CHAPTER 26
8There! Is that the underwater cave entrance?"; Cassie cried. 8I think so. It's in the right area. But there could be dozens of caves."; 8ationo time to worry about it,"; Prince Jake said. We plunged into the mouth of the cave. The floor rose steadily and we swam on grimly, blind, scared, and in a desperate hurry. Suddenly I felt my snout break the surface. Air! 8I think we're there,"; Prince Jake said. 8Demorph! Cassie, what do you think? Bat morphs?"; There was no answer. 8Cassie! Cassie!"; Prince Jake cried. 8The rubber band effect. She's gone. Back to Earth. Or ..."; 8It's happening faster,"; Prince Jake said. 8Less time between people disappearing. Just two of us now. We could both be snapped back before we reach this switch."; He sounded like I felt. Like he couldn't breathe. Like he couldn't stop his heart from pounding. It was too much! 8Demorph. Nothing to do now but hurry and try to get this job done!"; Prince Jake said. 8allyes, Prince Jake,"; I said. 8ally know, Ax, there's just the two of us now. We could probably drop the whole "prince" thing."; He paused, then added, 8ally could just call me "The Jake formerly known as Prince.""; 8Is that a bit of humor?"; 8allyeah. A joke. Not much of one, but Marco isn't here, so I figure ..."; At that point he made the transition to mostly human and lost his thought-speak ability. I emerged as Andalite, standing in a cold, absolutely black cave, with water still sloshing over my hooves. "Bat," Prince Jake said. His mouth-sounds echoed slightly. I focused on the bat. I felt myself shrinking, although there was nothing to see for comparison. But I could almost feel an upward breeze as I dropped from my own height down to the stumpy, few inches of the bat. 8Just you and me now, Ax."; 8allyes."; 8If one of us is stopped, for any reason, the other one has to keep going. Clear?"; We fired echolocation bursts and saw the sketchy portrait of a cave that stretched on and on, far past our faintest ultrasonic echoes. We took to wing. We flapped up on leather wings and raced at full, tearing speed. 8We have to remember the snakes,"; I said. 8Ugh. Ughughugh,"; Prince Jake said with a sort of shudder. 8allyes,"; I agreed. We flapped as if our lives depended on it. Through jutting rocks and stalactites, around sudden turns, up sudden chimneys, and down sudden wells. All of it reduced to colorless lines in our mind's eye. A sketch drawn with blasts of sound. Around one hairpin turn and suddenly ... A blast of sounds! A cacophony of echolocating squeaks and trills. 8The snakes!"; I cried. Our own echolocation showed them as writhing lines that hung from the low ceiling and reached out from the walls. There were thousands! Millions! All firing their own echolocations, yammering and confusing the echoes of our own blasts. Suddenly, in all the ultrasonic noise, the pictures in my head became distorted. Wild, swerving, swooping lines. Writhing borders of objects that no longer seemed solid. 8What do we do?"; Prince Jake asked. 8As Rachel would say if she were here: We go for it!"; It was a nightmare! Deadly snakes filled the air. Lost, confused, we powered on, flapping wings that became more and more shredded as more and more snakes found their target. I was losing maneuverability. Losing speed. I had lost sight of Prince Jake altogether. I could no longer tell up from down. I was spinning, flapping madly, afraid and confused. Lost! Lost in a squirming madhouse of darkness. And then, swoosh! I blew free of the snakes. The cave walls backed off. The ceiling was gone. And light! Blessed light was glowing all around me. I was in the "bright hole." I soared upward on tattered, shredded wings. Up into the stale air. Everywhere flowers and plants in absurd colors exploded from the walls of the hole. 8Prince Jake! Jake!"; I called. But there was no answer. Quite suddenly, I was all alone.
CHAPTER 27
I landed on a clump of screamingly orange mold or lichens or ... something. And began to demorph. Within minutes I was standing alone, an Andalite in a bizarre underworld universe cut off from the world outside. The "bright hole" was perhaps five hundred feet at its longest, half that wide. The roof was no more than a hundred feet over my head. It was very large for a hole in the ground. But it felt very small. No rain had ever fallen here. No sun had ever shone here. The only light was from the greenish glow of the walls. A light that never grew brighter, never grew dim. It was alive, but dead-feeling. A wonder of nature, but a creeping, spirit-crushing place. In the center of the place was the only artificial object: a vertical cylinder, five feet tall, a foot in diameter. On the side was a control pad, showing glowing blue numbers. Right where Galuit had said it would be. Just as Andalite intelligence agents had placed it. I looked cautiously around. But I saw no Hork-Bajir, no Taxxons, no Gedds. Just unnatural plants in an unnatural place. I exhaled, trying to shed my tension. 8Whoever decided to hide this thing here sure picked a good hiding place,"; I said. I began to trot toward the cylinder. But the ground was rough, rising, falling, overrun with mosses and molds and clumps of hideous flowers. There were no paths. I ended up having to step carefully, only able to hurry when I was sure of a place to leap. Ba-Whoooom! An explosion rocked the room. The concussion, trapped in that hole, knocked me off my feet and left me temporarily deaf. Brilliant light! Falling rock and debris. A hole had been blown into the top of the "bright hole." Leeran sunlight streamed down in a blinding shaft. And down, down through the shaft of light, the Hork-Bajir dropped. Their fall was slowed by small rockets on their feet and tails. The rockets burned red. Two, four, a dozen Hork-Bajir warriors falling in slow motion, unlimbering their Dracon beams. I could see them peering about as they fell, searching for the cylinder. And for me. I ran. I didn't care if I broke a leg. I ran, I leaped, I fell and lurched back up. It was a race between falling Hork-Bajir and me. Tseeewww! ZzzzaaaaPPPP! The Dracon beam stabbed at me, missed, and boiled a bright blue cabbage into steam. Just a few more feet! Suddenly, my hands were pressed on the cold metal. The code! What was the code? My fingers flew. Tssseeewww! Tseeewww! "Het gafrash nur!" a Hork-Bajir screamed. Tsseeewww! 