A/N: Written to the sounds of "Dare You to Move," Switchfoot ( watch?v=jE-Krlqi4fk)

My name is Tom. Just Tom, I guess, although you all know who I am. And I was infested for over three years.

The story of how I ended up with a yeerk in my head is about what you'd expect: I went to a Sharing meeting alone and left with a passenger. That story's boring, and doesn't have a happy ending.

How I ended up uninfested? That's a little more interesting.

That happened on the Blade Ship.

The entire world was going to hell around me. The yeerk empire was hours away from finishing the battle that would give them control of Earth. The Animorphs might already be dead, and the collection of morph-capable Controllers on this one ship represented a threat almost as great as the entire rest of the yeerk army. My particular problem was a little more small-scale: my cousin was trying to kill me, and Essa 412, the alien slug currently wrapped around my brain, was doing everything in its power to stop that from happening.

My body fell onto the deck of the ship, and before the yeerk in my brain had time to move it, seven hundred pounds of angry grizzly bear landed on top.

Rachel was up and moving in a second, already running across the deck as if unaware that she had just killed me. Crushed my entire body like a sledgehammer landing on top of a watermelon, reducing my ribcage and pelvis to a shattered mess of fragments, forcing chunks of skull through my skin so that blood and bile and brain fluid leaked out onto the floor. She left me there on the floor, drowning in my own blood as the yeerk in my head futilely struggled to inhale using lungs that had just been popped like a pair of water balloons.

The pain alone would have killed me if the Essa 412 hadn't been the one in control, screaming in my mind from the incomprehensible shock and agony, writhing helplessly on the inside of my cracked-open skull but still understanding how hard it had to fight to cling to life.

There was a part of my body beyond thought, beyond comprehension, that fought the oncoming darkness like a rabid animal attacking a brick wall until it tore its own claws off in its frenzy. But there was another, smaller voice that remembered what had happened, realized where I was, and thought yeah, this is okay. The tiny part of myself that was still me after all those years, even in that moment, thought it might be okay to rest for once. That maybe I'd get to take Essa down with me.

In those few seconds, I was actually at peace. Chalk it up to shock if you will, but dying didn't seem like such a bad idea at the time.

And then-something changed.

I was too far gone to understand what had happened at first, why I felt a brief warm stickiness on my cheek and the hand I hadn't even realized I'd been trying to move suddenly clenched together in a fist on the deck. I don't think I made any kind of conscious decision-I think I was beyond conscious thought the moment Rachel shattered my skull-but there was a second in which the rational part of my mind that wanted to die and the animal instincts that wanted to live fought, and instinct won. It didn't so much choose a morph as it chose life, threw every ounce of willpower I hadn't wasted on fighting Essa 412 into the task of lungs and bones and a body that could still survive.

The change happened slowly, and it hurt, even worse than the pain of crushed organs. My body had already been far too long without oxygen-another ten seconds and I would have been dead-but even so the pain felt as though it stole my ability to breathe, whited out my mind to anything other than the nerve signals screaming all over no no bad no make it stop no NO-

And then it was over, and I was lying on the deck of the Blade Ship in a still-warm puddle of my own blood as I completed the change and the cobra mind slid into place. It was only then, when I lifted my head up to look around and saw the small grey shape sliding across the deck next to me, that I understood what had happened. Essa 412 had abandoned my body, assuming it was too badly damaged to save, even through morphing. And now it was a helpless blob of tissue on the floor, and I was a sixteen-foot-long apex predator capable of strangling a buffalo in its coils. And when I flicked my forked tongue out between my fangs, I could literally smell its fear.

Funny, how tiny the monster looked as it scrunched and slid its body in a laughably futile attempt to escape across the deck.

In a motion too fast for human eyes to follow I snapped my neck forward and sank my fangs into the yeerk deep enough that my teeth clicked together clear through the slug body, not letting go until I felt the venom sacs empty enough neurotoxin to kill a full-grown elephant into that tiny body. I let Essa 412 fall back to the floor, watching as the yeerk stiffened and shriveled.

Distantly I could hear Rachel laughing in thought-speak as she taunted the other controllers, swaggeringly confident even as Navar 5515 slammed into her side in cape buffalo morph and Erda 781 sank lioness teeth into her neck. I understood her strategy well enough-she was trying to inflict as much damage to the controls of the ship as possible. The Blade Ship was already tilting, sliding out of control on the very outer edge of Earth's atmosphere. Even as I watched Ysa 301 tumbled past in human morph and slid out of the hole the Pool Ship's weapons had torn in the outer hull, screaming helplessly. I flinched, thinking of the poor girl trapped in there who was about to die horribly.

