“Good,” I interrupted. “Bring him along. We ran into Erek, but we still need help carrying our packages home. They’re very heavy. Very, very heavy.”
“Yeah, okay,” he said easily. “We’re on our way.”
“See ya!” I chirped cheerfully. I hung up. I forced a grin at some woman who was standing behind me waiting for the phone. I said, “Guys. Totally unreliable.”
I took a couple of deep breaths. Now for the rest of it.
My first stop, The Gap.
There was only one way we were gonna be able to get Erek out of the mall, and that was the way he’d come in.
Through the door, as a human.
I put my credit cards through some serious exercise and went rushing back to Spencer’s. I’d been gone for twenty minutes. I got back to find Cassie standing before a small group of kids and adults, including the Spencer’s clerk.
Cassie was lecturing them. She was also sweating and breathing hard. Cassie is not a “look-at-me” kind of person.
“Yes, it’s the latest thing from K-Tel. It’s the all-new Kitchen Droid. It slices. It dices. It can make Julie Ann’s fries.”
“You mean julienne fries?” a woman asked skeptically.
“Anyone’s fries,” Cassie said, her voice tinged with desperation. “This Kitchen Droid will even ask, ‘Do you want fries with that?’”
“So why isn’t it doing all that stuff?” some kid asked.
“Yeah, turn it on,” another said.
I saw Cassie’s knees do a little wobble. She’s definitely not a public speaker.
“This is just a mock-up, right?” I said loudly.
“Yes!” Cassie cried, as if I’d just told her the secret to winning the lottery. “Yes! This is just a mock-up! This isn’t the actual Kitchen Droid! The actual thing won’t be available till … oh, around, like, um …”
“In six months,” I said.
The crowd dispersed. Cassie grabbed my arm and dug in her fingernails. “Where have you been? I’ve been sweating blood!”
“Shopping,” I said. And before Cassie could strangle me, I added, “For Erek. He needs clothes and a disguise.”
I started yanking a shirt and pants and underwear from the bags.
“Underwear?” Cassie shrilled. She held up a pair. “Tommy Hilfiger underwear? He’s an —” She looked around to make sure no one could hear. “He’s an android. He doesn’t need designer underwear.”
“Sorry. They don’t have a Wal-Mart at the mall,” I hissed.
“Uh, Rachel? He’s an android? Excuse me? He doesn’t even need pants, except as a disguise.”
“Oh. Point taken.” I looked at the briefs. “Maybe I’ll give them to Jake.”
“Excuse me?” Erek said. “Can we not discuss what —” He shut up suddenly.
“I just called my manager.”
The voice made me jump. I spun around. The clerk.
“I just called my manager,” he repeated. “He said there’s no such thing as a Kitchen Droid. He wants me to find out who you are and call mall security and —”
“Grrrooooahhh!!”
The clerk jumped approximately six inches straight up.
“Oh, look! It’s a guy in a gorilla suit,” I said, almost laughing as I spotted Jake and a huge, hairy gorilla — an actual gorilla, of course — swaggering into the store.
The gorilla — Marco in morph — was wearing a sandwich board sign. It was crudely done in Magic Marker. It was an advertisement for a movie: King Kong vs. Gudzilla.
Yes, Gudzilla.
“That’s a really realistic gorilla suit,” the clerk said suspiciously.
“Look out!” I yelled at the clerk. “That Lava lamp is about to fall on your head and knock you out!”
“Huh?” He looked up and Marco totally missed his cue.
“I said, it’s about to knock you out!” I repeated, glaring pointedly at Marco.
Marco said in thought-speak. He reached out one canned-ham fist and gently tapped the clerk on the head. The clerk went down like a sack of wet cement.
“What’s going on?” Jake demanded, once we were sure the clerk was still breathing.
“It’s Erek. He’s frozen up,” I said. “I have clothes for him. Let’s dress him, fast! And get him outta here.”
“It’s like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz,” Cassie said, adjusting the poor clerk’s position so he’d be comfortable in his unconsciousness. “You know, all frozen up.”
“Let’s get clothes on him,” Jake snapped, taking charge.
It made me a little resentful. Also relieved.
“Marco, pick him up,” Jake said.
Marco grabbed Erek around the waist and, using his tremendous gorilla strength, shoved arms into sleeves.
Marco said.
“We’ve gone through that, okay?” Erek said.
“How about his face? A mask?”
Jake ran to snatch up some full-head masks. “I have Clinton, Gingrich, and a Teletubby. Dipsy, I think.”
“That’s not Dipsy,” Cassie corrected. “That’s Tinky Winky. Dipsy’s green and has the straight up thing. Tinky Winky’s the one with the triangle.”
Marco wondered.
“Po,” Cassie said.
“No offense,” Erek said, “but how on Earth have you people managed to avoid getting caught for this long?”
Meanwhile, as this slightly idiotic conversation was going on, I was dressing my first android. I had guessed right on every size.
“I am the goddess of shopping,” I said, feeling satisfied.
