The Encounter (9 page)

Cassie nodded. “It’s hard standing by while someone else is risking their life,” she said. “I understand
how you feel. But there have been times when
you
were the one taking the risks.”

“Look, we don’t have time to debate this,” Jake said. “We have a plan we’ve all agreed to. Let’s get on with it before the Yeerks show up.” Jake gets peevish when someone questions things after everything has already been decided. Usually it’s Marco getting on his nerves.

“We’ll be okay,” Rachel said confidently. Rachel took the fish in her hand. The fish went limp, as usual, while the acquiring was happening.

Suddenly I couldn’t watch anymore. I’d just had a flash of memory, watching the four of them straining to get out of their wolf bodies. What if they were trapped in fish morph?

The idea of being trapped was still not something any of them really understood. I mean, they knew it had happened to me. But people are funny—they never think something bad will happen to
them.
I knew it could happen.

And to be trapped as a fish? It made me sick just thinking about it. The rest of your life in the body of a fish? Being trapped in a hawk’s body seemed downright pleasant by comparison.

I said. I caught a small breeze and flapped hard to clear the treetops.

It was tough work gaining enough altitude to get a good view of the area. It was mostly dead air all around. But I was glad for the workout. It took my mind off imagining what life would be like if my only friends in the world were trapped as fish in a mountain lake.

I would have laughed if it weren’t so serious. I mean, come on, how many kids have to worry about all their friends becoming fish? Life had definitely gotten strange since that night when we saw the Andalite landing in the construction site.

I circled higher and higher till I could see the entire lake and most of the surrounding area. No Park Rangers. Yet. I wondered if Jake was right and maybe the Yeerks would move on to another lake. Maybe they already had.

Then, there, way down below, on a branch … the hawk. The female I had freed from captivity.

She was watching me. I could see her eyes follow me across the sky. In part, I knew, she was merely watching me for the simple reason that I was in her territory. Hawks are defensive about their territory. They don’t want strangers coming and grabbing all the best prey.

But I had the feeling that there was something more going on. She wanted me to join her. I don’t
know how I knew that, but I did. She wanted me to fly down to her.

Some people think hawks mate for just a season. Some people think they mate for life, and I don’t really know which is true.

One thing I knew for sure: I wasn’t ready to settle down with anyone. Especially not a hawk.

And yet there was this feeling in me. Like … like I
belonged
with her.

I looked away. I would be glad when this mission was over and I no longer had to come here to her territory. She confused me.

Suddenly, movement!

I had let myself be distracted.

Trucks! Jeeps! They were rolling down the road. They were within a mile and moving fast.

I looked frantically for my friends. There they were! I shrugged off the wind beneath my wings and dropped toward them.

I cried.

They ran for the cave. But it was harder to crawl inside in their human bodies. The wolves’ thick pelts had protected them against the scratches and tears of the bushes.

Thwak thwak thwak thwak thwak!

Helicopters skimming above the trees!

Too fast. My friends were still struggling to make
it to the shelter of the cave. One of the helicopters was on a straight line to them.

I muttered. I still had a lot of my speed from the dive. I flapped hard, powering up to maximum speed. Straight at the helicopter.

Straight at it.

I could see the pilot. A Human-Controller. Beside him sat a Hork-Bajir.

Straight at them!

The chopper was doing ninety. I was doing a little less. The distance between me and the chopper’s windshield shortened very fast. They weren’t going to pull up!

T
hwak thwak thwak thwak thwak!

The sound of the rotors was a roar. They were not going to pull up! We were going to hit.

But then, a flicker of the pilot’s eyes, a twitch of his hand on the control stick. I cranked right. The helicopter cranked left. It blew past me like a tornado. The backwash of the rotors caught me and tumbled me through the air.

I fell, upside down. I folded my wings, flared my tail, and spun around. I opened my wings and swooped neatly between two trees.

I banked left and flew over the cave. Rachel was the last one in. She was still clearly visible. The helicopter would almost certainly have seen her.

I watched till she was safely inside.

They couldn’t answer, of course. They were still fully human, so they could hear my thought-speech, but could not respond in kind.

The Yeerks went through the familiar routine. The phony Park Rangers fanned out around the lake with automatic weapons ready. The helicopters buzzed around until they decided the area was free of witnesses.

The helicopters landed and the Hork-Bajir jumped out. They seemed extra careful. Probably, Visser Three had given them all kinds of grief over the guy I had helped to escape the day before.

Visser Three was not a creature you wanted mad at you.

Then, I felt it. The emptiness in the sky. The sense of something monstrously huge moving slowly through the air.

It was above me.

Slowly it appeared, shimmering into reality like some kind of magic trick.

You could never get used to how big that thing was. It felt like someone was hanging a small moon over your head.

I flew out from under it, over closer to the cave. I announced.

From behind the truck ship came the usual guard of Bug fighters. Only instead of two Bug fighters, there were four. The Yeerks were definitely nervous this time. Two of the Bug fighters remained on patrol. The other two landed in the clearing beside the helicopters.

Why? Why the extra security? Was it just because of the guy I had helped to escape?

I felt something new in the air above the hovering truck ship. Another cloaked ship!

Not as large, but from that emptiness in the sky I felt a dread that I had felt before.

The cloak shimmered out and the ship appeared.

