Unless …
Unless she refused to return to oblivion.
It occurred to me then, for the first time, that Aldrea could live, through me, if I permitted it.
No! No, this wasn’t up to me. Was it?
She was alive, now. Alive in a way. She spoke and thought and felt and experienced and even learned. She was alive, but only by my grace.
Oh, my God. Was it my decision to make? Would I have to tell her when the time had come to return to nothingness?
Was I going to be the one to kill Aldrea-Iskillion-Falan?
The realization took my breath away. Aldrea felt my emotions.
I couldn’t answer. What could I say? If I’d realized before I accepted the Ixcila I’d never have agreed to go along. It was impossible. It was immoral. Aldrea was alive, and if she died again, if she ceased to exist, it would come from my own selfishness.
There it was, I thought, the fatal weakness that had drawn Aldrea’s Ixcila to me. At some subrational, instinctive level, Aldrea’s spirit had sensed the weakness in me. She had known that I could not, would not, demand her death.
Tobias came swooping past.
ALDREA
Hearts in my throat I raced through the trees. All familiar, a path I had traveled a hundred times, a thousand, with Dak beside me, with Seerow hanging onto my belly as we moved.
Home. It was just ahead. Home.
And somehow, somehow, he would be there, Dak, strong, smiling, holding his arms open for me.
My son, my little one, my Seerow, he would be there in his nest, waiting, smiling happily to see his mother.
Impossible. I knew. I was not insane. I knew. And yet, the hope … irrational hope. An emotion not touched by all that I thought I knew.
Home!
I swung faster and faster, leaving the others behind, with only the hawk for company, now.
I stopped. A clearing where there couldn’t be a clearing. An open space between the branches ahead. Sky rather than leaves.
No. It couldn’t be. I would die rather than see it. No.
I crept forward and now the others caught up. They stayed back, cautious, knowing something terrible had happened.
At last I did not need to go closer. I saw. A hundred trees, gone. The earth was scarred, bare. A huge, open space, naked beneath the sun.
The Yeerks had destroyed most of the valley’s end. It had been dammed up. A muddy gray sludge filled a crudely constructed lake. Tree trunks formed the sides. Bisected branches formed the piers that extended out into the lake.
Only it was not a lake.
My home, my valley’s end where the branches reached across the chasm to touch, was a Yeerk pool.
The others caught up to me. We all stood amid the high branches and gazed down at the devastation. The humans did not understand, of course, not really. This was my home. Not from decades ago, but from just the other day. Just the other day I left my husband and my son there. Just the other day they were alive.
It was true. I was dead. I saw, I heard, I touched and felt, and yet, I was dead.
This life was no life at all. This life was an illusion created by the Arn. My life was Dak. My life was Seerow. Everyone who had made up my life with theirs was gone.
I looked for any last clue to what had been. These had been trees I knew. Trees that had personalities, at least to me. They didn’t have the near-sentience of some Andalite tree species, but they were individuals nevertheless.
Stoola, Nawin, Siff trees, all gone, most burned away by Dracon blasts. Those that remained had been used to form the dam. Four of them laid lengthwise, stacked, then buttressed by saplings.
Behind the dam a billion gallons of the sludge Yeerks love. I knew Yeerk pools. I had spent my youth on the Yeerk home world with my parents. This had to be one of the largest Yeerk pools in existence. It might be home to ten thousand Yeerks, even more.
Then I spotted something I knew. Barely visible from this range. A minuscule patch where the bark had been cut away. Nothing unusual: where there are Hork-Bajir, there is scarred bark.
I told him where to look. And he described what I’d known he would see: The wood where the bark had been scraped away was cut with symbolic branches entwined. A bit of Hork-Bajir graffiti. A love letter.
I said nothing.
It was not an easy plan to work out. We needed to get into the Yeerk pool itself. We needed to be able to function underwater. Aldrea needed to be in Hork-Bajir morph in order to open the tree.
Then, if she opened it, we needed to be able to get inside, enter the ship, and figure out how to fly it out of the middle of a log a hundred feet in diameter.
The plan we hatched was pure insanity. I knew this, not because Marco pronounced it insane, he thinks everything is insane. But I knew we were in trouble when Aldrea said it was insane.
“You have a better plan?” Rachel demanded. “Because we’re all ears, here.”
“What you are proposing is suicide!” Aldrea argued, speaking through me.
Marco laughed. “You’ve got my vote.”
“We need a whale,” Jake said. He looked at me, at Rachel.
“I’ll do it,” Rachel said. “Hey, it’ll be —”
“No,” I interrupted. “A sperm whale has a very narrow mouth. And I’m better at controlling a morph. Faster.”
Rachel argued. Jake hung his head. He’d known it had to be me. I snuck my hand into his and he squeezed it briefly.
“This is not how morphing powers are used,” Aldrea said. “Let’s take our time, raid the Yeerks, take weapons, perhaps capture some Hork-Bajir and starve the Yeerks out of them, then, when we have an army —”
“I want this attack to succeed!” Aldrea shouted. “I don’t want a wasted, futile effort. You humans are just children! What do you know about fighting the Yeerks?”
