Author's notes: All right. Sorry for the delay; there have been power outages lasting long enough to make writing with a computer impossible. Next update still planned for 2-3 weeks, no long hiatus in sight.

First order of business: if you like this story, please drop me a comment or review, either here or over at r/rational! Your feedback keeps me going, and now that we're in the home stretch it helps more than ever.

Second order of business: we're in the home stretch! I believe there are seven chapters left, plus any number of interludes and maybe an epilogue. Possibly as many as eight or nine if I miscounted, but This Is It.

Third order of business: speaking of which, IF YOU HAVE BEEN A REGULAR COMMENTER, or if you POURED YOUR HEART AND SOUL INTO A COMMENT ONE TIME, or if you CONTRIBUTED TO THE CROWDSOURCED CHAPTERS, and you would like a cameo in the story, the next chapter is going to be the chapter with all remaining cameos, so just remind me of who you are in a review or in a comment on r/rational. I know and remember many of you, but I don't want to try to collect everyone's names myself and accidentally leave someone out, so just—just tell me "Hi, please put somebody with [name] in the chapter, thx." Honor system; you can also donate your cameo.

That should do it. Hope you enjoy; the next few chapters are going to come at us all pretty hard.

Chapter 43: Rachel

I drew my arm back.

"Are you ready?" I asked.

Marco went rigid—eyes wide, not even breathing.

I twitched—on purpose, for once—and he almost fell for it, giving a quick, abortive jerk before settling back into readiness.

"Go get it," I said, swinging my arm forward.

It wasn't a very good throw. My aim was off, and I couldn't quite get my fingers to let go at the right moment, so the balled-up pair of socks hit the deck almost immediately, rolling rather than flying across the empty cargo hold.

But Marco was handicapped, too, slipping and scrabbling on the smooth metal floor, running in place like a cartoon character before he managed to get traction, and then sliding right past the socks and into the wall—

—just as the door slid open beside him.

Ja—

Jo—

My cousin did a triple take, his eyes darting back and forth between me, Marco, and the pair of socks before his face fell back into the same—

The same—

Dammit.

That thing, where you put something on your face to look a different way, like at Halloween, or to rob a bank, or—

Whatever.

His face switched back to look the way it almost always looked, these days.

"Heard you were — better," he said softly.

He stepped into the room, the door hissing shut behind him, then took one more step to the side and pressed his back against the wall, sliding down until his eyes were only a little bit higher than mine.

"A bit," I said, taking a guess at the missing word. Or—well—not missing, exactly. I'd heard it. My brain just didn't know what to do with it.

Marco came padding over, the socks held tight in his mouth, his nails making little clicking sounds against the deck. I leaned back, clumsily patting my thighs, and he hopped up into my lap and turned around, gently depositing the socks in the space between my shins.

"Where'd — even get a Corgi — ?" my cousin murmured.

‹Madagascar,› Marco said. ‹Before you woke up.›

I tried to scratch between his ears, but my fingers still weren't really cooperating. Looking back at me, he rolled over, and my hand sort of ended up awkwardly patting his chest and belly instead.

My cousin's face—

Mask!

Mask. Mask was the word I'd been looking for.

My cousin's face did a few things, and I felt myself sort of ramping up, getting ready to be defensive—felt Marco's body tense a little bit under my hand—

But he didn't say anything. Just sat there, shoulders slumped, eyes unfocused, looking at Marco without really looking at him.

Time passed.

I leaned forward and picked up the socks. "Stay," I whispered, pressing my other hand down on Marco's suddenly-alert form.

Cocking my arm, I took careful aim—

‹Lol, nice shot.›

The socks had gone where I wanted them to, this time, hitting my cousin squarely between the eyes before tumbling to the floor.

He tried.

I could see him try.

But he couldn't quite stop the grin from spreading across his face.

"Hey, buddy," he said, reaching over to pick up the soft black shape. "You want this?"

‹Yes,› said Marco, back on all fours, legs trembling. ‹Obviously.›

My cousin's arm swung, and Marco scrabble-scrambled into motion—

‹Oh, COME ON—›

The pair of socks flew in the opposite direction, toward the other end of the cargo hold.

"Psych," said my cousin.

It took Marco a full five seconds to slow down and reverse direction, and when he finally got to the other side of the room he ran into the wall again—

We didn't play fetch for long. Two minutes, maybe. Maybe three. There was a war on, after all.

But it was a good three minutes. Three minutes in which my cousin and I couldn't stop laughing, three minutes that ended with him leaning against me and Marco stretched out on his back across both of our laps, with my hand patting his belly and my cousin scratching idly under his chin.

"Wish I still had my Homer morph," he said.

It was the sort of thing that might have broken the spell. But somehow it didn't. It didn't come across as sad, or self-pitying, or anything like that. It was just—

True.

Marco tilted his head back—

"Eugh," my cousin said, snapping his hand away and wiping the saliva on his pants. He made like he was going to grab Marco's snout, and Marco sort of dodged and nipped, and there was another minute or so of play-fighting before the pair of them flopped to the deck.

"What's — ?" my cousin asked.

‹Monty.›

A few seconds ticked by. My cousin rolled over and stretched out flat on his back, closing his eyes, his fingers still laced through Marco's fur.

"Can I acquire him?"

‹Sure.›

I watched as Marco's panting slowed and his own eyes fluttered shut.

"— morphing again yet?"

There was a pause.

"Rachel?"

I blinked. "Huh?"

‹He asked if you've tried morphing again yet.›

I flushed.

"No. Sorry."

My cousin's eyes were still closed, his hands tracing lazy circles between Marco's shoulder blades. "You going to?"

"Donut."

I winced.

"Ssssorry," I said. "Don—donu—I don't know."

His eyes opened, and he sort of tilted his head back, looking at me upside-down from his spot on the floor. "You scared?" he asked.

I glanced at Marco, who was doing that thing Corgis do where they look real—

Dammit.