The clerk groaned.
“We need to hurry,” Jake said. “Pick a face: Gingrich or Clinton?”
A minute later a gorilla wearing a sandwich board sign for a misspelled movie carried a very trendily dressed Bill Clinton over his shoulder out of the mall.
Fortunately, there was a big sale on at the department store, so not that many people noticed.
At least, that was my explanation then.
We caught a bus to Erek’s neighborhood and climbed down, feeling lucky. Feeling way too lucky.
“Good thing there was nobody on that bus but us,” Jake said to me.
Marco was further ahead, loping down the sidewalk with Erek over his shoulder.
“Yeah.” I looked around the quiet, deserted street. “Good thing. What’re the odds of a gorilla carrying Bill Clinton going unnoticed? We walk out of the mall and no rent-a-cop tries to stop us? We take a bus and the driver barely notices? And we’re the only passengers? I mean, come on. How likely is that?”
“Not likely,” Cassie admitted.
“So Erek’s exposed for an android but now that he’s out of the mall, nobody’s around to notice,” I said. “Weird.”
“Maybe it’s not,” Cassie said. “Maybe everybody’s just busy and we’re all just getting a little too paranoid, you know?”
Maybe, but I didn’t think so. My gut instincts were telling me that there was something else going on here.
See, I’ve learned not to trust coincidences.
“You know what?” Jake said grimly. “When Marco and I got to the mall, there were electricians’ trucks all over the place. I heard one of the workers say something about all the surveillance cameras going dead. I didn’t worry about it then …”
What? No video record of anything that had happened, when the mall was probably crawling with Controllers? When a dressing room in The Gap was one of the main entrances to the Yeerk pool?
Not a chance.
“Yeerks?” Jake wondered with a frown.
“Why expose Erek and then make sure there’s no proof?” I said.
“Are we being protected or set up?” Cassie asked.
“So is this some kind of, I don’t know, like some weird safe passage, or what?” Jake mused.
“‘Or what,’” I muttered.
Marco called.
“So basically no change from your usual self?” I called, then wished I hadn’t.
See, morphing is an incredible weapon. But it’s also a double-edged sword, because if you stay in a morph longer than two hours, you’re trapped there forever.
Like Tobias.
Thinking of Tobias brought back all the morning’s confusion.
Me, trying to be normal. Falling off the balance beam.
T. T., asking me out.
I was coming down off the adrenaline high. Normal emotions were resurfacing. Normal emotions like guilt. Guilt for even considering T. T.’s offer.
And as if he’d read my mind, Tobias swooped down and landed in a tree a few houses down on Erek’s front lawn.
he asked.
Jake moved within speaking range of Tobias. “Has anyone been following us?”
Marco explained.
“What if this is all a setup to find the Chee?” Cassie asked.
Tobias repeated.
He was right. If the Yeerks ever made a Controller of one of us, all our secrets would be out there.
“I don’t know,” Cassie said, shaking her head. “I think you were right, Rachel. There’s something weird about all this.”
And the minute Jake opened Erek’s front door and we stepped inside, I knew it was gonna get even weirder.
Mr. King, Erek’s “father,” was sitting on the couch. He had a TV remote in one hand and a pretzel rod in the other.
He looked like any other father on any other lazy day.
Except that his human hologram was gone, so he was sitting there like some weird android parody of normalcy. And, of course, he was no more Erek’s father than I was. He was just another nearly eternal android playing a role.
“So it’s not just Erek,” I said.
“No,” Mr. King said, without moving. “All the Chee have been immobilized. Holographic emitters down. Motor centers down. Logic centers, speech synthesizers, and Chee-net all functioning normally.”
Marco asked.
“Inter-Chee communication,” Erek said. “We’ve had our own Internet since the days when your ancestors were still drawing pictograms on pyramid walls.”
“But why is this happening?” Jake said. “How?”
“We don’t know,” Mr. King said.
Marco placed Erek on the sofa and started to demorph. Within minutes, the gorilla had shrunk and its coarse, black hair had been sucked back into Marco’s human skin.
“You must have some idea what could do this. I thought you guys were indestructible,” Jake said. He sounded a little annoyed. Which was okay. I was annoyed, too. We were used to the Chee being so in control, so capable.
Plus, it just had not been a good morning so far.
“The ship,” Erek said.
“The ship?”
“The Pemalite ship.”
“The Pemalite ship?” Marco echoed. “What Pemalite ship?”
“The one we hid in a deep, ocean canyon thousands of years ago when we arrived on Earth,” Erek explained. “It should have been safe from intruders. The atmospheric pressure down there will crush a human to the size of a guinea pig.”
“Uh, how deep is that?” I said.
“Fifteen thousand feet,” Mr. King said.
Marco whistled. “Almost three miles down.”
We all looked at him, surprised.
“Hey,” he said, “I told you before, I don’t sleep through all my classes.”
“Our Chee-net connects through the ship’s onboard computer,” Mr. King said. “That would be the only way to disable our systems.”
