idrinkwithmyhooves:

thejakeformerlyknownasprince:

[For anyone else who—like me—never heard of it: Peggy Sue Got Married.]

• The corners of Jake’s mouth are still pulled back into that dangerous smile.  Their little andalite fighter is rushing toward the Blade ship, full steam ahead, already gathering too much momentum to pull back now.  Marco’s gripping the console in front of him so hard his knuckles ache.  The modified Blade ship rushes at them with shocking speed, closing, closing—
• And then…
• Lights.  Noise!  Too much to make sense of.  They’re surrounded on all sides by cacophony.  Flashing, screaming.  Mayhem.  Marco’s halfway through trying to morph in panic when he realizes he can’t.  And then Jake grabs his arm.  Jake, who is about a foot shorter than Marco remembers him being.  Jake, who is baby-faced and wild-eyed.  Before Marco can say anything someone bumps him from behind.  He whips around, but Tobias is already shoving past him, heading deeper into the room.  The arcade.  The arcade at the mall that was destroyed over five years ago in the last days of the war.  And Jake and Tobias both look about thirteen.  Which means…
• Jake calls out a warning, but Tobias ignores them, shoving through the crowd like he’s running for his life.  He’s headed for the far door where two familiar figures have just emerged: one small and short-haired, the other tall and blonde.
• Rachel runs forward two steps.  She and Tobias slam into each other, babbling over one another with questions and exclamations and words on top of words.  Their first pause for breath and they’re kissing, desperately breathing each other’s air, grasping at each other as if they are drowning—or eating each other alive.  His hands drag themselves through her hair as if he wants to pull her even closer but cannot physically manage.  She crosses her arms over his back, devouring his mouth until they are one being.
• “What the hell?” Marco says loudly, looking from mini-Jake to mini-Cassie to the four-armed Rachelntobias creature.  “Seriously.  What the hell.”
• “So we rammed the Blade ship.”  Jake’s face is screwed up in thought.  It looks painful.  “And… and it created some kind of sario rip, and now…”
• “Sario rips can’t bring people back from the dead,” Cassie says quietly.
• Tobias extracts himself from Rachel and looks around as if only just remembering that there are other people present.  “She’s right.  And this has the Ellimist’s fingerprints all over it.”
• Jake drags them all outside before they can say anything else weird within earshot of potential controllers (“hell of a battle, yeah?” Rachel’s saying.  “We won, right?”) and they emerge into the quiet of the warm California evening.  
• “Whatever this is, we’ll figure it out,” Jake says.  “We will.  Let’s… let’s plant to meet at the Gardens tomorrow afternoon.  Get some morphs, figure out what to do next.”
• “What to do next is to go rescue Ax,” Rachel says.  “Now.  If we’re all here, that means he’s stuck twenty thousand leagues under.  So let’s hit the Gardens now that it’s closed, get us some dolphin morphs, and have him back on land before midnight.”
• “I think you’re forgetting.”  Tobias turns toward the construction site, expression grim.  “There’s something else we have to do first.”
• When Elfangor’s ship lands, Cassie slips her hand into Jake’s.  He glances over at her, startled, and she starts to pull away until he gently squeezes her fingers and she stops.
• “We know why you’re here,” Marco calls.  “We’re in, man.  The morphing, the killing, the nightmares, all of it.  God help us, we’re in.”
• Elfangor stumbles—and Tobias catches him before he can fall.  He looks around at them all.  <How…?>
• “Current working theory is that the Ellimist’s messing with us.”  Tobias, with Rachel’s help, lowers him to the ground.  “But you and Mom have used the Time Matrix before, yeah?  So maybe we should just tell you that we’ve had this conversation before and hopefully you won’t think we’re nuts.”
• Jake goes and finds the morphing cube as they continue talking.  One by one they press their hands against its sides.
• “Come with us,” Tobias blurts out, staring desperately into Elfangor’s main eyes.  “Morph, escape.  We can hide you, keep you safe.  We did it with Ax—Aximili—for years—”
• <Aximili survived the Dome ship crash?> Elfangor asks sharply.  <He’s all right?>
• “By any given definition of ‘all right,’ given this is Ax we’re talking about,” Marco says. “Retrieving his sorry butt from the bottom of the Pacific is our sad excuse for weekend plans.”