What I didn't understand at all was Jake's strategy. Where the hell was her backup? I could clearly see him standing with all of the other Animorphs on the comm screen to the Pool Ship, so how did he plan on getting Rachel out of here?

I was frozen, watching the battle play out without doing anything. I should help. I should move away. I glanced at the comm screen again; the other Animorphs were watching Rachel fight with coldly solemn expressions, not making any move either to help or to flee. What the hell?

She was still holding her own, but she was grossly outnumbered and I could see that a lot of the blood matting her dark fur was her own. She was going to lose this fight unless something changed soon. If I tried to help, would I be a distraction, would I just get chopped in half by grizzly claws for my trouble, or would I have the chance to save her? It was the first real choice that I'd faced in God only knew how long, and I was paralyzed.

{Jake?} I asked, trying out my own thought-speak voice for the first time.

Other than a slight tensing of the tiger's jaw, he gave no sign that he'd heard me. Of course. He thought I was still infested. He had sent Rachel to kill me.

He'd sent Rachel to kill me. Without backup. Without an exit plan.

He planned to kill us both. My sixteen-year-old, sweet, awkward baby brother who couldn't dribble a basketball to save his life and whose definition of cleaning his room consisted mostly of shoving everything he owned underneath his bed and hoping our mom wouldn't notice, who could spend over twenty minutes coaxing the ugliest-looking spider into a paper cup to toss outside rather than squash a bug.

He planned on killing Rachel. And me.

The knowledge winded me. And then it spurred me into action.

I surged forward and sank my fangs into the ankle of the nearest Controller. I couldn't tell who it was-one of the ones in lioness morph-but even without the full load of poison it worked, sending the host crashing to the deck in a heap, forced to remorph before rejoining the fight. The poison wouldn't kill the Controller fast enough to prevent her from morphing again and wading back in, but it would buy Rachel some time.

I slithered around the edges of the fray at the center of the Blade Ship's deck, trying to stay out of Rachel's sight-she would probably try to kill me if either she or Jake realized I was still alive-and biting two more Controllers before I felt the cobra body run out of venom.

I was gasping for air, trying to figure out what to do next and remembering yet again that snakes can move incredibly fast in the moment but have no stamina to speak of, when the whole ship tilted again and suddenly I was sliding and rolling across the slick metal deck.

The snake brain flipped out, unable to comprehend what was happening and why the ground was so smooth, as the whole world tumbled crazily around us. The human side of my brain was freaking out too, caught somewhere between wondering idiotically why the yeerk didn't do something to stop us and trying to flail arms I didn't currently have to stop us from falling any faster.

Everything tumbled past too quickly for me to take it in as I fell toward the far side of the ship. Something with claws-either Rachel or one of the Controllers who had noticed I wasn't infested anymore-took a swipe at me and missed.

I had a half-second to hope that I would just slam into one of the instrument panels or windows on the Blade Ship, and then I fell through the hole in the deck and plummeted to my death after less than thirty seconds of freedom.

The last thing I heard before I fell was Rachel's drawn-out scream of pain and rage, echoing silently through my mind.

The wind rushed past quickly enough to rip the air out of my lungs, the shock of cold so great that it actually took me a (precious, dangerous) second to realize that I was in free-fall.

{Shit!} I said to no one, and then {Morph, dumbass!} to myself.

I don't know if any of you have the slightest clue how unbelievably difficult it is to concentrate on having human fingers and human eyelashes and human kneecaps while falling through the air at hundreds of miles an hour and about ten seconds away from ending up a snake-shaped red spatter on the ground. In case you were wondering, it's unbelievably fucking difficult.

Amazing what that blind animal instinct can do for you, though, because I was doing it. Limbs were sprouting out of my spine like weird misshapen tumors, my body was twisting like an amoeba under a microscope that was trying to split itself in half, and hideous patches of human skin were appearing between my scales.

Even before I'd finished demorphing all the way I was already morphing again, trying to remember the golden eagle's wings and talons and crazy-sharp eyes. I was a disgusting amalgamation of body parts, feathers on a serpent body still twisting crazily through the air while a human mind inside screamed helplessly and knew that no one could hear, a mythological monster seconds away from becoming a twisted pile of meat on the ground.

