The Stranger (4 page)

I
flew into Tobias's territory. It was also the territory of at least one real horned owl, who would not be happy to have me around. It belonged to Tobias by day and to the owl by night.

I knew a tree where Tobias often slept. Sure enough, he was there. I stopped beating my wings and glided up.

I was already flaring my wings to come in for a landing when Tobias noticed me.

he demanded angrily.

I protested. I knew that some eagles and some falcons will attack hawks.

I settled on the branch beside him, sinking my talons into the soft bark. I could see why Tobias liked this perch. It gave a perfect view of the meadow, with all its tasty prey.

he said.

Tobias didn't say anything. Obviously, he knew I was lying. He just waited for me to tell him, watching me with gold-brown eyes that seemed to drill holes through me.

But I didn't really want to tell him. I mean, I guess I
had
wanted to, or why else would I have flown out to see him? But now it just seemed ridiculous to lay my problems on him.

I said.

he teased.

I said defensively.

really
bothering you? You're all … weird. You don't seem like you.>

I said.

As soon as the words were out of my head I wished I could call them back.

But Tobias was cool. He just laughed silently.

I said.

Tobias began preening his feathers. It's something he has to do, but it's also a habit he has when he's bothered by something. he added dryly.

For a while I didn't say anything. I couldn't. I was too busy hating myself for bringing this up with Tobias. Tobias, of all people! He was already a casualty in this war. He was trapped in a hawk morph. And here I was thinking of bailing out?

What was the matter with me? I couldn't leave. Leave Tobias living in the forest? Leave my best friend, Cassie, to fight, maybe to die, so I could cut and run? Leave Jake and Marco and Ax? Why? Because my dad was lonely and I could take gymnastics classes?

No. I wasn't okay. I felt sick. What was the matter with me? I couldn't leave. I couldn't give up. I lied. Yeerk Pool Two: Animorphs' Revenge
, right?>

Tobias said.

I said.

home
,> Tobias advised.

I opened my wings and beat them powerfully, sliding through the dead air of night.

But I did not go home. I flew around a while, trying to get a grip on the confusion in my head. But I couldn't. And I couldn't go home yet. I knew I would just lie there in bed, eyes wide open.

I turned and headed south.

F
rom the air, The Gardens looks very different than it does from the ground. The roller coaster doesn't look nearly as tall or scary. And flying above the zoo area, you mostly just see the roofs of the various interior exhibits. The rest of it seems, at first, to be sparse woods, with cement pathways winding in and around and through, like curled ribbons.

Looking closer, I could see the separate habitats. The trees and the running stream of the tiger area. The open field for the bison, separated by a tall fence from the impalas.

I glided over to the lions. Most were sleeping by a tree. One female was ranging around restlessly, like she was looking for something.

It took a while to find the bears. I wasn't interested in the little black bears. Or the polar bears. I was looking for the grizzlies.

I wanted power.

There they were in a habitat of trees and rocks and a deep water-filled moat fed by a tumbling, rushing stream.

There were two, a male and female pair. Both were asleep, sprawled across the rocks. The male was bigger. That's what I wanted. Big. Powerful. Fearless. If I was going back to the Yeerk pool, I wanted something desperately dangerous.

Leave? Move out of town? Give up? No way.

No way.

And my dad? I would still see him when he came to town. That's what jets were for.

I landed and began to morph back. To revert to my true human form. My feathers melted and ran together and became pink. My beak broke into teeth. My talons became smooth toes. My insides gurgled and squished and sloshed as some organs grew and others changed and others reappeared from nothing.

The bear heard the sounds of my bones stretching, and the faint rustle of feathers melting together to become flesh. He opened one eye and looked at me without understanding or fear.

He was well fed. He had been in the zoo for many years, and had all but forgotten the wariness of living in the wild. I was just something that smelled a little like a bird and a little like a human.

I reached a trembling human hand down to touch the rough coat of the grizzly bear. His nearsighted eyes watched me. I was nothing to him. I could not hurt him. He could destroy me without bothering even to wake up fully.

He was beyond fear. Beyond doubt. Beyond pain.

“It must be nice,” I whispered to him.

I touched him and felt his power flow into me.

And yet, as I absorbed his DNA and imagined myself becoming this fearless creature, I still could not forget the look in my father's eyes, or the quaver in his voice saying, “But, gee, Rachel, I think it could be okay, you know?”

I could already feel the emptiness his moving would leave in my life. He could say he'd come back every other week. He could say we'd still see each other just as much. But I knew it wouldn't be that way.

I could imagine him packing up to go.

I could remember the screams in the Yeerk pool.

I could remember Tobias trying to joke about college.

Too much. Things that were small and personal, and things that were huge, all swirled together in my head. Nothing made sense. It was too much stuff. Too much fear and guilt and loneliness. Too many decisions. Too much.

You know, there are days when I just don't feel brave and fearless. There are days when I just want to go to a ball game with my dad and eat popcorn and tune out everything else that's going on. Be a normal kid.

But that wasn't the life I had. Not anymore.

T
he next evening, as planned, we all arrived at the mall separately. I met up with Cassie at the food court.

“Hi. What a huge surprise to see you here,” I said.

“Uh-huh.”

We did a little act for any curious Controller who might be watching, pretending to be surprised to see each other. I looked at my watch. “Perfect. We have fifteen minutes to wander slowly toward The Gap.”

“I saw Jake and Ax down playing video games,” Cassie said. “Poor Jake. You know how unpredictable Ax is when he's in human morph. While I was watching, he tried to eat a stray cigarette butt off the floor.”

Andalites have no mouths and no sense of taste. So whenever Ax played human, he found the sense of taste extremely exciting. He would try to eat everything around him.

