The Departure

by K. A. Applegate

  But Marco is not a fool. He could see that I was whispering. And Karen was in such pain I wasn't sure she even understood.

  «l have an idea,» Marco said. «How about telling me what's going on? You disappear, your parents are both losing their minds from worry. We all go looking for you, and now, here you are, whispering to this girl.»

  I was human again, so I couldn't answer him in thought-speak. It gave me a little time to think about what I should tell him.

  «Ah. Okay. Tell you what. I'll go "bye-bye" for

  93 a couple seconds and come back as my own cute, lovable self.»

  Marco lumbered away, a massive, powerful gorilla with shoulders that looked like they'd been built by Mack trucks.

  "He'll be back in a few seconds," I hissed to Karen as I tore strips of cloth from my morphing outfit to clean her wound. "If he finds out what you are, he might... he might not see things the way I do."

  Karen grimaced in pain, but the Yeerk in her head was still alert and sharp. "A monkey morph? How's he going to hurt me with that?"

  "You idiot," I snapped, "that gorilla morph could rip a tree out of the ground and play baseball with you as the ball."

  "Sorry," she muttered. "The only things I know about Earth creatures are what the host brain knows. She thinks he looks like Curious George."

  "He's curious, all right. And smart. And he doesn't like Yeerks. And in that morph he could stuff you into the nearest gopher hole, so listen tome!"

  "Why are you protecting me from him? You weren't so sure about saving me from the leopard, were you?"

  I didn't answer. Instead I focused on cleaning

  94 the wound. It wasn't easy, and it was almost useless. The bite marks didn't go deep because the wood splint had stopped them. But they were sure to become infected eventually. And there could be crushed blood vessels below the surface that I couldn't even see.

  "How does it look?" she asked.

  "I don't know. It might become infected. It could even lead to gangrene."

  "What's gangrene?"

  "Putrefied flesh," I said harshly. "It could mean the foot will have to be amputated if it goes on too long. Maybe more of the leg."

  To my surprise, Karen laughed. "That would be just perfect. I'd not only be stuck in a little girl host body, I'd be stuck in a crippled little

  girl."

  "She's already crippled," I said. "What do you think you've done to her? She's already lost both her legs, and her arms and eyes and voice as well."

  She looked up at me with her startling green eyes. "You hate me so much? Why don't you just finish me off?"

  "Because I can't destroy you without destroying the girl," I said.

  She shook her head. "No. No, that's not all there is to it." Suddenly she burst out laughing. "Ah, hah, hah, hah! Amazing! I just figured it

  95 out! You're trying to turn me. You're trying to get me to turn against my own side."

  "I'm trying to save you," I whispered.

  Karen snorted. "You want to make peace, don't you? You want to find a way to stop us without having to get your hands dirty. You want to defeat us ... without having to kill us. It's almost sweet. It is sweet. Sweet and naive and foolish and utterly, utterly futile."

  «l agree.»

  I turned and saw Marco. Only he was in his osprey morph again, sitting twenty feet above us in a tree.

  Ospreys, like all birds of prey, have amazing eyesight. But what many people don't know is that they also have very excellent hearing.

  «l absolutely agree,» Marco said, his thought-speak voice vibrating with suppressed rage. «There's no peace with parasites. You don't turn them around. You bury them.»

  96

  ?There! There you have it!" Karen cried, pointing triumphantly at Marco. "Kill! Kill, he cries. Kill the parasite! Kill the Yeerk. Now where is your human morality? Now tell me again, Cassie, how you humans and your Andalite friends are better than we are!"

  «We don't crawl into people's brains and make them slaves,» Marco said. He flapped down from the tree to the ground and began to demorph.

  "Of course not. You're predators. So you think being a predator is fine. Well, we think being parasites is fine," Karen said, smirking. "Your morality is real simple. Anything humans do is okay, anything Yeerks do is wrong."

  97 Marco was mostly human now. Human enough to speak and to jab his finger angrily at Karen. "Hey, Slug-girl, we didn't start this fight, you did. We didn't go to the Yeerk planet and start killing Yeerks. You started this war."

  "Who started the war between humans and cows? Or humans and pigs? Or humans and chickens?" Karen demanded, laughing derisively. "Cows weren't eating humans, were they?"