It started with a 'c.'

Cworried.

Canxious.

Connnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnndition, traction, gradulation, sideration.

"Yeah," I said.

I was less scared than I had been, but that wasn't saying much.

The first day after—after it, whatever it was—

That first day had felt like it lasted a month. I hadn't been able to talk, hadn't been able to think—had only barely even been able to see and hear and feel. It was like my mind had been disconnected from itself—like everything I'd learned as an infant had been erased, and my brain was starting over from scratch. It had all been one giant pile of sensation—colors without shapes, sounds without meaning, muscles twitching at random, all of the signals from every nerve in my body feeling like they were coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. I'd been too disoriented to even feel frightened, at first—to feel anything as clear and specific and digestible as "frightened." There'd just been a wild, animal sort of panic, and an underlying d—

D—

No, not 'dead.'

Dead?

Read?

Dread.

An underlying dread, D-R-E-A-D, dread—that maybe this was it, that maybe it was going to be like this forever. That the pieces of me were never going to come back together again. I hadn't been able to think that, in words, but I'd felt it all the same—that nightmare feeling, like I was constantly drowning.

Eventually, the fog had started to lift, and things had started falling back into place. But words were still hard, and every muscle had to be moved on purpose, deliberately—even for stuff like talking or walking. And as for memories—

It wasn't amnesia. Not exactly. It was more like—

Like the contents of my memory had all been dumped into one big bucket. Like a pile of LEGO, with no order or structure. I could sweep my hand through it, and turn up a random mix of things, but I couldn't call up anything specific without rooting for it first, couldn't really remember things on purpose. Even recent stuff, stuff since it happened—I was pretty sure Garrett had explained what was going on like five or six times, but none of it had really stuck. It sort of—faded, in and out. It was like—like a movie that had played in the background while I was doing my chores, or the plot of a book I hadn't read in years and years. I had the gist of it—mostly—probably some of it was wrong—and as for the details—

I blinked.

There was a dog in my lap—a dog with its paws on my chest, licking my face.

Marco.

That was another thing. It was so easy to get lost, now—to get distracted, lose the thread. I could hold it together if I actively tried, but it was like holding a planche in gymnastics, and sooner or later I either lost focus or just ran out of energy. I hadn't noticed Marco coming over, hadn't felt him climbing onto my lap. I wasn't sure if my cousin had said anything else.

And worse—

I wasn't sure where I'd been, during the gap. It wasn't like daydreaming, where instead of paying attention you're thinking about something else—some specific other thing. It was more like my mind was a cell phone signal that kept cutting in and out. I kept—kept waking up, it felt like, usually after just a minute or two but sometimes—

—terrifyingly—

—after hours. Whole hours in which I had no clue where I'd been, no idea what I'd been doing or what had been going on.

I wrapped my arms around Marco, pulling him in close to my chest, burying my face in his soft, warm fur.

Yeah, I was scared.

Marco—I couldn't remember Marco. Not really. Not reliably. Sometimes just flashes, fragments. Different ones every time. A word, a phrase, a quick flicker of facial expression. Some of them felt like they might not even be real. Memories of his voice in my head, memories that might have been thought-speak but were probably just my own imagination.

But I knew—

On some deep and utterly fearless level, with a confidence too strong for words—

I knew that this person had my back.

I knew what he was made of.

I knew, when he was in a room—

Not that I was safe, exactly. None of us were safe anymore. That deep part of me knew that, too, even if I couldn't always remember exactly why.

But with Marco—with my cousin—with the little boy—

Garrett.

—with Cassie—

—with that quiet kid from school whose name I couldn't remember, the one with the dark look in his eyes, the one who was always hanging around Jake—

Jake!

My cousin's name was Jake.

I felt a twinge of horror at the thought that I might not remember that, next time I woke up. And then a deeper twinge, at what I might have forgotten this time, forgotten without even realizing I didn't know—

It wasn't any less scary, being so out-of-control inside my own head. But at least I wasn't alone, the way I had been in those first heart-stopping hours. Jake—

Jake.

—Jake and Marco and Garrett and Cassie and—and the new boy, too, the one who spoke English with a funny accent—and the alien, the scorpion alien with the sad eyes—

They were solid. Solid and real and unchanging, even as the rest of the world spun dizzily around me. Like when I was little and I'd had a nightmare and I'd run into my parents' bedroom. As long as one of them was in the room, I knew that I didn't have to—to—to keep track of all of it. To try to make my broken brain hold together, try to stay on top of everything, make sure I understood what was happening. With them around, I could let it go, let it go and fall apart and know that there was someone else whose eyes were open.

I needed that now.

I heard the soft sound of sliding fabric and opened my eyes to see J—

Ch—

Oh, god, no—

—to see my cousin, I might not know his name but I knew he was my cousin—

—he was sitting up, scooting closer. He leaned forward, falling onto all fours, and crawled to a spot right next to me, settling in, leaning back against the same wall that I was leaning against, his shoulder pressed into mine.

"Sorry," he murmured.

I shrugged—carefully, purposefully, diverting my attention away from the dog/boy in my lap and consciously tightening the muscles that would raise my shoulders. "It's okay," I said. "Bigger—"

Fish—to fly?

Wish to fly.

No, fish to—

"Lots of stuff happing on," I finished.

He sighed heavily. "Yeah," he said.

‹Speaking of which, how'd it go with Livingstone?›

"He was right where — said he'd be, and we didn't see any — of Visser Three. At this point, if Edriss is lying, or he can somehow spy through — not doing much with it."

‹So he's on his way, then?›

"Yeah. Helium was — the whole time, didn't turn over control of — fighter until it was already an hour deep into the rift. No hiccups."

‹Long time to be on a ship by yourself.›

"— exactly alone, though, is he?"

Only one of the names meant anything at all to me—Visser Three—and I could feel myself fraying again, dissolving, feel the fog creeping in around the edges. For a moment, I considered resisting, putting forth the effort to hold myself together, force myself to focus, but—

Static.

