Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The Encounter

"Look, all I'm saying is that Han Solo would beat the shit out of Indiana Jones. It's no contest, this is the cavemen vs astronauts argument." It was about the fourth time we’d had a “debate” like this in the last couple weeks, and debate is in quotation marks there because if he didn’t cut it out soon he was going to have the debate shoved up his ass.

"And I'm saying you're wrong. All things equal, they're both Harrison Ford, right? So if you put them on an even playing field, it should go 50/50 every time." He turned around, walking backward so that he could face me while he argued. As if looking me in the eye was going to change my opinion any. Why did I even hang out with these assholes again?

"But Han doesn't play on an even playing field," in comes Ryan from my right, butting into the debate. Nothing new there. "There's no way he wouldn't go into the fight without some kind of blaster or something up his sleeve. He's a bounty hunter, he knows better than that."

"Shut up, Ryan." That was Michael, shutting down a dissenting opinion.

Ahead of us, Jack lifted up the tarp covering up the gap in the fence that all the kids used to cut through the old construction site, giving us all a chance to crawl through before he followed behind. The construction site had been abandoned since Jack and I were in elementary school, if not before, and with that kind of constant temptation right between our houses and the arcade, it was a wonder we didn’t cave our little dumbass skulls in years ago.

"What other movies has Harrison Ford been in?" Ray asked. He was the kind of kid who, looking at him, you’d be forgiven for assuming that he’s the kind of brooding little dickhead who’s got girls dripping off of him. You’d be forgiven, but you’d still be fucking wrong. He may have looked cute and mysterious, but around people he didn’t know the kid was shy as dicks. He and Michael were like me and Jack - they went so far back and knew each other so well you’d think they were gay or related.

"Uh... There was that one where he played the guy who did stuff."

"Oh, didn't he play the president in some movie?"

"Uh, guys?" Jack said, so quiet I almost missed it. The only reason I heard Jack at all was because I’d already turned to look at him, expecting him to chime in with another film or two.

"Oh yeah, I remember now!" Michael said.

"Guys!" Jack yelled, grabbing Ryan’s sleeve and giving it a tug to get his attention. He’d stopped dead in his tracks and was looking up at the sky. The lads jumped a little at his tone, and when they turned to face him Michael already had his mouth half-open to protest before Jack added: "There's not supposed to be a meteor shower or anything tonight...right?"

"No," Ryan "the science guy" Haywood said hesitantly, his tone troubled as we all followed Jack's finger to the white streak hurtling through the sky. It looked like a plane, or the biggest damn comet any of us had ever seen.

"Hey, wait a... Is that thing getting bigger?" Ray asked, straightening his glasses to make sure he was seeing right. It would’ve been funny to watch him, Michael, and Jack pushing their glasses up at once if Ryan and I weren’t squinting up at the sky with our mouths open too. Sure enough, whatever that white thing was didn’t seem to be moving across the sky as much as it was just punching straight through it and hurtling toward us.

Oh, fuck no. I was not on board for this Armageddon bullshit.

“Fuck this shit,” was what made it out of my mouth, as I proceeded to turn and head right back toward the hole in the fence. If I was going to die tonight, I was going to do it whooping someone’s ass at Tekken.

“Geoff, where the fuck are you--” The rest of Michael’s words were drowned out by a loud whoosh of engines and wind as whatever it was swooped right over our goddamn heads.

Turns out, when something that big hits the ground about a hundred feet away from you, it knocks your ass to the ground. Michael ended up sprawled across my back, which I only noticed because that sort of thing makes it hard to fucking breathe.

“Get off me, asshole,” I muttered, giving him a shove.

“What the hell was that?” Jack asked, looking between me and the dust cloud that was only just starting to dissipate around us.

“Well, if it was a bomb we’d all be dust,” Ryan supplied helpfully, rubbing his head.

“Should we go see?” Ray asked, the first one back on his feet. “Make sure no one’s hurt?”

“Ray-”

“Why not? Maybe we’ll find something cool.” Michael took Ray’s hand, pulling himself to his feet.

“Ooh, like a meteor?” Ray the philanthropist easily distracted by the idea of something shiny. I stared wearily at Jack’s offered hand, giving him my best “are you seriously about to go along with this?” look. To which he responded with his own “could be an adventure” smile that he’d been using to get me to go along with his (and others’) stupid ideas for years. I let him pull me to my feet.

God, I hated that fucking smile.

-----

The giant crater in the middle of the construction site was a pretty good indicator of the party spot. What we weren’t expecting was the school bus-sized plane-looking thing in the middle of the hole. Reentry had scraped off a lot of the trimmings, but it sure didn’t look like any kind of satellite I’d ever heard of. It had two great big wings off the sides that were half-buried in the ground, and a massive gun or rocket launcher or something arcing up like a tail from the back of the ship.

“I’ll give you ten bucks if you go touch it,” I hissed to Michael.

“Done,” Michael said. Ryan put out an arm and stopped him before he jumped down the side of the pit.

There was a low hiss coming from the pod-like thing. I felt Michael shrink back in the space next to me, losing his nerve when a hatch opened in the side of the shuttle (it had to be some kind of a shuttle, right? Right), and I probably should’ve been more worried but the first hysterical thought that popped into my head was that I wasn’t going to owe Michael that ten after all.

And then a figure appeared in the smoke pouring out of the hatch.

This wasn’t Armageddon, this was an episode of the goddamned X-Files.

The figure, pretty damn tall and definitely not human, managed to make it down the gangway that emerged from the hatch, but that was about as far as it got before its legs crumpled beneath it and it fell to the ground. It was hard to see any details from where we were, but shape-wise it looked almost like a centaur. I glanced over at Jack at my other side when I saw his hands shift on the plastic barrel in front of us, and I saw his shoulders tense like he was going to push himself up.

“See,” Ray hissed, all the way from Ryan’s other side. “I told you someone was hurt.”

“Ray, don’t you fucking dare,” I hissed back. “You don’t know where that thing’s been, it’s probably got space herpes or mad cow disease or something.”

“I’m not gonna make out with it, I just want to see if it’s okay,” Ray argued. “Come on, Ryan, your mom’s a vet.”

“Uh, that doesn’t mean that I’m qualified to be a--” our conversation died in our throats when the alien (yep no doubt about it that’s a fucking alien) swiveled its head in our direction.

“Shit!” we all ducked down, backs to the pile of junk, and glanced at each other in silence for a moment.

“Do you think it saw us?”

<Come out here, young ones.> The voice was totally invasive but also kind of soothing. Like an old friend, almost. More importantly, I somehow understood it without the sound traveling into my ears. It sounded like it was right there with us, but there was no one there other than Jack, Michael, Ryan, Ray, and myself.

If I hadn’t gone to the bathroom before we left the arcade I probably would have shit my pants.

“Did you hear that?” Ryan asked. I nodded.

“Do you think it was--”

<I don’t have much time. Please, I mean you no harm.> The soothing feeling was still there - if anything, it got stronger. I actually believed him. Ray turned around and poked his head back up over the side, and we watched him bite his lip in thought for a minute.

Then he just vaulted the makeshift wall, leaving us all sitting there with our thumbs up our asses.

“Ray!” Ryan and Michael yelled, the first ones to jump up and go after him. Jack was close behind them, and I watched those assholes skid down the side of the pit before I groaned and followed them.

Up close, it became pretty damn clear that our own personal E.T. had gotten pretty fucked up by something. And there was no way in hell he would fit into a bicycle basket. He was head to toe bright blue, and centaur probably was the best way to describe him, although his animal half didn’t look like a horse. His tail was flopped on the ground behind him, either because he didn’t have the strength to lift it or because he was trying to make us feel better, but somehow the fucking scythe blade at the end of it made the gesture seem less comforting.

The longer I looked at him, though, the more at ease I felt. Like he was letting us know somehow that he really did mean us no harm.

“You’re hurt…” Ray said.

<I am dying,> the alien corrected, turning his huge green eyes on each of us in turn. They were so alien and so distracting I almost didn’t notice that he had two more eyes mounted on antenna coming out of his head, smaller but just as green as his two main eyes. He also had three vertical slits where his nose should be, and no mouth at all. But other than that and the blue thing, he looked like a weird, mostly bald human with big pointed ears. <But before I do, there is something important that I must tell you… and give you.>

Ray had dropped to his knees next to the gentle giant, offering his shoulders for him to lean on. Whatever it was, he was too proud to take him up on it, holding himself up through sheer force of will at this point.

<My name is Prince Reilig-Effilid-Ymotana. I am an Andalite; my people mean you no harm. But we are not the only race who knows of Earth. The Yeerks are a parasitic race who enslave their hosts by entering through the ear canal to take over their minds and bodies.>

I glanced at Jack and Ryan. They seemed to believe this about as much as I did.

“So you’re telling us that there’s an army of parasitic brain slugs on their way to enslave the human race?” I asked. The alien nodded.

“But we’re just a bunch of dumb kids,” Michael said. “What the hell are we going to do, ask them nicely to leave us alone?”

<That is true. Alone, you stand no chance against the Yeerk Empire. Their power is vast and their resources nearly limitless. You will not defeat them. But I can give you the power to fight them until the Andalite fleet arrives,> he said. His stalk-eyes swiveled toward me, pinning me under their weird bright green alien gaze. <Go into my ship and bring me the small, blue cube. It contains the secret to a power that my people developed.> I glanced at the others, and then up the gangway into the ship.

The first thing that I noticed as I stepped into the alien’s ship was that there wasn’t anywhere to sit. There was an open space in the middle of the floor, probably where he stood, and then there was a series of panels in front of the window. No seatbelts or anything, no wonder he’d gotten beat up in this thing. I found the cube he was talking about, sitting by itself on a stand. It was pretty small, but a lot heavier than it looked. It glowed under my hands like it knew what was coming. That made one of us. On my way out, I noticed a picture frame next to the command center - I couldn’t tell aliens apart to save my life, but it looked like there were two adults (one blue, like our new friend, and one more of a purple), a young adult, and a kid. Calf? Foal? Fawn? Three big ones and a little one.

I didn’t like knowing that this guy had a family. A family who probably didn’t even know he was stranded here, a million light-years away from home, dying while a bunch of dumb teenagers stood around with their mouths open. When I got back to the others, I handed the cube to the prince, watching the way the glow shone off of his matching blue fur. <Each of you lay your hand on one side of this cube, and it will grant you the power to morph into any being that you acquire. The Yeerks do not expect this planet to fight back. You have the element of surprise.>

Michael reached out first, putting his hand against one side of the cube. Jack followed him, and then Ryan. I looked at Ray, trying to read what he was thinking about this. He was looking at me like he was waiting to see what I would do before he acted. I took a deep breath.

“I can’t believe I’m gonna do this,” I muttered, and then pressed my left hand to the top of the cube. With the alien’s hand holding the bottom, that left one open side for Ray. He screwed up his courage with a grin.

“I mean, yolo, right?” and then his hand joined ours, and the bright blue glow grew brighter, the cube warming under our palms. Tingles shot up my arm, but even though the thought occurred me to pull my hand away I couldn’t bring myself to. The wind picked up around us, and I looked up to see that the sky had turned gray and stormy. As the tingles subsided, we all blinked dazedly, staring at our hands and then at each other.

<In order to acquire an animal, simply touch it and focus on absorbing its DNA. Then you will be able to morph into that animal at will. But be warned, you must not stay in a morph for more than two earth hours.>

“Why not?” Jack asked.

<Because you will be trapped in that morph and never be able to regain your true form.>

“...Sounds like a pretty good reason to me,” Ryan said.

The wind picked up again. The alien’s eye stalks turned upward, scanning the sky. I suddenly felt like we weren’t as alone as I had originally thought.

“Are there more of you?” I asked, not really wanting to get dragged into some kind of weird alien funeral. Prince Reilig shook his head.

<No. More of them.> Oh. <You have to go, now. There’s not much time.>

“You’re coming with us,” Ray said, determined, butting his shoulder up under the alien’s arm and trying to get him to his feet.

<It’s too late for me. You five get out of here - your lives are more important than mine. Now go!> Prince Reilig yelled into our brains, ringing like static. Ryan and Jack had already started hauling ass back to our hideout. Michael faltered when Ray didn’t start bolting. The alien prince laid his hand against Ray's forehead and closed his eyes, his stalk eyes bowing in concentration. Ray looked him in all four of his eyes for a minute, then nodded. Michael held out his hand for Ray, who took it with his free hand and the two of them headed for safety. I turned to follow, but spared one last glance for the green-eyed alien.

<If you lead them half as well as you care for them, the Yeerks don’t stand a chance,> his voice came through into my thoughts, pretty different from the tone he’d been using before. If he had a mouth I would’ve sworn he was smiling. I didn’t really know what he’d meant by that, but there wasn’t any time to ask him to elaborate.

When another spaceship came in like it was about to land near the place where Prince Reilig’s had crashed, I bolted up the slope and dove behind the pile of junk.

We all watched in shock as the hatch on the new ship, a huge black thing that looked like some kind of axe, opened, and out stepped an even bigger version of our new friend.

<Prince Reilig,> the other andalite sneered. It was a little unnerving how easy it was to read their emotions by their tone. <What a pleasure it is to meet you in the flesh.>

<Visser Three,> Reilig spat defiantly. <You’ll never win. The Andalite army will stop you from staking any claim on this planet-> The new guy’s big tail blade was pressed up to Reilig’s throat. I felt Ray tense next to me and I reached out and put an arm around his shoulders, not surprised to see Michael on his other side still clinging to his hand.

<Your precious army is spread too thin. While they’re scrambling to win the war elsewhere in the galaxy, we’ll infest this entire planet. And then with an army of billions, we’ll turn our ships toward your precious home world and I will personally oversee the infestation of your. Entire. Family.> The laugh that followed was probably one of the grossest things I’d ever felt, and the worst part was that it was inside, and I felt filthy just for letting it in my brain. <It’s a shame you won’t be alive to see it.>

And then we noticed him morphing. His shape shifted and stretched, knotty scales sprouting up on his body as his fur and hooves disappeared, leaving a grotesque, clawed, fucking enormous creature in his place. It picked up Prince Reilig like a finger sandwich, dangling him by his long tail as the andalite kicked and screamed.

I shut my eyes and reached over to cover Ray’s, fingers digging into his shoulder at the sound of bones crunching and the abrupt, ringing lack of screaming.

“Oh my fuck,” Michael croaked.

“Hey! Up there!” Fuck.

“Show’s over!” I was on my feet and making sure that the others were too, bringing up the rear so if anyone was caught it would be me. We scrambled around a corner of a half-built building, only half-listening to the building chaos behind us.

“Fuck!” Jack cried out. His foot was stuck in a broken chunk of pipe. I growled and dropped to my knees next to him, pulling on his ankle.

“You dumb motherfucker, why the hell weren’t you watching where you were going?” I snapped.

“You get the fuck out of here, Geoff,” he said, after the first few pulls did nothing.

“No! I’m not leaving my best friend to get some kind of fucking space slug for a headmate, goddamnit!”

They were getting closer. And whatever “they” was wasn’t entirely human, either. When I saw the thing that rounded the corner, I froze up in shock. Jack did too. It looked like someone turned a blender into a transformer, and then bred that with Edward Scissorhands.

Point is, it was big and scary and had a lot of fucking knives.

Michael, Ray, and Ryan had come up and started trying to pull Jack out. I looked between them and the thing, and I knew I had a decision to make right then.

It wasn’t much of a fucking choice. I stood up and ran back down the hill, turning away from the others.

“Hey! Asshole!” I yelled. “You hungry? Come get some, big guy!” Whatever the fuck it was sniffed at the air a couple of times before turning its gaze on me. The minute it started charging, I ran, leading it away from Jack, Michael, Ray, and Ryan.

“Come on! Soup’s on, motherfucker!” I yelled, keeping its attention. I nearly fell scrambling around a corner, and saw my salvation in a huge concrete pipe. I felt one of the knees of my pants rip as I threw myself inside, crawling as far as I could into it only to see that the other end was pretty damn blocked except for a hole way too small for my ass to crawl through. My heart was pounding like it was trying to pop out of my chest, and when I saw those big-ass chicken legs walk in front of the tunnel, pause, and keep going, I felt like I was about to fucking die.

Now the question was how the fuck was I going to get out of there?

The answer came with a squeak from the hole by my head. A big brown rat had its head poked into the hole, sniffing me out with whiskers twitching. It took a minute for the idea to come to me. It would either work or I was super fucked. Either way, it was worth a shot. I reached out carefully, grabbing the rat by its back so it couldn’t turn around and bite me. It let out a shriek in protest, but when I closed my eyes and concentrated on the rat, it went quiet in my hands. I felt the same kind of warmth in my hand that I’d felt when I’d touched the cube, and I opened my eyes when I felt the rat start squirming.

I set it down and watched it scurry out of the pipe, probably to go get a stiff drink and tell its little rat friends all about the crazy asshole who felt it up. Human feet appeared at the end of the pipe.

“Did you find them?”

“No sir, they managed to escape.” I felt like I just got punched in the chest. Those assholes had made it. They were safe. Now I just had to get my ass out of there and find them. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the rat that I’d just molested.