  "Hey, we're not cows," Marco snapped. "You can't compare what you do to humans with what we do to cows."

  "Sure I can. You're our meat!" Karen said.

  It was a harsh, spitting, evil statement. It seemed even more so coming from a little girl's mouth.

  She and Marco stood face-to-face, glaring. I felt as if I couldn't breathe. Like I couldn't make my mind work.

  "Cassie, we have no choice," Marco said. "She knows too much. We can't let her walk out of these woods alive."

  "She's not just a Yeerk," I begged. "She's also a little girl."

  "The little girl is gone," Marco said. "She's not in charge anymore. That Yeerk piece of crap is."

  "That's a funny thing for you to say, Marco. You, of all people," I said.

  I was talking, talking like I knew what I was

  98 saying. But inside me was a storm. I felt like I was going to explode. I didn't know what to do!

  His eyes flickered. "What are you talking about?"

  "You know what I'm talking about, Marco. There's someone you know . . . someone close to you who is just like Karen."

  Marco's mother is a Controller. Everyone, even Marco's dad, thinks she's dead. But we know that she is controlled by the Yeerk, Visser One.

  "And she's not the only one. You and I have a close friend, Marco, whose brother is one of them."

  Tom, Jake's brother, is also a Controller.

  "So what are you telling me? We can't fight the Yeerks because they hide behind humans? What do we do, just give up? Look, Cassie, you're so worried about this Controller here, why don't you worry about all of us - you know who I mean. You think she and her fellow Yeerks will hesitate to destroy us?"

  I felt the edge of panic rise a little higher. He was right. It was either Karen or the Animorphs. One or the other. Both could not survive. I couldn't go on pretending. I couldn't find an answer.

  "I don't know," I muttered desperately. "I don't know."

  99 Marco rolled his eyes. His opinion of me was obvious. It was okay: I agreed with him. I was a muddled, confused, foolish girl. I was sacrificing my friends ... for what? I was selling out the entire human race ... for what?

  So I wouldn't have to see one lost little girl destroyed? So I wouldn't have to know that a Yeerk - yes, a Yeerk, with her own life and feelings and thoughts - was going to perish?

  "I'll make it simple for you, Yeerk," Marco said. "You're going to die, that much we know. Now, you can leave that little girl and at least not take anyone else down with you, or... well, nothing personal, but you're not leaving this forest alive."

  "No," Karen said simply. "You want to kill me? You have the power. But I'm not making it easy for you."

  "Okay," Marco said. He said it casually, like it was all no big deal to him. I knew better. I knew he was feeling the awful violence-sickness inside of him. But I also knew he would do it.

  The three of us seemed frozen in time, no one ready to make the first move. The three of us just stood and stared and waited ... no! Not the three of us.

  "Wait!" I cried. "There's another person here who should have a chance to speak."

  Marco raised an eyebrow.

  100 I looked at Karen. "I want to hear from the real Karen. The human little girl."

  Karen laughed. "Don't be an idiot. You sh
ould know I can sound exactly like Karen if I want to. You'd never know for sure."

  "I would if you weren't in her," I said. I began to morph, as fast as I could, back into the wolf.

  "Yeah, that's what I'll do," the Controller jeered. "I'll just leave my host body and lie on the ground so your murderous predator friend here can -"

  "Cassie, what are you doing?" Marco demanded. He'd noticed that I was morphing.

  «I'm giving this Controller a place to go, so we can hear from Karen.»

  With my half-hands, half-paws, I grabbed Karen's head and pulled it to me. I pressed her ear against mine.

  "Nooooo!" Marco screamed.

  But there was nothing he could do to stop me. I was a wolf. He was a human. Already I could feel the tingling touch in my ear.

  "What are you doing?!" Marco yelled. "Are you insane? What are you doing?"

  I didn't have an answer. I didn't know the answer. I was beyond logic and reason now. I just didn't want to have to hurt anyone or anything.

  That was all: I just didn't want to hurt. . .

  Marco began to morph back to osprey. He'd

  101 understood instantly what I hadn't even thought about: The Yeerk that was entering my brain would be able to use my morphing power. If he stayed in human form, the Yeerk, using my morphing power, might attack him.

