pointed out—

—meant that it might actually be possible for us to take Visser Three by surprise, and either capture or kill him. Though the window on that opportunity was shrinking, depending on whether Telor would try to cover up the missing fighter or simply tell him about it.

Whichever way we ended up going, though, it was time to bring the President into the conversation.

There was a hum as Erek placed a finger against her temple, and then a brief flash of white light, and then—

“Huh.”

Another hum, another flash.

“Is she—”

“No, she’s breathing—look.”

“What’s going—”

“Quiet,” I said, cutting through the rising babble. “Wait.”

A third hum-and-flash, and still no reaction.

“Erek?” I asked.

“I’m not sure, unless—”

“What?”

“When I went to revive her the first time. A few seconds ago—right when I sent the charge.”

“What?”

“Her Z-space interlink. It failed.”

There was a moment of open, abject horror as the words slowly sunk in.

“Her Z-space…?”

“Interlink.”

“Oh, God,” Marco whispered. “Oh, shit.”

“Wh—”

“She was in morph?”

“Oh, jeez, morph armor—”

“The time limit—”

“Erek, why didn’t you say something—”

“What? Me? You guys are in and out of morph all the time, nobody told me to give you status updates—”

“Look, it’s not that bad, right? If she was in morph armor, then she’s lost a couple of weeks, at most—”

“Erek. Can you do the thing you did with Jake? Burn off the control tissue, wake her back up?”

“Hang on,” Erek said. “Hang on. Let me see if I can get a clear scan of which tissue it is. Last time, it had been dying for days, the decay made it easier…”

Trailing off, the android bent over the unmoving body, projecting a focused frown onto his face as he put one hand on either side of her head. “Yes,” he said, after a long pause. “I found a frequency that causes the tissue to respond. I can target it just like I did last time.” He looked up. “Do you want me to?”

They all turned to look at me, and some tiny, tired part of me threw up a bitter flag of resentment. “Yes,” I said, keeping my voice level, trying to inject confidence and authority into my tone. “Go for it.”

I turned to look at the two Secret Service agents lying next to her, still unconscious. “By the way, they aren’t about to pass the time limit, are they?”

“No,” Kodep said, speaking up from the back of the room. “They haven’t had the glow at any point.”

There was another hum, followed by a sound so faint I could almost convince myself I was imagining it—a sort of squelching, sizzling, crackling sound.

I wanted to throw up.

“Tobias,” I said, turning away again. “She acquired her armor the day you gave her the morphing power? Right there with you and—what’s it—Paul?”

Tobias’s brow furrowed. “I don’t—I’m—I can’t remember. Maybe? I know he acquired her right then, but I’m not sure about the other way around—”

“What if it’s not her?” Rachel cut in.

Another hush fell over the room, the only sound the hum-and-crackle of Erek’s continued laser surgery.

“You mean, like—like Nickerson or somebody?” asked Tom.

I felt a cold tingle in my fingers and toes.

“Why not?” said Marco, the tiniest hint of laughter creeping into his voice, the hollow amusement of despair. “I mean, she’s already got Paul Evans doing it, right? And if you think Telor might double-cross you—”

Crap.

It made sense.

It made perfect sense.

It was obvious, in fact.

And we just—

—hadn’t thought of it.

Every line and sag of their bodies speaks their inhuman exhaustion…

What else had we missed?

“Ax,” I said. “Get us into space, now.”

‹Direction, Prince Jake?›

“Doesn’t matter. Away from everyone and everything.”

‹Roger.›

There was a new hum beneath the sound of Erek’s work, and a slight sensation of acceleration, and then we were falling upward, the desert shrinking away below.

Serenity can track us.

We’d been thinking they would be careful, if we had the President on board—that they would communicate first, rather than launching a direct attack. But if she was just a duplicate—if they sent the other Bug fighter after us—

“Erek,” I said, my voice cracking.

Why’s your voice cracking, Fearless Leader? It’s just one dead person. Not like it’s a big deal or anything.

“—how much longer?”

“Maybe thirty seconds,” he said. “Then I’ll try waking her up again.”