It was completely insane; I was morphing in two directions at once, my brain chanting human-bird, human-bird one body part at a time. My spine crunched as it compacted together and then hollowed out. My fingers appeared for half a second at the end of my still scale-covered arm before they elongated and fused back together into a wing.

I was drifting, just starting to glide a tiny bit on malformed wings that couldn't properly lift a human body with a snake's head, when I slammed into the ground and everything went black.

I lost time. I'm not sure how much, just that it was less than two hours because when I woke up I couldn't feel anything but pain and yet I could see myself starting to demorph, driven automatically away from the agony of those hollow little bones shattered under the skin and toward familiar humanity.

It took a long, long time to demorph, lying there on the grass with black patches all around the edges of my vision, but each tiny victory back toward my original body made the next one easier by lessening the pain.

And then it was over. And I was just a human boy lying on his back on the patch of grass between a McDonald's and a furniture store. I just stayed there for a few seconds, trying to remember if I'd ever known the trick to calming down enough that I no longer felt like I was going to throw up from breathing too hard back when I'd been in control of my own body.

When it had been over a minute and I was still gasping air in and out so quickly my lungs hurt but I felt a little less like I was going to pass out again, I planted a shaking hand into the grass next to me and tried to push myself upright. Something went wrong with the motion and all I succeeded in doing was flopping over onto my stomach and getting a mouthful of herbicide-flavored grass.

Rachel.

Jake.

They needed me.

They were going to fucking die.

They were going to die up there while I lay here in the grass having a useless freak-out over the fact that I had just not died like a useless fucking baby.

My anger at myself was enough to get me past thinking about how to get to my feet and actually just doing it. I almost tipped over the second I was on my feet, ridiculously clumsy from not having moved my own body in way too long, but regained my balance by throwing out my arms like a drunk toddler.

I took my first two steps as a free human being, already concentrating on the golden eagle again even though I wanted to do nothing more than sit back down and shake until I fell apart, and came face-to-face with the muzzle of an assault rifle.

"Resume your original form immediately or I will open fire!" the soldier holding the gun barked.

I froze, blinking in surprise. In half a second there were seven guys in army fatigues surrounding me, all with guns pointed at my head.

"I repeat," the soldier yelled, as though we were standing way further apart than we actually were. "Resume your original form or we will shoot to kill!"

Slowly I held up my hands, as much to look disarming as to show them that the feathers were disappearing off my arms and my joints were flexing back into human shape. "Look," I said. The word came out garbled; I pressed my lips together, concentrated for a second, and then tried again. "There's something you should know-"

"Silence!" the soldier snapped.

I sighed but didn't say anything.

"Now," he said, more calmly, "Exit your host immediately."

Oh, shit. "I'm not-"

"There's no need to speak, just exit the human host. Now!"

"I swear to god I don't have a yeerk in my head," I said tiredly, knowing even as I did that it would do no good.

A different soldier to my left spoke up. He was older than the others, his face lined and creased with a long scar across his forehead. If he wasn't the one in charge, the others certainly looked at him like he was. "If you surrender now and release the human you are holding, then you will be held under the protections specified by the third Geneva Convention for prisoners of war, and you will not be harmed." He tightened his grip on the gun he was pointing at my head and added, "If you do not, then you will be an enemy combatant holding a human against his will and we will have no choice but to execute you."

"Wait!" I said. "Don't-" I stopped, frantically trying to think of any reason I could possibly give them to let me go. "What makes you think I'm even a Controller?" I asked.

"The local police force reported seeing you using stolen andalite morphing technology," the guy in front of me said. "You have no legitimate grounds to have access to that technology."

The older soldier with the scar cleared his throat. "That's not to mention the fact that, according to their call, you fell out of the sky a few minutes ago. Wanna explain that one in a way that doesn't involve aliens, son?"

I opened my mouth and closed it again, trying to come up with any steps between where I was now and my frantic need to morph and take off again, find Jake and Rachel and save them.

"How do you know I'm not an Animorph?" I said at last. "Aren't there, like, thirty of them these days?"

Two of the guys with guns exchanged glances; apparently they hadn't thought of that. "If you are then we'll find out three days from now," the younger soldier said at last.

"You can't do that," I blurted.

"If you're not a Controller, why would you object to us holding you until we can confirm that fact?" he said.

"Because my kid brother is up there," I said, pointing to the speck of the Pool Ship just visible in the sky above us. "And he's surrounded by a hell of a lot of yeerks who all want him dead, and if you don't let me go help him then-" I stopped, not daring to complete the thought out loud. Jake and Rachel would be fine. They had to be.