  "I'm going to get the others," Marco said, seething with fury. "You're a fool, Cassie. Now it's not the little girl who may have to die. It's you."

  102

  I felt the start of an awful pain in my ear. But the Yeerk secreted a chemical that made my ear go numb. And then I felt it pushing its way through my ear canal the way you still kind of feel the dentist's drill even after the Novocain shot.

  I felt the first touch of the Yeerk on my mind. There was no pain now. There was just a feeling of ... I don't know how to describe it. A feeling that I was being paralyzed, a little at a time.

  It touched my brain, and all at once I realized I could no longer move my right leg.

  It reached further, and my hands were no longer mine.

  103 It reached further, and the hunger I'd felt was now someone else's hunger.

  It reached further and further, sliding into the crevices. Slithering between the cauliflower contours of the gelatinous gray mass that was my brain.

  I looked at Karen. The simple, human Karen. She was crying.

  "I want to go home," she sobbed.

  And then my eyes moved and looked away. They focused on Marco as he flapped his gray and white wings and rose from the ground.

  I hadn't moved my eyes.

  It was all over so quickly. So quickly I lost all control of my own body.

  And then the Yeerk opened my memory. It was easy as any person reading a book. I felt my secrets, all my little shames and embarrassments, lying open for the Yeerk to inspect, to laugh at.

  But at the same time, parts of her mind seemed to soak into my consciousness. I could see her. Not as well as she could see me, because I could not control which of her memories I looked at. But just the same, the Yeerk's mind seemed to blur into mine.

  I was there, in the Yeerk pool, blind, swimming. I had a name and a designation: I was Aftran-Nine-Four-Two of the Hett Simplat pool.

  104 I was there, in Aftran's memories, opening Gedd eyes for the first time and seeing color! Oh, the shock! Oh, the glory of it! Even secondhand, even from so long ago, the beauty of color seen for the first time was overwhelming.

  I was there when the Yeerk first felt its Hork-Bajir host. Felt the grace and power that the Gedd would never have.

  I was there when the new Hork-Bajir-Controller was in its first blade fight. The fear it had felt!

  And after the battle, after the next battle, and the next, and the next, some other memory grew and grew. A memory of sadness. A memory of regret.

  Aftran was saddened by the battles.

  Then the human morph. Karen.

  Aftran had volunteered for the duty. She had wanted out of the Hork-Bajir body. She wanted out of the war. What could be a safer, more peaceful host than a little, human girl?

  The assignment was to watch her father. He was the billionaire owner of UniBank. Being close to him gave Aftran access to all sorts of information and vast amounts of useful cash. The Yeerks wanted to make the father a Controller, but hadn't been able to yet. So Karen had been taken, and made into a Controller to watch the true target: her father.

  105 Aftran had taken on the job to avoid having to kill. But her pool-brother, Estril, had stayed on as a Hork-Bajir. Estril had been acting as backup security to a meeting of The Sharing. A nothing job. No problem. Stay aboard a shielded ship, just in case . . .

  The "just in case" had been the battle. And I saw, with Aftran's memory, the image of a wolf, teeth bared in a vicious snarl . . .

  Me.

  And now Aftran opened that very memory. I could feel her absorbing my crystal clear images.-The moment when I lunged for the Hork-Bajir's throat and heard Jake yell, «Okay, they've had it, back away! Back away!»

  «His name was Estril-Seven-Three-One, of the Hett Simplat pool,» Aftran said to me.

  «Yes,» I said. And as the guilt welled up inside me, I could tell that Aftran was watching the emotion, solemnly curious.

  Now the Yeerk opened the secret I had guarded for months. She yelped in surprise. «Just five human children and an Andalite aristh?!» She laughed. «The entire Yeerk invasion force is in an uproar because of five human children and an Andalite cadet?»

  One by one she looked inside the memories I had formed since becoming an Animorph.

  106 She saw the construction site where Elfangor's fighter had crash-landed.

  She saw the moment when I learned that Tobias was trapped forever in hawk morph.

  She saw the first time I ever morphed a dolphin, the amazing, giddy joy of it, and I swear she laughed inside my head, enjoying the memory, too.

