And I thought of my future. Would I accomplish anything in this fight for freedom? Was the struggle, the pain, the loneliness endured in vain? Would I die before I defeated the enemy?
* * *
The icy tail blade against my forehead cooled my fevered mind. Kept me alive.
* * *
* * *
The brightness began to fade.
A final, overwhelming surge of things lived by Elfangor. Warrior. Intellectual. Oh, how he had lived! Endured. Accomplished. A sense of purpose. Things I couldn’t comprehend. Things I could. Things I might become.
Dimmer and dimmer. To a pinpoint of light. I felt my body shudder and I knew that I was dying. That pinpoint was life.
Visser Three’s far-off, threatening voice struck my ear.
Hold to the pinpoint. Hold!
Just as the light was about to extinguish, I felt the torture device flicker, and stop. The pinprick of light began to grow. Until at last I no longer looked into darkness, but saw the cube around me. I was flattened against the floor. Defeated, but alive.
The last, fading strain of Elfangor’s voice:
The thought-speak voice of Visser Three.
He stood behind Taylor. Her face was blank. No emotion. Then I saw her glance down at the floor. At the hatch that opened onto the starved Taxxons below.
Two Hork-Bajir banged through the door just behind the Visser. They carried a thick pole slung through a large wire cage. In the cage, a bald eagle.
An eagle!
Rachel! It must be Rachel!
The visser could hardly contain his enthusiasm.
He swaggered confidently toward my cube. Pointed a long Andalite finger at the eagle.
I whispered. I started to speak. I struggled to focus my eyes. To see past the leaden veil of fatigue.
The bird was badly injured. With a broken wing. Blood ran down its leg. Feathers matted and missing from the chest.
I breathed.
The visser roared.
I said.
He swung his tail blade and whipped his stalk eyes savagely. he screamed.
Taylor asked.
the visser said coldly.
The hatch remained closed. Instead the door opened and two slobbering Taxxons, monstrous centipedes, skittered in on their rows of needle legs.
Red, globular eyes wiggled anxiously. Long, thin tongues smacked hundreds of razor-sharp teeth.
“Shouldn’t we torture it, Visser?” Taylor asked, her voice tight with excitement. “This one might talk. We might get results.”
he pointed at me,
A Hork-Bajir undid the latch. The Taxxons rushed the cage, knocking it over in their eagerness. The eagle flapped and squawked, but it was over in a few bites.
I was coming back to life. I even tried to rise. The visser peered in at me, disappointed. But no longer in an eager rage.
he said flatly. sneered the visser as he turned and left the room.
This would be it. I knew that. I would die in the next round of torture. I would try to die well. I braced myself for the attack, took a last look around the room. It was just me, the sub-visser, and twelve hulking Hork-Bajir.
And …
I stumbled back.
the sub-visser mocked.
No way. I had to be hallucinating. My frazzled mind was playing a trick on me. This couldn’t be real.
I knocked my head against the glass just to make sure I was conscious. I was. So what I saw growing up from the floor, behind the sub-visser, was no mirage!
Silently, unseen by all but me.
A single Andalite emerging from flea morph!
A smooth blue chin emerged from piercing, sucking mouthparts. Andalite arms sprouted from tiny flea legs.
Ax?
Another hallucination. It had to be.
And yet, there he was, rising up from behind a solid dozen Hork-Bajir warriors.
he whispered.
Ax against twelve Hork-Bajir? Impossible.
he said, as if he’d read my mind.
Could I believe my eyes? My frazzled mind?
he added.
“Hear me, Andalite,” Taylor said to me. “You’ve caused me to lose the visser’s trust. You may well have destroyed me. And now, I will make you pay. Oh, yes. I’ve given you pain. I’ve given you pleasure. You’ve experienced them in succession. But never both at once. I will tear your mind apart!”
I tensed. Praying that I would survive.
Fwapp!
Ax’s tail slapped the door handle.
Fwapp!
The nearest Hork-Bajir went down, not even knowing what had hit him.
Sudden explosions of violence. A flash of Marco, huge and powerful in gorilla morph. A tiger, slashing. Hork-Bajir running. The wolf, so fast, so accurate with its dangerous white teeth.
And the bear.
The huge, slashing, bellowing, death-dealing grizzly bear in a rage.
Rachel.
She looked at me. Even with dim bear vision she could guess what had happened to me.
Five Hork-Bajir were dropped in as many seconds, three of them from swift, brutal encounters with Rachel.
Marco shoved Taylor rudely aside. He had no way of knowing who she was. What she was.
“A gorilla!” she yelped.
Marco yelled.
He reached the wall and heaved a grappling hook into the air. Over a steel beam. It clanked and connected.
“Stop him!” Taylor yelled. “Stop him!”
Jake coached.
Three Hork-Bajir dashed after Marco. Jake let rip a fearsome roar.
The remaining row of warriors lunged. Seized on Jake with blades flashing and harsh shouts roared in the Hork-Bajir tongue.