Next thing I knew, I could hear and feel my bones crunching and changing shape. My skull shifted and elongated, my tailbone stretched its way out, my organs shrunk and realigned themselves. I felt my ears move up my head, and I felt fur sprouting from every inch of my body. It felt like it lasted for fucking ever, but when I opened my eyes everything was a fuckton bigger than it had been before.

I was a rat.

And then the instincts hit me. Run, run, runrunrunrunrun. Dark. Closed. Escape. Escape escape escape. Before I could stop it, my body was doing just that, throwing itself this way and that under the blanket holding me down. The more I got tangled in it the more I panicked that I’d been caught, but when I finally slipped out from under it I looked back and realized that it was my clothes.

That hadn’t been something the andalite had warned us about. The sudden taste of freedom seemed to have shocked the rat into letting me wrestle control away from it, and I just sat there for a moment trying to figure out what the fuck I was going to do with my clothes. I was too small to move them or carry them like this.

I ended up headbutting them into a hole in the bottom of the pipe, shoving and pushing until they were completely hidden. Half an hour. I still had an hour and a half left before I got stuck. I’d have to come back for them tomorrow and pray that no one thought to bring a goddamn search dog. By then, the human feet were long gone, and I sprinted out the mouth of the tunnel, taking a sharp left and heading up toward the fence. I was small enough to slip through a gap in the chain link, and I felt like I was fucking flying with how fast I was running down the street.

I was home free. I was safe, my friends were safe, and that weird cube thing had actually worked. The world was fucking ending, and it was up to me and my asshole friends to stop it.

And I still had to go to school in the goddamn morning.

Chapter Text

I woke up in my bed the next day with Thunder laying on me, and it sure felt like I’d dreamed the whole fucking thing. The weirdest part was how clearly I remembered scattering outside the construction site, as Jack and Ryan ran toward their houses and Ray and I bolted toward ours. It was all way too freaky to be true, but it didn’t feel like a dream. Thunder, the family dog (well, he was my dog because I was the oldest, but he belonged to me and my brothers), huffed in my face and thumped his tail against my knee. That’s when I noticed that I was still wearing the same clothes I wore yesterday. I hadn’t even made it under the covers. I sighed and reached up to pet him, my fingers trailing through his curly fur.

Then it hit me. The alien told us we had the power to change into animals. Why not try it with Thunder? It was just the two of us in my room, it couldn’t hurt. Crazy as it sounded, it was only crazy if it didn’t work, after all. I stopped moving my hand and closed my eyes again, thinking about Thunder. I felt my hand grow hot the same way it had when I’d touched the andalite’s weird cube the night before, and Thunder stopped wagging his tail. The feeling faded after a second.

“Okay, Thunder, get up,” I muttered, giving him a half-hearted shove. For a dog that was half fluff, he could be pretty heavy when he wanted to be. He gave a groan and practically slid onto the floor, standing up on his hind paws and stretching as he dragged his nails down my bedroom door. I rolled my eyes and got up to open it for him, watching him head down the stairs. Then I shut it again and, before I took my hand off the knob, pushed the lock. Just in case.

Concentrate. Step one. I rolled my shoulders and closed my eyes, and imagined becoming the dog.

Almost immediately, I felt hair pushing its way out all over my body. The grinding shift of my bones breaking down into a different shape made me stop, eyes snapping open. The change stopped and I went back to normal, but not before I saw the curly hair down my arms.

“Holy fuck.” Well now I had to make sure it worked all the way, didn’t I? Plus, if the other guys could do it too then there was no way I was going to be the only one to puss out. I grit my teeth and closed my eyes. It started with the bones this time, and it took everything I had not to back out when I felt my face stretching out and my teeth changing shape to fit my new mouth. It knocked me onto my hands and knees, and I felt the curly fur pushing through my skin again. It didn’t hurt, but I could hear it, which was the weirdest thing.

Finally, it stopped. I looked around my room with my new dog’s eye view, and that was when I realized.

I could smell everything. I could practically smell the fucking sunshine, it was like an explosion of scents. I tried to take a step forward, only to notice that I was caught up in something. My jeans. Okay, so clothes didn’t morph with you. Good to know. I kicked them off and almost immediately my tail started wagging.

“Michael? I know you’re up, sweetie, Thunder just came downstairs. It’s time to get ready for school.”

Oh, right.

Oh, right! I needed to talk to the guys! I waited until I heard my mom walk back downstairs, and then I steeled myself to change back. It was a hell of a lot easier now that I knew what to expect, but it still sounded a lot worse than it felt. And then I was sitting on the floor of my bedroom in my underwear, trying to wrap my head around the fact that I’d just spent five minutes as the family poodle.

And if I hadn’t been dreaming that part… That meant that everything else had happened, too. I jumped up and started getting dressed. I had to get to school and see if anyone had seen Geoff. If that asshole had gotten his ass killed drawing that walking blender off of us, I was going to bring him back and kill him again on principle.

Ray and I met Geoff and Jack over the summer when they seemed impressed that Ray was the one whose high scores had been archived in pretty much every game in the arcade. They were a few years older than us, but after we hung out in the mall with them all day Ray and I had pretty much decided that they were a couple of the coolest guys ever. It definitely helped having them on our side when school started, too, since Geoff kind of had a reputation that no one wanted to mess with.

Not that we really needed it. I mean, Ray maybe, but I’d been taking care of myself for years, I didn’t need an upperclassman protecting me now. The four of us made it a routine to go dick around in the arcade for at least a couple of hours after school once a week, but it wasn’t until a few weeks ago that we bumped into Ryan. Jack and Geoff kind of knew him from their classes, but Ray and I had never really seen him before.

He almost beat Ray in a two-player match, and that was when we were sold. I mean, we still didn’t see that much of him at school or anything. He pretty much kept to himself, unlike Geoff and Jack who ruffled our hair as they passed our lockers and made a habit of hassling us at lunch every fucking day. But we started seeing more and more of him at the arcade, and we thought he was pretty cool.

Before we met that alien, we were all just a bunch of normal guys who hung out and played video games. Now we were pretty much drafted into a war that we didn’t even know was going on until that night. It was weird to think of. It was even weirder how normal the walk to school was. It was like the world still hadn’t caught up to the news. Ray was waiting for me on his front step when I walked by, and he jogged down his driveway to catch up with me.

“Did you try and call Geoff last night?” I asked. Ray nodded.

“Yeah, his grandma said he wasn’t home yet,” he said. Neither of us had to mention why that wasn’t exactly comforting. “Hey, I’m sure Jack prolly blew his phone up all night until he got home,” Ray added quickly, bumping my shoulder. “He’s fine, he’s just a lazy asshole.” I grinned a little.

“Yeah. I’m still gonna punch him in the fucking face, though.”

“You do it and I’ll try and hold him still.” We laughed at that mental image. We talked about pretty much nothing all the way to school, about a new console that was coming out and what kind of games it might have, and about if we both saved up and split the cost whose house we should keep it at. It was so normal that I almost forgot about my experiment with Thunder that morning. We both had first period English, and then we didn’t see each other until lunch. Somehow, it was hard to focus on Romeo and Juliet when both of us were distracted by our thoughts.

Second and third period I had with my other best friend, Lindsay. Her dad was the vice-principal, and his opinion of me always found some way to hit a new low whenever she started “acting out.” But after about the third time that I almost burned myself on our lab equipment, Lindsay was onto me.

“-chael? Hey, earth to Michael,” she called, bumping her shoulder against mine.

“Huh? Sorry, Linds, I was miles away.”

“I’ll say,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I asked what you were being so spacey for today. They wear you out at Boys’ Night last night?”

“Uh, yeah. Ray came over and spent the night last night after we left the arcade.” I didn’t want to lie to Lindsay, but not only was I pretty sure that she’d never believe “yeah we met an alien and Geoff might’ve got eaten, so I’m a little distracted because I still haven’t seen him today”, the Andalite’s warning came back to me about how anyone could have one of those slugs in their heads. Not that I thought Lindsay was one of them, but you know, anyone else could be. “Sorry, I guess we didn’t get that much sleep last night.” She waggled her eyebrows at me. I elbowed her in the ribs. “Shut up.”

“That’s okay, Michael, I love you and your boyfriend.”

“He’s not my fucking boyfriend, Lindsay,” I growled.

“Language, Michael,” Mr. Brown, our chemistry teacher, said, hitting our table with his yardstick. Lindsay giggled while I glared at her, jotting down something off of her paper to make it look like I was doing something. She didn’t bring it up again until we split up after class, me to go to lunch and her to go her next class.

“Try not to let him keep you up so late on a school night, dummy,” she teased, and she was gone before I could blow up at her, leaving me with my face hot and angry butterflies that felt like they were trained by the Navy SEALS slamming around in my stomach. It was lunchtime, which was the one time of day I had with all the guys. Even if we couldn’t talk too much about our newfound bullshit powers in front of everyone, we could at least arrange to meet up later and talk about them.

Jack was already at our table when we got there, picking at his bacon and tomato sandwich. My stomach fell when I saw the way his shoulders were slumped forward. So he hadn’t seen Geoff either.

“Hey Jack,” I said, putting my tray down on the table and swinging first one leg then the other under the table. “You not sleep well last night either?” Jack yawned, shaking his head at the same time.

“Couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I tried calling Geoff when I got home, but no one picked up.”

“‘Sup guys?” Ray put his tray down next to mine and hopped over the bench, landing on it hard enough to rattle it a little. He reached over to my tray and swiped a handful of fries to complement his own PB&J and milk lunch. “Anyone seen Geoff today?” Jack and I both shook our heads.

“We might have to think about what we’re gonna do if he got his dumb ass caught,” I muttered, ripping my carton of OJ open.

“If who got whose dumb ass caught?” My head shot up at the familiar voice, and looking at Jack and Ray I wasn’t the only one grinning like an idiot when we saw him.

“Oh my god, you fucking asshole,” I said, as Geoff took his usual seat next to Jack. As soon as he was sitting, Jack shoved his head forward to nearly slam it in his tray, bumping his shoulder hard enough to knock the dumb asshole over.

“You had us worried fucking sick,” Jack said, trying to sound irritated and doing a piss-poor job of it. Geoff just grinned.

“Listen, guys, I did it. Last night,” he said, leaning forward to keep his voice low. We all leaned forward to match him.

“Did what?” I asked.

“You know, the whole…” he moved his hands in kind of a cube shape. “That thing. That was how I got out of there.”

“Holy shit, really? What’d you turn into?” I asked.

“A rat. Lucky bastard just kind of wandered in while I was hiding wondering what the hell I was gonna do next. Let me tell you, it was weird as dicks. Also your clothes don’t change with you, which is a pain in the fucking ass. I missed first period this morning because I had to go back and get them without anyone seeing.” That explained why Jack hadn’t seen him that morning.

“I did it too,” I admitted. “This morning, I tried it out with Thunder.”

“How’d that go?” Ray asked. “And how come you didn’t tell me about it?”

“Geoff’s right- it’s weird as dicks. But it’s also pretty cool. I think I could smell for miles. Mostly I just wanted to lick my balls, though.”

“Yeah, well, what else is new?” We all laughed. I saw Ryan walk into the cafeteria, and half stood up to wave him over.

“Hey! Ryan!” I called. He saw us and walked over, sack lunch in hand. He sat himself on Jack's other side, leaning his forearms on the table. He looked pretty serious, which wasn’t out of the ordinary, especially since we’d all had a lot on our minds.

"So I think we should meet up at my mom's clinic after school," he said. "It's a little ways out of town, I can give you guys a ride if you need one." I looked between Ray, Jack, and Geoff.

"Will your car fit all of us?" Geoff asked.

"Oh, yeah," Ryan said. "No problem at all."

"Cool. Then yeah, I think we need to talk about this--” A couple tables over, two kids started shoving each other around, drawing the attention of a couple of teachers. “--you know, someplace a little less crowded.” I nodded, watching over Geoff’s shoulder as Mr. Tuggey come into the cafeteria drawn out of his office by all the noise.

“Hey! Break it up, boys!” he yelled to the fighting boys. I looked at Geoff, and the look on his face confirmed what I didn’t want to know. I wasn’t just imagining things. Mr. Tuggey was in the construction site last night, he’d been the one who spotted us.

My best friend’s dad was one of them.

----------

It turned out that the reason why Ryan knew his car would fit all of us was because it wasn’t a car, it was a grade-A mom van complete with stick-figure window cling portraits of Ryan’s mom, Ryan, and a small army of cats and dogs. Geoff and Jack started laughing when they saw it. I barely managed to stop myself and only then because I noticed Ryan’s shoulders slump in embarrassment.

“Get in, assholes,” I told Geoff and Jack, getting a noogie from the former for my trouble.

“Hey, dickweed, don’t be bossy,” he teased, climbing in and taking the seat behind Ryan. Jack got in the passenger seat, buckling his seatbelt still with a grin on his face. Ray stoically climbed all the way in the back, perching himself on the edge of his seat and wrapping his arms around the back of the seat next to Geoff, fucking leering at me as I climbed in. When I shut the door and reached for my seatbelt, Ray punched me in the back of the head and immediately sat back out of reach.

“Hey!” I yelled, turning around and taking a swing anyway. “Fuck you!”

“You’re it!” Ray giggled.

“Children, I haven’t even gotten out of the parking lot yet, do I really have to turn this car around?” Ryan asked from the front seat, grinning into the rearview mirror.

“Just drive,” I shot back, buckling my seatbelt and then looking over my shoulder to mouth “I’m gonna get you” at Ray. Ray just shrugged and mouthed back “Yolo” and I almost took his head off his shoulders.

“So why are we going all the way out to your mom’s clinic?” Jack asked, as Ryan put the van in reverse and started the arduous task of trying not to run over any of our stupid-ass peers on his way out of the parking lot.

“Well, for one, because it’s sort of my after-school job,” he said. “And besides, Mom’s got a patient right now I really want to practice with.”

“Me and Geoff have already tried it out,” I said.

“Ray and I haven’t,” Jack said. “Maybe we’ll find something there to practice with too. Besides, it might be easier with us all together so we can see what we’re dealing with.”

“Sounds like a party,” Ray piped up from the backseat, as Ryan turned onto one of the shittons of winding country roads. From what I heard, Ryan’s mom didn’t specialize in farm animals, but she was the only vet in town who knew what she was doing with them so she saw a lot of them.

Whenever the ride got quiet, my mind wandered back to Mr. Tuggey. I wondered if there wasn’t something I could do to make sure that those bastards didn’t get her too. It was my responsibility as her best friend who knew what the fuck was going on to help her.

Trouble was, we didn’t actually have any fucking clue what was going on yet.

“Alright, we’re here,” Ryan said finally, shifting the van into park and turning off the ignition. The parking lot was gravel and big enough for eight cars, or probably about four trailers. The building itself was brick and one-story, with a huge barn looming behind it, and we all piled out of the van and looked at each other. “Mom’s truck’s not here, so we’ve got free run of the place. Come on, let’s head to the barn first,” Ryan said, and we all laughed at how he was practically bouncing. “Now, in here is half boarders and half anything that’s too big to keep in the clinic,” he said. “Right now, we’ve got a couple horses, someone’s ostrich, and a bunch of hunting dogs that’re being boarded for the week.” He grinned. I didn’t know if I liked the sight of that. “And then we’ve got Edgar.”

“And what the fuck is Edgar--” Geoff started to ask, but Ryan pulled the door to the barn open, letting light spill in. Immediately, the sound of dogs barking filled the barn like an echo chamber, followed by a sharp whinny. Ryan practically skipped inside, and we all followed behind him, blinking in the dusty barn. He stopped in front of one of the stalls, folding his arms over the gate and peering in.

“This is Edgar,” he said when we caught up to him.

In the stall was possibly the biggest jet black longhorn bull I’d ever seen.

“That’s Edgar?” Ray asked. “Man, and here I was thinking he had to be like, an alligator or something for you to be so excited about it.”

“Edgar’s been here for months. Remember when we got all that rain and there was sinkholes all over the place? Mom was out on a house call when she heard Edgar. He was stuck in one of the sinkholes, and she had to call the fire department to help get him out. He wasn’t on anyone’s property, and she’s been trying to find his owner after he recovered, but so far no luck. We figure they probably already wrote him off as a loss,” Ryan explained. Edgar lifted his head and padded over. Geoff, who had leaned against the gate as well, all but jumped backward, but the bull only had eyes for Ryan, nosing his arms impatiently. The points of his horns reached up higher than my head.

“Okay, so I started with a rat, Michael turned into his dog, and you’ve decided you’re gonna go for broke and turn into a fucking bull,” Geoff said flatly.

“Go big or go home, right?” Ryan asked, reaching out and putting his hand on Edgar’s head. He just petted him for a minute, and then he closed his eyes and his hand stilled. We watched silently as Edgar’s eyes half-lidded and we waited until Ryan opened his eyes. Edgar snorted at the lack of treats and turned away, flicking his tail at us. Ryan took a couple steps back. “So now I just… Think about Edgar?”

“You kind of have to think about being Edgar,” I said. “It’s gonna feel really weird.”

“I bet it’ll look weirder,” Geoff muttered. “Oh, wait, you uh…” I glanced at him, and then realized what he was getting at.

