We saw two buildings separated from each other by the center dock. The buildings were identical, windowless rectangles painted white. Like warehouses. There were other smaller buildings around as well. The kinds of buildings they use as “temporary” classrooms.
Tobias pointed out.
I couldn’t tell him that was the building that connected to the big porthole with the grand but empty office behind it. The office I was sure was my mother’s.
“Grrrrooooaaaaarrrrr!”
<— do that.>
The roar was the roar of a tiger. A noise that could make adults want to crawl in bed with their teddy bears and pull the blankets over their heads.
The effect on the Taxxon in the doorway was instantaneous. He decided to back up.
A harrier and a red-tailed hawk were milliseconds behind me.
Past the distracted Taxxon without being seen! Through the doorway, way too fast! A long hallway. The end of the long hallway, coming up way, way, WAY too fast!
I banked my wings and shot through an open side door, scraping my back and my right wing on the doorjamb.
A room. A desk. A chair. Walls! Walls! Walls!
I flared to kill my speed, but not enough.
I banked an amazingly sharp left and flew through a second doorway into an almost totally dark room. I was no longer going fifty miles an hour. I was probably only doing about fifteen. But let me tell you: Flying at fifteen miles an hour in a dark room where you can’t see the walls is slightly too exciting.
WHUMPF!
WHUMPF!
CRASH! Rattle … rattle …
Ax had hit the desk. Tobias had hit the floor. I had hit a metal trash can and gone rolling inside it.
Ax said calmly,
With my excellent osprey hearing, I could make out sounds of damage and destruction coming from somewhere outside.
I demorphed as quickly as I could. We’d done a lot of morphing in a very short period of time. I was getting tired. But still, within a few minutes, it was me as human, Tobias morphed into his human shape, and Ax as his own Andalite self.
“You know, sometimes there’s just a very fine line between us and the Three Stooges,” I said.
“A stooge is a guy stupid enough to run around inside a Yeerk stronghold wearing a pair of bike shorts and accompanied by a Deer-man from outer space and a mouse-eating Bird-boy. That’s a stooge.”
I led the way from the darkened room. Ax came behind, tail at the ready. Tobias walked awkwardly at the rear. He’s still getting used to being able to be human again.
“I can’t believe I lived most of my life with these lame human eyes,” he grumbled. “You people are blind.”
“Shhh.”
I crept out into a brightly lit hallway. I took a second to try and figure out which direction to go. At the end of the hallway was a door, different from the others. On it was a gold symbol of some kind. Like the presidential seal.
“That way. Ax? If anyone pops out of any of these doors …” I let it hang. Ax knew what to do. He twirled the bladed end of his tail, limbering it up, I guess.
We scurried down the hallway. I reached for the door handle. I opened it.
“Come in,” a voice said.
I froze there. My head poking through the open door. My friends were hidden behind me.
“I said come in,” a sinister voice said. “Never make me give an order twice. You won’t live to hear me give it a third time.”
So I stepped through the doorway, closing it quickly behind me, blocking Ax and Tobias from view.
And I walked on wooden, rickety legs to the big desk in the center of the room. I walked over and stood there. Facing her. Facing my mother.
She looked the same.
But she also looked different.
Same dark eyes, same mouth, same movie-star hair. But there was a different soul looking out through those eyes. They were hard eyes. Mean eyes. Ruthless, pitiless eyes.
Like the eyes of a shark. No more gentle or sweet than the cold, eerie eyes of a hammerhead shark.
I was glad. You see, I had wondered whether she had been a Controller for long before she faked her own death. I had wondered whether it was a Yeerk kissing me good night, and teasing me about my vanity, and laughing at my dumb jokes.
But now I felt like I knew. It couldn’t have been, see, because she did look different. I could see the evil inside her. I would have seen it back then. Right?
Part of my brain said, Don’t be a fool, Marco. She’s among her fellow Yeerks now. Of course she’s no longer putting on an act. She doesn’t have to hide what she is anymore.
My mother looked at me with the eyes of a Yeerk visser. “I was expecting four new technicians. Where are the other three?”
