Katherine Alice Applegate - Invasion

Rachel said.

Cassie was nearly at the end of the infestation pier. The Hork-Bajir and Taxxon guards were still sticking to their duties. As I watched, another human was shoved headfirst into the Yeerk pool.

I cried.

Marco said. I hesitated for only a second, as a thousand thoughts went through my head. Later I would think about that moment. Think maybe… maybe… if only… I broke into a run. I had to get to her!

As I watched, the two Hork-Bajir on the pier grabbed Cassie by the arms. "Nooooo!" she cried.

I tore at full speed. I leaped over Taxxons. I dodged around Hork-Bajir. I practically flew. But I couldn't really fly. Not the way Tobias could.

I saw him high, high up in the cavern. Down he came.

Like a bullet.

The talons came forward. Tobias hit the first Hork-Bajir at about fifty miles an hour. He swooped away, leaving the alien clutching at the slimy mess where his eyes used to be.

That was all Cassie needed. She broke away and ran back down the pier.

I finally got there and went after the remaining Hork-Bajir-Controller.

I yelled to Cassie.

She looked at the other humans and Hork-Bajir behind her in the line. "Run! All of you, run!"

They did. Cassie plowed into the panicky crowd. Moments later a black-maned head appeared above the shoulders of the crowd. Cassie had become a horse and was racing for the stairs.

I started after her, racing back around the pool toward Marco, Rachel, Tom, and the crowd of hosts they'd freed from the cages.

The Controllers were starting to get organized. A group of Taxxons were slithering out to stop Cassie and me. Both the Hork-Bajir and the Taxxons were carrying weapons now.

I said to Cassie as we neared the line of Taxxons.

she yelled back.

I leaped. Cassie jumped. Side by side, we sailed over the startled Taxxons. They fired their hand-held Dracon beams, but too late. The beams sizzled the air behind us and we blew past.

I could see Rachel's towering gray bulk just a-head. The stairs were near. I saw Marco with Tom.

We were going to make it!

And then he stepped out daintily from a group of Hork-Bajir.

He seemed almost harmless in his Andalite body. A gentle half-deer, half-human-looking creature with bluish fur and an extra set of eyes on comical stalks.

Visser Three didn't look all that scary. Not compared to the Hork-Bajir, the Taxxons, or even our own Earth-animals.

But Visser Three had an Andalite body. He had an Andalite's power to morph. And he had been all over the universe acquiring the genetic patterns of monsters like nothing ever seen on Earth.

A Taxxon slithered up beside Visser Three and spoke. It was a weird, half-whistling sound. "Ssssweer trrreeesswew eeeesstrew."

Visser Three said nothing. He just looked at me with the vertical slits that were his eyes.

Visser Three said. He laughed silently.

It took me a couple of seconds to realize what he meant. Then it hit me. Of course! He thought we were Andalites. He'd guessed that we were morphs, not real animals. And he knew that the Andalites were the only species with morphing technology.

He began to morph.

I realized I'd been wrong to be hopeful.

We were not going to make it.

From Visser Three's Andalite body, the creature grew. Tall as a tree, towering over even Rachel. Eight massive legs. Eight long, spindly arms, each ending in a three-fingered claw. And from the place where the top set of arms grew came the heads.

Heads. Plural. Eight of them. This creature had a thing for the number eight.

Even the Hork-Bajir-Controllers backed away. Even they didn't want to be near Visser Three when he morphed this way.

But the Taxxons edged in closer, crowding around their leader like a pack of hungry dogs looking for table scraps.

I was frozen in terror. Stunned. Even the tiger that was a part of me was confused and worried.

I had started to think that with our morphed bodies we could take on anything. But we couldn't take on this monster. Not and survive.

I yelled to the others.

Cassie nudged two of the humans from the cages and tossed back her head. They figured out what she wanted and climbed on her back. Then she galloped toward the stairs.

Visser Three crowed.

Then, Visser Three struck.

From one of the heads a round, spinning ball of flame erupted. A ball of flame that flew like a missile.

It skimmed through the air and splatted against the back of one of the women riding Cassie.

"Ahhhh!" She fell off, screaming and rolling around to put out the flames. Cassie kept going with only one rider. She reached the base of the stairs.

One singed my shoulder and flew past. One hit Rachel in the ear and made her scream in my head and trumpet in terror.

The air was full of fire.

Marco yelled.

I repeated.

A big swarm of us was heading for the stairs, but the Taxxons had closed in around us. Anyone that got away from Visser Three was swarmed over by the Taxxons.

I saw Tom out of the corner of my eye. He was swinging his fists at a pair of Taxxons that were circling around him. Tom couldn't hurt them, but he was trying just the same.