I came awake again, unsure whether I had been gone for seconds or minutes, my only clue the beginnings of pins-and-needles in one foot. I shifted my weight, and the dog—Marco—looked up at me, his expression concerned—

Concerned, there you go.

Progress.

I reached down and scratched between his ears, moving each finger with deliberate effort.

"—not exactly stupid—"

I jumped, and the voice cut off.

"Rachel?"

‹She gets like that sometimes. Suddenly notices that you're talking, like you jumped out from behind a corner. It's fine, she's fine, we're all fine. Rachel? It's me, Marco. It's just you and me and Jake, and everything's fine. Okay?›

I reached down and scratched between his ears, moving each finger with deliberate effort.

‹Just keep talking. No need to make a big deal about it. Not much we can do, anyway.›

"Well, anyway, it's not that they're stupid, exactly, but it's like—like they're a bunch of eight-year-olds, or something? It's weird."

‹I mean, we were expecting that, right?›

"Maybe you were."

‹Okay, fair, not like expecting expecting, but it makes sense with what we know about Yeerks and stuff. I mean, Hork-Bajir aren't exactly the brightest bunch to begin with, and these Gedds are even worse—›

"Yeah, but I'm not — it'll mean once the — start catching up. Like, at some point, they're going to have opinions about all this, right?"

‹What does Perdão have to say?›

Drifting—

Static.

I came awake again. Marco was no longer in my lap—was pacing, humanlike, the look on his dog face oddly and adorably determined.

‹—between this and the Mediterranean, we just don't have enough people. Like, we could send that Ante kid, but who knows if he can actually handle himself? And I don't feel super great about the idea of leaving Helium here without backup.›

"Helium — bridge, Garrett in the — as — in case—"

‹We could shift Helium back to the cradle, maybe?›

"Yeah, but we need someone — to keep the eight-year-olds in line. Like, some visible — figure."

‹We could go grab Cousteau out of Germany.›

"Seems good — least one of the V1 Marcos on Earth — it? Plus now Visser Three has —"

Drifting—

Static.

I came awake, and the only thing that prevented me from screaming was the fact that I had forgotten how—

‹Rachel! Rachel, it's fine, it's me, Marco, I'm the dog, that's Jake right there—›

Static.

I floated from moment to moment, like a rock skipping across a p—

Across a—

A la—

A str—

Water.

Like a rock skipping across calm water, touching down for a moment before drifting off again. I understood everything I heard on the level of words and sentences, but none of it meant anything—none of it hooked up to any sort of deeper understanding, like listening to the grownups talk at Thanksgiving and Christmas when I was little.

I came awake to the feel of a hand holding mine.

I came awake to the sound of two human voices, both familiar, in a strange metal room I didn't recognize.

I came awake lucid, remembering almost everything, knowing that it wouldn't last, that soon it would all dissolve away again.

I came awake to the feel of a dog on my lap, and somehow I knew that the dog was Marco, and somehow I knew that sometimes I didn't know it was Marco.

I came awake—

"—in touch with Tyagi, there's two hundred thousand Visser Three Controllers down there now—"

‹Oh, right, that reminds me—did he say anything about how he's doing that?›

"Kind of? I mean, he said that he'd used some of Quat's tech to — some creature he found — can't remember the exact word. Fungal? Fungus-ible? Some kind of shared memory, not like a hive-mind but like all of — into the same Google doc—"

Static.

I came awake—

"I get it, okay?" Marco said quietly. "You—you've got to focus on the tactical stuff, there's — anything if we don't stay on top of the — and you can't keep us on top of the — we keep moving the goalposts. Makes sense. — Crayak, and the — not to mention the — I just—look, just know that I'm going to keep thinking about this, okay? Like, at some — might have a real strong opinion about — even if it's a hard one-eighty, okay? Just a heads-up."

Static.

I came awake—

‹—can hear me but I'm just going to keep talking until you wake up, it's me, it's Marco, I'm right here, you're fine, Jake was here too but he just left but he's fine, too—›

I reached up to touch the hand that was resting on my shoulder.

‹Hey,› said Marco.

In thought-speak, even though he was in his own body, because—

Because—

‹You've been having trouble with voices so I thought this might be better.›

I looked around the room—

‹We're on a Bug fighter. You had—uh—you had an accident. But it's okay, you've been getting better, you're just a little disoriented right after you wake up sometimes. We're here, we've got you, you're—uh—you're pretty safe, I mean let's be real, the bar for what can reasonably be described as safe has been dropped pretty low—›

I squeezed.

‹Sorry. Hi. Hello.›

I opened my mouth—

‹Take your time.›

I formed the sounds slowly, painstakingly.

"Marco?"

‹Polo.›

I blinked.

I smiled.

‹There she is.›

I put my hands against the cold metal floor and pushed myself up into a sitting position.

"Bug fighter?" I said.

‹Yeah. We took control of it. The—er, okay, actually, I hate to grab the wheel but I'm going to run through some words real quick, see where you are. Is that okay?›

I moved my head up and down.

‹Just—uh—make like a hum sound if you know the word, okay?›

I moved my head up and down again.

‹Okay, easy does it. Jake.›

"Mmmmmm."

‹Cassie.›

"Mmmmmm."

‹Tobias.›

"Mmmmmm."

‹Yeerk.›

I stiffened. "Mmmmmm."

‹Andalite.›

"Mmmmmm."

‹Visser Three.›

"Mmmmmm."

‹Okay—sorry, hang on, trying to remember how we did this last time—oh, right. Chee? Erek the Chee?›

"Mmmmmm."

‹Okay, how about David?›

"What do I say for 'no'?"

‹Uh. How about 'no'?›

"No."

‹Hmm. Ante?›

"Auntie?"

‹No. Ante, A-N-T-E. Tall, dark, and handsome.›

"Yes. I mean, 'mmmmmm.'"

‹Talking is easy?›

"No. But I can do it."