“Your clothes aren’t gonna change with you,” I said. “Me and Geoff kind of fell out of ours, but I’m gonna go out on a limb and assume that you’re not gonna have any left if you try not taking them off. Ryan’s eyes widened.

“Then I’m gonna ask you guys to turn around. I don’t want to get performance anxiety and end up a minotaur or something.” We laughed and turned.

“So what do you think?” Ray asked. “Think I should go for the ostrich?”

“Not if you want to keep your fingers intact,” Ryan remarked, as we heard his pants flop to the ground.

“Oh, well you know, I kinda need those,” Ray said. I laughed. We heard Ryan suck in a breath and then I cringed at the sound of bones crunching and grinding. It dragged on even longer than I remembered, and it was even worse just listening and not actually going through it.

<Huh. That wasn’t so bad.> It was surreal hearing Ryan’s voice without actually hearing it, the same way we’d heard the alien’s voice. I turned around and saw an exact double of Edgar standing there in front of us, watching us with oddly intelligent brown eyes.

“Ryan?” Geoff asked. The bull flicked his tail.

<Yup. How do I look?>

“Delicious,” Jack joked. Ryan gasped dramatically, and butted Jack’s hand when Jack came forward with his hand outstretched.

<You don’t get to pet the mighty Edgar until you apologize.>

“Did I hurt his mighty feelings?” Another light butt with his huge wet nose. “I am sorry, O Mighty One, for causing you offense.”

<That’s more like it,> Ryan said, letting Jack run his hand over his forehead. He put his head down so that Jack was caged in by the enormous horns. I took a step forward, reminding myself that it was still just Ryan in there, and Ryan wasn’t going to hurt anyone. His fur was smooth and thick, but not really soft. Geoff seemed to get over his own reservations and step up to Ryan’s other side.

“What’s it like?” Ray asked timidly from where he was hanging back. His jacket was zipped up and his arms crossed to cover his red t-shirt.

<I’m not sure I’ve ever given less fucks about anything in my life,> Ryan said. <I feel like I have seen hell and now I just could not care less. It’s liberating.>

“I wonder if that’s because the morph somehow remembers things or if bulls just genuinely don’t give a fuck,” Jack mused.

“Hey, Ry, are you gonna change back and help me and Jack find something to try out?” Ray asked.

<Ugh, fine. Turn around again until I get my pants back on.> We all did so, cringing again at the sound of Ryan changing back to his normal body. “‘Kay, you’re good,” he said after a moment of rustling.

He had a lot more muscles than I expected from a 17-year-old. I mean, I was more ripped than Ray, but Ryan put me to shame. He didn’t look at us until he was pulling his shirt down, giving us a grin.

“That was pretty cool,” he said. “Okay, let’s go inside the main clinic.” He went back to Edgar’s gate and leaned over to let the bull rub his wet nose on Ryan’s face. “Bye, Edgar,” he said, giving Edgar a little noogie between his massive horns. Edgar mooed and shook his head, rattling the posts of his stall.

“We’ve got all kinds of cats and dogs and stuff in the main building,” Ryan said, leading us through a back door after taking out a full keyring from his pocket. The building immediately rang with dogs just going berserk in their stalls, loud and sudden enough to make me flinch. Ryan led us past the dogs into the next room. The soundproofing was impressive, nearly muting the room behind us once the door was shut.

I sneezed.

Of course, the cat room. Geoff must’ve noticed the way that my mood completely tanked, because he took a step closer to me with a worried look on his face. Jack had already found his new best friend, an orange tabby that practically threw itself against the bars of its cage begging to be petted. Jack looked at Ryan, hand hovering over the latch to the cage.

“Go ahead,” Ryan said. “That’s Joe. He’s supposed to go home tomorrow, he’s fine.” When Jack carefully lifted the cat out of the cage, cradling it against his shoulder and soothing him, I noticed that one of the cat’s back legs was in a cast and his front paw had a patch of fur shaved off. Jack closed his eyes and leaned his cheek against the cat’s head, his hand stilling on its fur. The cat laid its head on his shoulder as he acquired its DNA, and he cuddled it for a few extra minutes before reluctantly putting Joe back in his cage.

Ray was looking around with a similar expression to myself, unimpressed with the feline offerings of the clinic. He shot a glance back at the door to the dog kennels, but then Ryan smirked.

“I know just the thing for you, Mister hard to please,” he said a little too cheerfully, going to a cage at the very end of the cat room. He opened it up and lifted out a huge brown rabbit that was about the same size as Joe.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Ray deadpanned, even as Ryan came at him holding the rabbit against his chest about as carefully as someone might hold a baby. Geoff was already laughing, and Ray hadn’t even touched it yet.

“She’s a French Lop,” he said. “At least pet her, seriously. She’s like the second softest rabbit I’ve ever felt.” Ray rolled his eyes, but he reached out and ran his hand carefully down the rabbit’s back. He must have decided that he might as well, because he closed his eyes and the rabbit relaxed in Ryan’s arms, and then he pulled his hand away.

“Alright,” Ray said. “Peer pressure’s a bitch. Let’s get this over with.” Ryan put the rabbit back in the cage and opened the door to one of the exam rooms, which was a pretty claustrophobic space for all five of us.

“Mom won’t even know we’re in here if we keep quiet,” Ryan said, checking his watch. He grinned at Jack and Ray. “Alright, let’s see ‘em!” he said. Ray tossed his hoodie onto the metal exam table and peeled his shirt off after.

“A little privacy?” Jack said. Ryan, Geoff, and I turned around. We heard them rustling around with their clothes, and then the crunching and grinding of bone again. The sound dragged on way too long for them to have started at the same time.

<Well this is different,> Ray’s voice rang through our heads.

<You say different, I say awesome,> Jack retorted. We turned around just in time to see the orange tabby poise himself to leap up onto the exam table, sitting down and primly licking his paw. Ray hopped over to my feet, standing up on his haunches to look up and only barely avoiding falling over.

“How is it?” Geoff asked, standing next to Jack. I bent down and picked Ray up.

<Hey! What the hell, man? At least warn a guy,> he complained, but he didn’t seem too interested in fighting when I carefully shifted my hold on him to the same one Ryan had used on the real deal, running my fingers through the soft, thick fur on the back of Ray’s neck.

“You make a cute rabbit, Ray,” I teased. “I think it really suits you.” Geoff laughed.

“You’re cute as dicks, dude,” he agreed, scratching Ray’s head and behind one ear. Ray nipped at his fingers.

<You guys suck. This better not be some genie magic shit where there’s a limited number of slots and you just wasted one of mine on a fluffy bunny.>

<I agree, Ray, you’re so cute I could just eat you up,> Jack teased, tail flicking mischievously. I felt Ray’s rabbit body tense against my chest.

<Man, why you gotta be like that?> Ray whined. <Fucking predators, I swear to god. If you wanna go, I can take you.>

<I just wanted the reaction,> Jack replied. <Geoff, pet me.>

“Since when am I your bitch?” Geoff asked, even as he reached out and ran his hand down Jack the cat’s head.

<Since third grade,> Jack replied, standing up so that he could pet himself against Geoff’s hand. The purr surprised pretty much all of us.

“I think we lost Jack,” I said.

“He’s taking his place among the host of feline overlords,” Ryan joked.

<I’m still right here,> Jack said. <Sorry, I kind of got lost in the cat instincts for a minute.> Geoff took that as a sign to take his hand back. Jack sat back down again, swishing his tail from side to side. <So this is awesome and all, but I’m not sure how a rat, a cat, a dog, a rabbit, and a bull are going to save the world.>

Jack had a point, and we all knew it. We were going to need a hell of a lot more firepower if we were going to stand a chance.

“My mom might have an in I can use,” Ryan said thoughtfully. “I’ll see what I can do. In the meantime, if you guys want to change back, I could use some help cleaning out the kennels!” Geoff and I stared at him.

“You asshole, did you bring us all the way out here so we could help you do your chores?” Geoff asked.

“Hey, it’s not chores, it’s a job that I don’t get paid for. Think of it as something to put on your resume.”

<Would that go before or after ‘Shapeshifter?’> Jack wondered. I bent down to set Ray back on the floor. He thumped his hind leg against the ground the minute he was free, hopping out of arm’s reach and brushing his face and ears with his front paws.

“There is no way in hell I’m spending my afternoon scooping dog shit,” I scowled.

“Well, you could go muck out Edgar and the horses instead,” Ryan supplied helpfully.

Three guesses how we spent the rest of the afternoon.

Chapter Text

"Any sign of the Andalites?" The voice outside the biology lab made me pause, leaning against the wall next to the door to make sure that I couldn't be seen from the window. We all knew that Mr. Tuggey, our vice principal, was under the control of the Yeerks, but to hear him whispering about Andalites in the hallway was curious.

“Nothing yet, sir,” the other voice reported. I couldn’t believe it. It was Burnie, the president of the A/V club. Burnie, one of the coolest nerds in school. “But our intelligence has led us to believe that they are taking the form of human children, around the age of my host.”

“I want these children found,” Mr. Tuggey snarled. “Or it will be your head I present to Visser Three in their place.”

“Yes sir,” Burnie said. Or, the alien slug controlling him. God, it was hard to believe. I’d helped him set up a basic website for the A/V club last month. Had he been a Controller then, too? That was the problem with the Yeerks - there was no way to tell.

I barely had time to register the doorknob to the biology room turning before I twisted and tried to look busy at the pencil sharpener near the door. I would be lying if I said I didn’t jump a little when Burnie came into the room, but he just looked around the door and smiled.

I actually had to try to smile back. Maybe it was just because I knew now, but there was something that felt unnatural about the look.

“Hey, Ryan. I just forgot my jacket earlier.”

“Oh,” I said. “Cool. I’m just finishing up that lab.” He went to the back of his room where his table was, picking up his jacket. I followed him out of the corner of my eye the whole time, and my heart stopped in my chest when he paused next to my seat. He picked something up off my desk, and then came back over to where I was standing at the pencil sharpener.

“I was just thinking, you should really come to a meeting of The Sharing,” he said, leaning against the closed door with his arms crossed over his chest. I quit fiddling with the pencil sharpener and looked at him. “I think you’d like it, it’s loads of fun.”

“Yeah?” I hoped that didn’t sound as strangled as I thought it did.

“Yeah. A guy like you would fit right in. You ought to convince Geoff and Jack to give it a try, too.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said. Burnie (not Burnie, that...thing in his head) smiled and patted my chest, something thin and hard pressing into my sternum. He pulled his hand away when I raised mine to see what it was.

It was my pencil. All the blood drained out of my face, and I think he could tell because I saw something sharpen in his eyes.

“See ya, Ryan,” he said, heading out of the biology lab. I slumped against the wall the minute I heard his footsteps going off down the hall, my heart racing ninety miles an hour as I tried to stop my hands from shaking.

See, there’s something that you need to know about what’s going on. It would be nice if I could tell you everything, because that would mean that things were relatively normal. And they’re not. They’re so, so not.

It had been a couple days since my friends and I cut through that old construction site on our way back from the arcade. It was originally going to be a mall or a convention center or something, but before they even got the skeleton finished the funding had dried up. It made a convenient, if hazardous, shortcut between the mall and the other guys’ houses, which were right down the road from our school.

It was also the place where we met a real, living alien. He was an Andalite prince, and he’d been fatally wounded in a battle somewhere over Earth. He gave us this power - the power to change into any animal we touch - so that we could fight the Yeerks. We all watched as Visser Three, the only Yeerk who had ever infested an Andalite, morphed into…something, and murdered the Andalite prince.

Now it was up to my friends and I to keep the Yeerks from enslaving the human race. It was a tall order for a bunch of kids, but if we ever told anybody what was going on, we’d be dead. Or worse.

I really didn’t want to think about what “worse” entailed.

There was a faint scratching from the air vent over my head, and then I saw what looked like some whiskers sticking out of the grate.

<Ryan?> I heard Geoff’s voice in my head. It’s how we communicate when we’re in morph - it’s how Andalites communicate all the time, since they don’t have mouths. <I can smell you, but I can’t hardly see for shit.>

“Geoff?” I asked, eyes narrowing at the whiskers I saw poking out from the vent. “You don’t have a free period right now.”

<Simmonds thinks I’m in the can,> he said. Simmonds was the remedial math teacher, well known for not giving more than the most cursory of fucks about where her students were at any given point in time. <Listen, I just saw something weird as dicks. I followed Tuggey into the janitor’s closet just now, and he...opened up the wall, somehow. I didn’t get a good look inside, but Ry, I heard…> I saw Geoff the rat shudder, and his voice cracked in my head. <Tuggey’s hidden a goddamn entrance to the Yeerk pool under the school.>

“Are you sure?” I asked. It was hard to believe he’d do something so obvious, but then again if it was hidden behind a fake wall in the janitor’s closet, maybe not. Still, something as big as the Yeerk Pool surely couldn’t be that easy to hide.

<Positive. Can we all meet at your house after school?>

“No problem.”

<Great,> Geoff said. He still sounded shaken as I saw his whiskers disappear from the vent. <I...Yeah, awesome. I’ll get Jack and the lads.>

“Right now, you better get back to class,” I said. “We’ll talk about it later.”

<Yeah. I just needed to get it off my chest. Holy shit, I can’t believe…> His voice faded out as he skittered further away from me. We were probably also going to need to have a talk about morphing at school, but he sounded so messed up I didn’t have the heart to chide him for it right then. I was still pretty shaken, too, although I had another reason.

I might have just fucked us all with my eavesdropping.

--

“So you think that there’s just a big Yeerk spa hanging out under the school?” Jack asked. We were all hanging out in the barn behind my mom’s vet clinic, watching Geoff pace the floor. Aside from him, I was the only one standing, as I leaned against the wooden door of Edgar’s stall, my arms crossed and my finger tapping anxiously at my bicep. The bull had his nose in his feed tray, munching away lazily.

“If you heard the screaming I heard, you’d be pretty fucking convinced, too,” Geoff snapped.

“Here’s my next question,” Ray chimed in from his spot perched on top of a barrel. Michael had taken the old lawn chair that Mom used when she had to stay out here overnight with a difficult patient, while Jack was watching attentively from a bale of hay. “What are we gonna do about it? I mean, not that I’m not all gung-ho about bringing the fight to them, but right now, Ryan excluded, we’re just bringing knives to a gun fight. Not even knives. More like plastic knives. We need something that can go toe-to-toe with a Hork-Bajir and stand a chance.”

Ray was kind of our info guy when it came to this whole war that we’d found ourselves flung into. That night in the construction site, he was the one who had formed the closest bond with the Andalite prince, and after the next day’s excitement about our first morphs and about the fact that Geoff wasn’t dead in a ditch, he told us that the Andalite had given him some kind of visions. That was how we knew what we did about the Yeerks. And their hosts.

Well, we still didn’t know much about their hosts, but at least “Hork-Bajir” and “Taxxon” rolled off the tongue a little easier than “walking blender” and “giant gelatinous sharkipede.”

“I think we’ve got another complicating factor,” I said finally. They all turned to look at me. I fixed my gaze on Geoff, knowing that what I was about to say would hit him the hardest. “Burnie’s one of them.”

The words hung in the air for a minute. Everyone knew what “one of them” meant, and no one said a word. I watched the emotions flash across Geoff’s face - confusion, betrayal, grief. But then I only had about half a second to register the blaze of anger that took over before I was on my back, blood pouring out of my nose. I heard Edgar snort in his stall, scraping the ground. I saw red.

“Burnie would never let himself become one of those things! You’re lying!” Jack was only barely managing to hold Geoff back from jumping me while I was on the ground, so I made it easier on him by getting to my feet. Geoff had a year of age on me, but I was bigger than him. I could have laughed at the defiant fury in his eyes, if I didn’t feel so damn hopeless myself.

“I overheard him talking to Tuggey outside the bio lab,” I explained, trying to keep my voice level as I raised my hand to wipe some of the blood off of my face and see if my nose was broken. It wasn’t, yet, but if Geoff’s aim was that good a second time I’d have an awkward injury to explain to Mom. “They were talking about Andalites,” I added, spitting out a mouthful of blood and wiping it from the corner of my mouth. “Do you think that’s something that someone who wasn’t one of them would just be casually chatting about with Tuggey?”

“That doesn’t really complicate things,” Jack said, half pleading to Geoff and half contemplative. “All it does is give us more of a reason to fight. Right, Geoff?” Jack was the one who was best suited to keeping the peace. He had one of those quiet, nonviolent personalities that made him a natural mediator. And with tempers like Michael’s in our little group, any help in that regard was definitely appreciated.

“Yeah,” Geoff said, shrugging off Jack’s concerned hands. His shoulders slumped under an invisible weight. “We’re going to get him out of there. Get that thing out of him. Both.” His steely gray eyes looked sharp enough to cut glass. “We’re going to kill two birds with one stone - we wait until the next time the thing in his head needs to feed, and then we tail him into the Yeerk pool and hit them as hard as we can.”

“With what?” Ray asked. “I mean, Peter Cottontail’s a badass but I think Visser MacGregor’s got more than garden implements that he can fight back with.”