  She saw that Jake's brother Tom was a Controller, that the leader of the Animorphs lived under the same roof with a Yeerk.

  She saw that Marco's mother was Visser One and the fact that it was Visser One who had freed us from Visser Three's clutches for her own evil reasons.

  «Politics and power,» Aftran sneered. «The Vissers spend more time attacking each other than they spend attacking our enemies. All they care about is their own power.»

  She saw the hidden, underground park where the Chee care for the stray dogs that remind them of their long-dead masters.

  She saw, as I had seen, through the eyes of the wolf, the dolphin, the skunk, the horse, the osprey, even the Tyrannosaurus. She experienced the distorted, eerie universe of the fly, the cockroach, the flea, the ant.

  And she dwelled at length on the termite. As she opened that memory, it was like being back

  107 there again, deep in the tiny tunnels within rotted wood. A lightless, sightless, scent-defined world of mindless automatons.

  She saw me destroy the termite queen.

  «You felt guilty for killing an insect?» she marveled.

  She discovered, through me, the secret of Zone 91 and laughed and laughed at that. «An Andalite portable toilet! Hah-hah-hah! Visser Three is obsessed with discovering the secret of Zone ninety-one.»

  And she came, at last, back again to the last few days. Back to now. Back to where she could watch herself through my eyes. To feel my own complicated mix of emotions.

  Then there was silence, and no more memories opened. Not for a long time. And Aftran's mind went away, closed off by itself,

  I tried moving my eyes, but they were still beyond my control. I wanted to scream. It was like being paralyzed. I was completely powerless. Completely.

  I sat there, waiting. Unable to move, unable even to control my own memory. All that was left to me were my own emotions.

  And those... I couldn't make sense of those. All I knew for sure was that I had betrayed everyone I cared about. Jake. Rachel. Tobias. Ax. Marco.

  108 And then, I felt
Aftran opening a specific memory. I felt her causing me to focus and concentrate.

  As she herself aimed my eyes, I saw the gray, feather patterns begin to appear on my skin, like drawings that slowly came to life.

  The Yeerk spread my wings. And she flew.

  109

  Up we flew, up from the pine-needle-covered floor of the forest. Up, up through the treetops. Up into brilliant sunlight.

  The osprey's eyes scanned the horizon, from the distant mountains, to the sea, now less than a mile away, down to the farms and roads and gas stations and Dairy Queens no more than three miles distant.

  It would be child's play for the Yeerk to fly to the nearest gas station, demorph, and call his superiors. Then it would all be over.

  Jake would be seized, probably by Tom himself. Rachel would be taken on her way to the mall. Marco, Ax, Tobias, one by one. They would each be dragged, unwilling, crying, screaming,

  110 begging, or perhaps with whatever dignity they could hold on to. Down, down into the Yeerk pool.

  And there, stunned unconscious to keep them from morphing, they would have their heads shoved down into the sludge of the Yeerk pool.

  And at that moment, their freedom would die. And perhaps the last, best hope of humanity would die as well.

  My fault.

  All my fault.

  I was a fool. I was a coward. I'd been unwilling to do the hard, brutal, necessary thing. Instead I'd followed . . . what? A wish? An instinct? A pathetic hope?

  «To be like this,» the Yeerk said dreamily in my head. «0h, to be like this. To fly. All alone, up here in the sky! To have these eyes. I can see everything! Everything down to the tiniest blade of grass.»

  I waited for Aftran to head toward civilization. But she didn't. She circled. Unsure. I could hear and feel her doubts.

  But then, down below, threading their way through the trees, a dozen men in state police uniforms. They were moving along the river. Glancing left, the osprey's eyes saw Karen, still sitting hunched on a rock.

  Several thousand yards of dense forest separated the men from the girl.

  111 «A rescue party,» I thought. «0f course. I'm missing. Karen is missing. There will be a massive search under way.»

  «Yes, there probably is,» Aftran agreed. «But those aren't normal rescuers. They are Controllers. I know some of them. They aren't looking for you, they're looking for me. They will expect me to be in Karen. If they find her, they'll know I've made you my host. They'll ask why.»