The Exposed

by K. A. Applegate

  SPPPRRROOOUT! Wings burst from my back.

  My face shifted and bulged. My chin slid away and my nose stretched, hardening into a fierce, deadly beak.

  Feathers etched a tattoo pattern on my skin, then rose and formed dappled layers. My vision sharpened.

  The eagle’s brain wanted to hunt. It wanted to eat.

  Get a grip, Rachel. Think about what you have to do.

  And suddenly, my mind was clear.

  I spread my wings and took off.

  First, I had to get to Erek’s to make sure Marco and Jake hadn’t walked into an ambush. Just because the news hadn’t mentioned our bus driver didn’t mean the Yeerks hadn’t found and questioned him.

  Aha! Down below, Marco and Jake stepped out of Erek’s and closed the door.

  I called, dipping a wing when they glanced up.

  I knew they couldn’t answer me in thought-speak, so I drifted above them for a few minutes, watching for a sign.

  And I got one, as soon as Jake turned down one street and Marco turned down a different one.

  I asked.

  He nodded and walked faster. Broke into a jog. Marco was morphing behind someone’s shed.

  I flew as fast as I could to Tobias’s meadow. He saw me coming and listened as I told him about the whale.

  he said.

  I veered off and headed back toward the barn. Cassie was perched in a wild cherry tree waiting for me, already morphed to osprey.

  Marco, in osprey morph, landed nearby.

  I said.

  Marco added grimly.

  A red-tailed hawk and a northern harrier drifted into view.

  Ax asked.

  Marco replied.

  Jake showed up twenty minutes later.

  So the place was going to be crawling with Controllers.

  Cassie said.

  Jake said.

  Tobias wondered.

  Marco said.

  Jake said.

  Cassie said.

  I felt a shiver of fear. Suffocating. The whale was suffocating.

  A whale, beached so we could acquire it. A pawn in someone’s game. Expendable.

  Not if I could help it.

  I said.

  It wasn’t a long flight in a straight line. But we couldn’t fly in a straight line. We’d have been a whole sky full of raptors flying in formation. Slightly conspicuous.

  So we stayed far apart at different altitudes, never seeming to go in the same direction at all.

  It took a while to reach the beach. It was empty of sunbathers. The sun was weak and watery and heading down. Besides, what people were still at the beach were gathered around to gape at the spectacle.

  It lay below us, improbable, out of place. Huge. It dwarfed the small army of humans who clustered around it like busy ants around roadkill.

  The whale looked dead. But I knew it wasn’t. Whoever or whatever was directing this little play wouldn’t allow it to be dead.

  Jake said.

  Marco said.

  That got a laugh from everyone. The time Erek had spent with us had involved a trip to the planet of the Iskoort, and a deadly confrontation with a creature of infinite power and malice: the monster called Crayak.

  Cassie said.

  Marco called.

  I said, heading for a deserted dune far away from the crowd around the whale.

  Jake said, his tone sardonic.

  I said.

  he confirmed.

  I sighed.

  Cassie said simply.

  I said, just as simply.

  We landed behind a dune in an area of tall scruffy grass. Tobias stayed airborne, always on alert.

  This was going to be a little hairy. If anybody came over that dune and saw us, they’d run screaming all the way to the next county.

  We were mutants. A group of bulging, stretching, pulsating blobs of feathers and flesh, fingers and wings. Stubby little people with beaks and talons, legs and hair.

  The first thing I noticed when I was fully human again was the smell. The fresh smell of salt and sand. Birds of prey have hearing and sight that is far superior to humans. But they are not into smell or taste.

  “It’s occurred to everyone that this is all a trap, right?” I said.

  “What?” Marco mocked. “You suspect treachery? Now, why didn’t I think of that?”

  I ignored him. “Okay, so look, we don’t expose anyone we don’t have to here.”

  Jake smiled at me. “You volunteering?”

  I shrugged.

  “Rachel’s right,” Marco said. “We go out there all together, we’re exposed. How many of us do we need to morph whale?”

  Jake nodded. “A couple, anyway. I’m not sending anyone squid-hunting without backup. But you’re both right. The less exposure, the better. So we pick two of us to acquire the whale. Excluding Ax, who can’t because he’d have to be in his own body to acquire.”

  “And that might cause some slight disruption down on the beach,” I said.