• “I mean it,” Tobias says, as if neither of them spoke.  “Morph.  Come with us.  You don’t have to die here.”
• Elfangor smiles sadly, the expression never reaching his stalk eyes.  <I can’t, Tobias.  If Visser Three thinks I’m still alive and fighting somewhere on Earth, he’ll annihilate this entire continent before the Council of Thirteen even has time to disapprove.  If he thinks that he’s eliminated the resistance, however, or that there are only a few unknown andalite warriors left on the planet… You’ll have time.  He’ll underestimate you, and you can use that.>
• “But…”  Tobias gasps for air, tears thickening his voice.  “But you can’t just…”
• Elfangor presses the flat of his his tail blade against Tobias’s forehead.  <I am so proud of you, and how I wish I could witness the warrior you will become.  But you must go.  Go, and don’t watch.  The Blade ship is already approaching.>
• He’s right.  There’s no more time for words.  Jake grabs Tobias’s left arm; Rachel grabs his right. They run. The five of them sprint (Tobias hesitating at first, but soon moving willingly) toward the far exit of the construction site.
• They burst out the far side just as the Blade ship is descending upon the andalite fighter behind them.  For a moment they all stare at each other in shock. Then they hug, and wipe tears off their faces, and go home.
• When Tom opens the front door of their house, Jake has already grabbed him in a hug before he thinks through what he’s doing. Stupid, stupid, he tells himself as he feels Temrash 114 jerk back in surprise.  It’s just… it’s been five years. No, it’s been eight.  Jake pulls himself away with a force of will. “I, uh, I got cut from the basketball team,” he mumbles, by way of explanation.
• Marco walks past his dad, not bothering to say a word, and goes for the computer sitting on the desk by the door. He forgot how much technology advanced since the war, he thinks, staring at the boot-up screen and drumming his fingers on the mousepad. Eventually when he manages to log on, he starts entering the code that will allow the crappy internet signal to intercept yeerk messages. It takes all night for him to hack the Sharing’s internal servers, but it’s not like he was going to sleep anyway.
• Tobias goes home with Rachel, although he’s forced to scramble awkwardly up the tree outside her house in order to slide through her window.  Once he’s inside she pulls him into her arms, and pulls them both onto the bed.  They whisper to each other about the things she missed during five years apart, all through the night.
• “Cassie?” her dad says over dinner.  “What were you thinking just now?”  She smiles, and comes out with a lie.  Because there’s no telling them that she was watching her parents in awe, wondering if they were ever really this young.
• The next day they assemble outside the Gardens.  The dolphin exhibit isn’t open for visitors for another two hours, so they wander: Marco to where Big Jim is kept, Rachel to the elephant exhibit, Cassie to the horse stalls, Tobias to the aviary.  Jake’s not actually stupid enough to wander into the tiger enclosure a second time, instead waiting until Cassie can create a diversion long enough for Rachel to morph and pick up the world’s angriest kitty in her trunk in order to carry it over for Jake to acquire.  When all’s said and done they still have time to kill, which is why Jake takes them all to the reptile house, Rachel leads the way to the polar bears, Tobias reluctantly points out the duck pond, and Cassie lets them into the owlery.  They never know what they might need—except that they kind of do know.
• When they finally get the chance to acquire dolphin DNA (Jake asks about orcas, and wilts a little when Cassie points out that exhibit won’t be by for several more months), they all morph ducks and fly out to the shore right away.  It’s a Saturday, and they don’t have much time to waste.
• “Anyone actually remember where the Dome ship was located, last time we found it?” Marco asks, as they pull off their outer clothes.
• “I mean, I know the general direction we should be headed.”  Tobias shrugs.  “Let’s keep going that way for as long as we can, and hopefully—”
• “We’ll run into another helpful whale, I’ll almost get eaten by sharks, Ax-man will blare out a distress signal that summons Visser Three, and it’ll take me two hours to get the taxxon guts out of my hair tonight?” Marco suggests cheerfully.
• “Great plan,” Rachel says.  “Let’s do it.”
• They’re all so much more adult now, Jake thinks with a touch of sadness, and it shows.  None of them allow themselves to get distracted by the dolphins’ playful euphoria, instead forming quickly into a tight pod as they head directly out to sea.  He catches at least two of the others—Cassie and Tobias, if he had to guess—watching the dolphin he knows to be Rachel as if expecting her to disappear at any time.  Rachel and Marco aren’t teasing each other the way they were last time, instead discussing whether to search in a grid or to start yelling for Ax once they get close.