"You know we can't let you do that," the soldier said.

"You have to." I knew that there was no point even as I was saying it, but I'd be damned if I was just going to stand there and let them lock me away while Rachel was fighting for her life and I could do something about it.

"You have one more chance to exit your host, and then we will be transporting you back to containment where you will be held without access to Kandrona until such time as you are forced to exit your host," he recited.

"Can't you do a brain scan or something?" I asked desperately. "There has to be a hospital somewhere nearby. You can just take me there, give me an MRI or whatever, and when you see that I'm telling the truth you can-"

"That's it," he said. "You're coming with us. If you attempt to escape or show any signs of morphing, you will be shot in the head. Do I make myself clear?"

What choice did I have? I went with them.

They loaded me into the back of an armored truck with about eight other heavily armed soldiers and drove for about an hour. They put handcuffs on me, although they had to know that if I wanted to escape I could morph my way out of them in about two seconds.

It made me a tiny bit perversely hopeful to realize that they actually weren't underestimating the potential danger of a morph-capable human, even one who was alone and unarmed. Maybe humanity knew what it was doing against the yeerks after all. Maybe we little primates actually stood a fighting chance against the empire's worth of aliens that was even now crashing down on our planet, now that the secret was out in the open. Maybe there were other people capable of helping the Animorphs even if I couldn't.

Maybe humanity would have actually stood a chance in hell if we'd ever managed to invent a type of space flight capable of doing more than clumsily flinging itself into the nearest gravity well and hoping for the best.

"Where are we?" I asked the group at large, several minutes after giving up pleading with the new group of soldiers just to cut my brain open already and prove I wasn't being controlled.

None of them answered for several seconds, and then a woman with a dark buzz cut and a slightly more relaxed posture than any of the others sighed and said, "Arlington, Virginia."

I nodded like that meant something to me. East coast, I thought, although I wasn't even totally sure about that much.

"Please, can't you do something to confirm I'm not a Controller?" I asked. "I need to-"

She pressed her lips together and looked away from me. I gave up again.

The truck lurched to a stop and one of the guys next to me nudged me with the muzzle of his gun to indicate I should get out. I gave him a sharp look and considered saying something rude in response, but I wasn't more pissed off than stupid so I settled for stumbling to my feet and stepping clumsily out of the back door.

We were at a military base of some kind, I could see; there was a huge American flag snapping against the wind on a pole out front and the barbed-wire fence surrounding the compound was covered in No Trespassing signs.

They led me into a back room of the nearest building in the compound, past a row of mostly-filled prison cells, and ushered me into a ten-by-ten plexiglass box that contained a cot, a small toilet, a few tiny air vents, and three surveillance cameras. One of the soldiers took the cuffs off me before exiting through a door that slid out of the wall and then back in without leaving any seams behind.

There was an Anti-Morphing Ray pointed at the box I was in and the two cells on either side of it, scanning back and forth from the pedestal outside. Even if I'd had a morph small enough that it might be able to squeeze through one of the extremely narrow air vents near the ceiling, and even if I hadn't thought that any attempt to start morphing would probably result in a bunch of army guys coming back and shooting me halfway through, I wouldn't have bothered for the AMR alone. The things were notoriously unreliable-the first model hadn't worked at all and its designers had been fed to taxxons, the second model had fried the half a dozen morph-capable Controllers that Visser Three tested it on, and the third model was still in the works when Essa 412 had started a revolution and left all main yeerk communication. Either way, I wasn't about to risk pissing the thing off.

The soldiers with guns were a different story.

They first came back a while later-I wasn't sure how long it was, I wasn't wearing a watch and there were no clocks visible from my cell-dragging a little girl who was screaming and twisting in and out of a vulture morph. I jumped up as soon as I saw them and, once the little girl was stowed in the cell next to mine, started banging on the wall.

"Hey!" I yelled. "Hey, let me out!"

Three of the soldiers glanced at me and then left without saying anything. The fourth sighed and walked over to me. "Shut up," she snarled.

"You have to let me out!" I told her. "I'm not infested! I was, but it's gone now-"

She rolled her eyes. "Do you have any idea how many times I've heard that today?"

"Fine, then!" I was still yelling, even though the plexiglass wasn't soundproofed and I could hear her talking at a normal volume just fine. "Do a brain scan or something if you want proof, but you have to let me go, now! My little brother and my cousin are both still up there, and if I don't help them, they could die! They could be-" My voice failed. I could feel my hands shaking. It was probably already too late to do anything to help Rachel, and I had no idea about Jake.