I just stared.
“Where are the other three who were supposed to come with you from the Pool ship?”
I jerked my head to break the spell. “The other three? The other three technicians? Oh. Um … they, uh, they had a problem. I think Visser Three killed them for doing something wrong.”
It was possibly the stupidest lie I have ever told. And yet it worked.
My mother raised one eyebrow contemptuously. “If that clown Visser Three thinks he can damage me in the eyes of the Council of Thirteen by sabotaging this project, he’s a bigger fool than I thought.”
I gulped. From outside there came a huge roar and a beastly bellow. Jake and Rachel and Cassie. Still creating a distraction. I could only imagine how desperate their situation was.
“We’re having a bit of a problem with the Andalite bandits Visser Three has still failed to exterminate,” Visser On
e said calmly.
All I could do was nod.
“I see,” she said. “Obviously your host mind is giving you some trouble. I’m sure you are aware that your host body is the biological son of my own host body.”
Not a shred of emotion. Not a shred of guilt. It was sitting there, using my mother’s body, knowing … knowing, like no one else could possibly know, the agony my mother must be feeling at seeing me.
I nodded. “Yes, Visser.”
“You must learn to control your host more completely. My own host is in here creating an awful racket,” she said, tapping her head. “But I do not let her weeping and wailing disturb me.”
“No, Visser,” I said in a whisper. “I will try harder to control my host.”
I wanted to destroy that Yeerk. I wanted to reach inside that familiar head and rip that filthy Yeerk out of there and stomp it into the floor.
I was surprised Visser One couldn’t see my hate. I felt it vibrating the very air around me.
But I couldn’t do anything. All I could do was stand there. Stand there with my arms at my sides and listen to the foul Yeerk visser, highest of all the vissers, sneer at the fact that my mother’s mind and heart were crying from seeing her son made a slave of the Yeerks.
WHAM!
It was the sound of something large being slammed against the outside wall of the building. I pictured a Hork-Bajir thrown by a rampaging elephant.
Visser One barely blinked. “Well. I guess I’d better see to this little problem outside,” she said wearily. “I have to wrap up this shark project and have a thousand shark-Controllers ready for use on Leeran within two months. I don’t need to be pestered by Visser Three’s leftover Andalite problems. That incompetent fool will be arriving soon. I only wish these tiresome Andalite bandits would remove that particular annoyance from my life.”
She stood up. She straightened her hair exactly the way my mom always did. I looked into her eyes, wishing I could see some sign there of my mother. Wishing I could tell her, “Don’t worry, Mom, I’m not a Controller. I’m fighting, Mom. I’m fighting them and some day I’ll save you.”
But that would have been fatal. And I’m not someone who does emotional, stupid things. Sometimes I wish I were.
“Get to the lab,” Visser One said. “Go to work.”
She walked past me, like she’d already forgotten I existed. I held my breath as she stepped out into the hallway. But Ax and Tobias were gone.
I breathed a sigh of relief. Why? Maybe because Ax would have hurt her. I don’t know.
Then, through the massive round porthole, I saw something large and sinuous. Like a snake. But a snake that was fifty feet long and thicker than a Taxxon.
It was the yellow of poison. With a mouth that looked able to swallow a small boat.
It was coming straight for the facility. And on either side of it, like an honor guard, were a dozen Hork-Bajir in bizarre red diving suits, propelled by small water jets attached to each ankle.
I had a feeling I knew this particular snake’s name.
I followed her out in the hall, but she walked away. Swaggering. Like the Yeerk visser she was.
I watched her for longer than I should have. Then I ducked into a side door. The room was dark. I expected to find Ax and Tobias there. I did. I found Ax very suddenly, in fact.
THWAPP!
A tail blade was pressed against my throat.
“Hey, it’s me. Please don’t remove my head. I use it sometimes.”
“We were just trying to figure out whether we should try and rescue you or go join the fight outside,” Tobias said in his now-unfamiliar human voice.