“Then we’ll need some heavy ammunition,” Michael said. I didn’t like the look in his eyes when he looked at me. “Hey, Ry-bread, how much gas do you have in the van? I think it’s about time we take a field trip.”

“To where?” I asked, almost afraid of the answer.

“The zoo, obviously,” Michael replied with a grin.

“Michael, I don’t know how well you thought this through,” Ray said, “but we can’t just walk in there and go ‘Hey, we’re the animorphs, can you take us to your biggest and deadliest creatures please?”

“We’re the what?” Jack asked.

“The animorphs. You know, animal morphers.” There was a long pause as we all absorbed the portmanteau.

“Dude, that’s the fucking stupidest name I’ve ever heard,” Michael said. “There’s no way we’re calling ourselves the animorphs, what the fuck?” An argument immediately broke out amidst the laughter.

“What about the Hunters?” Jack proposed. “Because our job is to hunt down these aliens’ weak points and try to wipe them out - or at least ruin their day.”

“I like it,” Geoff said. “But what if it stood for something, too? Like the H.U.N.T.ers?”

“Humanity United against a Numberless Threat?” I proposed, putting my SAT words to good use. I wondered if the SAT even mattered, now, in the face of an intergalactic war that we were suddenly dragged into the middle of.

“That makes us sound a lot cooler than we really are,” Ray quipped. “Sounds good to me.” We all looked at Geoff.

“What’s the plan, boss?” Michael asked. Geoff looked around at all of us, notably meeting my eyes last. His sleepy gaze was sharp, blue eyes meeting mine, but while I was going to stand my ground when I felt like he was being stupid I knew that I would defer to his leadership. I was more of a strategy guy, myself. He was seemingly asking me for confirmation on the question Michael had asked earlier. I nodded.

“Well, it looks like we’re going to the zoo.”

--

“I can tell you one thing, I don’t have thirty bucks to shell out every time we need more firepower,” Geoff grumbled.

“You didn’t have thirty bucks to shell out this time,” I pointed out, putting my wallet back into the back pocket of my pants. “You talked them into giving us a family rate, and then I still had to cover you.”

“I’m still saying, we need to have some plan for sneaking into the park. We can’t just wing it.”

“Actually,” Jack said, pointing up with a smug grin. We all looked up to see the small group of pigeons overhead. It was a pretty good idea, I had to admit. Pigeons were the bird equivalent of the word ‘said’ - no one really questioned them, no matter how big a group they were in (well, maybe not no matter how big, I’m pretty sure people would question a flock of pigeons that looked like it was straight out of Hitchcock. But five? Nah).

“We’ll catch some sky rats later,” Geoff said, glancing around and then dropping his voice down to make sure that we weren’t being overheard. “Right now, let’s find an employee entrance so we can get this over with.”

“We’re closest to Asia,” Jack pointed out, unfolding the mini-map of the zoo that we’d picked up when we got in.

“Dude,” Ray said, his eyes lighting up. “They just opened that new Komodo Dragon exhibit. What’s better firepower than a dragon? Come on.”

“That better not be anywhere near the fucking snake house,” Geoff snapped testily. Jack laughed, which meant that there was probably some kind of story there that I was missing.

The komodo dragon enclosure turned out not to be near the snakes, but rather wedged in between Africa and Asia. There was supposedly two lizards in the enclosure, although we could only see one from the outside. One at a time, Ray, Michael, and I snuck in through the employees only door that was hidden on a fake rock wall, leaving Geoff and Jack as lookouts. Considering how keen Geoff was on looking anywhere but at the lazy reptile sunning himself on a rock, I was pretty sure that they’d intercept any employees that tried to come in. The gate was locked, but Ray could fit one of his skinny wrists through the bars into the area where they left the food for the dragons. He tore up the overpriced hamburger that we’d bought on the way over, pitching it into the metal bowl loudly enough to draw the attention of the nearest dragon.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a komodo dragon move, but it’s actually pretty terrifying. They swagger around like they own the place, forked tongue flicking out to taste the air. Not to mention they’re big. And I mean big. Michael stepped back away from the bars of the cage when the 8-foot lizard slipped into the feeding chamber, hidden from the eyes of the zoo guests.

“Here, Godzilla,” Ray murmured, trying not to sound nervous. “Just a little closer, come on. Look at that nice, tasty burger for you. You hungry? You’re sure drooling a lot.”

“Ray,” I whispered. “That’s not drool. Well, I mean, it’s not entirely drool. Komodo dragons have a bacteria cocktail in their saliva that’s potent enough to kill animals a lot bigger than you.”

“You know, if you’re trying to make me un-nervous, that’s not really the way to go about it,” Ray muttered. The komodo dragon sidled up to the metal food dish, drooling jaws gulping down the hamburger like hors d'oeuvres. Ray slowly reached his arm through the bars, the komodo dragon not really caring as he laid his hand carefully on the upper part of its tail. Ray took a deep breath in to concentrate, and slowly it stopped eating as it fell into the acquisition trance. When he drew his hand back through the bars, it shot us a dirty look, finished its snack, and sauntered back out into the main enclosure.

I let out a sigh of relief, as Ray turned back to us with a grin on his face.

“Alright,” he said. “Who’s next?”

Geoff was. He’d been looking at the map to figure out where we wanted to go next, and he knew exactly what he wanted. Which was how we ended up looking for a way into the bighorn sheep enclosure without being seen. This time the lads were standing guard in the sterile-looking hallway that, it turned out, ran behind and through most of the bigger zoo enclosures, while Geoff, Jack, and I slipped into the enclosure. This gate was unlocked, which was good because unlike the dragons there weren’t any sheep in sight. We slipped in one at a time, with me closest to the door because unlike the other two I didn’t exactly have a morph small enough to hide with if we got busted.

“Stay out of sight,” I reminded them. There was a lip around the edge of the mountainous habitat so that the sheep couldn’t scale it and jump out, and also probably for the exact reason we were using it - to hide handlers from the public view when they came in to toss new salt licks into the enclosure or whatever.

Geoff didn’t seem to hear me, but he seemed like he knew what he was doing. Jack and I watched as he drew the attention of one of the rams, and three hundred pounds of shaggy muscle daintily pranced down to where he was. He must have figured that people in his enclosure meant lunchtime, because he shoved his nose against Geoff's hand roughly before he relaxed and fell into a trance as his DNA became part of Geoff.

That was one of the nice things about the power - the trance. It made it so that we could get up close and personal to all things big and scary, and come away with our bodies pretty much intact. The ram snapped out of the trance before Geoff did, and for a minute it seemed as if he'd lost interest and was starting to wander off. Geoff turned and started to come back toward us, flashing us a grin and a thumbs up. I saw the ram rear up onto his hind hooves, head lowered.

"Behind you!" I hissed. Geoff turned just in time to take three hundred pounds of force right to the diaphragm. Geoff didn't so much go sailing as he crumpled, a pitiful grunt escaping him when he hit the coarse, fake stone wall of the enclosure. In an instant, Jack was at his side, hefting Geoff's arm over his shoulders to help him get to his feet. The ram backed up like it was getting ready for another charge. Without even thinking about it, I was running forward, concentrating on the only morph I had. The only one out of the three of us who stood a chance in a battle of horns against an angry ram.

I concentrated on becoming Edgar.

The thing about morphing is, there's no real way to control it. Not usually, anyway. But as I stood there, putting my own head down to meet the ram, I concentrated on the one part of the bull that I really needed - the horns. Now, morphing is disgusting. You can feel your bones shifting around, but it's a dull, kind of faraway sensation, like when you're at the dentist and your mouth has been shot full of Novocain.

I felt my skull start to thicken. My hair shortened and grew coarser, and the muscles and bones of my neck grew thicker and sturdier. I had my eyes shut, praying that the ram would decide that it was freaked out. If those horns met my head too early, I was done for. My only warning was a slight throb at my temples, before-

THUNK! The massive, heavy horns of the bull appeared. I opened my eyes, straining to find the ram. He had dropped back to the ground and was staring at me with an uncomprehending expression of "What the actual fuck." I started backing away from him, keeping my head down because that was pretty much all I could do. As I got closer to where I knew the door was, I started concentrating on changing back. The horns started shrinking back into my head, and I felt the neck of my t-shirt loosen as my neck went back to its normal size, and my skull thinned back out to normal.

The ram had given up on chasing us out since we were already on our way anyway, and I made sure that he was back up on one of the massive rocks before I turned. I all but fell through as the door opened behind me, heart thudding at the hand on my chest to keep me steady. When my head cleared, I noticed Ray was looking up at me worried, his hand pressed flat to my chest to keep me upright where I'd tripped.

"You alright?" he asked, as the door to the enclosure clicked shut behind us. I cracked a smile and ruffled his short hair.

"I'm fine," I said. "How's Geoff?"

"Sore as dicks," Geoff wheezed. He was pale and trembling a little bit, slumped against the sterile wall of the hallway with Michael kneeling on one side and Jack on the other.

"Maybe we ought to call it a day," Jack murmured thoughtfully. "Geoff, you really don't look good. I think you should go to the hospital." Geoff shook his head.

"No fuckin' hospital," he said. He winced and tensed, clutching at one side with a near-silent cry. Jack was right. He didn't look good. I pulled away from Ray and crouched in front of Geoff, gently but firmly uncurling his tensed muscles and pulling his hand away from his injured side. He hissed and flinched away when I pressed my hand to it.

"You're a fucking idiot," I told him. "You could have broken ribs, ruptured organs, who the hell knows?"

"Never thought I'd end up with such a looker between my legs," he mumbled, stormy grey-blue eyes clouded. Despite my concern, I felt my cheeks get warm.

"Now I know he's fucking delirious," Michael muttered. "He's hitting on Ryan."

"Geoff, look at me," I said firmly, cupping his face in my hands. "You have to concentrate. Morph something, right now."

"Dude, your eyes are pretty as dicks."

"I don't know if dicks are all that--"

"Not the time, Ray. Geoff, morph." Geoff closed his eyes, and there was a brief, horrifying second when I thought that we'd lost him. His skin started turning ashen, but it kept changing color, taking on highlights and lowlights, until grey-brown fur finally popped out all over his skin. His hair schlurped back into his head, and I let go of his face just as his nose and mouth stretched forward into a rat's pointed snout.

"Oh-- Oh, ew, fucking--" Michael fell backwards, staring in shock. Geoff's ears, which already stuck out a pretty big ways, slid up to the top of his head and thinned out until they were like little pink satellite dishes. Thankfully, we didn't have to watch his eyes change shape, but the way that his skull reformed around them and behind his eyelids was still pretty twisted.

At some point, his legs had shrunk up out of his pantlegs, and as we watched his face what had been sparse stubble suddenly sprouted out into whiskers.

Finally, finally he started shrinking. One minute we were staring at a roughly child-sized rat, and the next he had completely vanished into the folds of his clothes. We watched his shirt rise and fall for what felt like an age after the sounds of bones crunching together finally stopped.

"Geoff?" Jack called cautiously. A little pink nose twitched out from the hem of his t-shirt. Jack was the one who picked him up, holding the rat in his hands.

<Uh… Ryan?>

"Yeah?"

<Sorry about, uh. ...Coming onto you.>

"Well, I don't know if you got that far," I joked. "Feeling better enough to change back?"

<Yeah, I'm good.> Jack set the rat down on the floor, and then we stood up, turning our backs to Geoff and making a protective semi-circle around him, wincing in sympathy at the sound of crunching bones. I glanced over at Michael, noticing that he had his arms crossed and his finger tapping at his bicep.

"Are you alright?" I asked. My concern mounted when I saw him draw in a hiss and clench his eyes shut.

"How did you know what to do?" he asked quietly, softly enough that I was pretty sure Jack and Ray didn't hear him. Then, so quietly that I almost didn't hear him: "Weren't you scared, too?"

My heart ached. I didn't know what to say - of course I'd been scared. I put my arm around Michael's shoulders and pulled him against my side.

"He's okay now," I reminded him. "If one of us gets hurt, we just have to talk them through a morph, and they'll be okay." I felt Michael's nod against my shoulder.

"Hey, you kids! What're you doing back here?" ...Oh, shit. I spun around to see the handler at the end of the hallway, blocking the only exit that we were sure of. I glanced into our little protective circle and immediately wished I hadn't.

Geoff was on his hands and knees, but it hardly looked like Geoff. For one, he still had whiskers all over his mostly human face, as well as beady black eyes that looked up at me with something that I was pretty sure was horror. He was as naked as the long pink tail that still hung like a grotesque bullwhip from his tailbone, and even as I watched I could almost hear the schluuurrrp! as all of the vertebrae in his tail disappeared, leaving it looking like a deflated balloon animal.

Needless to say, we couldn't let Mr. Zookeeper see Geoff like this. Jack and Ray were blanking.

"It's, uh… We're getting ready to film something for a class!" I blurted, switching places with Jack. The handler looked skeptical.

"Well, this area is off-limits to guests. What kind of class, exactly?"

"Performance art," Ray chimed in suddenly. I nodded.

"Yeah, performance art. It's for drama class," I explained.

"And what are you boys hiding back there?" the handler asked, gesturing at our obvious lookout posture.

"Uh…" I started. Before I could come up with something, I felt the fabric of what I sincerely hoped was a t-shirt slap against my ear as Geoff jumped up behind us, swinging his shirt wildly over his head with a war cry.

A quick glance confirmed that, yep, he was still buck naked. I tried not to cringe too visibly. Behind me I could hear Jack and Michael trying not to laugh.

"BOOK IT!" Geoff yelled. Michael grabbed Ray's hand and took off deeper into the tunnels. Geoff bolted around our zookeeper friend and headed for the door out back into the park. Jack and I just kind of stood there in shock.

"You two-- stay here!" the zookeeper yelled, pointing at me and Jack before taking off after Geoff.

"...Yeah right," I muttered. "Come on!" Jack and I ran the same direction that the lads had gone, diving down the first hallway that we saw. At the other end of the hallway was two more employees, seemingly in a hurry. There was nowhere to hide. Except…

"In here!" I pulled open the nearest door and shoved Jack in in front of me. We pressed ourselves against the door until we heard the employees pass by the door, hardly even breathing until we were in the clear. Jack slumped down onto a sandy-colored rock.

The rock had a tail. Tipped in a dark brown tuft, it flicked back and forth in a decidedly feline matter.

"...Jack…" I said slowly. "Don't move. Turn your head." He did, looking over his shoulder at what he'd just sat on. Which was the rear end of a very confused, very large male African lion.

The lion's lips curled back into the beginning of what was decidedly not a purr. Jack swallowed.

"Nice kitty..." Jack said, not in a hurry to move because at least if he was leaning on the lion it might buy him a couple of seconds. "Good kitty... I'm gonna just...leave you alone now, okay? Don't eat me." His hand reached down and smoothed over the lion's fur. I only realized what he was doing when the lion's eyelids drooped lazily and his tail stopped flicking. I saw an emergency ladder hidden on the side of the enclosure, and reached out to take Jack's hand. I gave it a tug when he was done acquiring the lion, pointing to the ladder. He nodded and stood up slowly after me. With one last look at the predator, who was quickly coming out of the acquiring trance, we bolted to the ladder, not worrying about being seen.

"Go on, go on," I hissed, giving Jack a boost so he could grab the rungs of the ladder. He grunted as he tried to climb up onto the ladder, and I jumped up to grab on after him. The lion was below me now, considering whether we were worth the effort of the hunt. Jack was a few rungs ahead of me now, and I took a deep breath and swung my arm up to the next rung, feeling my arms burn as I pulled myself up so that I could get my feet on the ladder. Before I knew it, I was up the ladder and Jack was leaning over the top with his hand outstretched to me. I took it and pulled myself up and over, just in time for our friends the zookeepers to run up and spot us.

"Hey, you kids!" one of them yelled. I held onto Jack's hand and pulled him into the crowd of people that had gathered around the lion enclosure. We lost them by ducking into the little alcove where you can watch the manatees underwater, pressing our backs to the fake stone wall as we listened to them run past.

"Thanks, Ryan," Jack said. I grinned at him.

"Fun day at the zoo, huh?" He laughed.

"Let's get out of here and find the others."

--

Geoff was out in the parking lot, dressed and leaning casually against the van when we came out. We'd run into Ray and Michael on our way, so we were pretty relieved to see that Geoff's lucky streak had continued.

"What took you dickheads so long?" he asked, as I unlocked the van and we all piled inside, anxious to head home.

"Ran into a hairy little problem," I said. "What about you? I see you decided to change out of your birthday suit. How'd you lose them?"

"I ducked into the bathroom, went rat, and hid in the trashcan for a few minutes to make sure I'd lost them before I got dressed. Did you all get something useful?"

"Yup," Michael said from the backseat.

"Ditto," Jack chimed in.

"Great," Geoff said. "Now let's go plan a break-in."

--

We decided that the best strategy was a direct one, following some Controllers down into the Yeerk Pool and trying to just not draw attention to ourselves while we checked out the place. Going at night would make it seem more like we belonged there, and it would make it easier to hide until we found someone we could fall in behind.

