“Two minutes,” Quafijinivon said. “We will land just above the vapor barrier, within the former range of the monsters we created to restrain Hork-Bajir curiosity.”
I felt the tension rise in Cassie. This was all alien to her, of course. A strange world.
For me it was familiar, and yet not. I had, in my mind, never left. The years had not passed. The change seemed sudden, massive, shocking. The destruction of decades in the blink of an eye.
But it was Toby who interested me. This was her ancestral home. A place she had never seen, but that must, in some way, be part of the substructure of her Hork-Bajir mind.
She was staring out of the window with curiosity, even fascination. But Hork-Bajir faces show little emotion. What she felt, if anything, remained a mystery. We would be landing, soon, and I didn’t even know my own mind. I did not trust the Arn. I did not like the Andalite, but trusted him to be what he was.
I didn’t know the humans, not even the one whose brain I shared. The one named Jake had performed well.
But I did not know what was ahead. I knew only one thing: Whether the Arn was true to his word or plotting some betrayal, it didn’t matter. I had seen what the future held for my adopted world. And all my doubt, my cynicism born of exhaustion, was wiped away.
I, who had never left, was back. And I would make the Yeerks pay. No matter the cost.
I sensed the human, Cassie, reading my emotions, listening for clues. I was being careless. I closed my mind to her and sealed off my emotions.
I felt the ship gently touch down. I felt the wall inside me go up.
I couldn’t blame Aldrea. If the situation were reversed, I don’t think I’d want to witness all the ways Earth had been violated by war and then have some second person reading my first thoughts.
“We have made it,” Quafijinivon said with some satisfaction. “We are home. I will open the hatch and —”
“Hold up,” Jake said. “What’s out there? Should we morph to Hork-Bajir?”
Quafijinivon shook his head. “We’re just above the Arn valley, in the no-man’s-land. The Yeerks don’t come here now that all the monsters are dead. And, of course, they think all the Arn are dead as well.” He gave a sad, dusty-sounding laugh.
He led the way to the ship’s exit bay. I couldn’t help noticing that his legs were slightly unsteady.
When I stepped onto the ramp, I was struck by how bright it was outside. That’s really all I noticed at first — the intensity of the light and the way the sky almost seemed to glow.
“I must start my work soon, or risk a degradation of the DNA I harvested,” Quafijinivon said. “My lab is not far. Follow me.”
He led the way across a gently angled space of scrub bushes and weeds that ended abruptly in a jaw-dropping cliff that went straight down seemingly forever.
“You may not be aware of this, but not all of us have wings,” Rachel pointed out. “At least not at the moment.”
“There are steps,” Quafijinivon assured us without turning around.
I gingerly approached the drop-off and peered down. Straight down almost nothing could be seen. But across the narrow chasm I could see that the far side was carved with doorways, windows, archways, and walkways. They were cut directly into the stone. Sections had been blasted away by Dracon beams, perhaps long ago, but the Arn village was still beautiful.
Jake said, “Tobias?”
Tobias flapped his wings, took to the air, and soared out over the valley. He floated for several minutes, using his laser-focus hawk’s eyes to look down and around. Then he swooped back.
he reported.
“Yeah. It looks like those Anasazi cliff dwellings in New Mexico or wherever,” Marco said.
Rachel gave him a look. “Since when do you even know the word ‘Anasazi’?”
“I’ve told you guys before, every now and then I stay awake in class. Just for a change.”
Quafijinivon led us down a narrow stone staircase. There was no guardrail.
Tobias said.
Jake, Rachel, Tobias, Ax, Marco, and Toby started down the side of the cliff after Quafijinivon. I fell in at the end of their single-file line. I wasn’t happy about it. I’m not crazy about walking on cliffs. But it’s not like I had a choice.
I locked my eyes on my feet, watching them as they moved from step to step. If Aldrea was feeling any fear, or any contempt of my fear, she wasn’t letting me know about it. She’d sealed up the wall between us and every brick was still in place.
“What’s that red and yellow gunk at the bottom?” Marco called. “It looks like it’s moving.”
“Oh, thank you, Marco,” I muttered. “Right now I really need to be thinking about what’s way, way, way down there.”
“It is the core of the planet,” Quafijinivon answered.
“The core,” Rachel repeated. “You’re talking core as in center?”
“Yes, of course,” he answered. His tone made it clear that he thought she was a little on the slow side.
“So, it’s like a volcano down there, with lava and everything,” Marco said. “How hot is that lava? You know, in case we fell in?”