The soldier's expression softened a little. "I'm sorry," she said. "Just in case you're telling the truth-I'm sorry. We can let you out in another three days, once we're sure that-"

"It'll be too late by then!" I didn't consciously decide to slam my fist against the glass hard enough to bruise it; it just happened. I breathed in and out a few times, trying to calm myself down. "Please, they're going to get themselves killed unless someone does something."

"If they're among the infested, then they should be all right in just a few days' time," the soldier said.

"They're not Controllers, they're Animorphs," I said sharply.

Her eyes widened, and she looked me over in surprise.

"Jake Berenson is my kid brother, and he's only sixteen years old," I pleaded. "Rachel just turned seventeen, and she has two little sisters that worship her, and her mom has been through hell already and can't lose her-"

"What's your name?" the soldier asked.

"I'm Tom," I said. "Tom Berenson."

She nodded. "Private Leslie Burke."

"Please, if there's anything you can do to prove I'm not infested-I'll go through an MRI, I'll do anything-"

"I'll let you know if we have any news about either of them," she said. Before I could keep arguing, she turned and walked away.

I stood there in silence, staring after her and trying to catch my breath.

"Nice try," the little girl in the cell next door said. Her hair was pulled back into pigtails tied with pink elastics, and she couldn't be more than six years old. "You seriously end up with Jake Berenson's brother for a host, or was that all bullshit to get their sympathy?"

"I hope you starve to death and burn in hell," I informed the yeerk.

An excruciating few hours went by, during which time the little girl next to me went from confidently promising to kill everyone to screaming impotent threats at anyone who walked past. Soldiers came back twice, once to drop a businessman in the cell on the other side of me and once to slot MREs through the door to all three of us. I ignored the food and the new houseguest in favor of banging on the wall and continuing to demand that they release me any time they came in, growing more frantic with the hours that passed. Neither group included Leslie, which gave me some hope that she actually was looking for a way to get me out.

After the last group came and went and there was no sign of anyone else, we all lapsed into silence. I didn't know what the yeerks on either side of me were thinking-although I could take a guess at how desperately both the hosts were hoping that the human troops would keep us here long enough to starve out their yeerks.

Because there was no point in wondering what the hell was happening on the Blade Ship until I went insane, I started concentrating on remembering what my own body felt like instead. Over the next long unmeasurable period of time I discovered that I still sucked at talking clearly or doing any kind of complex motions, but I was getting to be a pro at opening and closing my eyes every time I tried to do so and standing in one place without losing my balance and falling over. Yippee.

"You tested out the Anti-Morphing Ray yet?" the businessman said at one point.

I looked up at him from where I'd been wiggling my fingers one by one, marveling at the novelty of being able to do so. "Go ahead and try it," I said dully. Maybe I'd get lucky and it'd simultaneously short out, kill the yeerk, and blow a hole in the wall large enough for me to morph a cobra and slither out.

It was more difficult than I remembered, knowing how to breathe, how to form words using my mouth. I kept finding myself doing things-standing up, scratching my nose, chewing my nails-without realizing that I was doing so. I'd been sending impulses from a panicked brain to an unresponsive body for so long it kept startling me when I realized that not only could I move, half the time I had already done so just by thinking about it. And then there were motions that seemed ridiculously simple that I had forgotten how to do: at one point I tried to run my fingers through my hair and bumped into my own forehead with my hand twice.

"You dare to speak to me using that tone, warrior?" the businessman was saying in the background. "I am Sub-Visser Eight, distinguished in battle for killing over twenty Andalite arisths and-"

I ignored him; he was talking to Essa 412, not to me, and anyway Essa was dead so I didn't have to answer if I didn't feel like it.

At least until he started banging on the wall that separated our cells and cursing at me. Then it got annoying.

"Tell me your rank and number immediately, before I decide that I should report you to Visser One for your insolence!" He was kicking the wall now, and it made a loud banging noise every time.

I turned around sharply to glare at him, climbing clumsily to my feet as I did so. "Essa four-one-two," I snapped. "Visser Seventeen. Yes, the little voice in my head can beat up the little voice in your head! And last I saw Visser One was in Animorph custody, so can you shut the hell up and die already?"

"I will kill you, you filthy traitor!" He started banging on the wall again.

"How you gonna do that, dumbass?" I asked, deliberately turning my back in the hope it would piss him off. "Glare me to death?"

"Give up," the little girl advised the other Controller. "I think this one's brain is empty."