It was a pretty good plan, all things considered. Pretty stupid, but pretty good. I was getting ready to head back into town after finishing my chores at the clinic, having already told my mom that I was going to hang out at the arcade that night. I pulled my shirt on (one I wouldn't mind losing, just in case the worst came to worst and we had to morph to get out of there) when my mom called up from downstairs.

"Ryan, your friends are here to pick you up!" I froze. I was the only one with a car, and Geoff and the guys wouldn't walk all the way out here. Not when we couldn't really risk being, you know, "together" before a surveillance mission. My heart dropped to the pit of my stomach.

It dropped even further when I got to the bottom of the stairs and saw Burnie and Gus standing there. Gus was another guy in the A/V club: he was the executor of Burnie's grand ideas.

"Hey, Ryan," Burnie said. "You wanna take a walk with us, buddy?" I knew I couldn't risk doing anything in front of my mom. Even if my own safety wasn't dependent on them not finding out about my morphing power, I didn't want them to go after her.

And I didn't trust myself to be able to kill them, if I had to. Briefly I entertained the notion of knocking them out, tying them up and holding them three days until the Yeerks in their heads starved. Here was Burnie, the guy we had all risked our lives to save. I had the chance to save him right here and now.

But what if they'd told someone where they were going? I forced a smile.

"Sure thing," I said. "I'll be back after while, Mom."

"Okay darlin', don't stay out too late!" Mom called back from where she'd retreated to the kitchen already, baking dog biscuits for her patients. I wondered if that was the last time I would ever hear her voice again. Or speak to her with my own tongue. If they got a Yeerk in my head, they'd have everything. My secrets, my friends, my family...

And I couldn't think of anything that I could do to fight back.

Chapter Text

The plan was simple - we were all going to meet in front of Geoff's house around 8, after his grandma had gone to bed, and then walk over to the school from there. It gave us a getaway vehicle if we needed the extra horsepower to escape, since none of us had acquired a set of wings yet, but it was less risky than Ryan just driving straight to the school.

Except now, it was 8:30 and Ryan still hadn't shown up. Michael was pacing the path in front of the house, wearing a cross into the ground like he was planning on praying at it. Ray was sitting on the steps just beneath me, but from the way his brow was furrowed and his lips were pursed I could tell that he was getting worried too. He had been the first one there, because his aunt was out for the night again and wouldn't be back until the following afternoon. I hadn't been able to get past my parents until 8:05, and Michael had to help his younger brothers with their homework before he was able to get out of the house.

But even Michael had been there by 8:15, so when Ryan was a half hour late we were all starting to go from "he had a hard time sneaking out" to "something's happened."

Geoff had already given us enough close calls, with Controllers and wild animals alike, that it was hard not to jump to the worst possible conclusion.

"Maybe we should call him," I suggested quietly. It was a lot more dangerous talking on the phone than anything else, but at this point it was either call him or keep worrying, and for the sake of Michael's blood pressure it was worth a try. Geoff didn't look too much better, either, tapping his foot anxiously on the wooden step next to mine. He stood up and used the spare key to sneak back into the house.

"If he doesn't pick up, we're going without him," he muttered under his breath, even though we all knew the threat was pretty empty. Ray and I sat there and watched Michael keep pacing and snarling like a caged animal for a couple of minutes.

He came out of the house white as a sheet, his sleepy blue eyes the widest I'd seen them. I was on my feet in a second.

"What happened?" I asked, because to get Geoff that spooked the worst-case scenario wasn't an if, anymore. It seemed to jolt Geoff into action, not into words, storming past us and down the road. Ray jumped up to follow him.

"Hey! What did he say?" Michael hissed, jogging to catch up with him.

"They got him," Geoff said. I stopped dead in my tracks. Geoff took a couple more steps before his shoulders slumped and his head dropped forward with a heavy sigh as he turned to face us. Color was flooding his face in angry splotches, now. "His mom told me Burnie and Gus came to pick him up a few minutes ago. I'd bet anything they're already on their way down… down into that place, and they're going to shove one of those slugs in his head and then it'll be bye bye Hunters-"

"Geoff, calm down," I said. "That's not going to happen, because we're going to get him out." Geoff closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

"Right," he said. "The plan doesn't change. We try to sneak in there, and scout out places where we can hide and morph if we have to. We grab Ryan and Burnie and we haul anus. Ray, if we need a distraction you run off and morph first."

"Got it."

"I'll be the muscle if we need it," Michael said. Geoff nodded.

"You and Jack are the brute squad, then. If things start totally shitting up find someplace to morph and take care of it." I nodded, practically feeling the lion's DNA thrumming through my blood. I hadn't tried morphing him yet, but it was still a comfort, even a small one, to know I had such a powerful creature as part of me.

"Roger that," I said. Geoff turned and started walking again, and I jogged to fall into step at his side, letting the lads lag behind.

"Ryan will be okay."

"I know," Geoff said. "I'm worried about those other motherfuckers." It wasn't much, but it was a little bit of the old Geoff.

The lights in the parking lot at the school were on, and the lot was about half full of cars. Right up front, in one of the teachers' parking spots, was Ryan's van. My heart sank at the sight of it. Despite what I'd told Geoff, I was pretty worried. We were all new to these powers, and Ryan didn't have anything that was remotely stealthy, unless he'd acquired something when we weren't looking. I didn't say anything, but under the harsh, icy white light of the parking lot lights I could see Geoff's tired face set in grim determination. Not for the first time I wondered if maybe we weren't relying on him too much already. He was the leader. And I'd known Geoff long enough to know that as long as he considered himself our leader, if something happened to us he'd kick his own ass for it.

I saw him clench his fist, and I wanted… I don't know where the hell it came from, but seeing my oldest friend so stressed out I wanted to take his hand and squeeze it. He looked like the scrawny little beanpole who laid into the bullies in our third grade class for making fun of him because he'd been held back. Who'd sat by himself at lunch and recess, because all his friends were in fourth grade and they had lunch after we did.

But this wasn't fixed with half a sandwich and some go fish. The only thing we could do was go in there and get Ryan out safe.

We fell in silently behind another group headed into the school, trying to look natural as we walked right into the pit of vipers. Most of the hallways were still dark, and the school was totally silent other than our footsteps. Guess alien brain invaders don't exactly do much in the way of water cooler talk. I glanced over my shoulder to look at Michael and Ray. There was a cold fury brewing in Michael's eyes, fiercer than Geoff's grim determination. It looked like a thunderstorm in his brown eyes. Ray looked as blank as possible, but when he caught my eye he gave me a brief, nervous grin.

The guys said that I had a way with people, but really it was just observation. I care about people, so I try to notice when there's something wrong so that I can fix it. Geoff was the one with a charisma that made you feel instantly like you've known him forever, and a laugh that sounded like something made of pure fairy tale magic.

As we narrowed into a single file line the closer that we got to the janitor's closet, the only thing I could think of when Geoff stepped into line in front of me was how it felt like years since I'd heard him laugh like that.

We watched the group in front of us disappear into the janitor's room, and Geoff slipped in behind them to watch how they opened the door. When the group in front of us had gone, we all piled in behind Geoff and waited for him to open the door. He glanced at us like he was taking a head count, and then reached out and grabbed the scummy soap dish, pulling it toward him and twisting it sharply ninety degrees to the left. The minute he did, the lock released with a hiss and we got our first real sight of the entrance to the Yeerk Pool. The walls were made of compact dirt, and it looked like tunnels carved out by giant earthworms, except with a rickety set of metal stairs like the kind you find in cave tours as liability insurance for anything steeper than a gentle incline. It felt like hours that we walked down the stairs, occasionally taking a twist here and a turn there that cut us off from the sight of the door out.

I had a bad feeling about this.

That bad feeling turned into the screaming heebie-jeebies when I realized what the quiet murmur had been at the top of the stairs. It was screams. Human screams. The only way to tell that we were getting any closer to the bottom was how the noise became more and more intelligible. Dozens of scared, angry voices screaming for help, for mercy. How long had this been going on right under our noses? How many times had these people been through this?

How long would it have been until we were infested, if we'd never met the Andalite prince?

Eventually, the musty dirt smell of the cavern was replaced by another scent that just… smelled slimy. It wasn't enough to actually do any damage, but it felt like it was clinging to my sinuses. It was impossible to describe, but it was disgusting.

Even between that and the sounds, nothing could have possibly prepared us for what we saw. The tunnel that we were in opened up abruptly into a massive cavern. There were earthmovers and backhoes parked around the edges, butter yellow turned orange in the dim red glow. The only other lights were flood lights perched here and there, presumably for the comfort of the human-Controllers. There were dozens of cages along the back wall, each one filled with humans and Hork-Bajir, all screaming and begging for mercy.

But even more chilling was the sound of laughter. There was a group of humans gathered around a card table, eating sandwiches and watching TV. Voluntary hosts. There were Taxxon-Controllers milling around, few and far between in comparison to the walking salad shooters and the humans.

The focal point of the cavern, however, was the pool in the middle. I say pool, but it wasn't the kind of pool you or I would be caught dead swimming in. It looked like it was filled with shit-brown jello, only instead of cherries or vegetables it was filled with millions of slimy, writhing gray slugs. There were two wide piers on either side of the pool, and after watching the process for just a minute or two, it was obvious what they were for.

Departures and arrivals. The dropoff pier had Controllers lined up neatly, with two Hork-Bajir guarding the end. The host would kneel and tip their head to the side, bending as close to the sludge as they could. We couldn't see or hear the Yeerk plop out, but we could tell pretty immediately if the host was voluntary or not. The involuntary hosts started screaming the minute they were free, fighting as hard as they could even as they were grabbed by the Hork-Bajir guards and dragged toward the cages. The voluntary ones walked calmly back down the pier and over to their little waiting area.

I heard Geoff suck in a breath when he saw who was next in the dropoff line.

Burnie walked calmly up to the edge of the pier and knelt down, bending close to the sludge. A couple seconds after he turned his head, he staggered to his feet roaring curses at the top of his lungs.

"You'll never put that thing back in me! I'd rather die!" he screamed. The two Hork-Bajir grabbed him before he could try to run for it. He pulled against their iron grip with all his might, kicking out at their shins and flailing as they dragged him off balance. "Let go of me! Let me go!" he howled. When I winced away from the sight, I caught a glimpse of the spark of anger in Geoff's shocked expression. I knew that look well, it was the look that said he was about to do something stupid. I glanced around for a shadow and promptly pushed Geoff into it, holding him there with my hand over his mouth until he looked me in the eye. I was a year younger than he was, but I was heavier than him and I wasn't above using the fact that he would rather cut off his own arm than hurt us against him when it was for his own good.

"We can't save him if we get caught," I whispered. Geoff's sleepy blue eyes clenched shut, and when they opened he was looking away from me. He nodded against my hand, and I eased up on him. "Are you okay?" I asked.

"I'll be better when this is over," Geoff muttered.

"Ryan!" Ray gasped, his voice a shocked whisper. We all turned to look.

Remember what I said about there being two piers? Ryan was being held by a Hork-Bajir in line for the second one. The infestation pier. And he was about three away from the front of the line. He had his head down, his hair hanging over his face, but I would recognize him anywhere.

It was funny, because before we met the Andalite prince, none of us really knew him that well. But here we were, risking our lives for the guy, and not just because it was our necks on the line as well.

"Ray, we could use a distraction!" Geoff hissed. Ray nodded and ducked into cover to start morphing. "Brute squad, get ready in case Ray needs back up."

"What are you going to do?" Michael asked, before I had a chance to do so.

"I'm gonna go after those cages. If you want to break a lock, what better than a battering ram?" The lazy grin was 100% Geoff, but there was something sharp and deadly at the edges. And then before we could stop him, he was off, sneaking around the perimeter and ducking behind one of the backhoes to morph. I watched him go, before turning my attention back to Ray.

Just in time, too, as the eight foot Komodo dragon swaggered out of cover, tail whipping as he hauled ass toward the infestation pier. Little known fact about Komodo dragons, they can be pretty fast when they want to be.

< Don't mind me, just your everyday radioactive lizard, > Ray said in thought-speak. His tone was hilariously nonchalant, compared to the human-Controllers jumping out of the way and the Hork-Bajir-Controllers giving him the same look you give that one annoying cousin whose name you can never remember. < You guys got room for another kaiju up in here? >

Ray's tail lashed out like a whip and hit one of the guards squarely in the knees, catching him off-guard and sending him tumbling into the sludge.

< Wait a second, this isn't Tokyo! Dang it, I knew I should'a taken that left turn at Albequerue, > he said dramatically, whirling around to stare down the rest of the pier. Suddenly, every Hork-Bajir in the place seemed very interested in stopping this giant lizard. Including the one who had been holding Ryan. The suddenly-free involuntary hosts scattered and ran for the exits and I lost sight of Ryan briefly in the chaos. There was a splash as another Controller was knocked into the sludge. At least, I hoped it was a Controller and not Ryan. Then I saw his broad shoulders and shaggy blond hair duck behind one of the pieces of construction equipment, and I let out a sigh of relief.

CLANG!! the sound of bone against metal rang out over the chaos and screams that Ray had caused. Geoff, or at least the 300-pound ram that couldn't be anybody else, was back on his hind legs, horns tilted and ready for another strike at the lock of the first cage.

< You ain't got shit, motherfucker! > he crowed, as the lock snapped like a twig under the second strike.

TSEEW! the first Dracon shot rang out, searing through the air like a glowing red bullet. Ray narrowly skidded out of the way, giant claws scrabbling at the dirt ground for purchase. He was cornered by five Hork-Bajir, and his tail was only tripping them up so much.

I focused on the lion DNA and let it surge through my veins. My spine shot out, ripping a hole in the back of my pants as my leg bones changed shape and forced me down onto all fours. Golden fur burst out in prickles all over my body. My fingers sucked back into my palms, which grew massive, callused pads on the bottom of them. My ears curled into a more cup-shape and slid up to the top of my head, as my jaw changed shape and stretched out into a snout. My nose peeled back and thickened into the dark nose of the lion, and my eyes shifted, focused into more acute predator's vision. Ray and I had left our glasses back at Geoff's house, and at that moment I was glad we'd had that burst of foresight. I felt every muscle of my body shifting and coiling and bulking up like I'd just taken a double dose of horse steroids. My shirt and pants tore at the seams, falling to the ground in tatters.

I shook my head and felt like something straight out of a shampoo commercial, seeing the long brown locks of the lion's telltale mane sprout out and wave around me as I did. I've never felt as much raw power as I did then. I felt like I could take down any threat. I felt invincible.

I opened my mouth and let all of that power and energy surge out of me in a loud, unmistakable roar. The look on the Hork-Bajir's face as I lunged for the one on Ray nearest to me was almost comical. Imagine if you got hit by a car, and on the front of that car someone had ran nails through copies of Ulysses, and that's about what I imagine it felt like to get hit with my plate-sized paws. I was enough of a distraction for Ray to clamp his jaws down on the ankle of the next Hork-Bajir and then make a bolt for it, leaving a raw, bloody wound that would probably take its toll in a few hours. I got up off the first one when I was sure that he wasn't going anywhere and rounded on the next.

TSEEW! a Dracon beam sizzled the tuft of my tail. TSEEW! TSEEW! two more shot toward me, so that I had to dodge out of the way. I roared in anger. Or, the lion roared. I'm not great at the whole 'thinking on my feet' thing, so I let the lion instincts do what he had to do to stay alive. And boy, was kitty not happy with this turn of events.

I didn't expect my roar to be answered by another animal.

You know what's even scarier than a goddamn lion appearing out of nowhere? Seeing a grizzly bear stand up to its full height and let out a roar that would wreck even the most steely of bladders.

< SAY HELLO TO MOGAR, BITCHES! > Michael crowed triumphantly, as the bear swung one frying pan-sized paw and knocked a Hork-Bajir ass over tits like it was nothing.

And then another one went sailing over my head and landed soundly in the pool with what was more like a squelch than a splash. I turned and saw a familiar jet black longhorn with a devilish glint in his eye.

< So the cavalry finally showed up, > Ryan said teasingly, turning away from me as I did the same to watch his back.

< Yeah, well I don't think they were expecting a field trip from the zoo, > I said cheerfully, lowering my weight to my forepaws so that my hindquarters were ready to spring. Ryan had planted himself like a tank, forehooves spread and locked into place and his head down like he was gearing up for a charge. < Ready for a rodeo? > I asked. I could hear the grin in Ryan's voice.

< Just look at all these clowns. > I lunged. He charged. Dracon beams sliced through the air around us as the three of us swatted Controllers around like matchsticks.
Pain seared through my shoulder, and I reared back with a roar of agony, writhing to get away from the blade. The paw barely held my weight as I skidded to the ground and turned to face the Hork-Bajir who had hit me, but "barely" was still enough. The lion was in full control, and boy was he pissed. I leapt and hit the Hork-Bajir like a ton of bricks, rage building in my veins. My teeth split the reptilian scales like it was nothing, jaws closing with hundreds of pounds of pressure-

< Jack! > I heard Ryan yell, but distantly, like it was a mile away and underwater. I shook my head while the bladed arms grasped at me desperately, alien blood filling my mouth. I felt my teeth meet bone, and shook my head one more time. SNAP! The sound hit me like a shot. The Hork-Bajir beneath me ragdolled, head flopping limply to the ground on its broken neck when I let go.