8Aaaahhh!"; I felt a burn across my back, a glancing blow from a Dracon beam. The code! The code! I entered it. Was I right? Had I remembered? Then ... 8System armed."; The cool, thought-speak voice of the computer. 8Warning. This system is armed."; I collapsed, leaning back against the cylinder. Galuit had said once they got confirmation that we had armed the system, they'd wait half an hour to give us time to escape. Half an hour would be too long. The Yeerks would be able to disarm it by then. A huge Hork-Bajir hit the ground right in front of me. I punched the built-in communicator on the cylinder. 8This is Aristh Aximili,"; I said. 8Do it now. Do it now! Blow the Yeerks off this planet!"; "Filshig Andalite!" the Yeerk inside the Hork-Bajir screamed. I was calm. Shockingly calm. 8Detonation in ten seconds,"; the computer warned. "Disarm that weapon!" the Hork-Bajir commander yelled, switching to Galard, the interstellar language. 8Seven ..."; 8I don't think so, Yeerk. This time you lose. This time, you die."; 8Five ..."; The Hork-Bajir raised his Dracon beam in rage. "You'll die first, Andalite scum!" 8Three ..."; He squeezed the trigger. The Dracon beam fired. Point-blank range. Five feet from my face. 8One ..."; I literally saw the Dracon beam stop. The beam stopped in midair as time froze. I heard a "pop!" And suddenly, I was no longer there.
CHAPTER 28
I felt the warm, human skin beneath my six legs. 8What?"; I yelped. 8What the ...?"; Rachel yelled. 8Whoa! Whoa, I am serious: Whoa!"; Marco cried. 8This is way too strange."; I was back. On Earth. In mosquito morph. We were all back. All back! And all at the same exact moment. We were in the hospital room, surrounded by human-Controllers who were busy firing human guns out the window at the bushes below. Still trying to kill the Andalite. Me. But that was not the biggest problem I had. Because right then, as I sat on vibrating human flesh, surrounded by giant hairs, a huge, sky-filling object came hurtling down toward me. 8ationo way!"; Rachel yelled. 8Ax, move out!"; I fired my wings. The object, five fingers each as big around as a large tree, came slapping down at me. "Ow!" said Hewlett Aldershot the Third, as he slapped the spot where I'd been busily biting him. "Ow!" he said again. "The human! He's awake!" one of the human-Controllers said. "He's not supposed to wake up yet!" another moaned. "He's in a coma!" "What do we do?" "The Visser will kill us!" "The police are coming. We can't
be taken!" "Run! Run!" "What do we do with this Aldershot human?" "We have no orders." "Run!" someone yelled again. And this time, the rest agreed. There came a loud vibrating thunder as the human-Controllers all raced from the room in a panic. Moments later, a frightened nurse came in. "Mr. Aldershot! You're ... you're conscious." "Of course I'm conscious," he said. "Nurse, are you aware that this room is full of mosquitoes?"
CHAPTER 29
"So wait a minute here," Rachel said. "We get zapped back here through Zero-space, one by one, at different times. But when we get back here, we all arrive at the same moment? And no time has passed?" I nodded my human head. We were at the mall. At the place where the excellent food places are. I was in human morph. Behaving perfectly like a human. "Exactly, Rachel. Eggs-Act'-lee. Zactly. We arrived back at the precise moment when we were snatched away. We were all yanked away at the same moment, so naturally we all arrived back at the same moment. Yanked. Yanked is a strange word. Yank. Yank-kut." "Yeah," Marco said. "That's what's strange: the word "yanked." Us turning into mosquitoes to suck some guy's blood so we could morph into him and instead ending up in the middle of some war to control psychic yellow frogs, and oh, by the way, blowing up a small continent full of Yeerks, saving an entire species, then getting back here to find out Coma-man woke up from a mosquito bite delivered by a morphed alien-slash-deer-slash-scorpion-slash-four- eyed centaur, that's all totally normal. That's just an average day. Dear Diary: another boring average day, till someone said "yanked."" I recognized his tone. Sarcasm. It is a form of humor. So I laughed using mouth-sounds. "Hah. Hah-hah. Hah. Hah." I considered, then added, "Hah." Prince Jake, Cassie, Marco, Rachel, and Tobias, in his own human morph, all stared at me. "What was that?" Rachel demanded. "I laughed." "Don't ... don't do that, Ax," Prince Jake said. "It's disturbing somehow." "Yes, Prince Jake." "Don't call me prince." "I will call you "The Jake formerly known as Prince."" Marco made a horrified face. "Oh, no. Now he's making jokes. Bad, bad jokes." "Actually, that was my joke," Prince Jake said stiffly. "Oh, fine. I get it. You can't laugh at my jokes. Okay. Great. I don't even care." I was an Andalite, all alone, far, far from home. Far from my own people. Except that sometimes your own people are not just the ones who look like you. Sometimes the people who are your own can be very different from you. "Can we eat cinnamon buns now?" I asked hopefully. "Bun-zuh?"
THE END
K. A. Applegate, The Decision
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