Rachel ran over and plowed into one of them, crushing him beneath her tree-trunk legs. Marco threw his arms around the second Taxxon and twisted till it split open, spilling its putrid guts all over the floor.

Rachel had hit the bottom few stairs and stopped. Elephant bodies are great for some things. But they are useless for climbing stairs.

I told Rachel.

She began to shrink almost immediately, but there wasn't time to wait until the morphing was complete. Rachel started up the stairs as a shifting mass of gray and pink, part human, part elephant, staggering on weird, half-finished legs and dragging a shriveled trunk that made her pretty face into something awful to see.

We ran. But it was impossible.

By the time we had climbed a few dozen stairs, there were only a few free humans and two free Hork-Bajir with us. The rest had all been recaptured or burned.

A fireball exploded at my feet and I snarled. But still we retreated.

We were a hundred feet up the stairs when the last two freed Hork-Bajir were brought down by the Visser's fireballs. They fell in flames.

The Visser was climbing the stairs now, all alone. He was so big he barely fit on the stairs. I knew when we reached the point where the walls closed in around the stairs that we would be safe from Visser Three. Glancing up, I saw that Cassie was almost to safety above us, with one human rider.

The rest of us, along with Tom and a pitiful handful of freed humans, were bunched together.

Visser Three began pelting the staircase ahead of us with fire. We were trapped. Fire ahead. Visser Three himself behind.

"No," I heard a familiar voice say. "No, you filthy creep. You aren't going to win this time." It was Tom.

All alone, he charged at Visser Three, armed with nothing but his fists. One of the Visser's arms came down and swung at him.

I cried. My tiger body roared with all its might. But the sound was lost in the noise of crying humans and whistling Taxxons.

I saw Tom stagger from the Visser's blow.

I saw him fall from the edge of the stairs.

I went a little crazy.

I was on the Visser before I knew what was happening. On him, digging my claws into his flesh. I twisted up and behind one of his eight heads.

The tiger in me knew what to do. I sank my teeth into his neck and clamped my powerful jaws and held on.

Another head turned back and aimed a fireball at me. I dodged the first fireball. The second burned my flank. I jumped clear.

The Visser roared in pain. I roared in hatred.

And we ran, ran, ran up those stairs with a hundred nightmares on our heels.

We ran. Exhausted and burned and terrified, we ran.

Visser Three had made one mistake. He was too large in his morph to follow us much farther up the stairs.

I heard Visser Three yell something as we finally got away. He said,

Actually, I think it did matter. We hadn't exactly destroyed Visser Three, but we had come out of it alive, we Animorphs.

The final count was exactly one human freed — the woman who rode Cassie's back up out of that hellish pit.

And Cassie had gotten away clean. It had been the suspicious Controller policeman who had grabbed her. He was the only Controller to know her name, where she lived, and that she had been spying on The Sharing.

Cassie said we didn't have to worry about him anymore. She didn't want to talk about what had happened to him.

As for Tom… My brother.

Tom was not freed.

I was lying in my own bed, shaking and shivering and crying from the aftereffects of terror, when I heard him come home later that night.

He never knew that I was the tiger. He never knew how close I had come to freeing him. He was a Controller again. The Yeerk was in his head once more.

Cassie and Marco and Rachel and I had all made it up those stairs. We had emerged into the hallway of a school that would never seem the same to us again.

And Tobias? He survived, too.

It was almost morning when I was awakened from dead sleep by feathery beating on my window.

I opened it and Tobias flew in.

"You made it," I said. "Oh, man, you had me scared. I figured you were still trapped down there. I mean, I thought you could probably find somewhere to hide in that cavern, but I knew you'd been morphed for a long time. I was worried you wouldn't be able to morph back without getting caught. It's good to see you."

he said.

"Alive," I said. "Alive. I guess that's all that counts."

"Come on, Tobias," I said. "Morph back. You can stay here. I'll even let you have the bed. I could sleep on nails, I'm so tired."

He didn't say anything. And I guess in my heart I'd known it all along. I just didn't want to admit it.

"Come on, Tobias," I said again. "Morph back."

"Just come on, back to human now, dude. No more flying tonight."

he said.

I just stared at him. At his laser-focus eyes, at his wicked beak and sharp talons. And at his wings. At the broad, powerful wings that let him fly.

Tobias said.

I knew there were tears falling down my cheeks, but I didn't care anymore.

I went to the window and looked up at the stars. Somewhere up there, around one of those cold, twinkling stars, was the Andalite home world. Somewhere up there was… hope.

Tobias said.

I nodded and wiped away my tears. "Yeah," I said. "Until then, we fight."