‹Okay. I'm going to keep doing thought-speak, okay?›

"Okay."

‹Do you remember Finland?›

I thought for a minute—

"I remember—I remember—a school?"

‹A school in Finland?›

"They had—I think they were making—bombs?"

‹Uh. I don't know anything about that. But—no, yeah, actually, that makes perfect sense. Explains a lot about our newest recruit, not to mention your deep and mysterious bond.›

"What?"

‹Never mind. Look, you seem to be doing okay. Do you—what do you know about what happened to you?›

I felt myself bite my lip—not on purpose, just the sort of reflexive movement that I must have done a thousand times before.

"I know—"

I paused. What did I know?

"I had—a stroke?"

‹Or something like it. We haven't been able to get you to a hospital yet. Do you remember waking—er, scratch that. What's the first thing you remember since it happened? Like, do you remember who found you?›

I tried to pull up the memory, but it was like dragging a branch through a hedge—

‹Don't worry about it. Do you remember Garrett and Ante finding you?›

Garrett and Ante—

"The cube," I said. "Something about the cube—"

‹Don't worry, we have it. Do you remember what caused it?›

"No."

‹Okay. Morphing. Do you remember morphing?›

"Yeah."

‹Something was—something went wrong with your morphing.›

"I remember that."

‹You do?›

I didn't, actually. But I remembered the injunction, smeared across my brain in bright red letters—DO NOT MORPH.

"I remember I'm not opposed to. Opposed. Knots. Knots opposed—"

‹I got it, don't worry. Do you remem—whoa, whoa, heyheyhey, relax, it's fine, you're okay—›

My body had begun to slide, and when I moved to brace myself it had begun to twitch and convulse. I could feel Marco's hands on my upper arms, a deep, reassuring pressure.

‹Relax, it's fine, it's—hey, Rachel, you can let go, okay? I've got you, you're safe, you don't have to hold it together, you can just—›

Static.

I came awake knowing, this time. Not knowing everything, but knowing who I was, and where I was, and most of what had happened.

My name was Rachel. I was on board a captured Bug fighter, with—with my cousin and his best friend and—a couple of other people, maybe, unless they were off on other ships. We had taken over a Yeerk fleet, and we were heading back to Earth to do—something—

"I'll be fine," I said, pushing myself up to a sitting position.

‹Are you sure?› he asked nervously.

Marco. His name is Marco.

"Yeah. I mean, what's the worst that could happen?"

‹You wake up by yourself, freak out, morph into a grizzly bear, and try to kill all of us when we come back.›

"Do I even have a grizzly bear morph?"

‹Yes, thanks to a supreme lack of judgment on Ante's part, and me being stupid enough to think it wouldn't be a problem to give one to him. We don't let him in here anymore.›

I couldn't tell if he was joking or not.

"Listen," I said, forming the words one at a time. "I know that I—I know I have good hours and bad hours. This—this feels like a good hour. I don't think I'm going to—to fog out any time soon."

‹Okay, but if you do, just—gah. I wish there was some way to leave a message that you'd actually get—›

"You could write something on the wall."

‹Tried it. Not foolproof. Uh. You, uh. Sometimes you can't read.›

I blinked.

"I'm fine," I repeated. "You said Garrett will be here in half an hour anyway, right? I can hold it together for that long, can't I?"

Marco made a face, and somehow I knew it was a face I hadn't seen very many times before—the kind of face he mostly only made out loud when he was by himself.

"Marco. I'm fine."

It wasn't true, of course. I wasn't fine.

But I was fine enough to not need literally constant babysitting.

‹Okay,› he said finally, still looking uneasy. ‹Okay, fine. I'm going to go. I'm going to go, and you're going to stay here, and it's all going to be—›

"Fine."

‹Fine. Right. Sure. I'm going to go ahead and stay in touch with you until I'm out of thought-speak range, okay?›

I felt my lip twitch upward. "Okay," I said. "Grandma."

He sighed.

Looked around the room.

Looked back at me, an oddly intense light kindling in his eyes.

"Squeeds?" he asked, in regular speech.

What?

I frowned—

"Never mind. See you later, warrior princess."

He turned to leave—

"Wait!" I blurted.

I remembered. It had taken an extra couple of seconds, but I remembered.

"Smoots," I said back, feeling a rush of warmth in the center of my chest, heat and happiness and embarrassment all rolled up into one.

Marco turned back to face me, a bright, childish grin smeared all across his face. Spreading his arms wide, he closed the distance and wrapped me up in a hug, the side of his head pressed into my breastbone.

"Squeeds," he repeated, giving me a tight squeeze.

It was a password—a password Marco had invented to make sure that I was really me—that I was enough there to remember that we—

That he and I—

"Smoots," I whispered, and planted a gentle kiss on the top of his head.

‹All right, all right,› he grumbled. ‹No need to get sentimental.›

But his arms stayed wrapped tight around my ribs.

I laughed, and he looked up at me. ‹Tell me the plan again? Please?›

"Garrett will be here in half an hour. All I have to do is stay here and not freak out."

‹Sorry again about the awkward gap,› he said. ‹But Garrett got held up and we're a little short-handed right now—›

I felt a stab of guilt—

‹—which you should absolutely not feel guilty about in any way, shape, or form, you're a goddamn purple heart in recovery and it's not your fault. We'll have you back punching aliens in no time, okay?›

"Okay," I said. I felt a sudden urge to ruffle his hair—

‹Fuck off, Fridwulfa,› he said blithely, jerking back out of reach.

"I don't know who that is."

‹And you never will.›

He winked, flashed another grin, and spun on his heel, darting for the door. It slid shut behind him, and then I was alone.

‹Good morning!›

I couldn't help it. I yelped. I had forgotten that he'd said he was going to stay in touch via thought-speak—

‹Good morning.›

I leaned back against the cold metal wall and slid downward until I was sitting on the floor.

