Authors: K. A. Applegate
I flew aimlessly for a while, but I knew in my heart where I was going.
Rachel’s bedroom light was still on. I fluttered down and landed on a birdhouse she had deliberately nailed out there for me to land on when I came over.
I rustled my wing softly against the glass. I scratched with one talon.
A moment later the window slid up. She was there, wearing a bathrobe and fuzzy slippers.
“Hi,” she said. “I was worried about you!”
“We weren’t very sensitive this afternoon,” she said. She spoke in a whisper. We couldn’t let her mother or one of her little sisters overhear her having a one-sided conversation with no one.
“Come inside. I have my bedroom door locked.” I hopped in through the window and fluttered over to her dresser.
Suddenly I realized something was behind me. I turned my head around. It was a mirror. I was looking at myself.
I had a reddish tail of long, straight feathers. The rest of my back was mottled dark brown. I had big shoulders that looked kind of hunched, like I was a football lineman ready for the snap. My head was streamlined. My brown eyes were fierce as I stared over the deadly weapon of my beak.
I turned my head forward, looking away from my reflection.
“What do you mean, Tobias?” I wish I could have smiled. She looked so worried. I wish I could have smiled, just a little, to make her feel better.
“Wh — What … How do you mean?” she asked.
She bit her lip and tried not to let me see. But of course, hawk eyes miss nothing.
“You belong with us,” Rachel said firmly. “You are a human being, Tobias.”
“Because what counts is what is in your head and in your heart,” she said with sudden passion. “A person isn’t his body. A person isn’t what’s on the outside.”
I could see that she wanted to cry. But Rachel is a person with strength that runs all the way through her. Maybe that’s why I came to see her. I needed someone to be sure. I wanted someone to let me borrow a little of their strength.
She went over to her nightstand and opened the drawer. She rummaged for a minute, then came back to me. She was holding a small photograph. She turned it so I could see.
It was me. The me I used to be.
I said.
She nodded. “It’s not a great picture. In real life you look better.”
“Tobias, someday the Andalites will return. If they don’t, we’re all lost, all the human race. If they do come back, I know they’ll have some way to return you to your own body.”
I said.
“I am sure,” she said. She put every ounce of faith into those three words. She wanted me to believe. But I could see the tears that were threatening to well up in her eyes as she lied.
Like I said, hawks don’t miss much.
T
alking to Rachel helped. A little, anyway. I spent the night in my drawer in Jake’s attic.
I spent the next day flying around, waiting for my friends to get out of school. In some ways, I realized, my situation wasn’t all bad. For one thing, I had no homework. For another, I could fly. How many average kids can hit forty miles per hour in level flight and break eighty in a stoop — a dive?
I went to the beach and rode the thermals there. It was best where the cliffs pressed right up against the blue ocean.
I saw some prey, some mice and voles in the
grass along the top of the cliff, but I ignored them. I was Tobias. I was human.
Jake had called a meeting for all of us for that evening in his room. Tom, Jake’s brother, would be away at a meeting of The Sharing.
The Sharing is a front for the Yeerks. They pretend it’s just some kind of Boy Scouts or whatever, but its real purpose is to recruit hosts for the Yeerks.
I’ve gotten into the habit of checking people’s watches from up in the air. Also, you know how banks sometimes will have a big sign showing the time and temperature? Those are helpful, too.
It’s strange the things you miss when you lose your human body. Like showers. Like really sleeping, all the way, totally passed out. Or like knowing what time it is.
In the afternoon I flew back to the school. I drifted around overhead till it let out. Then I waited till I saw Jake, Rachel, Cassie, and Marco come out. They appeared separately. Marco had pointed out that it was bad security for them to be seen together all the time.
I followed the bus with Jake and Rachel in it. They lived closest, just a few blocks away from each other. Marco lived in some apartments on the other side of the boulevard. He lived with just his dad, since his mom drowned a few years ago.
Cassie had to travel farthest, out to the farm, which was about a mile from the others. For me it was about a three-minute flight.
Like I say, there are some good things about having wings. I guess really it’s okay most of the time. Really.
I floated on a nice thermal above Jake’s house, waiting for him to get home. I saw him get off the bus and go inside. I couldn’t see Rachel from where I was because there were trees in the way, but I did see Marco for just a second or two.
I concentrated on watching my friends. That way I didn’t notice the squirrels in the trees as much. Or the mice that poked their little noses from their holes and sniffed the air.
After a while I saw Tom leave Jake’s house.
Tom looks just like Jake, only he’s bigger and has shorter hair. I’d never really known Tom well. But it was during the doomed attempt to rescue him from the Yeerk pool that I was trapped.
He headed down the street, acting nonchalant. Then, a block away, a car pulled up and opened a door. He jumped in.
Off to his meeting of The Sharing.
After a while, I saw the others start to head for Jake’s house. I could identify Rachel easily. She was practicing for her gymnastics class as she walked. She
would walk along the edges of curbs, pretending they were balance beams.
I flew in Jake’s window once everyone was there. I didn’t want it to look like I’d been hanging around all that time with nothing to do.
“About time,” Marco said. “We’ve all been waiting here for, like, an hour.”
They’d been there for about two minutes.
“We better make this kind of quick,” Cassie said. “Ms. Lambert gave us papers to write by the day after tomorrow, and I promised my dad I’d help him release this great horned owl. He was a mess. He’d landed on a power line and got fried. But he’s ready to go now. We have a habitat picked out.”
