The Escape

by Katherin Applegate

  I felt a tingling, watery feeling in my head. The control chip was being liquidated. Ax had said it would happen when the facility’s computer decided the end had come.

  The Yeerks are good at destroying evidence. The chips in all the sharks were liquidating. No fisherman would ever catch a shark with alien technology in its head.

  Cassie said.

  Tobias said.

  It was just the kind of thing I would have said.

  Jake and Ax were silent. I knew Jake would tell Cassie now. If he didn’t, Rachel would. They would all know. Jake and Rachel and Ax already knew.

  They knew that my heart was ripping apart. They knew that I was crying. Or crying as well as any shark could.

  I had lost my mother once. Now I’d lost her again. Unless …

  I pictured the Leeran swimming toward her. Had she made it? No. It wasn’t possible.

  We swam away. We swam toward shore, where we would be human once again and go back to our lives. Back to home and homework. Back to saying good night to a picture of my mother.

  But nothing would ever be the same now. How could it be? They would all know.

  I felt the energy drain out of me. I was exhausted. Exhausted and defeated. I waited for someone to say something nice. Something sweet and comforting. Something that they would never have said to the old Marco.

  Rachel said.

  Tobias argued.

  Rachel said.

  I didn’t hear anything, either. Maybe Rachel was just making it up. Maybe she was trying to give me some tiny hope to cling to. It didn’t sound like something Rachel would do. But there are hidden depths to Rachel. There are times she’ll surprise you.

  I said.

  You know, if she’d said, I’d have known it was a lie. That she hadn’t heard a sub. That she was just trying to be nice.

  Rachel sneered in her usual Rachel sneer.

  It was a pretty good shot. It made me laugh a little. I don’t mind when the jokes are at my own expense. As long as they’re funny.

  Was it true? Had my mother made it to the sub and escaped? I don’t know, and I guess I wasn’t totally sure what I wanted the truth to be.

  If she was gone … really, really gone, then I could be a normal person again. I could be sad and then put it behind me. I could be free.

  If she was still alive, still trapped, then I was still trapped, too. I still had to try and save her. I would still be a prisoner of hope.

  Jake said privately so no one else could hear.

  Like I always say, you have to decide whether you think life is tragedy or comedy. I long ago decided to look for the joke in life.

  And now I had to decide whether, in my own mind, she was dead or still alive. Suddenly I had this flash. This picture in my head. Me and her. Me and my mom. My real mom, free, no longer a Controller. It would be far in the future. Years from now, maybe. Me and her and my dad would sit down together and talk about how it had been. About all the stuff that had happened. All the secrets and despair. All the fear. All the anger and hopelessness. We’d remember it all.

  And then, slowly but surely, we’d talk less about how horrible it had all been. We’d start talking about the strange stuff. The weird stuff. The stuff that we could laugh at, now that it was all over.

  See, it was my mom who taught me that the world was funny.

  And if she was alive, we’d maybe still get that day in the future to sit down and laugh together.

  I said.

  I typed “Bball24.”

  Then I typed in my code word, which is a series of letters and numbers.

  I moved the mouse and placed the arrow on “Sign On.” I clicked the mouse. And I waited while the modem dialed.

  My name is Jake

  Just Jake. I can’t tell you my last name.

  My name online is Bball24. At least, that’s close to being my real online name. I have to be careful, even about that. See, nothing is safe from the Yeerks. I could give you my actual screen name and they could find me.

  That would be the end of Jake and Bball24. All my friends. And, just maybe, the entire human race.

  You want to know what my screen name means? Well, I used to be really into basketball. I tried out for our team but didn’t make the cut. But my best game ever I scored twenty-four points. So that’s what Bball24 is about: basketball, twenty-four points.

  Kind of dumb now, I guess. Basketball isn’t all that important to me anymore. And not just because I didn’t make the team. It’s just that I’m playing a much more intense game now.

  I’m an Animorph. It’s a made-up word. You won’t find it in any dictionary. My best friend Marco came up with it. It’s short for “Animal Morpher.”

  It’s what we are, thanks to an alien who died trying to save the people of Earth. He gave us the power to morph. To become any animal whose DNA we could absorb through touch. We use this power to fight the Yeerk invasion of Earth.

  That’s another word you won’t find in the dictionary: Yeerk. But the word has a terribly real meaning. The Yeerks are a species of parasitic slug. Yeerks live in the brains of other species. They live inside Taxxons, inside Hork-Bajir, inside Gedds, and I guess inside a few Leerans. And, unfortunately for all the free races of the universe, they live inside the brain of one Andalite.

  They live in the brains of humans, too. Human-Controllers. That’s a human who isn’t exactly human anymore. A human-Controller is a slave to the Yeerk in its head.