‹In less than an hour, aircraft from here will join others from around the world—›

So, you and Marco, huh?

‹—and you will be launching the largest aerial battle in the history of mankind.›

Looks that way.

‹Mankind—that word should have new meaning for us today.›

He's kind of a dork, no?

‹We can't be consumed by our petty differences anymore.›

Well, you're kind of brain-damaged, so—

‹We must be united in our common interest.›

You weren't brain-damaged back when you were morphing into his body every other night—

‹Perhaps it's fate that today is the Fourth of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom.›

I took a deep breath.

Not right now.

‹Not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution, but from annihilation.›

I looked around the room.

Half an hour.

I had half an hour before Garrett would arrive. It was the first time they'd left me alone since—since it had happened.

‹We're fighting for our right to live. To exist.›

Now or never.

‹And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday—›

I had been forming a plan—in fragments, piecemeal, in little stolen moments of lucidity. Moments which I had access to now, moments which would no doubt leak in and out of my brain a dozen times over the next few days. But right now, I was holding it together.

‹—but as the day when the world declared in one voice—we will not go quietly into the night!›

I took another deep breath.

‹We will not vanish without a fight!›

There were parts of me that knew—that acknowledged—that what I was about to do was wrong, and dumb, and risky.

‹We're going to live on.›

There were other parts of me that might have tried to argue back—to convince myself that it wasn't all of those things.

‹We're going to survive.›

But somewhere in the ragged mess of memory, I had grown a little. Matured, a little. I didn't know exactly when, couldn't remember the exact details of every mistake that I'd made, every lesson I'd learned. But I knew enough not to shout down that voice of caution and reason. Knew to listen to it, take it seriously, heed its warnings—

And then do the right thing anyway.

‹Today, we celebrate our indep—›

The voice cut out as whatever craft Marco was riding on moved out of thought-speak range.

I took a third deep breath.

The thing was—

The thing was, I wasn't any good to any of them, this way. Crippled. Broken. Incapacitated. And while that might not matter to them—while they might be perfectly happy to have me along as a pity-mascot—

Hey, now. That's not fair.

Okay. It wasn't fair. But still.

While they might be fine with it, I wasn't. Not now. Not with a war to win. Not when every scrap of time and attention and manpower made a difference—when they couldn't even spare somebody to watch me, because there were too many things that needed to get done.

And I knew—I remembered—

—for now, at least—

—that they had my morph. My DNA. My morphs, plural—they had acquired me plenty, both before and after whatever-it-was. Marco, for sure. Jake, probably. Tobias. Garrett. Helium. Tom. Cassie—

No, wait. They told you about Cassie—

I shut down the stray thought.

The point was, if I died—

Well. When you got right down to it, I'd rather they bring back Old Rachel than tie up a bunch of resources looking after Burden Rachel.

It wasn't depression. It wasn't psychosis. I wasn't feeling suicidal or delusional, and it wasn't that I thought handicapped people didn't deserve to live or anything stupid like that. I had taken my time to make sure, wading in and out of clarity over the past week. I'd formed the intention, rolled it around, waited to see if it stuck, forgotten and reinvented it six or seven times over.

It was what I wanted. What I wanted for the world. What I wanted for the fight. What I wanted, because of who I was and what I cared about.

I took a fourth deep breath.

Clock's ticking.

Closing my eyes, I focused.

I had no idea whether Marco had been joking about the grizzly bear. I couldn't remember either way.

But there was one morph I was absolutely sure that I had. One morph I could clearly remember acquiring—one I'd acquired carefully, deliberately, sneakily—so sneakily that I think he really might not have noticed, though if you asked him he probably would have guessed.

I pictured the long, dark hair. The tiger's-eye skin. The knowing smirk under razor-sharp eyes.

Almost immediately, I felt the changes begin.

I counted to fifteen, then stopped.

I stood.

I was shorter, maybe. An inch or two. My breasts might have shrunk, just a little. But my hair—

It had gone pure black.

Okay. Now back it up.

I switched tabs, swapped in a new mental image—gold instead of black, thickly muscled instead of basement-nerd wiry, a mouth that always felt like it had too many teeth.

Fifteen seconds later, I was back in my own—

—broken—

—body.

I took another long, slow breath.

All right. That's phase one.

I could stop there, I knew. Stop, with the knowledge that I could morph if I absolutely had to, that I had at least one morph in me, for emergencies.

But that wasn't enough. I needed to know if I could function in morph—if the fog and clumsiness that had followed me for the past week would clear, or if I would carry it with me into some crucial battle.

And I needed to know if I'd survive the demorph.

You're stalling. You're stalling and you don't have time.

A tiny fragment of memory floated to the surface—a single word, along with its meaning—

Sisu.

I focused again, and ninety seconds later, I flipped the little mental switch—

It didn't take him long. I'd been hanging out in that cargo hold a lot, after all.

‹Rachel?›

Yeah.

There was a pause.

‹I cannot fucking believe I left you alone in here. Are you okay? Is everything okay?›

Everything's fine.

I felt him reach out for control and let him have it, let him guide our shared body smoothly to its feet.

‹Are you—gah. Do you—are you, like, sane right now? Do you know what's happening?›

Yeah.

‹Okay, then what the FUCK.›

I said nothing. I was too busy leafing through his memories, looking at myself—at the situation—at all of it—from the outside.

‹Rachel?›

It was too much—too much to take in all at once, and I realized that the fog had come with me. Not all of it—no more than what I'd been feeling when I said goodbye to the real Marco—but enough so that the memories were like trying to do three-digit multiplication in my head. Like hearing someone's name for the first time, and realizing two seconds later that you have no idea what it was.

‹Okay, Rachel, I'm starting to get a bad feeli—›

I'm fine.

‹Okay, then seriously—what the fuck? Alone?›

You wouldn't have let me.

‹That's not—I mean, it's not that I—›

Don't lie.

A long silence.