“You’re not helping,” I told him, without raising my eyes from my feet. “Really not.”
Ax comforted me.
“Thanks, Ax,” I answered.
he continued.
Sometimes I think hanging around Marco so much has given Ax a totally twisted sense of humor. Very un-Andalite.
Quafijinivon turned at one of the arches. One by one, we followed him into a long, narrow room, almost a cave.
For the first time since we started down the side of the cliff, I raised my eyes from my feet. I watched as Quafijinivon pressed a small blue pad set in one wall.
An instant later the whole wall slid open. A row of long, clear cylinders and an elaborate computer console filled most of the room.
“It took me years to piece together all the equipment I needed for a new lab,” Quafijinivon said. “The Yeerk raids destroyed almost everything.”
“I’ve never heard of Yeerks using Arn hosts,” Toby said. “I understood the Arn spared themselves that by altering their own physiology.”
“True, Seer,” the Arn said. “The Yeerks did not kill us in pursuit of hosts. It was a game. A sport. My people were exterminated, our culture destroyed, because the Yeerks enjoyed using us for target practice.”
The Arn’s voice held only an echo of a bitterness that must go very deep.
Then the strange creature shuffled away. “I have work to do.”
ALDREA
Home. Planet of the Hork-Bajir. My planet.
I was desperate to escape from the soft, slow human body and feel my true form again. I wanted to be Hork-Bajir.
“Okay, we aren’t here to sightsee,” Jake said. “We’re here to retrieve the weapons Aldrea and Dak hid. We find them, we tell Quafijinivon where to pick them up, and he flies us all home.”
“Toby is already home,” I said.
Toby looked up sharply. The idea surprised her.
“This is your home world, Toby,” I said.
the nothlit hawk said.
The emphasis on “all” would have been impossible to miss. The creature named Tobias was warning me.
And what, I wondered, would you be able to do if I decide that Cassie stays here? But I said nothing. The humans and the obnoxious Andalite were already suspicious of me. Paranoid. Aximili was more concerned about me than about the Yeerks.
/>
I had no allies in this group. With the possible exception of Toby. She was, after all, my great-granddaughter.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you,” I said aloud.
“Are you ready? You’re our guide. Take us to the weapons. Let’s get this moving.”
“Yes, I’m ready,” I said. I tried to cover the uncertainty I felt, tried to hide it from Cassie.
I did not know the location of the weapons. I remembered Dak and I and the others, the few who still gathered with us, taking the ship. But I must have hidden them after recording my Ixcila.
Cassie accused.
She opened her mouth. “J — … unh … Ja …”
I released my hold, shocked at my own behavior. I hadn’t meant to stop her, hadn’t meant to battle for control. A mistake; I’d had no time to think it through.
Everyone was staring at me. All but the Arn who was busy elsewhere.
Cassie said.
Then she opened our — her — mouth and said, “She doesn’t know where the weapons are. Not for sure. She has an idea.”
Andalite facial expressions are subtle. But I had been born an Andalite. I saw the triumph in Aximili’s eyes. The sense that he had judged me correctly.
Human facial expressions were still strange to me. Jake’s face showed nothing. It seemed to be deliberately void of expression.
“That’s something we should have thought about before we took off,” he said mildly.
I asked Cassie.
“I am confident I can find the weapons. I know where I would have hidden them. Where I intended to hide them.”
“That’s great,” Marco snapped, “but there’s a big difference between getting yourself killed for a ‘definitely’ as opposed to a ‘possibly.’”
“No one will be in danger. I know the place. I know the trees.”
Jake said, “No choice now. We’re here. But, you, Aldrea, are no longer to be trusted. You’re mad at the Andalites, mad at the Arn, and you don’t treat humans as allies. I understand your anger. You’re in a very strange reality right now. But we get in and out alive, that’s what we do. So if you get in the way, make me doubt you again, we will put you down.”
I bridled at the insult and the threat. “This is my world, human. My battle. Follow me, do as I say, and you will soon be able to scurry back to Earth.”
Rachel said, “And you’ll be back in Quafijinivon’s bottle.”
“That’s right,” I said.
Jake took a deep breath and then said, “We want to avoid Earth morphs if we can. No point announcing ‘The Animorphs are here.’ We’ll travel as Hork-Bajir. All but Tobias. I want you in the air, man. But stay out of view if possible.”
the nothlit said. He spread his wings, flew along the ground for a while, then flapped up and away into the mist.
“Okay. Now we morph.”
ALDREA
I said to Cassie.
she said.
I waited as she focused her mind on the Hork-Bajir DNA within her.