“Ghafrash!! Gulferch Andalites!”
But they hadn’t checked their backs.
A blur of Andalite tail blade and one was down. A snarl and chomp of wolf jaws and another fell to the floor, cradling his leg. That left five. Five dazzling, muscular machines of destruction.
Marco leaped at the wall. Feet against it, hands clutching the rope, he climbed quickly toward the ceiling. Nostrils flaring. His small eyes widening as he strained in rhythmic grunts toward his goal.
I yelled.
Taylor was running for the weapon cabinet, torture device in hand. Cassie grabbed her heel. Yanked back and forth.
“Get off me! Yahhh!” She slammed Cassie across the muzzle with the control device.
Cassie yipped and lost her hold.
Marco was swinging from conduit to conduit now. Flying across the ceiling like a giant monkey in the rain forest canopy. Two Hork-Bajir we
re in pursuit, just one swing behind. Another midway up the rope. It wasn’t hard to tell they had evolved as tree-dwellers. Marco grabbed for a smaller pipe.
It was no pipe at all! Just a bundle of wires, unsecured. They began to snap under Marco’s weight.
Kkkkkkkeeehh! Kkkkeh!
Sparks flew as the wires broke. But Marco held on, clutching the cable like a vine, swinging desperately to reach the cube. One of the Hork-Bajir dangled from a nearby beam. He raised his elbow blades into position and slashed the wire.
Zzzzzzz. Kkkkkkk. Zzzzzz.
A blue flash!
A visible charge of controlled lightning arced from the wires to the Hork-Bajir. He shook and trembled in the grisly grips of electrocution. I looked away. He dropped to the floor.
Thwoomp!
Two mammoth gorilla feet struck the top of my cube. It swayed violently and smacked me against the wall.
Marco yelled as he wrapped a giant hand around the steel cable that suspended the cube. He tightened thick fingers around a bolt head, securing the top of my cube to the cable. He twisted with all his might, trying to loosen the connection that held me a helpless, dangling prisoner.
BOOM! BOOM!
BOOM! BOOM!
Four clawlike Hork-Bajir feet etched the top of the cube. Sent it bobbing out of control.
Marco scrabbled to find his balance. The Hork-Bajir flailed, looking for a hold.
“Gilaaaaaaa!”
One slipped off, unsuccessful.
Floomp. Tasssshh!
He crashed to the floor. Green-blue blood began to ooze from his chest. Impaled on his own tail blade!
We were an out-of-control pendulum. How could the other Hork-Bajir maintain?!
And then I saw how. He had found a hold. And the hold was Marco’s flank.
Marco fell to his knees on the cube. His face, contorted with agony, teeth bared, pressed onto the glass.
he screamed.
The Hork-Bajir, eyes bulging from strain, muscles flexing powerfully, struck again.
Ptt. Ptt. Ptt.
Red droplets began to spatter the top of the glass. The Hork-Bajir had slashed and embedded a wrist blade deep in Marco’s flesh. The more they struggled, the more we bobbed. An unanchored raft.
Pttpttpttptt. The blood splattered more quickly now.
Marco grunted, agonized. He continued to work on the bolts.
he gasped.
Two Hork-Bajir had Ax pinned into a corner. Another two slashed mercilessly at Jake. He swiped back with lightning-fast claws, but he was a bloody mess. Missing an ear.
Cassie screamed.
The sub-visser spun 180 degrees. From the weapon cabinet to the room’s center. She extended her arm. Her hand clutched a Dracon beam. Aimed …
I screamed.
Directly above my head.
At Marco!
BOOM! BOOM!
BOOM! BOOM!
Two more Hork-Bajir landed on the cube.
“Arrrgh!” Taylor shouted. Cassie leaped and knocked her down. Too late!
She fired.
TSEEEEW!
Dracon fire.
Keeeew!
And a snap. The cable, vaporized, just below Marco’s hand!
The cube. Free! The floor rushing up …
KABLAMMMMM!
The cube smashed the floor in a thunder crack.
“Ghalaaaa!”
Screams of confusion. Pain.
Shards of glass shot out from the impact like shrapnel. Drawing blood indiscriminately.
Wumph.
The dead weight of a Hork-Bajir arm collapsed onto me and held me down, my back to the floor. I looked up through a hole, a cylinder burned clean through his upper arm by Dracon fire!
Marco dangled from the red-hot wire. Flesh and hair began to sizzle.
Thought-speak and gorilla fused in one wrenching bellow. A primal scream. He couldn’t take it! He dropped. Onto a bed of gouging glass that cut and snapped under his weight. Another roar.
Pain wracked my body. As though the impact had fractured every bone. But I was conscious. Morph! Focus! The snarls and snorts of battle throbbed in my ears as violence raged around me. I felt the changes begin.
Suddenly the Hork-Bajir body was lifted and thrown aside. I was startled, vulnerable. I stopped the morph, twin Andalite arms budding from my chest.