‹Okay, fine, I would've leaned on you pretty hard, I admit that. But what if—what if you die, demorphing? Are you really okay with—›

He broke off, leaving the thought unfinished, but I could feel the shape of it in his mind—are you really okay with what that'll do to Jake? To me?

You'd both handle it fine, I said quietly. You both handled Cassie just fine, right?

‹I don't know if I'd call what Jake was doing 'handling it.' And besides, that's not the only risk. What if you go nuts while you're in morph? Try to hurt one of us, or—or forget that you even can demorph?›

That's not going to happen.

‹Rachel, I have all the respect in the world for you, but I've seen you shit yourself three times this week, and that's before you acquired me. I don't think you can—›

When you're in morph, your brain is on pause, right? Being run on some kind of computer? So it can't change—change—whatever the word is, it can't change the way-it-is, like water being ice or water or whatever.

‹State.›

Yeah. State. It can't change state, right? That's why you guys couldn't fall asleep. So if I was able to concentrate hard enough to morph, then I'm going to be fine in morph.

There was a long silence, in which Marco took our body and began to pace—slowly, thoughtfully, his feet making almost no sound against the cold metal deck.

‹You just thought of that just now, didn't you?› he asked quietly.

So? I shot back. Doesn't mean it isn't true.

‹No, but that means it's not the reason you felt okay going through with this—›

I morphed into you, okay? I morphed into you so that—

Marco stopped pacing.

So that if anything went wrong I'd—you would—

I didn't finish the thought, but I could see into his thoughts, and I knew that he got it.

‹Jesus,› he said quietly. And then again—‹Jesus.›

It was still hard to absorb more than a fraction of what I was seeing. I couldn't have written it down, if I'd had a pen—the words and images went by too quickly for my half-fried brain. But I could sort of feel the gist of it, track the overall theme of where his mind was going, and what I was getting—

Sadness.

Just sadness.

Not anger, not impatience, not derision—none of the scorn and condescension I'd come to expect from Marco, none of what I'd learned to brace myself against ever since that conversation after we'd each morphed the other for the very first time. After he'd learned about what I'd done with the Chapmans.

From where I'm standing, the person we can most afford to lose is you.

That's what he'd said to me. What we'd both agreed on, before I morphed into Tidwell and carried Illim into the Yeerk pool.

It felt like it was just a couple of weeks ago, to me, though they'd also felt like some of the longest weeks of all time.

But now—

Inside Marco's head—

It wasn't just that we'd started to hold hands and kiss. More like, we'd ended up holding hands and kissing because of it, because of the same reason that he was feeling sad right now, they both had their roots in the same thing—

You don't care about anything I have to say, I'd told him—back in that first conversation, before the mission to the Yeerk pool. You don't care, because stupid people promising not to be stupid is a promise they can't keep. Because they can't tell when they're about to be stupid. Not in time to stop.

Marco—

He didn't think I was stupid.

As in, right now, thinking about how I'd gone off and morphed on my own despite everything that had happened, he still didn't think I was stupid. He was thinking—not in words, but I could feel it—he was thinking I don't get it, what am I missing?

Not what is she thinking, but what am I missing.

I had changed, and Marco had noticed.

And I was ready to throw it all away, and Marco—

He didn't think that was wrong, or dumb.

He just thought it was sad.

‹You're watching all this?›

Mild, the thought. Not defensive or snippy or accusatory. Just a question.

Yeah, I said.

‹And?›

The silence stretched out.

I don't know what to say. Thanks. Sorry.

More silence.

And sorry I didn't tell you. I mean, him. The other you. You know. I just—

I hesitated. There was water in our eyes, enough to blur the view of the cargo hold.

I think I had to figure this one out on my own.

‹Yeah.›

He reached up a hand, grabbed our shirt and wiped the moisture away before it could bead up and turn into a tear.

‹You ready, then?› he said. ‹Clock's ticking.›

I wanted to say something back. To thank him for taking care of me, to apologize for waking him up just to erase him again. To explain why I'd woken him up—why I hadn't just flipped through his memories and demorphed, leaving him in stasis.

But he already knew.

Yeah, I whispered. I'm ready.

He stayed with me as long as he could, all the way up to the halfway point where thought-speak clicks away. It was a long forty-five seconds, and the forty-five that came after were even longer. I held my breath, waiting for another attack, for something to go wrong.

But nothing happened. Marco went away, and my old body came back, and that was it. I cried for a few minutes, and then the fog started to roll in, and then—

Static.

I came awake—

I came awake—

I came awake—

I came awake—

I came awake—

I came awake—

I came awake, and this time it was already quiet—had been quiet for a while, according to some deep, primordial instinct.

I looked around. The room was empty, with dull, metal walls—slightly curved along two sides, like a cathedral or a music hall.

Bug fighter?

Why would I be in a Bug fighter?

I opened my mouth to call out, then thought better of it.

Don't call attention to yourself.

I moved to stand—

Whoa.

I was clumsy, uncoordinated, my limbs sluggish and awkward.

Drugged?

I had been drugged before, I thought. Or—

No, wait. That wasn't right. It wasn't drugs, it was—

I had woken up in a dark room, but it hadn't been a room like this. It had been—

A hospital?

A flicker of memory—a thin, balding man in pressed scrubs and gold-rimmed spectacles—and a book, a heavy book—

You don't remember?

I felt a rising swell of panic, but I throttled it, controlled it, contained it.

What do you remember?

Rachel. My name was Rachel.

There was a war. A war against—against—I couldn't remember the word but I knew what they were, what they looked like, tiny gray slugs that crawled inside your ear and ran your body like a remote control car, except—

Except some of them were on our side?

Ax.

The blue one. There was a blue one who was on our side—

No, wait, the blue one was the enemy, the main bad guy—Vicious—Vicious Three?

That doesn't sound right.

Were there two blue ones?

I could still feel the urge to panic, but I was staying on top of it, staying above it. I didn't have any weapons, but that didn't matter, because I—

CLANG.