• Demorphing and then re-morphing in the water is surprisingly efficient.  It turns out that Marco remembers how to swim, even if his body is smaller and clumsier than he remembers, and of course Tobias being able to tread water as a human in between morphs makes the whole process much easier.  
• Further proof that they’ve grown up: they’re approaching what Cassie thinks she remembers might be the right area (although she’s already offered eight or nine apologetic explanations that her memory’s not perfect) when they all “see” a sharp-edged shape approaching in their echolocation.  Jake doesn’t even have time to think a command before they’ve all already snapped into battle formation, fanning out behind Rachel at the head of their phalanx.  And then—
• <Prince Jake?> the shark says.
• <Prince Ax?> Jake calls back.  When there’s a collective burst of silent laughter, he says, <Only one of us actually earned that title, dudes.  And it wasn’t me.>
• Their little group slides together with shocking speed, complete now in a way it hasn’t been in five years.  They continue teasing each other the whole way back to shore:
• <However it may have happened, in this timeline I am only an aristh.  So you really shouldn’t call me ‘prince,’ you know.>
• <I know, Prince Ax.>
• This time around the near-giddiness that infects the whole group, causing Rachel to try and knock Marco off course while Tobias dryly lists off all the things he’s not going to miss about being a bird and Cassie points out distant fish species with childlike awe, can’t be chalked up entirely to the dolphin morphs.  Still, Jake thinks, if anyone asked, that would be the excuse they’d give.
• Nonetheless, when they all meet up in Cassie’s barn the following afternoon, they’re all business.  On the chalkboard where Cassie’s dad normally keeps track of his patients and their meds, the six of them start the most exhaustive list they can recall of everything they did in the war and whether or not it actually worked.  One whole side of the board is devoted to a list of people they want to bring into the war as soon as possible—James is at the top of the list, but Jara and Ket are directly below, whereas Arbron and Erek both have question marks next to their names.  There’s another section for people they want to keep out if at all possible, including their families but also celebrities like William Roger Tennant and Jeremy Jason McCole.
• There’s one name none of them have mentioned so far, Rachel thinks.  One person whose presence, or absence, has been a festering sore at the center of this team since he first crawled into their lives.  She doesn’t have a solution for David.  Not yet.  But she will come up with one, she resolves.  Because that’s what she does for this team: she takes out the trash.
• They spend almost an entire afternoon arguing (at one point Cassie’s mom comes out to offer them lemonade, terrifying them all before they remember that Ax is currently human and Tobias doesn’t exactly look suspicious) but at the end of it they have something approaching a plan.
• “We’re going to do it right this time,” Jake says, grimly looking over the rough battle plan doodled across the far wall.  “No mistakes, no needless deaths—”
• “Good luck with that,” Marco drawls.  “The rest of us, who are only human, are going to screw up plenty.  But hey, if we muck it up too badly, the Ellimist will probably just let us start over again, and again, and again…”
• “We get the point,” Rachel says.  She watches Marco startle for the fourth or fifth time as he remembers that yeah, she’s alive.  (None of them have asked her what it was like being dead.  Which is good, because she doesn’t remember anything.  Maybe there’s nothing to remember.)
• The following afternoon, Marco and Tobias and Ax work together to go through every inch of the construction site in a grid pattern, but they find no trace of the morphing cube.  They suspected that might happen.  David didn’t find that thing by accident.  And it didn’t survive the destruction of Elfangor’s fighter by chance, no matter what the Ellimist might claim.
• They have a busy week.  Cassie and Tobias pull Mr. Tidwell aside, tell him outright that they know about Illim and the Yeerk Peace Movement, and set up a cautious line of communication.  Marco takes Ax with him to talk to Erek and the rest of the chee, dodging any questions about the pemalite crystal as they stoke his need to fight back.  Jake gives Rachel backup as she marches up to Mertil and Gafinilan’s front door, rings the bell, and (when Gafinilan answers) announces that she’s recruiting them both to fight and doesn’t care about any vecol nonsense when it’s all hands on deck on this planet.