“Friend of yours, Tobias?” Marco teased me.
The others all shot him nasty looks. But the truth was, it made me feel okay to be teased by Marco. Marco teases everyone.
“He’s a beautiful animal,” Cassie said.
I said.
“Um, okay, look, if Cassie has to get going, maybe we better deal with business,” Jake said.
“Yeah, if you two are done with the bird-talk part of the meeting,” Marco added.
“I have to get going soon, too,” Rachel said. She looked a little embarrassed. “My gymnastics class is putting on an exhibition at the mall.”
“Oh, I’m
there,”
Marco crowed.
“No, you are
not
there,” Rachel snapped. “None of you is going near that place. You know how I feel about having to put on stupid exhibitions.”
Rachel is not one of those people who likes to perform in front of a crowd.
“We have learned how the Yeerks get their air and water,” Jake said, trying to get down to business. “And we even know where they do it. And we more or less know when. There ought to be some way for us to use this information. Any ideas?”
Rachel shrugged. “We try and find a way to destroy the ship.”
Marco raised his hand like he was in class. “How about if we, um, go back to talking about birds?”
Rachel ignored him, as she usually did. “Look, we find some way to destroy that ship and maybe the Yeerks will run out of air and water. Maybe that will even mean that they have to give up and go home.”
“Maybe,” Cassie said. “Or they may have a dozen more of those ships in different places all over the Earth. We don’t know how many ships they have.”
“This one would be all we need if—” Marco began to say. Then I guess he realized he was about to suggest something dangerous. “I mean … nothing.”
“What?” Jake asked him. “What were you going to say? “
Marco looked trapped. He shrugged. “Okay, look, what if that ship didn’t get blown up or disintegrated or whatever. What if it was flying over the city and suddenly the cloaking device was turned off?”
We were all silent while we thought about that image. Suddenly a million people would look up in the sky and see a ship the size of a skyscraper.
“People would probably notice it,” Jake said.
“Oh yeah, they would notice it,” Rachel agreed. “Radar would see it, too. A million eyewitnesses. The Controllers would never be able to cover it up!”
Jake grinned. “The whole world would see. The entire human race would realize what was happening.” He was getting excited now. “And
then
we could go to the authorities. The Controllers wouldn’t be able to stop us! We could tell all we know!”
Rachel’s eyes were gleaming. “We could tell them
about The Sharing. We could turn in Chapman!”
“And you figure Visser Three and his pals are just going to sit around and do nothing?” Marco asked. “Like you said, we have no idea how many ships they have. Or how much power.”
Jake looked a little disappointed.
“And how do you know that?” Marco asked.
I expected Marco to have some smart comeback. But he just nodded. “Yeah, you’re right.”
“This could be our big chance,” Rachel said. “Uncloak that ship, so the whole world can see.”
“I hate to ask this,” Marco said with a groan, “but how do you think you’re going to do that?”
It was Jake who answered. “We’ll have to get inside that ship.” He winked at Marco. “Want to know how?”
Marco shook his head. “Not really.”
“Through the water pipes. As fish.”
Marco sighed. “Jake, I just
told
you I didn’t want to know.”
R
achel and Cassie took off, heading in different directions.
“Have a good show,” Cassie called to Rachel.
“Yeah, right,” Rachel said grumpily.
“I’ll be there soon,” Marco told Rachel. “Don’t fall off any balance beams until I get there.”
Rachel shot Marco one of her “you’re a dead man if you mess with me” looks and disappeared, leaving just Marco, Jake, and me.
“She really kind of likes me,” Marco said, with a wink at Jake and me.
“Uh-uh,” Jake commented dryly. “Look, Tobias,
if we’re going to do this mission, it can’t be till the weekend.”
“The timing. We have to morph to travel up there. There are no buses and we can’t walk that far in human bodies. Even as wolves, though, it takes time. It took more than an hour last time. It just seemed to me that we might want to get up there in the morning, camp out somewhere hidden, and then be ready by afternoon when the Yeerks show up.”
“And this time we may want to travel
around
that other wolf pack’s territory,” Marco pointed out. “I don’t want to get into it with them again.”
It made sense.
“Anyway, it might be a good idea if we had as much information about the area as we can get.” Jake gave me a thoughtful look. “So I was thinking—”
Marco and Jake both laughed. I think Marco was surprised that I could make a joke about myself.
I saw an intense look in Jake’s eyes. He was wondering if I was okay.
He raised an eyebrow and nodded. He had been upset, too. I could imagine. I suspected there had been a lot of nightmares over that mess.
“Okay, so now what?” Marco asked. “Do I sneak into the mall without Rachel being able to see me, or do we all sit around and play video games?”
“I have homework,” Jake said. “And trust me, Marco, if Rachel sees you at the mall making faces while she’s on the balance beam, she will turn into an elephant and stomp you.”
Marco winced. “Remember the good old days when all a girl could do to you was call you names?”
I flew off, leaving them to play video games or do homework, or however they ended up killing time. Either way, it wasn’t something I could participate in.
It’s kind of a shame, really. With my eyesight and the reaction time I have, I could probably be major competition in first-person shooters.
But joysticks and control pads aren’t made for talons.
I swooped out into the cool afternoon.