Blond hair glittered. Spotlights. An iron-strong hand closed over my seven small fingers. Crushing them!
The sub-visser!
She yanked me across the piercing glass. Began to drag me across the floor. But then let me drop and ran back toward the destroyed cube like she’d forgotten something.
My voice issued as a dry hiss. Jake and Ax, two-on-five with Hork-Bajir, couldn’t hear my cry. The sub-visser picked through glassy rubble and found what she was looking for: the miniature copy of the control panel. With the larger control under one arm and the smaller one in her hand, she headed for me again.
I called again, desperate. But I was too weak! Cassie couldn’t hear me. I watched as she leaped off the table onto Hork-Bajir shoulders, knocking him down.
Only Marco saw me. He moved to run, but collapsed to the ground in a spasm of pain.
I tried to force the morph. Faster! Where was the tail! The blade!
I couldn’t keep my focus. I flapped pathetically with my half-wing, half-arms. Beat at the air and scratched across the floor with exhausted legs. But I couldn’t get away.
I felt the red circle cut into my back. Cripple me. Then stop. She was striking at me again with the torture device. But why now?
Again she clutched my delicate Andalite fingers. Out through the door she dragged me. Onto a sort of balcony. Maybe forty feet long, but very narrow. Not more than four feet wide. Projected out off the rock face. Running into a small tunnel at the far end. An observation deck? In an underground network of narrow tunnels? A putrid, earthy odor filled my lungs. A stench I …
“Ahhh!” A loud, shrill yell as she exerted herself to swing me up over the railing. Up in an arc I sailed, her fingers still gripping my own.
Bam! I slammed against the outside wall of the balcony.
Pain rattled my bones for the hundredth time. I looked down.
The Yeerk pool.
That vast cavern the size of three Astrodomes. A Yeerk complex underground. Beneath the foundations of half our city. Storage and control center buildings. Docked spacecraft. Diverse alien species moving rapidly about their business, united in a common goal: the conquest of humanity. And there, at the center, was the pool itself. Sludgy, leaden liquid teaming and churning with Yeerk slugs. In their natural state. Vulnerable there, and there only.
“I don’t know what you are!” the sub-visser yelled to make herself heard over the shrieks of protestation from the involuntary controllers caged at the Yeerk pool’s edge, and the less horrific acoustic wash of the dome. “I don’t know what power you possess, that you can morph beyond the two-hour limit.” An inhuman hatred coated her words. “But I know that I don’t care. You will die! Die! Die!”
She tightened her grip until the bones in my fingers cracked audibly. And then, she released her hold.
“Die! Die!” she shrieked.
But I clung to her.
With weak, shaking, half-formed Andalite fingers, I held on. Dangled from the end of Taylor’s artificial arm. Some hundred meters from the nearest platform below.
“Let go!” she screeched, struggling to shake off my fingers. “Let go, you filthy grass eater!”
Still holding the smaller control device in her other hand, she moved to pry off my hold. The device slipped out of her hand.
I looked down and saw the control device replica still falling
. Falling.
Cooonk!
It hit a metal storage building and ricocheted off the wall of the lower landing.
I didn’t hear it splash. But I watched as it landed in the Yeerk pool.
“No!” she screamed. With one violent wave she shook me from her hand.
I clutched wildly at the stone face of the balcony wall. Amazingly my talon caught on something. About three feet down. And with weak, broken fingers I grasped a rough, small protrusion. My heart hammered.
“You little …” She strained to reach me. To knock me off and send me careening to the cavern floor. I was just beyond her grab. It was a matter of seconds now. That’s how much longer I could hold on. My fingers were slipping. I was heavy. I was running on nothing but adrenaline and that would give out in …
“Rrrrrooowwrrr!”
An enraged roar. A roar I recognized.
Taylor started to turn, but too late.
Two brown claws closed over her shoulders, pulled back before she could scream. I heard a thud and I knew she’d gone down hard.
A grizzly bear claw reached over the balcony, gripped my back, lifted me up. Taylor lay incredulous on the floor. I focused on finishing the morph to Andalite.
Rachel’s mass filled the balcony. She began to growl. Deep, continuous.
She picked the sub-visser up off the floor. Taylor struggled, but without result. Rachel’s grip was unwavering, strong. She bellowed an animal cry of retaliation.
For a split second, time froze. And I saw Rachel and Taylor face-to-face. One strong. Her morph a crazy manifestation of an inner strength and bravery. One weak. This girl for whom appearance had been everything, honor nothing. This poor girl whose weakness had made her easy prey for the Yeerks. And I felt pity. Pity for my torturer.
Rachel’s claws closed on Taylor’s neck. Crushing her esophagus. She was turning blue, suffocating.
“Help!” she rasped pitifully. “Someone help me!”
She moved as if to slam Taylor against the wall.
I yelled.
Rachel turned to look at me. Hesitated. Then dropped Taylor like a crumpled candy wrapper. The sub-visser fell to the floor and scrambled for the door.