• Arbron is trickier.  They all admit to one another, when pressed, that they probably couldn’t pick out one taxxon from another in a lineup.  They’re also not sure how to get ahold of the rebellious taxxons without accidentally alerting the voluntary taxxon-controllers to their presence.  Jake tells them to keep thinking about it, but to worry about other problems in the interim.
• Jara Hamee and Ket Halpak are also out of reach for the moment.  The problem there isn’t that the Animorphs don’t know how to find them; it’s that even all six of them aren’t necessarily enough to sit on two hork-bajir-controllers for three whole days as they wait for the yeerks to starve.  Waiting around for the Ellimist to help seems like a bad idea, since they’ve never been able to count on him to do anything.
• On top of that, if they try and recruit James and Erica and the others without being able to offer them the power to morph… “They’ll laugh at us,” Marco says flatly.  “And then James will do that thing where he grabs you and throws you on the floor with, like, his pinky muscles, and then they’ll all laugh at us some more.  And then Collette will call security.”
• Lacking other options, they decide to wait.  Wait for the Ellimist to make his move.  Wait for Crayak to make his.  Hope that, this time around, they get the chance to do it right.  In the meantime, there’s plenty of work to keep them busy.
• The day before the governor of California is due to arrive at the local hospital for an unspecified treatment, a small-scale bomb at just the right power station shuts down the entire grid for that section of the city.  Rumors—which have no traceable origin, but seem to be all over—suggest that there’s going to be another attack, even bigger, on the governor when he arrives.  He cancels the visit.
• “Hey Mom, you think we’d be able to visit Grandpa G this weekend?  We just haven’t seen him in a while, is all.  Could we do that, just for a day or two?”
• Jeremy Jason McCole shuts the door of his dressing room, and gets about half a second into a scream of terror before a thing grabs him from behind and puts a part-human paw over his mouth. “You will not join the Sharing,” the creature sitting at his dressing table (it looks like a horribly mutated grizzly bear, one with blond hair) growls at him.  “You will cease all communication with them.  If you don’t, we’ll know.  And we will come for you.”  Jeremy Jason McCole bobs his head in frantic agreement, and the werewolf (oh Jesus, that’s a werewolf, he’s never seen one before but he knows what one would look like) releases him.  He collapses to the ground, gasping for air, and by the time he finally looks up both monsters are gone.
• “Aunt Ellen?… Yeah, it’s Rachel.  Look, I had a weird experience earlier… And anyway, I wanted to make sure… Could you make sure Saddler’s always wearing a helmet, like, every time he bikes anywhere? … Yeah, Brooke and Justin should probably do the same.  I just don’t want… You’ll do that for me? You’ll make sure? … Oh, no reason… Thanks, you too.”
• None of the other Animorphs ever find out about it, but Taylor’s parents receive an anonymous phone call telling them to check the wiring in their house.  The voice on the other end claims that there have been over a dozen house fires in properties made by the same developer, and that he can’t give out any more information for fear his employers will find out he leaked this information.  Tobias doesn’t know whether or not it works; he never bothers to find out.
• “Ms. Robbinette, hi!  Mind if I call you Nora?”
• “Yes, Marco.  Yes I do.”
• “Sure thing.  Mrs. Robbinette, then.  That was a great class today, with those, uh, binomial quadratic functions and all.”
• “I must say I had no idea you were paying so much attention.  Judging by the expression on your face, you spent the entire class either daydreaming or dozing off.”
• “Yeah, well, I’ve heard it all before.”
• “What?”
• “I just mean, uh, from my dad!  Because he’s taught me a lot about the FOIL stuff.  See, my dad’s a great guy.  Really.  All that stuff about him stealing prescription meds and getting high off pain pills he doesn’t need, it’s… Okay, fine, that’s all true, but he’s really a nice person.  When he’s sober.  Which isn’t that often.”
• “Marco, honey, is there a reason you’re telling me all of this?  If you’re having problems at home, then Mr. Chapman—”
• “He’s thinking of asking you out!  My dad, that is.  Not sure why, since he’s already got two or three girlfriends he’s seeing.  Well, not sure if they’re girlfriends, but a lot of them come by and spend the night.  I don’t mind, not really, and I guess if you don’t mind him cheating on you all the time…”
• “I’m not dating your father, Marco.  And I have no intention of doing so.”
• “And that’s awesome.  Anyway, have a nice day!”