As I stood there in shock, a giant suffocating weight threw me off of the body and onto the ground, tiny insect legs scrabbling for purchase in the lion's thick fur. The Taxxon shrieked in my face, and I bared my teeth and roared, rolling onto my back and kicking out with my hind legs. Instead of just kicking it off of me, my claws sunk in and tore its belly open, sending stinking blood and ooze splashing all over me and the ground. It screamed in pain, writhing as I threw it off me and bounded away from the three other Taxxons closing in. Naturally, the smell and sound of their wounded brother were instantly more interesting than something like me that was still capable of fighting back. I looked away quickly.

< Jesus, Jack! > Michael yelled.

< You okay over there? > Ryan asked cautiously. I looked at Michael, at Ryan, and all I could smell and see was the blood on my own muzzle and paws, the blood on Ryan's horns and Michael's claws.

What were we doing?

< I could use a little help over here! > Geoff yelled. His voice was like a splash of cold water and a hot shower all at once, and I felt the tension ease into the lion's easy power as I scanned the room looking for him. I could have a crisis later; right now, we had to stay together and stay alive. Geoff and Ray had formed a protective barrier in front of five of the freed hosts, one of whom, I noticed, was Burnie. Burnie was staring in shock at the ram and the komodo dragon guarding him. Admittedly, it was pretty weird.

< Help Geoff, > I told Ryan. Michael had already dropped to all fours and lumbered over with a roar that shook the walls of the cavern. Ryan snorted and scuffed his front hoof on the ground.

< Are you gonna make it? > he asked, nodding at my paw, which I was holding a few inches off the ground. I put weight on it and snarled as pain shot through my shoulder, making me nearly collapse on it.

< I'll be fine, > I said, not sure if I was lying or not. < We need to get out of here! >

< What are you imbeciles doing!? > The entire room went still and turned in unison. It would have been funny, if it wasn't for the pure evil that that voice belonged to. We'd only heard that voice once, but I would know it anywhere if I'd heard it once or a hundred times.

Visser Three. The universe's only Andalite-Controller, and the murderer of the Andalite Prince who gave us the power to morph. If we were H.U.N.T.ers, then he was our prey, but that was giving us a lot of credit for five dumbasses who could hardly find our asses with a map.

"Sir," one very brave Human-Controller said cautiously. "These animals infiltrated our defenses." Visser Three's stalk eyes scanned the menagerie that was the five of us. His main eyes narrowed into slits, and his thought-speak boomed out.

< Idiots! Those are no ordinary animals! They're the Andalite bandits! > he snapped.

< That sounds like a band name, > Ray quipped nervously, private to the five of us.

< KILL THEM! > Visser Three boomed.

< Time to get the fuck out of here! > Geoff ordered. Ryan charged past me and over to the freed hosts.

< All aboard, > he said. A boy who looked like he was maybe a freshman, maybe an 8th grader scrambled up onto his back, hooking his arms around Ryan's broad neck and holding on for dear life. Burnie helped a girl onto Ryan's back behind the boy, a junior from our school with long blonde hair and glasses. I limped over to them and nudged Ryan's rear end to tell him he was full up. He headed for the nearest set of stairs, which looked wider than the ones we'd come down through the school. Dracon beams seared past him and over him, but even under orders to kill the Controllers were smart enough not to get in range of those horns.

Geoff gave Burnie a light headbutt to the back of his knees to get him running, following behind with an impatient "Baaaaaa!", and Ray swaggered past to keep pace with Geoff, leaving the brute squad to bring up the rear. We ran a few paces with our backs turned, and then turned around when we were near the base of the stairs, holding our ground and backing up slowly.

< Andalites! > Visser Three boomed, his powerful voice feeling like a bomb being dropped in our heads. If I thought the Controllers parted before Ryan, it was nothing to how they split like the Red Sea when that tall, muscular Andalite body galloped toward me and Michael. < Surrender now, and I may choose to simply kill you. >

I looked at Michael, caught a glimmer in the surprisingly intelligent eyes of the bear. Dread pooled in my stomach. He was going to do something incredibly stupid. He reared back up to his full height, towering at least four whole feet over the Andalite, and swung one of his frying pan-sized paws at Visser Three's head.

Snick! That deadly tail shot forward. Michael let out a roar and reeled back, clutching at the bloody stump where his arm was just a couple seconds before.

< RUN! > I yelled at him, as I let out another loud, earth-shaking roar. We turned tail and ran, hobbling to compensate for our missing or injured paws. Michael crowded the stairs in front of me, his blood pouring everywhere and making even the jagged, slip-proof metal hard to walk on. I had never been more glad for the lion's iron stomach, although I could've done without the sense of smell just then. < Demorph, Michael! You're losing way too much blood! > I cried, feeling the desperation settle like panic. The bear stumbled and almost fell back down the stairs. He got back on his feet with a grunt, and only made it a couple more steps before he crumpled and didn't move. < Michael! > I yelled.

The relief I felt when I heard the sickening sound of crunching bone was short-lived, when I realized that the bear lying on the stairs in front of me wasn't getting any more human-shaped.

And the sound was coming from behind me.

The thing about the power to morph that the Andalite gave us that night in the construction site was that it was common technology for Andalites. Which meant that it was a trick that Visser Three had up his sleeve as well. I looked over my shoulder to see the Andalite body swelling grotesquely, blue fur spreading out between patches of slimy, amphibious skin. The delicate, deerlike hooves hulked out and split into dozens of arms up and down each side of his body.

I turned and shoved Michael as hard as I could with my head, trying to get him to wake up. I sunk my teeth into the meat of his furry ass, shaking my head as gently as I could.

< Michael! Wake up, asshole, we've got company! > I snapped, desperation evident in my tone. Come on, come on, I'm not leaving you behind! >

< Goddamnit this is hard to navigate going down with these nubby legs-- oh holy fuck. > Around the bend of the stairs ahead of us, the reptilian head of the komodo dragon appeared.

< Mmnnngh. Just five more minutes… > Michael groaned.

< NO! > I yelled. < No more minutes! Come on, demorph! > When he didn't answer, I was afraid I'd lost him again. I could hear the sickly squelching sound of something very large and gelatinous trying to shove its way into the stairwell. Ray had disappeared to run ahead and tell the others what was going on.

Finally, I heard the best sound in the goddamn world. Gross as it was, the sound of Michael's bones crunching down as the bear's shaggy brown fur slipped into his body until all that was left was the mop of curls on top of his head, watching a new, human arm shoot out of the bear's bloody stump. I felt slightly guilty as the fur disappeared and the bite marks I'd left in his rear end closed last. When he was half-morphed, a mostly hairless bear head on a 6' naked linebacker's body (which was one of if not the weirdest thing I'd ever seen), but not bleeding anymore, I gave him another nudge up the stairs with my head. Now awake enough to realize that whatever that sound behind us was it wasn't good and it was getting closer, he tripped over his own bear-sized feet and stumbled up the stairs. Fur started sprouting all over his body again as he started morphing back into the bear without even needing to be told.

I bounded up the stairs behind him, taking them three at a time and turning to look behind us every time I caught up with him, using my paws and my head to keep him going forward.

Visser Three kept coming, and now we could see the watery, glowing blue of the eyes of whatever his morph was. It looked almost like a Taxxon, but bigger and grosser. It had a large, circular mouth ringed with jagged, needle-like teeth that looked like harpoons.

< NO! > I heard Geoff howl, like it was torn out of him, and before I could say anything I saw what had made him cry out. Or rather, who.

Burnie shoved his way through Michael's shaggy fur and past his massive bulk, knocking me off-balance as he headed down the stairs.
Down.

Toward that…thing. I watched, flabbergasted, as Michael kept climbing.

"You're not going to win this time!" Burnie yelled, swinging for one of the gooey blue eyes. Visser Three hissed in pain, thrashing his head. Burnie dug his arm in deeper, using it for leverage.

< Foolish human! > the Visser snarled. He slammed his head against the side of the tunnel, and I was close enough to see Burnie's eyes roll back in his head. I saw him collapse and fall to the floor, pushed aside by the sheer mass of the thing making its way through the tunnels toward us. He fell to the ground below the stairs and lay there. Anger burned in my throat, but I was frozen in shock.

< BURNIE! > I whipped my head around and saw Geoff on the stair above me. But he wasn't looking at me, or even at Burnie anymore. He was looking right at Visser Three.

He leapt, head down, aimed like a missile right for the same eye that Burnie had brutalized. I roared and lunged, claws raking through the next one, blood and goo spraying all over me like a popped zit. My back claws found the third eye as I was scrambling for purchase, and I kicked as hard as I could before I was thrown clear by the thrashing. The Visser, now blinded, roared in outrage and knocked Geoff by luck as he surged upward. I grabbed Geoff's tail in my teeth and yanked him clear, turning and running up the stairs like the hounds of hell were on my heels. I was small enough, if barely, that Geoff could fit in the passage beside me, and fit he did.

< Run away, Andalite filth! > Visser Three yelled in our heads from below us. We rounded a corner until we could no longer see him if we looked back, but his voice was just as loud in our heads. < It doesn't matter! I'll kill you all anyway! You will all die at my hand! > I said nothing as we ran, ignoring the pain in my shoulder and the blood running into my fur if it meant getting the fuck out of there.

Geoff said nothing, either, clear goo and glowing blue blood running down his horns and matted in his fur. His head was down, gaze focused on the stairs as we ran. Burnie was still down there. Either to get reinfested or to die, we'd had no choice but to leave him behind.

Geoff trusted me enough to let down the shield and let me see him already loathing himself for it. He didn't even have to be in his real body for me to be able to tell.

Sometimes, I wished I wasn't so good at reading people.

--

The staircase we escaped through let out in the back room of a big box store. Geoff and I came crashing out at the same time. I stumbled on my hurt paw and flopped to the concrete floor, letting my eyes close for a second. My ears twitched as the lion listened for anything coming up the stairs behind us, but instead there was just the sound of concrete grinding against concrete as the fake wall slid back into place.

< Come on, Jack, it's not naptime, > Michael said, batting at me with one of his massive paws. I flailed my good one in his direction, and then rolled upright and looked around. The bear was the only one in the room, aside from Geoff and I, although a lot of the racks were trashed and knocked over. Michael was sitting about as close to cross-legged as a bear could get, watching us.

< Where's Ryan and Ray? > I asked. Michael pointed with one paw toward the back door, which was hanging off his hinges. < Huh. You'd think they'd have better security here. >

< I don't think Visser Three cares too much about somebody breaking into the Toys R Us for the newest Gameboy, > Michael said. < Ry's staying the night at Ray's house so he can wait until the parking lot is filled with teachers and students, not Controllers, to get his car. > I nodded, and then glanced at Geoff, who was pacing impatiently. Michael followed my gaze and dropped his paws into his lap.

< Hey Geoff? I'm, uh… I'm sorry about Burnie- > he started, but Geoff rounded on him, head lowered instinctively.

< Sorry nothing! You don't say sorry, because he's not gone yet! > Geoff snapped, scuffing his hoof and looking like he was about to fight Michael if he said different. Michael didn't say anything else. Geoff's burst of anger faded back into nervous energy. < We're gonna save him. We have to. > He shook his head to clear it, and then trotted toward the door. < Come on, let's get out of here before they decide to surround the place. > We obediently followed him out the broken back door and across a lot, a couple of predators meekly following a ram. It wasn't until we found a park that we stopped to demorph, and there we realized something that I hadn't really paid attention to when Michael had morphed before.

"Not even underwear?! Fucking shit!" Michael swore, covering himself with his hands and closing his eyes to look away from me and Geoff. Geoff and I looked away from each other and Michael.

"New rule," Geoff said. "We find somewhere to stash some clothes before we do this shit again. Now come on. You guys can call your parents from my house or sneak back in the morning or whatever, I don't give a shit. There's a spare bedroom across the hall from mine, and you can borrow my boxers if nothing else."

It was an uneventful, if chilly, walk back to Geoff's house in the dark. When we got there, Michael called Ray to check in while Geoff went upstairs to get us some shorts. We'd gotten a little less embarrassed about it on the walk across town, but I was still on high alert for Geoff's grandma. That poor lady didn't need to see two teenage boys naked in her living room. And I wasn't sure I'd be able to look her in the eye ever again if she did.

The tension in Michael's shoulders lifted at the same moment that I heard Ray's muffled voice on the other end of the line.

"Hey man, you guys make it okay?" Michael whispered. "Yeah, we're all okay. We're at Geoff's for the night. ...No, Burnie didn't make it out." I winced and looked at the stairs for Geoff. "How's Ryan? ...Yeah, right, no homo," Michael said with a quiet laugh. Geoff appeared at the top of the stairs and threw down two pairs of boxer shorts, one blue and one red. Michael tucked the phone into the crook of his ear as he pulled them on. "Hey, listen, I'm gonna go. I'll see you at school tomorrow, alright?" he whispered. "Yeah, bye." He hung up.

"We need to be careful about what we say on the phone," Geoff chided. "Like it's fine now because Nana's asleep and nobody's at Ray's house, but if they got Burnie and Gus we don't know who all they've got, alright? No more talking about missions anywhere but face to face." Michael ducked his head like a scolded child.

"Sorry, Geoff," he said. Geoff scoffed.

"Come on, assholes, I'm tired as dicks," he said, motioning us up the stairs. He gestured to the spare bedroom, which was about as granny-looking as you could get, and was also packed with enough boxes and shelves that there wasn't much room for anything but going straight to the bed. "One of you can sleep in here and one of you can sleep on the floor in my room," he said.

"You've still got that air mattress, right, Geoff?" I asked.

"Yeah, it's going up now."

"Sweet, then I'll let Michael have the bed and I'll crash on the floor." Michael sat down heavily on the bed.

"Night guys," he said.

"Night, Michael," I called back, closing the door gently.

"...Just like those old sleepovers, huh?" Geoff asked, right outside his bedroom door. I put on as reassuring a smile as I could.

"Just like old times, Geoff."

We spent about half an hour lying on our respective beds and just staring up at the same ceiling, at the glow-in-the-dark stars that we put up when we were kids. Most of them had fallen down or been taken down by now, but the "Go" in the hastily-misspelled "Goeff" was still up there. We'd survived. We'd all survived somehow, and we'd rescued someone. The boy and that girl - I think her name was Ashley, I remembered her from the school paper - were free. And maybe others had escaped too.

I just wished we could have gotten Burnie out of there, too. I played that moment over and over again in my mind, thought about what I could've done to stop him, but I had been frozen solid. I could have pushed him back, gotten in front of him. Maybe grabbed his shirt and pulled him up, hell, I dunno. But I didn't. And we didn't win anything. We just survived.

"Shove over, meathead," came a sleepy grumble, followed by a creaking of springs, and that was my only warning before Geoff plopped down onto the air mattress, bouncing me a couple inches. He put his pillow half on my chest, and I moved my arm to let him curl up next to me.

"No homo?" I asked lightly, only realizing how tired I was when I yawned.

"Shut up," Geoff muttered, before he fell asleep. I must have dozed off, too, because in the dark and the quiet the sound of the door opening sounded like a neck snapping, and my eyes snapped open with the taste of alien blood in my mouth. Michael stood in the doorway, meeting my wide-awake gaze with his own.

"...Well I was gonna ask if there was room on the air mattress for two, but it looks like I've got an answer," he remarked. I looked down at Geoff, drooling heavily into his pillow.

"What's the matter, Michael?" I whispered as quietly as I could.

"...I bet you can guess," Michael replied, suddenly looking anywhere but at me. "Should I just take the bed, or..."

"Get over here and go the fuck to sleep," Geoff mumbled. I tried not to disturb him too much when I laughed.

"You heard the man," I said. "The bed's free, or I think we haven't met the weight limit on this thing yet." Michael hesitated for a moment, and I couldn't really blame him. It wasn't exactly like crawling in bed with your parents, and he'd only really met us over the summer. Geoff and I were different, we'd been going on camping trips with my family and having sleepovers at his house since we were kids.

Michael came up on the empty side of the air mattress and dropped quietly to his knees.

"You sure?" he whispered. I held out my free arm the same way I had for Geoff. Michael smiled gratefully and crawled under the covers, curling away from me and using my arm as a pillow. Michael was asleep after a little bit of wiggling around, and with the warm bodies of two of my best friends, both of whom I'd almost lost at least once in the last couple days (God, I was so grateful we had all made it), it wasn't hard for me to follow.

Chapter Text

"So is that your new toy?" Ryan asked, standing up to wipe the sweat off his forehead with one of his arms. I looked up from my gameboy at him, and then saved and stuffed it in the pocket of my cargo shorts.

"Yeah, found it on the kitchen counter this morning," I said. "You sure you don't want a hand?" I asked, watching with a raised eyebrow as he scraped another shovelful of hay off of the floor and tossed it into the wheelbarrow next to him. Ryan was basically an all-American pretty boy, with broad shoulders and wavy blond hair that sometimes fell in his downright sky blue eyes. He had a nice amount of muscle from doing a lot of the hard labor in his mom's animal clinic. He was also the smart guy as well as the hot guy, which wasn't fair at all.