  How many humans have the Yeerks infested? We don’t know. Too many. My brother Tom is one of them. Marco’s mother is one. Our assistant principal at school is one. We’ve seen human-Controller cops, human-Controller teachers, and even a TV star who wanted to become a human-Controller — weird as that may seem.

  They are everywhere. They can be anyone.

  And that’s why we fight. That’s why we undergo the nightmarish transformations into animal form again and again. Because our only weapons are the animals we become.

  I connected at 38,400 bps. I wish I had a faster modem, but at least this one is better than my old 14,400.

  Some offers popped up on the screen. Would I like to apply for a Web Access America Visa card? No. Would I like to buy a new antivirus program? No.

  “You’ve got mail,” the computer said with a sort of mechanical excitement. Like it cared that I had E-mail.

  I clicked on the mail icon. Three E-mails. One was a chain letter. I dumped it. One was from some guy who must have thought I cared about politics. It was some stupid conspiracy theory. I dumped it, too.

  The third was from “Cassie98.” I opened it and read it.

  “Jake, oooh baby, you are the man for me. I love your big manly shoulders. I love your piercing brown eyes. (They are brown, right?) But most of all, I love the macho, manly way you boss us all around, snapping out orders left and right. I think of you as the new Clint Eastwood. I must have you all to myself. Signed, Cassie. XXX.”

  I sighed. Marco, of course. Cassie seldom goes online, and never sends E-mail, and would certainly never send me such a stupid E-mail. Kind of a shame, actually. But this was definitely the work of Marco, using one of his many fake screen names.

  I
clicked on the “Create Mail” command. I thought for a moment, then typed.

  “Cassie, you know I like you, too. But I have vowed not to get involved with any girl until my best friend, Marco, gets at least one girl to like him. And since we know that’s never going to happen, I guess we’ll never get together. Signed, Jake.”

  I sent the E-mail, feeling pretty pleased with myself. Marco would get a laugh out of it. Marco always looks for the humor in any situation and he doesn’t mind if the joke is on him. As long as it’s funny.

  I was going to sign off because, as usual, I couldn’t really think of much to do online. But then I had this weird urge. I don’t know why. I clicked on the Internet icon and brought up the Web browser.

  In the search space I typed the work “Yeerk.”

  I clicked on “Search Now.”

  It took a few seconds to get the answer back. I expected to get nothing. There was no reason for there to be a Web site using the keyword “Yeerk.” Like I said, it’s not a word in any dictionary.

  But then, to my utter amazement, up popped the list of hits.

  There was exactly one.

  I clicked on the blue hypertext link.

  And suddenly I realized we Animorphs were not as alone as we’d thought.

  About the Author

  The Animorphs series, written by Katherine (K. A.) Applegate with her husband, Michael Grant, has sold millions of copies worldwide, and alerted the world to the presence of the Yeerks. Katherine and Michael are also the authors of the bestselling Remnants and Everworld series. On her own, Katherine is the author of Home of the Brave, Crenshaw, Wishtree, and the Newbery Medal–winning The One and Only Ivan. Michael is the author of the Gone and Front Lines series.

  The invasion has begun.

  Catch up on Newbery Medal–winner K. A. Applegate’s world-conquering series.

  #1: The Invasion

  #2: The Visitor

  #3: The Encounter

  #4: The Message

  #5: The Predator

  #6: The Capture

  #7: The Stranger

  #8: The Alien

  #9: The Secret

  #10: The Android

  #11: The Forgotten

  #12: The Reaction

  #13: The Change

  #14: The Unknown

  #15: The Escape

  #16: The Warning

  #17: The Underground

  #18: The Decision

  #19: The Departure

  #20: The Discovery

  #21: The Threat

  #22: The Solution

  #23: The Pretender

  #24: The Suspicion

  #25: The Extreme

  #26: The Attack

  #27: The Exposed

  #28: The Experiment

  #29: The Sickness

  #30: The Reunion

  #31: The Conspiracy

  #32: The Separation

  #33: The Illusion

  #34: The Prophecy

  #35: The Proposal

  #36: The Mutation

  #37: The Weakness

  #38: The Arrival

  #39: The Hidden

  #40: The Other

  #41: The Familiar

  #42: The Journey

  #43: The Test

  #44: The Unexpected

  #45: The Revelation

  #46: The Deception

  #47: The Resistance

  #48: The Return

  #49: The Diversion

  #50: The Ultimate

  #51: The Absolute

  #52: The Sacrifice

  #53: The Answer

  #54: The Beginning

  Text copyright © 1998 by Katherine Applegate

  Cover illustration by David B. Mattingly

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, ANIMORPHS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  e-ISBN 978-1-338-21656-1

  First edition, February 1998