• “But—”
• “See you tomorrow.  Can’t wait to get started on factoring those second-order polynomials!”
• Joe Bob Fenestre’s house, after the grounds are soaked in accelerant by several birds of prey that are illogically each carrying their own gas can, catches on fire.  It burns to the ground in less than an hour, although the fire is controlled enough that the entire household staff and even the guard dogs escape unharmed.  Web Access America goes offline for three hours in the ensuing chaos, leading Marco to compose a fifteen-line lament about how they’re going back to the dark ages.
• They’re all so much less careful this time around, Jake thinks with weary concern.  It all just matters so little, even less than it did when they were first fighting.  He’s twenty-two years old, not thirteen; it’s annoying rather than panic-inducing to realize that he’s already been out over an hour past his parents’ curfew.  His mom’s attempts to ground him are somewhere between exasperating (because they’ll inconvenience him for an hour or two before he can sneak out again) and endearing (she’s just doing her best to be a responsible parent, he can see that now), but either way they don’t slow him down for long.  Still, at this rate—none of them doing any homework, most of them lying only halfheartedly to their families—something’s going to crack.  Much sooner than it did the first time.
• Marco and Tobias are the ones who manage to get footage of William Roger Tennant grabbing one of his own cockatiels out of the air and throwing it at a wall, mostly by lurking in his bushes for several hours at a time with a long-range zoom camera that Ax helped them assemble from Radio Shack parts.  However, Rachel’s the one who walks them through the process of mailing the tape off to her dad, and of ensuring it will make the six o’clock news.  Contact Point gets cancelled (and good riddance, Marco insists) before the Sharing ever comes up in conversation.
• “My parents would kill me if they knew about this,” Rachel mutters.  Somehow the gun—yes, that’s a freaking gun in the brown paper bag she’s holding gingerly—seems so much more awful than the dracon beams or even claws and teeth she’s used before.
• “My parents would probably be fine with it, especially given what’s at stake.”  Marco lets out a high-pitched little laugh.  He’s rubbing at his arms as if he’s cold, even though it’s a perfectly mild night.
• “Fine, then.”  Tobias smiles, although there’s no humor behind it.  “You want to be the one to…?”
• Marco holds up both hands, taking a step back from the bag in Rachel’s hands.  “You know,” he says slyly, “If your parents knew about this, they’d probably give you a freaking medal.”
• “Nuh-uh.”  Tobias crosses his arms.  “I went through all this trouble to steal some perfectly good ski masks.  I’ve done my part.”
• “December sixth, right?”  Rachel cuts the boys off before they can bicker any more.  She’ll be the one to use the gun.  She’s done worse things before, and lived with herself afterwards.  Tom’s alive, and so is David.  An old man who would have had a heart attack in a TV studio is going to live another few boring years.  All things considered, she’s fine.
• “I’m sure.”  Marco is now jumping up and down in place, jitters infecting his whole body.  “He brought it to school on a Monday, said he found it the night before.  I know it was the first Monday of December because we went on winter break just after…”  He coughs, clears his throat.  “It was December sixth.  I’m sure.”
• “Let’s do it.”  Rachel pulls the mask over her own face, tosses the other one to Marco.  Crumpling the paper bag in her pocket, she adjusts her grip on the pistol.
• David is walking home alone, having unwisely cut through the construction site to get from the mall to the suburbs exactly the way they used to do.  He freezes, putting up both hands, when Rachel steps out of the alleyway in front of him and points the gun at his head.  
• “Give us the backpack, asshole,” Marco growls, stepping up behind her.  “Or we’ll blow your head off.”
• David’s face is dead-white, but even Rachel can grudgingly admit that he shows an impressive amount of bravado when he says, “I’m a kid.  I have a couple textbooks and maybe three dollars—”
• “Don’t care.”  Marco steps forward, arms crossed and stance squared in what is clearly an attempt to look bigger than he is.  “Give it up.”
• Rachel thumbs the safety off the gun.  It’s not loaded, but she’s pretty sure even David isn’t stupid enough to test whether it is.
• “Fine, fine.”  He swings it off his shoulder and tosses it at their feet.
• “You got any more money in your pockets?” Rachel wants nothing more than to grab the bag and run for it, but she also knows they have to make this look like a real mugging.
• Rolling his eyes, David shrugs out of his light jacket and tosses that at them too.  “Happy?”
