A Splash of Blue

PROLOGUE: MARCO

My name is Marco. I can't tell you my last name. I can't tell you the names of my friends or where I live. I can't tell you where I go to school, or the real names of the place where my dad works or the mall we hang out at, or anything that might be used to identify us. If the wrong people identity us, we're dead—and so are you. Because as ridiculous and melodramatic as it sounds, my friends and I are the only thing standing between planet Earth and total disaster.

There are bad people out there, you know that already, but what you don't know is that as bad as you think people can get? These people are worse. Because see, I call them people, but they aren't—at least, not the way we usually think of people. Because these people, they aren't human. They're aliens.

That's right, aliens as in outer space aliens. And they want to control your brain.

Still with me? Well, if you haven't decided that I'm just another crazy dude with tin foil on his head screaming about the Martians in the cornfields, here are the quick facts: the bad guys are called Yeerks. They are parasitic aliens about the size, shape, and sliminess of fat gray slugs. They crawl into a host—that's what they call the people they infest, hosts or Controllers—they crawl in through the ear canal and wrap themselves around the brain, and then…then they own you. Every thought, every memory, ever flinch, every blink of the eye—all of it belongs to the Yeerk. You can scream as loud as you like and no one will hear you, no one will notice, because you're only screaming inside your own head. The Yeerk controls everything else.

With their access to their host's memories, they can blend in seamlessly. Anyone can be a Controller: a cop, a librarian, the principle at your school, your brother, your mom…even you.

That's why we can't tell you our last names.

But things aren't totally hopeless. The Yeerks aren't the only aliens out there with an interest in planet Earth. There are the Andalites too, a species of bright blue…well, think of centaurs, although their lower half looks more like a deer than a horse. (A blue deer.) And they have no mouths, and four eyes; two in roughly the same position as a human's eyes, and two more rising on stalks on the tops of their heads. They have seven fingers, two arms, four legs, and a tail. Oh, the tail; you will never forget the tail once you see it. Because Andalites are beautiful, peaceful-looking creatures…except for the tail. Imagine that your pretty blue centaur has a fast, muscular tail—think of a scorpion's but without the insectoid segmentation—and on the end of that tail is a blade, shiny and fast and incredibly sharp.

They could open your throat in the time it would take you to blink, with that blade.

Fortunately Andalites are…well, they aren't peaceful and they aren't perfect, but they're on our side. At least more on our side than not, since they're fighting against the Yeerks too. They've been fighting them for longer than I've been alive, I think. Fighting them all across the galaxy—and they fought them in the skies over Earth, too, until they lost. Their ships were destroyed but one Andalite survived the battle long enough to crash on Earth and give me and four other human kids access to the only weapon we have against the Yeerks: the power to morph. We can become any animal we can acquire, at least for two hours at a time.

Yes, it is every bit as awesome as it sounds…and every bit as horrifying, too, at times.

But I'm getting ahead of myself now.

Because this story starts a long time ago, at the mall…