Black within black, an out-thrust spear, razor-edged — I had seen this ship before. The Blade ship! I had seen it first at the construction site where the Andalite had been murdered while we cried helplessly.

No wonder the Yeerks were nervous.

The Blade ship lowered toward the landing area.
The Hork-Bajir and Park Rangers on the ground were in a frenzy now, searching the woods as if their lives depended on it.

Tssewww!

Someone had fired a Dracon beam. I looked and saw a deer in mid-leap sizzle and disappear. The Yeerks were shooting anything that moved.

The doors of the Blade ship opened. More Hork-Bajir poured out, Dracon beams leveled. Behind them came a pair of Taxxons, slithering and shimmying on their needle legs, undulating their gross caterpillar bodies.

And last, he stepped out: dainty Andalite hooves. Deadly Andalite tail, like a scorpion’s. The mouthless Andalite face. The two small Andalite arms with too many fingers. The two mobile eyes mounted on antlerlike stalks that turned this way and that, always searching, so that the large main eyes could focus on one thing at a time.

An Andalite body.

But not an Andalite mind. For in that Andalite body lived a Yeerk. The only Andalite-Controller. The only Yeerk ever to enslave an Andalite. And thus, the only Yeerk to have the power to morph.

I dropped down into the trees. I waited till a patrolling Hork-Bajir had walked past the cave where my friends hid.

When I was sure no one would see, I fluttered down and into the cave, scraping the bushes on either side.

“Tobias? Is that you?” Jake whispered.

“What are you doing here? That’s not the plan.”

He’s
here.>

No one asked who. They all knew from the way I had said it.

He
was here.

Visser Three.

W
hat is
he
doing here?” Cassie asked in a low, frightened whisper.

“He’s here to kick butt on his boys,” Marco said, trying to sound tough. “They screwed up and now he’s here to make sure they don’t do it again.”

why
he’s here,> I pointed out.

“A deer?” Cassie cried. “Those stupid jerks. Deer never hurt anyone.”

I reminded them.

“Not with Visser Three hanging around,” Marco agreed.

“I disagree.” It was Rachel. “I think we should still try this. Look, if we pull this off, if we manage to get inside that ship and disable the cloaking device while they’re over the city … this whole thing will be over.”

Jake jumped in to support her. “We’ve always said, if there was just some way to show the world what was happening … well, this is the way. This would be way too big for the Controllers to cover up. I don’t care
who
they are. Even if the mayor and the governor and the entire police force were Controllers, they couldn’t cover up something like this.”

For a while no one spoke. It was Cassie who finally
broke the silence. “There may be a way,” she said. “See, a fish can survive out of water for a couple of minutes. And the fish we’re morphing is small.” She looked at me. “Small enough for a red-tailed hawk to carry.”

Well. That idea got everyone’s attention, I can tell you.

“Excuse me?” Marco shrilled. “Are you saying you want me to not just morph into a fish, but to morph into a fish
out of water
and then be carried through the air by a bird?”

Cassie bit her lip. “I’m just saying it could work.”

“It would work,” Jake said. He and Rachel exchanged a slightly insane look that said, “Okay, let’s try it!”

I said.

“I know it’s dangerous,” Jake said. “But we may never get a chance this good.”

Marco whined. I argued. But in the end it was three against two. Besides, Jake was right: We had a chance to seriously mess up the Yeerks.

I have watched Marco morph into a gorilla, Rachel become an elephant and a shrew and a cat, Cassie become a horse, and Jake become a tiger and a flea (man, was
that
weird!). But this was the first time
anyone had tried morphing into an animal that lived in water.

Cassie insisted on going first. “It was my idea,” she pointed out. She did not point out that she was also the best morpher.

“If you feel like you’re suffocating, you have to back out of the morph,” Jake told her. He took her hand. “Are you listening to me? You have to back out if it gets bad. You can’t pass out halfway into a morph.”

Cassie smiled. “I will. Don’t worry about me.”

She closed her eyes and began to concentrate.

I’ve told you that Cassie is always the best at controlling a morph. She has an almost artistic talent, where she can make it all look kind of cool and not so gross.

But not this time.

As I watched, her hair disappeared completely. Her skin began to harden, like it was coated with varnish or something. Like she had been dipped in clear plastic.

Her eyes swung around to the side of her head. Her face bulged out into a huge mouth that gaped and seemed to be blowing invisible bubbles.

As this happened, she was shrinking. But not fast enough. I could still see every nightmarish change in her body. The way her legs shriveled up, smaller
and smaller, till her legless body fell to the ground.

From her lower back her body stretched out, elongated.

“Ooohhh!” Rachel cried.

A tail had just suddenly spurted from Cassie’s behind. A fish tail.

Now her varnished-looking skin cracked and split into a million scales.

Her ears were gone. Her arms were shriveling. She was no more than two feet long, lying helpless, a monster, on the floor of the cave.

she said, but her thought-speech was shaky.

But at that moment, two slits appeared in her neck.

Gills.

she cried.

“Cassie, pull out of it!” Jake cried in an urgent whisper.

I said grimly.

She was tiny now. Less than a foot long. All that was left of her human body were two very tiny doll hands. They became little fins.

Cassie flopped wildly. Her mouth gasped silently.

“Go!” Jake said.

I closed careful talons around Cassie’s squirming fish body, aimed for the small sliver of sky that I could see through the cave’s opening, and flapped my powerful wings.

I burst out of the cave into fresh air.