Ax led me over to a glowing, three-dimensional computer display. It was weird, the way most of the place was like any standard, boring human office. Like an insurance agent’s or a school secretary’s office. But I guess the Yeerks didn’t want to be stuck messing with human level computers.
“Roooaaaarrrr!”
Jake’s tiger roar sounded a little frazzled.
“We need to get out there and help them,” Tobias said.
“No,” I snapped. “They can’t be helped by us rushing out there. Visser Three is coming with more Hork-Bajir. He’s morphed this giant snake from planet Whatever.”
They stared at me like I must be hallucinating or something.
“Look, it’s him, okay? I saw it through the porthole. A huge yellow sea snake with Hork-Bajir alongside. Who do you figure that would be?”
“I don’t think it is a rescue mission. I think it’s a coincidence. I think he happened to be on his way here.”
“Just our bad luck,” Tobias said.
“Maybe not,” I pointed out. “Visser One and Three are rivals. Visser One let us escape to mess with Visser Three. This may work for us. But first things first. Ax? Start questioning that computer.”
I couldn’t believe I was standing there so calmly while Jake, Rachel, and Cassie were probably fighting for their lives. But I guess I’d had a good look at the ruthlessness of the Yeerks. I’d seen it in Visser One’s cold eyes. I’d heard it in the pitiless voice that didn’t care one tiny bit that I was the son of the body it now controlled.
I guess there are times when the only way to survive is to be as ruthless as the enemy. To destroy before you can be destroyed.
“But it’s a watery world, so they can’t rely on Hork-Bajir,” I said. “It’s true. The hammerheads are being reengineered to allow for Yeerks to make them Controllers. The shark-Controllers will be the troops in the war for Leeran.”
“Great. Now can we get out there and help Rachel and the others?” Tobias demanded.
He hadn’t waited for an answer. He was already demorphing. Red-tailed feathers were sprouting from his hands.
“Ax, can you find a way to remove these things in our heads?” I asked.
Ax communicated mentally with the computer.
“What?” Tobias said. “You can’t eliminate these things without blowing up the whole place?”
“Ax. How do they keep the water out of this place? How do they keep it from flooding? If it were just air pressure our ears would be seriously imploding.”
“Can you reach the controls?”
“Can you turn off the force fields? Without letting the Yeerks know?”
Ax laughed derisively.
“Destroy the facility and it may trigger the liquidation of these head implants,” I said. “Ax, can you build in a five-minute delay?”
“Yeah. And those who can’t grow gills … I guess they’ll wish they could.”
We ran from the room. I morphed as I ran. I morphed into a gorilla. We were going into a fight. And although the gorilla isn’t a mean or aggressive animal, it is amazingly powerful.
By the time we reached the door to the outside, I was done. Tobias was already flying, and Ax was Ax.
I threw open the door to the outside. Actually, I forgot I was in gorilla morph and opened the door so hard it ripped clear off its hinges.
What I saw was a scene of destruction. There were injured Hork-Bajir lying crumpled around the facility. There was a reeking, squashed Taxxon being munched on ravenously by a fellow Taxxon. Rachel in grizzly morph, Jake in tiger morph, and Cassie as a wolf had done some serious damage. But now they were cornered, almost surrounded by wary but determined Hork-Bajir.
Visser One, my mother, was striding toward them, seemingly unconcerned. As she went, she was kicking the wounded Hork-Bajir, demanding they get up and fight. Half a dozen had already rallied to her.
I broke into a loping run. Tobias flapped away. And Ax ran, tail at the ready.
Ax and Tobias went ahead. I hit the group of Hork-Bajir that was following my mother. They didn’t see me coming.
WHAM! I slammed a Hork-Bajir down to the concrete and he stayed down.
SWISH! A Hork-Bajir spun around and swung his arm, wrist blade turning toward me. But he’d already been wounded. He was slow. I was slow, too. But I didn’t miss. I drove my canned-hamsized gorilla fist, with more power than ten Evander Holyfields, into the Hork-Bajir’s chest. The other Hork-Bajir stayed back.
My mother turned around. “Kill it, you cowards! Kill it!”
The Escape Page 8