I laughed at the image of Ax chewing on a cigarette butt. I was surprised I
could
laugh. This was not a mission I was looking forward to.

We arrived at the store.

“Marco says it's in the last dressing room,” I reminded Cassie. “And we have to assume the people who work here in the store are all Controllers. Speaking of Marco, I wonder if he made it on time?”

“I'm sure he did,” Cassie said. “He seems to be kind of into all this lately.”

“Yeah, what's that about?” I muttered.

Cassie shrugged. “People change, I guess. I feel sorry for Tobias, not being able to come along. It'll tear him up. On the other hand, I'm jealous.”

I nodded in agreement. I was feeling hyper again. Jazzed. The way I usually did before we set out to do something dangerous. Only more so this time. I'll admit it — the Yeerk pool scared me. The idea of that awful place made me sick at heart. And now we were going back down there.

“Time to go to the dressing room,” I said. “Pick something out you want to try on.”

Cassie looked at me blankly. “Like what?”

I rolled my eyes. Cassie cannot shop. She is shopping-impaired. “Just pretend you're me. Grab a sweater or something.”

I spotted Jake and Ax across the room. Ax's human morph is always a little surprising to see because it's a combination of DNA from Jake, Marco, Cassie, and me. He's a guy, but sort of pretty, and with a definite hint of weirdness about him.

I grabbed a sweater for Cassie and held it out for her.

“Like I would ever wear
that
,” she said. “It says ‘dry clean only.'”

We went to the next-to-last dressing room and closed the door behind us.

“Let's do this,” I said tersely.

We had all decided the best way to go was in cockroach morph. The last time we'd morphed into roaches, things had not gone well. But roaches were fast, and their senses were good enough to use for our purposes. Also, they might go unnoticed.

I was not looking forward to doing the roach body again. I don't like becoming anything that can be stepped on. Besides, if you think
looking
at a cockroach is gross, try
being
one.

I looked at Cassie and let out a yelp. Two hugely long antennae were sprouting from her forehead.

“Jeez, you could have warned me you were starting.”

Morphing is not some neat, sensible process where you just gradually become something else. It is much weirder than that. Different changes happen at different times. Body parts appear suddenly, other parts disappear. And the sizes don't always match up till the end.

The first change on Cassie was the sudden appearance of the antennae, which shot straight out of her forehead like two fishing poles.

Then her skin started to get crispy-looking.

At the same time, we were both shrinking, which feels just like falling. I mean, you see the walls shooting up, higher and higher. You see the ground rushing up at you like you're a parachutist whose chute didn't open.

Unfortunately, since it was a dressing room, there were mirrors on two sides.

“AAHHH!” I cried, startled by the nauseating sight of the skin of my back melting into two huge, hard, brown wings.

Cassie was too far gone to say “shh,” but she held one of her hands up to what was left of her lips. Just then her extra legs came popping out of her stomach, and I think I would have yelped again except that I no longer had a mouth.

I heard a slurping sound as the last of my bones dissolved, and I sagged into my exoskeleton.

My clothing was piled around me like a huge collapsed tent.

Human sight was gone now. What I could see was vague and muddy and shattered into a thousand pieces. But I'd had practice being a roach. I could make some sense of the roach's confusing way of seeing.

And there were compensations. The antennae that had sprouted from my head were amazingly good at reading vibrations and smells.

I asked Cassie.

she said.

I said.

The straight pins were steel shafts that looked as big around as the crossbar of a swing set. The sharp ends didn't seem very sharp at this size. And the blunt ends were like big steel beach balls.

I said.

We scurried on our six legs over to a corner underneath the small triangular seat.

Cassie said.

I agreed. When you first morph an animal, it is almost always a struggle to adjust to its particular instincts. We had morphed roaches before, so we were prepared, but the first time I had become a roach it was all I could do to control the panic.

Even now, the roach's jumpy instincts were barely under control. “Run!” it said. “Run!”

I heard loud, crashing vibrations. Something huge moved over our heads. I couldn't see well enough to recognize him, but a few seconds later he began to morph down into our world.

I asked.

After that came Ax, who had to morph back into his Andalite body and then into a roach. Jake grabbed all the clothing we had shed, stuffed it into a bag, and took it away to store in one of the coin lockers out in the mall. Then he came back and morphed into his own cockroach form. His own outer clothing would be sacrificed, left in the dressing room. That would look strange, but not as strange as five separate sets of clothing.

Marco said,

Jake said.

We scampered like a very tiny, very gross army beneath the divider that separated us from the next dressing room. This was the dressing room Marco believed led to the Yeerk pool.

I said.

One of the cooler parts of being a roach is the ability to walk right up most walls. We shot up the wall and cowered beneath the roof formed by the little triangular seat.

I rested, facing straight up on the wall. Tiny spines at the end of my legs gripped the small bumps of the painted wall. I could see two of the others just above me, parked like low-slung tobacco-brown cars. Their antennae waved around, just as mine did, picking up scents, feeling vibrations.

And then, quite suddenly, it happened. The door of the dressing room opened. A shape so tall, it might as well have been a skyscraper, came into the room.

Marco announced. As if we hadn't noticed. As if our little roach brains weren't screaming at us, “Run! Run! Run!”

Then, I heard a soft snap.

The mirror on the back wall of the dressing room swung open. I felt an assault of damp air, rich with a mineral scent. I had smelled that aroma before. Memories came rushing into my head. Memories I wished I could forget.

Jake yelled.

We tore down the wall, hit the carpet, and blazed for the doorway. The feet of the Controller were just ahead of us, monstrous building-sized shoes that lifted and swung ahead, disappearing from sight.

In we went after the Controller. The door closed behind us.

Jake said.

Marco replied.