  “Two of us will morph into whales and go find a squid,” Jake continued. “The rest of us will use our dolphin morphs, stay topside as backup —”

  “Who gets to be the whales?” I interrupted. “I’ll go.”

  Cassie rolled her eyes. “You know, Rachel, you’re like the smart kid in class who sits in the front and always raises her hand. ‘I know! I know!’ Only with you it’s ‘I’ll go! I’ll go!’”

  I laughed at the image.

  “I guess we’ll draw straws,” Jake said. He bent down and yanked up some grass and began breaking the stems into pieces.

  Ax said.

  As usual with Ax, it was hard to tell if that was supposed to be a joke.

  Jake put his hands behind his back, then held them out in his fist. “Pick. Short ones ar
e whales.”

  Part of me wanted to hang back. I had bad mental images of the world several miles underwater. But most of me wanted to go, and for the same reason: because it scared me.

  Tobias landed on a broken piece of wooden fence. he said.

  I met his fierce gaze. I looked hard at him, as hard as he looked at me.

  he said in thought-speak only I could hear.

  I narrowed my eyes and pressed my lips tight together. I couldn’t thought-speak, but Tobias would get the message.

  he said.

  Marco drew a straw. A long one.

  Cassie drew. Long straw.

  I glared at Tobias.

  he snapped in angry surrender.

  I pulled the straw second from the left. “Short,” I announced, holding it up.

  Tobias said.

  Jake walked over to him and held out his hand. Tobias pecked up a straw with his beak.

  he said, looking hard at me.

  “Rachel and Tobias,” Jake said, letting the other straws fall. He looked from Tobias to me, suspicious.

  I shot Tobias a furious stare. He hated the water! He could never entirely subdue his hawk instincts, instincts that told him water was definitely not his environment. It scared him. But he’d cheated to pick the short straw for himself.

  My fault. I’d insisted on going. Tobias wasn’t going to let me go down there without him to watch my back.

  Later, I would be kind of touched by that loyal gesture. But right then I was just mad: Tobias was risking his own life because I was jerk enough to make him cheat for me.

  Guilt. I hate guilt.

  Jake sighed heavily. “All right. Rachel? You and Cassie go down to save the whale. Cassie being there will seem normal. Everyone knows she’s —”

  “— a tree-hugging animal nut,” Marco interjected.

  “And everyone knows Rachel is Cassie’s best friend. It works out. Tobias? In and out, man. Choose your time, zip in, lock talon, and bail. The rest of us will stay up here as backup. Ax? Morph to seagull and give us some air cover.”

  Cassie and I started down the dune. Jake grabbed my arm and pulled me aside for a private word. “Don’t you ever do that again,” he said, far angrier than I’d suspected. “It’s your fault Tobias is going. Remember that next time you decide to make fools of the rest of us.”

  He let me go and I walked away, a little shaken. Jake doesn’t get mad much. When he does, it sticks in your mind.

  “Coming, Rach?” Cassie called, already down the dune.

  Oh, yeah.

  This party couldn’t start without me.

  Ax merged with the gulls screaming and wheeling overhead.

  Tobias called down.

  “They must be expecting something to happen,” Cassie said.

  “Well, they’re right,” I said.

  “Look,” Cassie whispered, going still.

  I came up behind her and followed her stricken gaze.

  Felt my stomach drop.

  The whale was a toppled skyscraper. A huge eighteen-wheeler, one of the big rigs. A string of railroad cars.

  A gigantic, tragic, breathing, out-of-place mistake.

  It didn’t belong on land. But it was here, and helpless. Slowly being crushed by its own mass.

  “Oh, no,” I said softly as it feebly moved a flipper. All that immense power and it couldn’t save itself.

  I clenched my hands into fists. Dug my nails into my palms.

  “I am going to hurt whoever did this,” I whispered.

  “I’ll help,” Cassie said.

  I forced myself to look closely at the whale. Study it. Learn it. Its head was a huge, boxy rectangle that ran almost half of its total length. It had a blunt, squarish snout, a narrow, underslung jaw dug into the wet sand, and small, dark, glistening eyes.

  I elbowed my way into a group of bucket-bearers near the water and someone thrust a bucket into my hands.

  I emptied it over the whale’s wrinkled side.

  Another bucket, another pitifully small splash of water.

  The whale’s tail was still in the ocean and every few minutes it thrashed weakly and kicked up sandy waves.

  Some guy, a biologist who was some kind of whale expert, yelled, “Hold up!”