“They know quite a bit, Great-grandmother,” Toby said.
Jake held up his hand, cutting off debate. “The Chee c
an’t cover for us forever. We need to get this done and get out of here. Aldrea, yes, it’s crazy. But we’ve been doing ‘crazy’ since Ax’s brother showed up.”
There was a vote. Aldrea pleaded with me to vote against.
I said.
That’s what I told her. What I felt was a whole different story.
I said.
She was still arguing as I morphed to osprey. Still arguing as the others all morphed to flea or fly, all as small as they could get. Only Toby would not be coming along.
Once I was completely osprey, I picked the insects up, one by one. They crouched inside my beak. Not roomy or pleasant maybe, but safe enough.
I took to the air, released my grip on a high branch and floated out over the valley, out into the Hork-Bajir night. The narrow valley funneled heat upward, an almost continuous thermal that made flying easy. I turned in a spiral, flapped, rested, flapped again, higher and higher.
I flew up till I could see the barren lands beyond the chasm. There the thermal failed, dissipated by horizontal winds. I was as high as I could go.
I was trying hard to sound nonchalant. I was scared to death. I was so far up, but not far enough.
Marco said.
I took a deep breath. I picked my aiming point: near the dam, but not too near. I didn’t want to hit wood. I didn’t want to hit as a full-fledged whale, either. A whale at that speed would be crushed by the impact.
Speed. It was all a question of speed.
I began to demorph.
I began to demorph. My talons became pudgy and grew into toes. My feathers melted together like wax under a blowtorch.
My face flattened, my beak softened into lips. My sensitive human tongue could feel the five insects inside my mouth.
Don’t open your mouth, I reminded myself. But that was only my secondary worry. That part was easy.
The hard part was keeping my wings.
I fell. Down and down through the night. Down and down toward the bright Yeerk pool below. Down toward the still-oblivious sentries who could burn me out of the air.
I fell, more and more human. But my wings, my osprey wings, I kept.
Morphing is never logical or rational. Things don’t happen in a neat, predictable sequence. No one can ever be sure how it will happen. But I could, with some part of my mind I couldn’t even feel, some part of my brain with which I could not even communicate, shape the way the morphing happened.
Ax says I have a talent. A gift. It wasn’t my doing, and I don’t know where it came from or why I have it. But, as I fell and demorphed and fell, my human body, my short, pudgy human body had wings that grew and grew and spread wider than osprey wings can spread.
I couldn’t flap them or even turn the edges or control a single feather, but I could hold them stiff, and as I fell, I fell … slowly.
I fell slowly, reusing the accelerating pull of gravity. And then, only a hundred feet above the Yeerk pool, I began to morph to whale.
My feet twined together, like fast-acting ivy, or spaghetti twirled on a fork. They melted, and fused and my flesh grew thicker, fatter.
And still, I kept the wings.
Now I was within visual range of the Hork-Bajir guards. Now they could shoot at me, any moment, if only they looked up. One head raised to look at the stars and I would be —
Tseeeeeew!
A red beam appeared five feet from my face, then disappeared.
I cried.
Tseeeeew!
A second shot, this one behind me. More and more Hork-Bajir were looking up, goblin heads tilted back to see me.
They would not see a human. That was vital. We could not be here, certainly could not be humans. Humans on the Hork-Bajir home world? It would cause a galaxy-wide alert and bring more pressure than ever on Visser Three to find us, at all costs.
When the Hork-Bajir looked up they saw a melting, shifting thing with wide white wings and a whale’s tail.
Tseeeeeew! Tseeeeeeew!
Tseeeeeew! Tseeeeew! Tseeeeew!
Red beams everywhere, left, right, some so near I smelled the air burning.
Aldrea cried. I felt her will surge, a tidal wave inside my mind.
She was trying to fold my wings, trying to drop, reaching to take over my mind.
Tseeeeeew! Tseeeeeew!
A shot burned a seven-inch slice into my side. The pain was staggering.
My wings were … closing … losing the morph …
NO! This was my body, this was me!
I shoved against the tidal wave of Aldrea’s will, weak hands holding back a cataclysm.
But my wings stayed firm. I fell, faster, but not too fast. Aldrea fought me, I fought back, but I still owned this body, this morph. We fell, the strange, sad Andalite turned Hork-Bajir, the dead creature with a will of iron, and me. And all the while I morphed. Morphed till my osprey wings grew heavy with flesh that was as much whale as human.
The ground fire was a wall of flame.
At last, close enough. I demorphed my wings and plunged.
ALDREA
I had lost.
We fell, fell toward certain death, plunged tail first into the Yeerk pool, and still, all I could think was that I had lost.
Lost to a human child. I’d assumed the only question was one of self-restraint. I’d believed I could seize this body if ever I chose. But the little human female had held me at bay even as she performed an act of morphing that would have made her a hero among the Andalites.
No time to think about that. No time to think about how she could have … no, there was a battle to fight.
We plunged deep in the Yeerk pool and now Cassie was growing with a shocking speed, growing so huge, so fast that the body was creating little whirlpools.
I almost laughed. It was outrageous. Now she needed me?
I said. What else could I say?
The Prophecy Page 7