The changes began with surprising swiftness. Cassie was an experienced morpher, that much was clear. But as I watched the smooth, elegant transitions, I realized she was more than experienced. She was talented.
Her five-foot-tall frame expanded upward, growing like a sapling, shooting up by a full two feet. The muscles layered over her own weaker human musculature. The bones became dense. The internal organs shifted with a liquid sound, some disappearing altogether, others appearing, forming, finding a place, making connections, beginning to secrete and digest and filter.
Her heel bone grew a spur, the Hork-Bajir back toe. Her own five human toes melted together, then split and grew into three long claws.
The tail grew as an extension of her spine, adding link upon link, bone growing from bone, wrapping itself in flesh and blood vessels and skin.
Her flat mouth pushed outward, lips stretching into a hideous grimace then softening into the familiar Hork-Bajir smile.
Then she did something I did not know could be done: She controlled the appearance of the blades so that they appeared, one by one, rippling up one arm, down the other, down a leg, up the next.
The horns grew the same way, one, two, three. She was showing off. Trying to impress me. And I was impressed.
I said.
I saw the subtle evolution from human to Hork-Bajir eyes. Colors shifted as the spectrum of visible light moved toward the ultraviolet, losing color toward the infrared end of the spectrum.
I saw the planet of the Hork-Bajir as a Hork-Bajir. I was truly home. Myself once more. Not a female, a male, but that was irrelevant.
I was Hork-Bajir!
All the others were completing their morphs. I was back with my adopted people. Or at least the illusion of my own people. And in my life as it was, at this moment, nothing could be free of illusion.
Jake said, obviously preferring to use thought-speak rather than struggle with the difficult Hork-Bajir diction.
I pointed upward, out of the valley. “To the trees!”
We ran up the narrow stairs. Hork-Bajir did not fear heights. Up the stairs, across the barrens, feeling the slope grow ever more steep. Up through the mist. And then, still at a run, my head rose through the mist and saw the first tree.
Huge! It was a curved wall, a monstrous Stoola tree. My hearts leaped. I ran straight for it. Cassie ran. The Hork-Bajir ran. Andalite, human, Hork-Bajir all become one in the excitement of running, running, then leaping up, digging blades into the soft bark.
I was climbing. The experience that was so strange for an Andalite had been so strange for me for so long and was now so familiar.
To my surprise the human Cassie was both afraid of the growing height and, at a deeper level, strangely comfortable racing up toward the lowest branches a hundred feet or more up the trunk.
Of course. I should have realized: the arms that hinge through three hundred and sixty degrees, the strong hands with opposable thumbs, the feet with vestigial fingers.
I asked.
Up and up, toes and blades biting the bark, racing straight toward “Father Sky.”
Marco said.
Rachel asked.
I reassured them.
Tobias remarked.
Jake asked.
I said.
ing through branches for a while, but I’m used to the air above two hundred feet being wide-open.>
We reached a long branch that ran almost level toward the south. Toward the valley’s end where Dak and I lived. Had lived. Had given birth to Seerow.
If I had hidden weapons, it would be there.
And it was my home. A week ago, to my mind, it had been home.
I had to see it.
Run!
We raced along the branch. Ran at full speed on a curved, uneven, knotted branch.
Ran like giant squirrels, sure-footed, and yet, within a few inches of falling and falling and …
The end of the branch!
Leap! Fly! Falling, arms outstretched, falling, wind whipping by, a flash of Tobias, leaves the size of circus tents.
She stuck out a hand. Grabbed a thin branch, I could close my hand around it, too small to hold us, oh God, we were going to die.
Falling, the branch bending down and down and down and then, slower, slower, uh-oh, uh-oh, we were going back up! Spring action now whipped us up at dizzying, insane speeds, a giant rubber band, a slingshot, and at the top of the arc, she released.
We flew, somersaulted, and fell, down, down, THUNK!
My Hork-Bajir feet bit into a new branch, a new tree.
I yelled.
The others were following, move for move, more or less.
We took off again, more businesslike now, but still swinging wildly from branch to branch, tree to tree in a trapeze act like no one on Earth had ever seen.
Aldrea stopped finally and rested. She watched the others catch up. More specifically, she watched Toby. The young Hork-Bajir seer was blazing through the trees, smiling, laughing.
Aldrea said.
I said.
Aldrea insisted.
I felt a chill. Aldrea was right. This person, this Andalite or Hork-Bajir, whatever she was who shared space in my brain, had nothing. She was not alive. Not truly alive.