  The bucket line stopped as the man stepped in to draw blood into a large syringe.

  I glanced quickly at the people next to me. I saw Cassie further down the line. She nodded very slightly.

  I pressed my hand against the wall of gray flesh. Wet. Warm. Gritty with sand that had been picked up in the water.

  I felt the calm descend on the whale. I absorbed its DNA into me, feeling presumptuous and small and silly somehow.

  Then the biologist was done and we went back to work. Bucket after bucket. Several dozen humans working hard to save one whale. Failing, but trying anyway.

  Every now and then I’m actually proud of my species.

  Ax said, his thought-speak voice startling me.

  I glanced down the beach and spotted Jake and Marco, running and kicking at the surf. Playing the roles of carefree kids. They turned back toward the dunes.

  What about Tobias? Had he acquired the whale yet? His was the biggest risk because he had to do it while in red-tailed hawk form. Hawks don’t exactly hang out on beaches.

  I had no answers, so I followed Jake’s and Marco’s footprints into the hollow, where three identical seagulls were waiting for me.

  Marco asked, cocking his head.

  “No,” I said, concentrating hard on my own seagull morph.

  Jake asked.

  “You know Cassie. You’ll have to tell her to stop working down there.”

  Feathers sprouted. My nose dissolved and a beak began to push out. I was falling toward the sand, shrinking, as waist-high dune grass suddenly loomed tall above me. I spread my arms/wings to steady myself.

  Hello!

  An empty Lay’s Barbecue Chips bag I hadn’t noticed before. And at least two chips! All I had to do was hop on over and —

  Marco said.

  Oh, yeah. This was not mealtime. Of course, to the seagull brain, it was always time for trash.

  Ax called down.

  Jake said, taking off.

  We followed him, cresting the dune.

  Tobias was perched on the whale’s back.

  Chapman stood below him, pointing and staring.

  I demanded.

 

  Jake snapped.

  Cassie said.

  Tobias grumped.

  We flapped hard and took off, not worried about flying together. We were seagulls. We belonged. Besides, we weren’t the only gulls wheeling around the whale.

  I said.

  I gained altitude, thirty or forty feet, and swooped. I snatched a man’s pretzel right out of his mouth.

  We milled and screeched; we stole food and sideswiped people; and we used the seagull’s ultimate weapon: precision guided, cruise-missile poop.

  Marco said.

  Sploot!

  Chapman wasn’t looking up. A pity.

  I broke away from the melee and aimed for Tobias. I asked.

  he groaned.

  I hit him, chest out, barely braking. I caught him where
his left leg met his own chest.

  Whumpf!

  The talon tore free. Tobias flapped, skimming along the back of the whale.

  Zing!

  A rock shot past, expertly thrown. It missed Tobias by a feather. I saw Tom stoop to find a second stone in the wash of surf. I saw hatred on his face.

  Tobias said.

  We did.

  Did Chapman and Tom buy the act? Probably not. They’d both seen a red-tailed hawk too many times before. They knew. But what could they do?

  We followed the beach, out of sight of the whale’s various saviors, then turned and headed out to sea. Tobias gained altitude, flapping hard with nothing but dead air to lift him. When he had altitude enough, he began to morph to seagull himself. He did it in midair.

  We skimmed the gray, choppy waves until we were sure we couldn’t be seen from the beach. The light was fading. The sun was going down.

  The ocean is always intimidating. But when the sun sets and darkness rolls across the waves, you just can’t help but be awed and abashed and a little frightened of it.

  Millions and millions of cubic miles of water. Twenty miles deep in places. Stretching all around the planet, touching every continent, most nations. Home to tens of millions of species, everything from the submicroscopic to the immense.

  You feel small beside a whale. Insignificant. Then you realize that a whale is insignificant in the ocean.

  And then you’re flying over the bare fringe of that ocean, flying over a mystery that puny Homo sapiens may never fully understand.

  And you feel your own smallness, your own utter weakness, and it’s like a lead weight on your chest.

  It’s not that the ocean is an enemy. It simply doesn’t care. It feeds you, it makes the oxygen you breathe, it gave birth to your species, and, if you get careless, it kills you. All without the slightest personal interest.

  There’s nothing you can say to the ocean. No mercy to be begged. No deals to be made. If we were weak or careless or stupid, it would smother us, crush us, bury us forever in miles of black, black water.

 

  I yelped, shaken out of my dark imaginings.