Tobias mused, perched on top of the TV and preening his right-wing feathers.
“Or what they hope to get out of it,” I added.
“Or how to reverse it,” Jake said. “Is it even reversible?”
“Yes, that part would be simple. But reaching the computer would be a very dangerous undertaking,” Mr. King said.
“Being a paralyzed android isn’t exactly safe,” I pointed out. “Especially since someone obviously knows you’re here and vulnerable.”
“What about other Chee?” Cassie asked.
“All the same,” Erek said. “All have lost holograms and lost the capacity to move. Most are safe, out of sight. But two are presently at high risk. The first works as a janitor in a nuclear research facility. When his hologram failed, he locked himself in the safe the facility uses to store radioactive material.”
“At least that sounds secure,” Jake suggested.
“Only until the shift changes,” Mr. King said. “At ten o’clock each night, all areas of the facility are inspected before the night crew takes over. Whoever opens that safe is going to expose a highly advanced … and nonhuman … technology.”
“If the Yeerks get hold of our technology —” Erek began.
“Don’t even think it,” Marco muttered.
“Are we supposed to get into the nuclear plant?” I asked.
“No,” Mr. King said. “It’s maximum security. You wouldn’t be able to get the Chee out undetected.”
“What about the other Chee you said was in a bad situation?” Jake asked calmly. Jake always sounds calmest when he’s most worried.
“She’s in more immediate danger,” Mr. King said. “Her human name is Lourdes.”
“She’s been living the low-life,” Erek said. “She’s a homeless street person.”
“A what? Why?” Cassie demanded.
“We need access to all levels of society to track Yeerk activity,” Erek said. “And don’t feel too bad. You have to remember that we Chee live many lives. In her previous human guise, Lourdes was a movie actress. Very successful.”
“She’s been sleeping in an abandoned building. Abandoned except that half the building is being used to store stolen goods. It’s sort of run by a fence named Strake,” Mr. King continued. “We suspect he’s a Controller.”
“A Controller who fences stolen goods?” I asked, half-laughing.
“Yes,” Erek said. “It puts him in touch with a broad range of the criminal element.”
“Wow,” I said. “Not all glamour being an android, is it?”
“Tell me about it,” Erek said. “I’m passing as a junior high school kid.”
“Point taken. Where is this Lourdes person now?” I asked.
“She made it to a closet under the front stairs,” Mr. King said. “There’s a complication: We have information that the police are going to raid the place. The raid will occur in about twenty minutes and we’re certain there’s at least one human-Controller assigned to the SWAT team.”
“Twenty minutes!” I nearly shrieked.
“Time is short,” Mr. King said apologetically. “But you understand that we cannot ask you to help rescue this Chee. There is a high likelihood of your being hurt.”
“There’s a high likelihood of us getting hurt every minute of the day,” Marco said, exasperated.
“Where?” Jake demanded.
Erek gave us the address.
“Landmarks,” I said impatiently. “We’ll be flying in.”
“Tobias, get Ax and follow us,” Jake rapped. “Now!”
I snatched open the door and Tobias bolted.
“The abandoned house backs the railroad tracks. It’s br
ick, surrounded by condemned buildings and close to a junkyard,” Mr. King said. “Be careful. It’s a bad neighborhood.”
“Yeah, we’re real worried about being mugged,” I said with a laugh.
“So let me get this straight,” Marco said. “We have to rescue a paralyzed Chee from a stolen goods warehouse before the Controllers get her. Then we have to dive down to the bottom of the ocean, find the Pemalite ship, somehow get inside it and turn off the signal before ten o’clock tonight so the Yeerks don’t get the Chee in the safe at the nuclear waste facility. Is that pretty much it? Or do we have to discover the Fountain of Youth and come up with a low-fat cookie that tastes as good as Mrs. Fields’s, too?”
“Ticktock,” I said with a grin. “Ticktock.”
“You are mentally ill,” Marco said.
“There’s one more thing,” Erek said. “The Pemalite ship’s signal will have been picked up by orbiting Yeerk spacecraft. They may already be down there waiting for you.”
Marco joked as we flew toward the south side of town.
I called back, careful to maintain my distance from the others, though staying close enough to communicate in thought-speak.
As we’d morphed, Erek had filled us in on accessing the Pemalite ship. Then we had bailed at top speed, pausing only long enough to change the channel on Erek’s TV. The two Chee would be stuck there for a while.
We flew all out, forgetting about saving energy. We had energy. What we didn’t have was time.
Jake said.
Train tracks ahead. Along with junked cars, sagging buildings, and mounds of garbage. My eagle eyes showed me everything: the smashed liquor bottles, the empty vials. Spent bullet casings. Cigarette butts. Graffiti.
Even the air felt different here. Darker. Grayer.
Heavy with the absence of hope.
This battlefield had already been claimed by the enemy. And suddenly, I wasn’t so sure we could take it back.
I was glad Ax wasn’t there. I didn’t want to have to explain this to him. And I doubted Tobias would find him in time to get involved.