“Will she even know?” Tobias asked. “I mean, Jake—Jake didn’t—”

“She’ll know,” Garrett said quietly. “She was awake, wasn’t she? Turned on, or whatever. She wouldn’t trust a negotiation like that to somebody just pretending to be her, she’d want to be the one actually driving. She’ll remember.”

I turned to stare at the still form lying on the deck—at the rise and fall of her chest, the tiny movements of the blood beneath her skin that said she was alive, that she wasn’t just a corpse lying there.

That’s really Tyagi in there.

Whoever else it had been—whether it had been the real Tyagi in morph armor, or Sergeant Nickerson, or some other volunteer—

They were Najida Tyagi, now. Now, and forever.

What if—

“Ready,” Erek said, cutting across my thought.

Another hum, another flash of light, this time followed by a fraction of a gasp—the barest beginnings of an emotional reaction, cut short by iron control.

“Where am I?” asked the voice of the President of the United States of America.

There was a long silence as everyone turned to me. As everyone waited for me to answer.

“You’re on a Bug fighter, Madam President,” I said, as she sat up and took in her surroundings. “Do you know what a Bug fighter is?”

Her eyes narrowed, thinning by less than the thickness of a hair. “Yes. Of course. What happened? I was in the middle of a negotiation, and then—”

“The negotiation failed,” I said quietly. “Dragar sent a signal, and some kind of beam weapon knocked everyone unconscious. We suspect they were planning to kidnap you, maybe all of the others too—”

“We had contingency plans in place for—”

She broke off, and the eyes narrowed another thousandth of a degree.

If they had contingency plans in place, why weren’t there a hundred missiles flying at the Bug fighter the second things went south? They had Thàn—they knew where it was just as well as we did—

“We did, too,” I said, shoving the distracting thought aside. “Madam President, I’m very, very sorry to be rude, in a few minutes I’ll be happy to drop you off anywhere you want—provided it’s safe for us—but first, I have to ask. Are you a morph?”

“What?”

“Are—are you the original Najida Tyagi? Or—are you—were you—someone else?”

This time, the eyes widened, the skin lightening from coffee to caramel as the blood drained away from her face. “What time is it?” she breathed.

“Eight thirteen A.M.,” I said. “Pacific.”

“Foster,” she murmured. “Oh, Foster, you idiot—”

Not Nickerson, then.

I felt a knot of tension in my chest try to loosen itself, felt another part of me move to object—

As soon as I saw it was a kid I didn’t know, I felt better, Cassie had said. Like it would have been worse if it were a friend of mine, like this kid’s life didn’t matter because I didn’t know his name.

One life.

We’d traded one human life, for one Bug fighter.

Well, one Bug fighter plus the enmity of the entire US government—

Shut up, Marco.

I turned to look out through the Bug fighter’s viewscreen, at the curve of the horizon shrinking away as we rose higher and higher, the blue sky fading into black.

Just the simple expression of being here, as though they had been doing this forever, and nothing else—

I let out a breath.

It was the same question it had always been. The same mission, the same goal. The fact that we were on a Bug fighter instead of in morph made no difference. The fact that we’d kidnapped a presidential decoy made no difference. The fact that somebody named Foster had died—that Cassie had died—that so many people had died—

It made no difference. We had a job to do, and we had three weeks left to do it.

“Jake?” Rachel asked, her tone laced with caution.

“We’re going to drop her off someplace safe,” I said, the words sounding as if they were coming from someone else’s mouth, hollow and tinny and fragile next to the commanding voice of President Tyagi. “We’re going to drop her off, and then—”

I broke off, looking around at the faces filling the narrow space—Animorphs, Chee, humans and Andalites. I weighed my words—what could be said, what was safe—ran them through my little black box to see how they would land.

They have fought hard, eaten little, washed none, and slept hardly at all. Their nights have been violent with attack, fright, butchery, and their days sleepless and miserable with the crash of artillery.

It felt like years since we’d all been in the same place at the same time.

All of us, except—

“And then we’re going to find Visser Three.”