No homo.

"I think you'd break in half," he said with a smile. I pulled my hat down over my ears. I, on the other hand, was about as big around as a pencil, with the kind of muscles that come from a life of being picked last in gym. "Sorry I'm not too much fun this morning."

"Nah, you're fine," I said. "Me and Edgar are just hanging out, right Edgar?" The bull in the stall I was perched on the gate to mooed his confirmation, butting his nose against my hand. I ran my hand down his smooth fur.

"So, what'd you want to know if my aunt was in town for?" I asked, watching the muscles in Ryan's arms flex against his sleeves as he threw another shovelful of hay into the wheelbarrow.

"Just to make sure you weren't gonna be lonely today," he said. "It is your birthday, after all."

"And that's also why you drove all the way into town to come get me before you did your chores?" I asked. He shrugged.

"Hey, I got most of them done before I even called. Soon as I finish getting this stall ready for a new patient Mom's getting tomorrow, I'm yours for the afternoon. Just be glad I got the kennels all cleaned before I came and got you. Changing litterboxes you can do."

"Oh, yeah, happy birthday to me," I said sarcastically. Ryan laughed. "Sounds like you've been up way longer than should be allowed on a Sunday," I added, watching him carefully. None of us had had the chance to have another sleepover in the weeks since we went down to the Yeerk Pool, but if Ryan's nightmares were half as bad as the rest of us it probably wasn't a new thing for him to be up this early. Ryan glanced at me so quick I almost missed it under the wavy bangs brushed over his forehead.

"Better than another dream about the desert," he muttered half under his breath, snorting a puff of air as he scooped the last shovelful of hay into his wheelbarrow. Suddenly, I didn't feel like laughing.

"...Dreams about the desert, and a voice calling for help," I said, without even thinking about it. I jumped and almost fell off my perch at the clatter of the wooden shovel handle hitting the concrete floor. When I looked up, Ryan's eyes met mine, and a heavy silence hung in the air. "Heh. You too?" I asked, trying to sound light about it.

"Those dreams just went from vaguely uneasy to highly disconcerting," Ryan said. "We'd better see if any of the others have been as lucky as we have."

--

"Dreams about the desert?" Geoff asked. "Can't say as I have. I've had dreams about all kinds of weird shit, but nothing about deserts and voices. Now, beaches, I've had a couple dreams about, but unless the voice you're talking about belongs to a Baywatch babe, I'm pretty sure we're talking about two different things."

We were all in my aunt's living room. Geoff was propped up on his hands on the floor, legs crossed in front of him. Ryan was poised at the door to the kitchen (which Jack, Michael, and Geoff had already barred me from), and Jack was pacing the length of the room like a caged lion. Michael was sitting on the plastic-covered footstool, hands between his knees. I was sitting on the coffee table next to him, so close I could practically hear his teeth creaking with how hard he was gritting them.

"Way to drop your dick in the conversation," I remarked.

"I can drop my dick anywhere you want, babe," Geoff teased. I grinned and faked a swoon, batting my eyelashes at him. Geoff was our de-facto leader, tall and lanky. He was currently sporting a haircut that his grandma gave him which generally gave him an overall look of being a long-lost member of the Beatles. He was smart as hell behind his sleepy blue eyes, though, which I guess was why we all looked up to him. That, and he was the oldest, which didn't really hurt.

"That's nice," Jack interrupted. "But...what do we do about these dreams?" Jack was the sensitive one. He had maybe an inch on Geoff, but he was a lot broader, and everything about him just kind of felt homey, like a giant, walking hug. It was nice. It was a shame to watch Geoff get serious again, as he pulled his long legs up toward his chest and rested his arms on them instead.

"I don't think there's anything we can do," he said. "I mean, unless one of you guys happened to get coordinates, it'd be a pretty major death wish to just go running off into the desert after a dream."

"Get our hands on some peyote and it'll be a spirit quest," Ryan snarked from his position guarding the door (possibly from me, possibly on the off-chance that my aunt magically came home a week early).

"Just say no, Ryan," I said.

"Ryan the illegal drugs guy," Geoff remarked automatically.

"Hey, I mean, we're already neck deep in alien bullshit, at least then we'll have an excuse for all the shit we've seen," he shrugged nonchalantly.

"What if there's something out there that needs our help?" Jack asked. "Like, what if it's actually a cry for help?"

"Jack," Michael interrupted, "there's only one kind of thing we know of that can send brainspeaky messages, and of the two we've met, one's already way beyond our help, and the other is..." A shudder ran down all our spines. It had only been three weeks since our trip to the Yeerk Pool and our encounter with Visser Three, but I was pretty sure I wasn't the only one who had woken up in a cold sweat multiple times after that. Sometimes it was hard to even get to sleep just knowing that something that evil actually existed in the universe.

"The prince said there were others, though. Maybe there was another crash or something. One that Visser Three didn't notice?" Jack was reluctant to let the matter slide, and frankly I couldn't really blame him. I mean, I knew where Geoff was coming from. We didn't have enough information to just go running off on a suicide mission, especially with the days getting shorter and the desert extremes getting even more extreme as winter approached.

But on the other hand, Geoff hadn't heard the voice. It sounded lost and scared. I always woke up feeling lonely afterward, the heavy kind of lonely where you just want to cry it out for a few minutes until you remember that there's other human beings on the earth.

Judging by the way Ryan was biting his lower lip in thought, I knew I wasn't crazy for that part, either.

"What if we sleep on it tonight?" Ryan suggested diplomatically. "See if we can see anything suspicious on the news. Worst comes to worst, maybe Ray and I will get better information out of one of our dreams."

"Sounds good to me," Michael muttered. Michael was my best friend since pretty much ever. When we were younger, we spent so much time at his house playing the NES that his little brothers practically thought I was part of the family. Michael had a mop of curly hair and intense eyes that made him constantly look like he was gearing up to kick the world's ass. Out of all of us, he was kind of the one who had taken to this whole intergalactic war thing the best. It was like it gave him a chance to actually vent all the anger that he carried around with him. As he stood up, I noticed that the white smudge on his shirt wasn't part of the design.

"Yeah," Geoff agreed. "That okay, Jack?" he asked. Jack couldn't have looked more reluctant if there was a busload of kittens at stake, but he was also smart enough to trust Geoff (or dumb enough, jury was still out on that one, but whatever it was we were all in the same boat).

"Yeah. Yeah, you're right," he admitted. Geoff got to his feet, unfolding himself to his full height, and glanced at Jack. Jack smiled weakly in response.

"Now that that's decided!" Geoff said suddenly, clapping his hands together. "We've got a little something for the birthday boy. Jack's smile widened to a full-on grin.

"Oh, fuck you guys," I said. I glanced at Ryan and saw the smirk on his face. "Especially you. Is this why you came and got me this morning?" Ryan shrugged.

"Guilty as charged," he said. "It was all Geoff's idea."

"So whose house is getting broken into next?" I asked, maybe a little testily.

"You say 'broken into' like I don't know where the spare key is," Michael called from the kitchen. "Quit being a little shit and take your surprise party like a man." He struck a match and held it to a little candle, touching that flame to the fourteen other candles in the pan before sticking that one back in. I sighed.

"Don't you dare sing," I said, as we gathered around the counter. The fifteen glowing candles were stuck in a pan of brownies. "My aunt will kill me if she comes home and the windows are shattered." Geoff laughed.

"Just blow out your candles, dude," he said. I took a deep breath and blew out the candles, barely puffing out the last one.

The only thing I could think of to wish for was for everything to go back to normal. It didn't matter if I got them all in one go, because I knew it'd be a long-ass time before that wish came true. If it ever did.

"Next year I want those number candles," I said, pulling out the smoking candles from the brownies.

"Yes sir," Jack teased, setting a pack of napkins on the counter and cutting into the brownies. He scooped one out onto a napkin and slid it over to me, before getting one for Geoff, Ryan, Michael, and himself. I picked mine up and took a bite before they could start watching me expectantly.

"Holy shit, who made these?" I asked. Jack and Michael both looked at Geoff. "You beautiful bastard," I said.

"That good, huh?" Ryan asked, taking a bite of his own. "...Yup. Definitely that good."

Normally, when you get five guys together in the same room, it's only a matter of time before the conversation turns to video games and girls. And, well, at least we had one of those to fall back on. When anyone could be a Controller, it was hard to talk about who was cute and who was girlfriend material, knowing that any one of them might have a Yeerk in their head. We couldn't even talk about actresses! Imagining a yeerk acting out Jerry Maguire may seem funny at first, but man, it got way less funny when you then thought about all that publicity.

And we couldn't talk about school. Vice Principal Tuggey, Michael's (other) best friend's dad, was pretty high up there in the Yeerk forces. Concentrating on history was hard, knowing that there was an army of Hork-Bajir shock troops gathering at the Yeerk Pool, ready to come up through the janitor's closet at a moment's notice.

Which meant it was a good fucking thing we'd all first met at an arcade, because video games were pretty much the only thing that The Man...or, well, The Aliens hadn't taken away from us. And for a while, it almost felt like my wish had come true after all. Just five normal guys sitting around talking about the new video games coming out in a couple months.

When it came time for the news, though, the elephant in the room decided to butt his way back into the conversation. I turned on the TV after the third or fourth time we glanced at it out of the corner of our eyes, and we sat there finishing off the last of the brownies and watching the news.

"And on a lighter note, a cattle rancher found something very unusual on the edge of his property." A map popped up on the screen to show where said cattle rancher hailed from. "Our field reporter is on site with more to the story."

We all stopped chewing in unison.

"I was out on the west side of my property, you know, fixin' up a fence that'd come down in the storm last week, when I saw this here big chunk of metal out there in the desert a bit." The camera zoomed in on the charred debris. There were some kind of symbols written on it.

I didn't like the sound of Geoff's sharp inhale. We all ignored the rest of the broadcast to turn and look at him. He glanced at us and cleared his throat.

"...So, guys. You remember when the Andalite crashed, and he sent me inside his ship to get something...? Well, I saw writing in there, and that looks a hell of a lot like what I saw."

"Great," Michael said. "You think there's a fucking Andalite ship crashed somewhere in the desert?!" he snapped.

That was the last thing I heard before the room swirled around me and I crumpled, hardly noticing Geoff's arms stopping me from hitting the ground before I blacked out totally.

--

It was hot. Unbelievably hot, like what it had to feel like to be an ant under a magnifying glass. Sand and dirt stretched out forever in every direction, making me feel hopeless and trapped by the limitless expanse. The glare of the sun burned my skin, and I felt...scared.

< I'm here, > a voice cried out, accented like nothing I was really familiar with. < I'm here! I can't survive much longer. Can anyone hear me? I need help... >

Suddenly, my eyes snapped open. Michael's worried brown eyes were hovering over me.

"Jesus, Ray, what the fuck was that? Are you okay?" he asked, sounding relieved.

"Yeah," I muttered, that voice still ringing in my head. Michael helped me sit up, and I found myself grateful for the warm hand on my back.

"Guys, he's awake," he called.

"Should I still call 911?" Jack asked. I sat up to look around to where he was standing next to the phone, receiver off the hook and his finger over the 9 key. "What about Ryan?" Dread shot through me. I was still a little dizzy, but when I saw Ryan sprawled on the floor, Geoff kneeling next to him, I crawled over to them. Ryan's eyes snapped open as suddenly as mine had, darting once, twice in fear before he relaxed.

"...You too, huh?" he asked when he saw me, parroting my words from earlier. I smiled.

"Must be some kind of 'R&R Connection,'" I said.

"They're fine, they're making stupid inside jokes," Geoff called, although the way he nearly collapsed betrayed his relief. "Jesus, you guys had me scared as dicks. What the fuck happened there?"

"...The dream came back," I said. Jack hung up the receiver like it could be recording us at that very second.

"It was different this time. It was more...urgent," Ryan added, sitting up, his brows furrowed in concerned thought. "Urgent enough to knock us the fuck out, anyway. And you guys didn't feel anything?" Jack, Michael, and Geoff all shook their heads.

"We have to help," I said, surprising even myself with how determined I sounded when I said it. "We have to go out there and do something." I looked at Geoff pleadingly. "I think there's an Andalite out there."

"An Andalite? Are you serious?" Michael asked. "Did you forget what happened last time we met an Andalite? Or the fact that there's only one Andalite on Earth that we know of? How do we know it's not Visser Three trying to trick us?"

"We don't for sure," Ryan admitted. "But that sure didn't sound like Visser Three to me. Did it to you, Ray?"

"Nah," I said. "It sounded a lot...younger? And a whole lot less evil." Michael still looked unconvinced. "Look, assuming it's not a trick, that means that there's another Andalite out there who needs help. And if it's not Visser Three, then you can bet your sweet ass he's been hearing it too." Michael pales and went silent. He'd had a personal horror story about Visser Three the last time we ran into each other down in the Yeerk Pool. And we all remembered the last ringing scream of the Andalite Prince who gave us our power to morph.

"All right, we're going," Geoff said. "We'll need something with teeth. Something that can blend in, because if it does end up being a trap our priority is to run if we can and fight if we can't. Only if we can't," he added with a pointed look toward Michael.

"Five birds of prey in the desert would probably be too conspicuous," Ryan mused, already on board with the idea. "But if we spread out enough we might as well use them to get out there. What about coyotes?"

"Where the fuck are we going to find a coyote?" Michael asked.

"Funny you should ask," Ryan said, a smirk settling firmly on his face. "Because-"

"Let me guess, your mom just got a coyote that somebody hit with a car?" Geoff deadpanned.

"Close. A couple of hikers found her in a rusty old trap. Her leg was an absolute mess, so Mom had to take it off. She's still trying to figure out what to do with her."

"So we'll all ride home with you tomorrow after school, and try not to lose our fingers when we pet the nice doggy."

"...Eh," Ryan said with a shrug that was downright worrisome. "If we do we can just morph something and then morph back."

"You are a creepy motherfucker, Ryan," Jack said.

"A creepy motherfucker with a point," Ryan pointed out. "Anyway, Geoff's plan sounds good. When are we going to go?"

"We should do it ASAP," Geoff said.

"Yeah, but..." Ryan started. "I'm just afraid that if we all skip school, Tuggey's going to get suspicious." We all froze. We hadn't thought of that. I wasn't surprised that Ryan was the one who had, either. Out of all of us, he was the one who had nearly been infested. He was the one the yeerks had come for. I still remembered the relief on his face when he saw my komodo dragon morph on the pier of the Yeerk Pool.

And the way he'd fallen asleep with his head on my shoulder while we were waiting for Michael to call and tell us Jack and Geoff made it out alright.

"It'll be safer to go at night," Geoff said. "Cooler, too, so we won't be baking."

"We're still looking at a six, seven hour flight? That means at least three or four stops to demorph, both there and coming back. Not counting how long it'll take to find the thing. Even if we leave right at three and we find it right away, that's still...5 am we'd be getting home."

"Well, what do you fucking think we should do?" Geoff snapped. "You're the one who was all gung-ho about getting out there." Ryan chewed on his lower lip in concentration, his eyebrows furrowed anxiously over his blue eyes. I was watching him so intently I didn't realize for a second that he was looking at me.

"Huh?" I said. Yeah. Real smart, there.

"I said, what do you think?" Ryan repeated. I was half-tempted to ask 'huh?' again, because the idea of a smart, funny junior asking a freshman for advice just blew my mind all over the place. "Do you think this can wait til the weekend, or do you think we need to move tomorrow?" I thought about the voice in my dream. A look crossed Ryan's face that I couldn't read, as he watched for my response. I must've had some tell on my face, while my mind was racing, because nobody said anything for a long moment.

Truth was, I didn't think it could wait. Maybe til Tuesday or Wednesday, sure, but there were Controllers all across the state who'd seen the same news story we had. Controllers who would also recognize the piece of the Andalite ship. More than that, the voice itself had sounded weaker and more desperate. We didn't really know much about them, but I didn't figure them to be too suited for surviving in a desert.

And besides that, if Ryan and I had been having those dreams, if they really were from an Andalite trying to reach out to his own people, we couldn't forget that there was another Andalite on Earth. Visser Three. And whatever it took, we couldn't let him beat us to the other Andalite.

We didn't need to be able to thought-speak to know that we were all thinking about the same thing. The Andalite Prince's final scream still chilled me to the bone.

"We need to get out there," I said.

"I was afraid you were going to say that."

--

The next day, we were all on the edge of our seats at school. Michael and I barely talked in the classes that we had together, and despite the fact that Geoff and Jack passed our lockers at least three or four times during the day, there were none of the usual affectionate hair ruffles or pats on the shoulder.

Michael and I picked at our lunches together, trading peanut butter for a ham sandwich and then barely getting half of it finished before we had to go on to our next class. It was absolutely torturous. I couldn't wait to get this over with.

We all met up in the parking lot at Ryan's van, Ryan last of all, and when it was unlocked we got in.

"Didn't think I'd be pulling all-nighters in my freshman year," Michael said, to break the tense silence in the car.

"Yeah?" Geoff asked from his uncontested seat in the front passenger side. "Too bad birds don't drink espresso," he muttered.