• “Get out of here,” Marco snaps.
• Rachel’s heart is pounding so hard she feels the rush of blood throughout her entire body.  It’s not until they retreat back into the alleyway and pull the morphing cube out of the bottom of David’s bag that she finally feels her heartbeat start to slow.  “Yeah,” she breathes, “Jake’s not exactly going to be annoyed with us for long.”
• That same week, the G7 summit scheduled for the conference center downtown gets cancelled after a bomb goes off in one of the hotel’s satellite buildings.  At least, everyone assumes it must be a bomb, because even the Secret Service agents don’t know of anything else that could cause that much destruction in that little time while leaving the surrounding areas untouched.  If they’d been from Sudan or the Central African Republic instead of California, they might have recognized the aftermath of a rhinoceros rampage when they saw one.
• Two days later, a group of kids wanders into the long-term pediatric care ward of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.  James takes almost as much convincing this time around as he did the first time—none of them have exactly become master persuaders in their old age—but once again he agrees after he sees what the morphing power can do.  Jake gives him the morphing cube for safekeeping, with instructions to use it as he sees fit.  Cassie, at least, suspects that James is going to have a couple hundred new Animorphs ready to go by the time they need his help again.
• The EGS tower gets infiltrated by a large collection of cockroaches, and half an hour later the ground-based kandrona generator gets shut off.  Erek King talks them through the process of hammering a hole in the side and then pouring salt water into the crack.  The damage will look accidental, a product of wear and tear and improper maintenance, but it will also result in the core ceasing to put out its life-giving rays.  This time around the secrecy is a must, because this time around the Yeerk Empire doesn’t even know there are morph-capable agents on Earth at all.  At least, not yet.  It’s only a matter of time, Jake knows.  It’s only a matter of time.  And they have to use their advantage while they have it.
• “This is cruel,” Cassie says.  “It’s cruel and it’s wrong and it’s inexcusable.”
• “Do you have another way?” Marco demands.  “Another way that won’t result in even more people dying?”
• She hunches her shoulders, crossing her arms over her chest where she leans against a post of one of the horse stalls.
• “Seriously, though.”  Jake looks up at Cassie from where he’s sitting on a bale of hay on the floor.  “Do you?  Because I don’t know how to do this without killing so many of them that the rest don’t have the will to fight.”
• It’s just the six of them, sitting around in a circle in Cassie’s barn.  Almost like old times, except for all of the ways it’s not.
• For instance, Rachel thinks, it never occurred to them last time.  Because they never knew.  But they know now: yeerks are like slugs in most of the important ways.  Most importantly of all, if they dump salt in the yeerk pool…
• Saddler did it one time when they were kids, mostly just because he thought it would gross her out since she was a girl.  He’d waited until the little brown slug had slithered up onto the front porch, and then he’d taken his mom’s salt shaker and…
• And the result was more horrible than Rachel could have imagined.  She didn’t know in advance that it would stiffen like that, that the tiny body would convulse and shake.  That despite not making a sound the slug could put out such a visible scream of pain and bewilderment as its very skin peeled back from the pale muscle underneath.  That it would blister and deform as if it cooked alive from the inside.  She never found out how it ended; she’d stomped down as hard as she could, ground the body into the wood of the porch, and then she’d punched Saddler in the face so hard she’d blackened his eye.
• There are three 25-pound bags of road salt leaning against the door frame of the barn.  Marco has already made four and a half jokes about how salt allegedly kills evil things in the old urban legends.
• “We’ll warn the Yeerk Peace Movement in advance,” Jake says.  As if that will make it okay.
• “Let’s do it.”  Rachel doesn’t know what else to say, if there even is anything else.
• In the end it works.  God help them, it works.  They hit the yeerk pool during its peak hours—midafternoon on a Tuesday, when there are always Sharing full members’ meetings—and simply break down the door of the entrance in the closet of their school.  There are no Gleet Biofilters, since Visser Three doesn’t know there are “andalites” on this planet, so it’s no problem at all for the six of them, along with the twenty-three members of James’s team, to burst through the door.  They are mostly elephants or gorillas, creatures that can drag the huge bags of road salt with them, and they are in and out with vicious speed.
• Over one hundred thirty-nine thousand yeerks die in the most horrible way imaginable in the span of about ten minutes.  Cassie thinks, sick to her stomach, that even flushing them into space would have been kinder.