All of the thoughts fell out of my head, and the fear swelled to fill the space they'd left behind, as if every drop of blood that I had had been replaced with ice water.

The sound had come from the wall behind me.

The wall behind me was—

I thought—

—the wall of a spaceship.

The sound had come from outside of a spaceship.

So what? Spaceships can be on the ground—

But something—some instinct, maybe, or maybe some sliver of memory—something told me that no, this spaceship was not on the ground, this spaceship was somewhere out in space, and the sound that I had just heard—

I shuffled closer.

Was there a hum?

I shuddered. I didn't want to get any closer to the wall, didn't want to press my ear up against it, what if something was out there, what if it was about to burst through, but I had to know—

I leaned in.

There was a hum.

I shuffled away, moving as quickly as my clumsy limbs would let me.

Was there a hum on the other wall? Was that just the sound of the spaceship, the way airplanes sounded like KHHHHHHHH?

I pressed my ear against the other wall.

Nothing.

Something is coming. Something is coming, and you don't have much time, you need to get ready—

I didn't trust the fear—not entirely. I knew that I could be panicking over nothing—knew that I was confused, knew that I did not have anything even remotely resembling a grip on what was going on.

But at the same time, it would be stupid not to try to get ready, in any way I could.

I hobbled over toward what looked like the exit, moving my legs like a puppeteer.

It didn't move.

I pressed against it.

Nothing.

I looked around for a switch, a sensor—

Nothing.

I turned back to look at the wall the sound had come from.

Was the hum a little louder, maybe?

I banged my fist on the door, and listened.

Silence.

"Hey!" I shouted. "Hey, is anybody in there?"

No answer.

The hum was definitely louder now, and I thought the room might have gotten warmer, too, as if something was slowly burning its way through the metal. I swept my eyes around the wide, open space—

A closet?

I pulled it open. There was nothing inside.

The hum was louder still, as loud as an electric toothbrush, and I began patting my pockets, looking for anything I might use as a weapon—

One of my pockets crinkled.

I reached inside it, pulled out a scrap of paper.

Hey, Rachel,

You were awake when I left but you were looking a little woozy. This might not even work, idk, but if you read this, we'll be back soon, okay? We locked the ship down, and Helium's got his eye on it.

—Marco

P.S. You had an accident, that's why you're feeling weird. You're recovering. Everything's going to be all right.

I felt a part of myself starting to try to feel relieved—felt another part of my brain intercede—

Everything's under control.

The note didn't say anything about clangs.

No, but it said there's somebody keeping an eye on you.

Yeah, unless whoever's attacking got to them first.

You're panicking over nothing. Remember Grandma Diana? She would get freaked out every time the garbage truck drove by.

I woke up alone with amnesia in the cargo hold of a Bug fighter. It's not the same thing at all.

Meanwhile, my eyes continued to trace uselessly around the empty, featureless room, looking for a weapon that wasn't there—

Oh.

Right.

I didn't need a weapon. I was a weapon.

Except—

Wasn't there something about—

The hospital room. You woke up in the hospital room and you couldn't morph—

But that had been before, hadn't it?

Before what?

I wasn't sure, but the hum was as loud as a microwave now, and the temperature in the room had definitely risen. I was running out of time—

Big, or small?

I looked around the room again. Bright, smooth walls with no cracks. Clean light everywhere. No shadows. Nowhere to hide except the tiny little closet—which would be the first place someone would look.

Big.

I tried to remember what big morphs I had.

Elephant?

I closed my eyes and concentrated.

Nothing.

Rhino?

Nothing.

Gorilla?

Nothing.

My heart began to pound, the panic finally winning out over my control—maybe the morphing really is broken, maybe there's nothing I can do—

Tiger.

No.

Grizzly—

I gasped with relief as the telltale tingle swept over me, the hairs on my skin darkening and multiplying into a forest of thick, black wires. I gritted my teeth, forcing myself to stay focused as the humming grew louder and higher, as the wall began to glow a dull, angry red.

Just give me one more minute.

There was a shriek—

A flash—

Another clang as a giant chunk of metal toppled inward—

I turned, still only two-thirds transformed, as a lone creature stepped in through the hole.

It wasn't large. Smaller than a Hork-Bajir. About as big as my dad. It was moving slowly, easily, as if relaxed and confident. It walked on two bowed legs, with a swinging, cowboyish gait. It had two long arms, with what looked like a gauntlet or a set of extra claws emerging from each wrist, sort of shielding the almost-human hands. Its torso was pinched and narrow, and it looked as if there was a ball bearing halfway up, as if its head and shoulders were balanced on top of some kind of living lazy Susan.

My vision was blurring as the morph continued, but I could see that the creature's skin was black and cracked, shot through with a spiderweb of red lines, like half-cooled lava. It was naked, except for a woven metal belt around its hip and a matching bandolier across its shoulders, each filled with what looked like guns and knives and grenades and other, stranger instruments.

The creature took two steps into the cargo hold and paused, tilting its melted, misshapen head like a dog, watching the last moments of my transformation through two bright, robin's-egg-blue eyes. I couldn't be sure, but it didn't look scared or angry or determined—just curious, maybe even fascinated, craning its neck, its hands relaxed by its sides, a series of tiny, excited chirping noises coming out of some orifice I couldn't see with the grizzly's weak eyesight.

For a moment, we both just stood there, each waiting for the other to make a move.

It burned through the hull of a Bug fighter—it could be an enemy of the Yeerks—

‹Uh,› I said. ‹Hi?›

The creature's eyes widened. It tilted its head to the other side, letting out another stream of chirps and squeaks.

‹I don't understand.›

It raised its arms, hands out to the side, fingers moving in a strange, sinuous pattern. It pointed at me and chirped again, then gestured at its belt, then at the hole behind it.

‹Sorry, still nothing.›

Slowly, as if not to startle me, the creature began reaching toward its belt with one hand, carefully unclipping a device that looked sort of like a metal ice-cream cone.