I threw my hands up. "Thank you! You mind telling the nice people with guns that?"

She didn't respond to my question, staring me down with alien coldness. "You are a slave," she said quietly. "A pathetic, mewling microorganism that is part of a species so idiotic, so subject to its dumb animal impulses, that it was always meant to be subjugated. It doesn't matter that in this moment you have the tiny illusion of freedom. You are no more free than the whimpering animals locked in their cages around the yeerk pool, gasping at their tiny token moments of illusory control as they sprint in endless circles within their chains, believing that they are progressing when in fact they are only wearing themselves out sooner, bringing their weak meat-sack bodies closer to the moment when they will rot in the ground."

I'd taken a step back from the wall we shared. I wasn't sure when I had done so.

She didn't break eye contact with me, and she didn't vary from her cold tone. "You and every one of your species are only good to be used and wrung out until there is nothing left of you, so that the strong hands and keen eyes evolution has wasted on such small-minded beasts can be used to advance our glorious cause. You were born to be a slave, and you should fall down in thanks to worship the gods you invented that your slave body will be used to its last drop of energy by a species so much infinitely greater than your own that you cannot begin to comprehend our intelligence and willpower."

I shrugged, trying to look more nonchalant than I felt. "Yeah, well, only one of us is going to die in this cage, and it sure as hell isn't me," I said, amazed when my voice didn't shake. Much. "So you keep on believing in your long-term subjugation plan, and I'll keep right on believing in my short-term ability to go for more than three days without Kandrona."

The yeerk smiled at me, twisting the little girl's face into something ugly in the process. "The humans might be holding their own in this particular battle, but you know as well as I do who will win the war."

I wasn't sure what I was going to say in response, but just then the door to the cell block opened again and Leslie walked back in. She was still in uniform and still armed, but her blond hair hung loose against her back in a way that made her look no older than I was, and her expression was dull with exhaustion.

I walked eagerly to the corner of the cell nearest to her, even though I knew that I wouldn't be able to reach her if I tried.

"Tom." She stopped and took a deep breath before continuing to speak. She was watching me with pain in her expression, and she didn't want to say whatever it was she'd come to tell me.

Oh god.

My stomach fell through the floor. Blood roared into my ears so loudly that I almost missed when she spoke next.

"Jake is safe and unharmed," she said, and I remembered how to breathe. "The other Animorphs as well, except..." She put her hand against the glass as if she wanted to rest it against my arm but couldn't. "Rachel was reported killed in action earlier today. I'm so sorry."

I'm not sure if I sat down on the floor too quickly, or if I actually fell. Either way I found myself sitting in the corner where I'd been standing a second ago, head ringing and vision tilting in and out of focus. My body felt cold and numb all over, and I didn't seem to be breathing correctly.

It shouldn't have been a shock. I should have known.

Rachel.

I had known before. If I was honest with myself I had known. I had seen all those claws sink into the thick grizzly fur, had heard her scream inside my mind. I'd frozen, the moment that Essa had crawled free, too caught up in saving my own skin to try and go back for her, and now she was-

"Thank you. For letting me know," I heard myself say. I think I probably garbled the words.

Leslie said something else-I don't know what-and walked out again. I pulled my legs up to my chest, rested both arms on top of my knee, and leaned forward to brace my forehead against the heat of my arm. I'm not sure whether or not I was crying; none of my senses seemed to be working correctly and I wasn't consciously in control of my own body.

I couldn't tell if my vision was swaying back and forth or if my whole body was. I'd been cut off again.

She was seventeen years old. Seventeen. Because she'd just had a birthday.

She spent way too much time picking out clothes and she could play in the mud for hours and still have perfect hair. She talked me into climbing onto the roof of her dad's tool shed with her when we were eight and ten years old, and she didn't even cry when she fell off and broke her arm. She knew the lyrics to every song Alanis Morissette had ever written but had a terrible singing voice. She would fall off a balance beam thirteen times in a row and still pick herself up like nothing had happened and climb right back up just in case she got it right the fourteenth time.

Jordan and Sarah thought Rachel had hung the stars. Aunt Naomi sighed every time she talked about her grades but took off work every time to attend her gymnastics meets.

She lost her first tooth when she was four and started a fight with a boy twice her age on the playground. She never got a driver's license.

She was loved, and she was feared. Both with good reason.

It should have been enough. Enough that someone, somewhere, would choose to save her.

The last thing I heard before I lost consciousness from shock and exhaustion was the little girl, laughing so loudly that I could hear her through the glass dividing my cage from hers.