• The seventeen thousand-odd yeerks on the Pool ship are lucky, though they don’t know it.  They are the ones, along with the few surviving yeerks in the pool and the handful at known yeerk-owned locations like the community center, who see Jake’s message when it plays.  Jake is the one speaking into the camera, but Cassie and Marco were the ones who wrote most of the message.
• Jake offers the remainder of the empire peace.  He holds up the morphing cube where the camcorder will pick it up, and explains that he is willing to offer its use to any yeerk who surrenders.  He tells them that he is as weary of fighting as he is sure many of them are, and that if they do not comply then he will slaughter every single one of them.  He lists names: hosts they know are infested, sub-vissers they can find and kill in an instant, plans from within the highest levels of the empire that prove he has insider knowledge.
• The recording isn’t live.  Jake’s not there to see it play.  He, and the other Animorphs, are crowded into the Kings’ basement along with their terrified and confused families.
• Well, not all the Animorphs, and not all their families.  Because Visser One was overseeing the construction of the underwater base that would prepare their troops for Leeran, as they expected she would be.  She also summoned the nearest Bug fighter and took off for command central the instant she got the news, as expected.
• What Visser One couldn’t have expected is the second Bug fighter that rams into hers at top speed.  She doesn’t have time to expect the explosion that comes, or the crash that follows.  She certainly isn’t expecting the gorilla that comes wading through the wreckage toward her, or the young andalite who grabs the dracon beam off her belt before she can even think to reach for it.
• Most surprising of all is the voice that says <Hang in there, Mom.  Not much longer now,> as enormous arms lift her and toss her over one black-furred shoulder.
• He’s right, as it turns out.  Eva lives to see the end of the war a scant month after Visser One dies.  She sees things she never could have imagined: her own son planning battles before he’s old enough for his voice to change.  His best friend, no older, commanding armies hybridized from their own bandit force and the U.S. Military.  Humans and rebellious yeerks and even a handful of taxxons and hork-bajir working together to turn back the andalite force when it finally arrives to “help” with the after-battle cleanup.  Reconstruction.  Something almost like peace.
• <You think someday it’ll end?> Marco asks.  He and Tobias and Ax are floating half a mile up from the area out in back of Cassie’s barn, blatantly spying as they watch her try and work up the gumption to ask Jake out.  So far her first two attempts have petered off into awkward stammering while Jake remains as clueless as ever; any minute now Rachel’s going to get exasperated enough to drag them together by force if she has to.  In the meantime, it’s better than daytime TV.
• <You mean, are we going to wake up one of these days and be, what, back on board the Rachel?> Tobias asks.  <About to die, with none of this ever having happened?>
• <There are no records of a sario rip lasting more than one of your weeks without becoming permanent,> Ax says, but he doesn’t sound that certain.
• <Yeah, well, maybe this is all a weirdly elaborate dream and any minute from now I’m going to wake up.>  Marco tilts around to look at him.  <You ever think of that?>
• <And there she goes,> Tobias says.  Rachel is now standing between Jake and Cassie, gesticulating wildly.  <Marco, if you jinx us, then so help me…>
• <Andalites simply exchange will flowers with one another,> Ax says.  <Have you humans ever considered the merits of such a policy?>  He doesn’t seem particularly interested in the drama below; Marco suspects he’s just looking for every excuse to spend as much time as he can with the others.  The shuttle that will take Ax home to see his parents at long last will be leaving one week from now.  He’s been trying to talk Tobias into coming along to meet his grandparents, and Tobias has already shown signs of wavering.
• <Marco,> Tobias says, <You think too much.  Ax, I’ll come with you, but only if we can be back within a month or two.  It’s a brand new reality, and I’ve got plans.>
• <Plans? When do you ever have plans?>  Marco regrets the words as soon as he says them.  <Does this mean you’re in on my idea about the World Series?> he adds quickly, trying to cover.  <Yankees beat the Braves, four games to nothing, six whole months from now.  If we put down just one or two liiiiittle bets…>
• <You’ve decided, then, that we are still going to be here six months in the future?>  Ax is doing that thing where he’s being a little bit sardonic and a lot bit literal.
• <Oh yeah,> Marco decides.  <I’m so betting on it.>

This post is a gift.