‹Are you looking for the Yeerks?› I asked.

The creature chirped again, and slowly began to raise the cone, turning it in my direction.

All right, no.

I reared, coming to the grizzly's full height of almost eight feet and letting out a low, threatening growl. The creature paused, and slowly reversed its motion, returning the device to its belt.

‹Yeah,› I said. ‹That's right. Let's not be pointing strange objects at—›

"KEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-row!"

There was no warning.

It was a sound so loud it was hardly a sound at all anymore, a howl that blasted through the still air of the cargo hold with the force of a small bomb. I staggered back, clapping two giant bear paws to the sides of my head and falling over in the process, a ragged roar of pain—pitiful by comparison—tearing its way out of my throat.

The creature didn't move, didn't react—just stood there and watched as I convulsed on the floor, blood pouring from my ears. Eventually, I managed to pull myself back to my feet, trembling as I turned to face it again—

"KEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-row!"

If anything, the sound seemed even louder that time, the pain like a pair of gunshot wounds as both of the bear's eardrums burst and the wals themselves seemed to shake. I collapsed again, fighting the bear's frantic instinct to run, to hide, knowing that there was nowhere to go—

"Keeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-row."

Somewhere in the back of my shell-shocked mind, I realized that the third howl wasn't any quieter than the last two—that the bear body was going deaf, the cells in its ears withering and dying before the unearthly onslaught. I climbed back to my feet again, and the fourth howl was detectable only as a vibration, a gentle wind against the hairs of my face and shoulder.

The creature's head tilted once more, and it gave a strange little shiver that seemed almost like a nod, as if it had asked a question and gotten back exactly the answer it expected. It raised its arm again, once more holding the cone-thing—

I charged.

Have you ever seen a grizzly going all-out?

They are fast.

Much faster than you'd expect. Fast enough that it almost doesn't seem natural.

But the little lava creature was faster.

I closed the distance between us in about half a second, but the creature had already—pivoted, moving one foot and then spinning like a top, its other arm flashing out, its claw-gauntlet thing slicing four thin strips of skin and fur out of my shoulder.

The grizzly roared. We were both angry, now, my own fear and adrenaline mixing with the animal's fighting instincts. I didn't know who this little alien was, or what it wanted, but if it wanted a fight it was going to get one.

It danced to one side, wobbling at the waist like some drunken acrobat. For a split second, it passed out of sight, and I felt a sudden spray of impacts along my hip, as if the creature had thrown a handful of stones at me. I whirled, and saw a number of tiny silver cylinders still tumbling to the floor—

Darts!

It had shot me with darts—but none of them had penetrated the grizzly's thick fur—

It was close—closer than it should have been. Pushing off with my back legs like a sprinter at the starting line, I feinted with my left paw—

Got you.

It dodged, just as I had suspected, and I slammed it into the deck with my right, my claws tearing a huge chunk out of its shoulder and snapping the bandolier.

But the creature—bounced, sort of, cartwheeling its upper half into the deck and bringing its legs up, whirling like a weed whacker. One clawed foot caught me in the throat, and I felt a sudden darkening in my field of vision as blood began to spill out of the wound—only for a moment, before the bear's rage came back twice as strong, but I didn't know how long I could fight before blood loss took over—

Stamping one paw down on one of the creature's arms, I seized it around the middle with my jaws, biting down until something—until several somethings—cracked. Hot, acrid fluid splattered across my face—

POOMPH.

I felt rather than heard the discharge of the alien weapon, and suddenly there was a melon-sized hole in my left shoulder. The bear shrieked—not a roar of challenge but a cry of pain and fear—and the creature fell to the deck and rolled to one side. It grabbed at something at its belt—I reared, swiping—it dodged—there was a spear of green light like a lightsaber—

Half of my left arm fell to the floor, and me along with it.

I was in shock—

—fortunately—

—maybe—

—and so I almost didn't feel the pain, almost didn't notice the dizziness as the blood gushed out of the wound, a sharp diagonal slice just above the elbow, straight as a razor's edge. I lay on the floor, unable to do anything except look up at the creature as it stepped closer—

But it made no move to finish me off, only watched, curious, ignoring the sticky ichor leaking from its own horrible wounds. Ten, twenty, thirty seconds—I didn't know how long, as every part of my mind screamed at me to demorph! Demorph now!

Something held me back, though, some tiny scrap of animal cunning, not a plan so much as a desperate, delirious hope. I stared back at the bright blue eyes, let my own lids fall shut—

I heard nothing. But I felt it, through the deck—a set of tiny vibrations, as the creature turned away, began heading toward the door that led to the rest of the ship—

I lunged. With every last scrap of power I had left in me, I burst off of the floor, hurling myself straight at the creature's back. It heard me, began to spin—

Too late, asshole.

The flesh of my upper arm had begun to fall away, loose and dangling, leaving the cut end of my humerus—sharp as a flint arrowhead—exposed. With five hundred pounds of muscle behind it, I had plunged that bone straight into the space where the creature's head met its shoulders. There was an explosion of pain, enough that the bear body began to retch even as the pair of us fell to the floor, and I began demorphing without even checking to see whether the creature was dead.

If it isn't, it's all over anyway.

Ninety seconds later, and I was human again, surrounded by blood and gore and alien technology, my arms and legs trembling as if I'd just run a marathon. I wanted to throw up again, but there was nothing in me, so I just dry-heaved on the floor for who-knows-how-long before I finally had the strength to stand again.

The creature was still alive.

It was still alive, and it was watching, its eyes following my every movement. It lay still, and for a moment I thought that maybe it had been paralyzed by my attack—

But no. As it met my eyes, lying there on the deck, it tilted its head once more, raising an arm in an eerily human fashion.

The creature waved.

It waved, and then the light faded from its eyes, and the arm fell back to the deck with a meaty thunk.

It—

It could have—

All those weapons within reach, and it just—

It just—

What?