"We don't need coffee," I chimed in. "We're getting high on the spirit of adventure." I felt a swell of pride at getting even a halfhearted laugh out of the guys.

When we got to Ryan's house, his mom's truck was gone from the driveway, which was all the better for us. The guys had all already told their parents and/or guardians that morning that we were all going home with someone else. Michael's parents thought he was staying with me to work on a group project, Jack's thought he was with Geoff, Geoff's grandma thought that he was with Jack, and Ryan had left a note with his mom saying simply that he was staying the night with "some friends" to work on a group project rather than drive back into town and back out.

We didn't go to the barn this time, Ryan instead taking us into the kennels.

"She doesn't mind the smell of other dogs," he explained. "Our guess is maybe someone was keeping her, and she got loose. She's not microchipped, because as far as we can tell she's a full coyote. But either she's too sick to fight back, or she's been used to humans." We stopped in front of a cage, and watched Ryan crouch in front of it, making a little kissy noise.

"Hey there, girl," he said softly, unlatching the cage. "You doing alright today?" The coyote growled, her tail sweeping side to side. She slunk forward at the promise of escape. "That's a good girl," Ryan said soothingly, reaching in to bury his fingers in her thick fur. She flinched at first, but we could all tell the minute she went into the acquiring trance. Her eyes lidded and her tail stopped wagging nervously, and the tension eased out of her shoulders. When Ryan had acquired her, he stepped back, and Michael knelt down next, not wanting to seem afraid in front of the three older boys. I went after him. She was still heavily in the trance, looking like she could fall asleep at any second. Her fur was so soft that I almost forgot to concentrate on acquiring her. After I stood up, Geoff knelt down next, running his hand over her back before bringing it back to her collar to acquire her. Jack knelt down and pet her a little longer than Geoff had, after he had acquired her. She came out of the trance slowly, blinking large hazel eyes up at Jack.

"Hey there girl," he cooed, stilling his hand to make sure she was still okay. "Thanks for helping us out. You're a good girl." She relaxed under the sound of his voice, tail thumping against the blankets in her crate like 'yes I am a good girl, aren't I?' He smiled at her and gave her one last friendly scratch before standing. Ryan took his place and nudged her back into her crate, bolting it shut behind her. She laid down, still a little groggy from the acquiring trance, and was asleep in seconds.

We all looked at each other with big, dopey "what a soft puppy" grins on our faces. God, our species is stupid.

But she was so soft.

"Alright, let's get out of here," Geoff said. "We're burning daylight."

We drove back to my house to get the cheap disposable watch that we'd gotten to keep track of our morph time, as well as to drop off our clothes. In the weeks since our first disastrous raid on the yeerk pool (we were lucky none of us got trapped and stuck, and we weren't counting on getting that lucky again) we'd pretty much gotten used to the fact that modesty was a thing of the past. It was hard to act shy in the locker room at school when you'd seen your best friend's trouser snake sprout fur, let me tell you.

It was also pretty hard to look Ryan and Geoff in the eye afterward, at first, but that was easy enough to get over.

Kind of.

(Geoff had dubbed him and Ryan "Team Magnum Dong" and it was not a misnomer.)

Anyway, all told it was about 20 minutes before we were in the air, staggered with five minutes between takeoff so that we didn't look quite as much like a bird watcher's wet dream.

Jack was the one carrying our watch. First he took to the air, spreading his giant wings and flapping to get off the ground until he could catch a thermal off of the street and launch himself into the air. Michael followed after, his Harris Hawk smaller than Jack and Geoff's matching Mountain Hawk-Eagles.

You know what's awesome? Being a bird is awesome. There is pretty much nothing better than taking to the air and catching a sweet thermal under your wings. Since we'd all morphed at the same time, Ryan, Geoff, and I were all in my aunt's backyard, dancing from clawed foot to clawed foot waiting for our turn. My Red-Tailed hawk instincts were on edge because of the presence of the larger hawk-eagle, but Geoff wasn't looking at me or Ryan like prey. That helped force down the instincts.

< Ryan, > Jack called. Ryan spread his wings and flapped hard to gain altitude.

< Yeeeah! > Ryan cheered, as Geoff and I watched him catch a thermal and shoot almost straight up in the air.

< You're up next, kid, > Geoff said. I mentally hummed my acknowledgment, ruffling my flight feathers to prepare for takeoff. < You okay, bud? > Geoff asked. I wasn't sure how (none of us were really sure how the intricacies of thought-speak worked, even though we'd all figured out how to use it) but I knew that that was directed to me and only me.

< Yeah, > I lied. < Don't worry about it, I'm fine. >

< Fine my ass, > Geoff said. < What's eating at you? >

< Just nerves, I guess. > The hawk-eagle looked at me expectantly. < Hey Geoff? >

< What's up? >

< If this turns out to be a trap... >

< It's not, > Geoff cut me off decisively. < I trust you and Ry. If I thought it was a trap, we wouldn't be going, plain and simple. > I fell into stunned silence. Geoff trusted me. I'm sure I knew that before he said it, but hearing the words made it real. It wasn't just a necessity, because we were all fighting the same war. We were friends.

< Thanks, Geoff, > I said. I could feel his smile, even though the rigid beak of the eagle made it impossible to see.

< Sure thing, > he said.

< Ray, you next? > Jack asked. His voice sounded distant, like he was barely on the edge of thought-speak range. He must have been circling around right on the edge.

< Go get 'em, tiger, > Geoff teased. I let the hawk brain take over enough to get me off the ground, feeling a thrill of adrenaline shock through me as I hit the same sweet thermal that had lifted all the other guys up high over the pavement and the houses. As soon as I was high enough, I veered west, just like we'd planned.

Flying as a hawk is a lot like what I'd imagine hang gliding to be like. Or at least, that's the closest humans will probably ever come. But you know, lying on your belly under a big pair of fake wings might have the same feeling as catching a thermal, but it's nowhere near the full experience of being the original flying ace.

Birds are awesome. Being a bird is awesome. 10/10 would recommend.

As soon as Geoff was in the air, we all turned west and started making a beeline for the desert. Our bird brains were on autopilot, keeping us in the air as naturally as could be.

Trouble was, that meant that there was nothing for our human brains to do.

< I spy with my little eye, something that rhymes with 'ass', > Geoff said.

< Grass, > Ryan deadpanned. < It's been grass the last three times you've gone. At this point, I think you just like saying the word 'ass.' >

< It took you this long to figure that out? > Jack asked.

< A little birdie told me, > Ryan said. We all groaned over the sound of Ryan's thought-speak giggling.

< That was awful and you should be ashamed of yourself, Ryan. >

Unfortunately for our brilliant plan, "six or seven hours" after we got in the air by 3 o'clock was 9 or 10 at night. And what we didn't take into account was that sure, during the daytime an eagle or a hawk can see the puff of gas from a fly farting on a blade of grass, but after dark that super vision quickly turns into a shit sundae with fuck you sprinkles.

< Fucking shit on a stick! > Michael swore, as the thermal he was surfing dropped out from under him, sending him plummeting toward the ground. There were a couple pockets left, but we'd long ago left civilization behind, and the shitty thing about the desert is that it's hot as hell during the day, but as soon as the sun's gone the temperature drops almost instantly.

< At this point, it might be faster to land and go coyote, > Ryan mused thoughtfully. < We're getting pretty close, anyway. >

< Yeah, > Geoff said. He'd been the first one to nearly drop out of the air, and his bigger morph had made it harder for him to pull out of it. < Yeah, let's do that. > One by one we landed and demorphed, glancing away from each other under the guise of looking out for predators like mountain lions or, you know, humans. After we'd caught our breath (this would be our fifth morph in 8 hours, so we were getting pretty fucking tired), we all started morphing.

The thing about morphing is that it looks different every time, and for every person. Geoff, for instance, sprouted thick tawny fur all over his body first, while Jack was forced down on all fours by the gross, sickening sound of his leg bones shifting and changing shape. Michael's ears shot up to the top of his head, and the hair on his head turned into tawny fur, which crept down over his skin like mold. I could feel my fingernails thickening and curling into canine claws, as my fingers sucked into my hand to become the nubby dog toes. It should have hurt like a bitch, but I guess part of the Andalite technology was a numbing agent, because it just had that uncomfortable, toe-curling feeling of being under a dentist's drill when you've been all shot up with novocain. My teeth thickened and turned into sharp canines, drawing my human lips back around the teeth that were too big for my mouth.

Scrunch! My mouth stretched out into a snout, my nose thickening into the wet, black canine sniffer. And boy, the smells! To a human, the desert smells like a whole bunch of nothing, just sand and useless scrub. But a coyote can smell where every other coyote in that desert has taken a piss in the last two days. It can smell every single prey animal hiding under the ground, and especially those that weren't. I could smell cow pies off in the distance, back the way we'd come. We were all still mid-morph, but it was hard to not get distracted by the influx of information.

And then there was fucking Ryan. While the rest of us were all looking like Frankenweenie gone horribly wrong, Ryan had a pelt of thick fur down his back that seamlessly transitioned into his sandy blond hair, shaggy tail sprouting from his ass. He gave it a testing wag in our direction, to which Geoff (who was the only one of us still with fingers) responded with a certain gesture. Suddenly, my puny human night vision was amplified a fuckton as my eyes changed to those of the coyote. I could see where everyone was now, although my color vision sucked shit compared to human. Ryan's ears changed first, sliding up to the top of his head, and then his eyes changed shape, and then finally his snout sprouted. He got down on all fours and finished the morph, as the rest of us were finishing up our last changes as well.

Then the instincts hit. The three-legged coyote we'd acquired was suddenly smelling four other copies of herself, and she was incredibly confused. And the thing about wild animals is that when they're confused, they usually get aggressive. She was outside of her territory, and there were four other coyotes who smelled just like her standing there.

We all let out an identical snarl, ears tucking back against our heads and hackles raising. Ryan snapped out of it first, a shudder running from his head to his tail as he got control over the coyote instincts.

< Come on, guys, > he said. < We need to get moving again. We can stay closer together, now, no one will really be suspicious of a pack of coyotes at this time of year. They'll think we're looking for a big creature of some sort. >

< Technically, we kind of are, > Michael said, the next to snap out of the instincts. I clamped down on the coyote brain and stamped out that scavenger's paranoia as best as I could, clearing my head.

< Let's go, > Geoff said. < Keep your noses open for anything out of the ordinary. >

Fwip-fwip-fwip-fwip-fwip! We all froze at an unmistakable sound overhead, looking up at the bright light that swept over the ground. A helicopter.

< Does that count? > Ryan asked. We all knew just who - or rather, what - was flying a helicopter out here this late.

Controllers.

They were definitely looking for something that wasn't us, though, because the light barely swept over us before they moved on. Without needing direction, we all broke into a run headed west.

< Let's hope they've got bad directions! > Geoff yelled.

In situations of extreme fear, a coyote can run up to 45 miles an hour. It took us about half an hour to get a scent in our noses that was definitely not one we were familiar with. It smelled kind of like grass, but not, and also like...metal.

< Smell that? > Geoff asked. We hadn't seen the helicopter again for a while. < Come on, we've got to be almost there. > We ran for the top of the nearest hill, stopping at the peak to look out for anything out of the ordinary.

< Uh, guys? > I called. < Look down. > Four coyote heads tipped downward. The hill we were standing on had been caved in on the other side, by what looked like a large glass dome. Now that we were literally on top of it, we could smell dying grass, and - more temptingly - fresh water.

< Holy shit, > Michael said. We didn't need direction, we skidded and slid and ran down the hill and around it to the dome. There was an open hatch on the outside that we sniffed around before crowding into.

The coyote brain was not happy with the way that the hatch slid closed behind us.

< Demorph, > Geoff said, almost hesitantly. We all did, going through the ugly process all over again until we were five naked humans standing in a hissing chamber. There was a hatch in front of us that looked just like the one behind us, and there were small emergency lights along the floor.

The door in front of us opened, and Ryan was the first one to step out onto the thick grass. It was dry and singed from the desert sun, but as our eyes adjusted to the near-darkness, I could see that the grass didn't used to be green.

"...Hello?" Geoff called. "Anybody home?"

"You are a fucking idi--" THWACK!

--

When I came to, my head was throbbing and I felt almost like I'd been drugged. Something hard and needle-sharp grazed my ribs, and I flinched.

"What the fuck?!" I snapped, sitting up. Geoff was on the ground next to me, still unconscious. Michael was a few feet away, squirming like he was just starting to wake up.

But my attention was grabbed by the scorpion-like blade that had just nudged me. My hand went to my side to see if I was bleeding, but came back clean. The creature standing over me had the body of a deer, standing on four delicate hooves. It fidgeted back and forth, shifting its weight and flicking its tail away from me when it saw I was awake. But where a deer's neck and head would be, there was a taller human-like torso, probably standing even over Jack, with thin, lean muscle stretched over an almost dainty skeleton and covered in blue fur. Skinny arms ended in long, excessively-fingered hands.

Huge green eyes watched me with fearful curiosity from an almost triangular face. It was almost human, except for the vertical slits where a nose should be and the blank skin where a mouth would go. Two horns twisted up from the top of its head, except they weren't horns. A pair of equally green eyes swiveled, alternating between watching me and watching the others. It was one of the weirdest-looking things I'd ever seen, but it wasn't the first time I'd seen one.

Once you've seen an Andalite, you'll never mistake it for anything else.

< I knocked you out so I could see what you were, > came a voice in my head. It sounded heavily-accented to me, anyway, thoughts curling into the words that invaded my head. Thought-speak. I felt an almost triumphant warmth spread through me.

It was the same voice from my dream.

"So we can be pretty sure this isn't a trap from Visser Three," Michael muttered. The Andalite tensed visibly, tail flicking into an attack position.

< Don't say that name! > he snapped.

"Uh, yeah, Michael, ix-nay on the isser-Vay," I hissed to him. The agitated fidgeting of the Andalite had stirred the other three out of unconsciousness with varying groans of dismay.

< Who are you? > the Andalite asked suspiciously.

"I'm Ray," I said stupidly.

"We're here to help you," Ryan added, as he came to and assessed the situation. "We heard you calling us." The Andalite's eyes narrowed.

< I wasn't calling you, > he argued. < That message was meant for my cousins. How could you hear it? >

"We're not normal humans," Geoff said, getting to his feet.

< Controllers? > the Andalite practically squeaked, recoiling with his tail poised ready to strike.

"Also no," Jack said. "We're fighting the Yeerks. That's why we're here - part of your ship was found on someone's property."

"Are you by yourself?" Ryan asked. The Andalite's stalk eyes glanced around the dead grass and dying trees.

< Yes, > he said. He scuffed his forehoof against the grass. < ...I was too young to fight. Never really liked it, anyway, > he admitted. < Are there... no other Andalites on Earth? > he asked. We glanced at each other, none of us wanting to answer.

"Not any free ones," Geoff said.

"Not anymore," I added. The Andalite's stalk eyes swiveled to me.

< Who?! > he asked. < Who else was there? > I wracked my brain for the name of the Andalite Prince, but it was long and alien (well, duh) and I couldn't remember the whole thing.

"Uh, I know part of it was Prince Reilig," I said. The Andalite reeled back like he'd been stung. A high keen of distress pierced through my head so sharply that it almost made me want to cry.

< No... No! You're lying! > the Andalite cried.

"I wish we were," Geoff said quietly. "We saw him get murdered." Another noise, lower in pitch this time.

< Who killed him? >

"The, uh... The guy whose name you don't want us to say," Michael said. The Andalite made an oddly bird-like trill in our heads, but didn't offer a coherent thought for a minute or two.

< ...He was my brother, > he said finally.

"We owe him our lives," Ryan said. "He died protecting us. He gave us... He gave us the power to morph." The Andalite hit us with another inarticulate noise that could only be transcribed as !!!!!!! That shit was really starting to get old.

< But that's against the rules! He must've thought there was no other choice if he trusted you with the morphing technology... > His main eyes looked up at us, as his tail dropped to the ground. < And you fight the Yeerks? > he asked.

"With everything we've got," Michael said. "I'm Michael. That's Ray, Ryan, Jack, and Geoff."

< I'm... > The Andalite hesitated, looking at us like he was still uncertain if he could trust us. < I'm Gavino-Darvi-Fede, > he finally said, tilting his chin up proudly. We all looked at him funny for a minute.

"Gav," Michael said decisively. "We're here to get you out of here. I know you were hoping for a different rescue party, but we're what you've got. And not to freak you out, but on our way here we, uh. Saw some other people looking for you who aren't quite as friendly as we are. So we prolly ought to get the fuck out of here soon," he added. Gav looked at us all and made a thoughtful sound in our heads.

< Who is your Prince? > he asked.

One by one, we all turned and looked at Geoff.

"No, fuck you guys, I'm nobody's Pr--" Geoff stopped short when the Andalite stepped right up to him (I was right, he totally had a couple inches on him) and bowed his upper half in respect.

< Prince Geoff, > Gav said. < I'll help you against the Yeerks however I can, until I can go back to my people. > Geoff's lidded blue eyes widened, and he glanced at Jack and then at Ryan, before looking back to the Andalite.

"Uh," he said. "Alright. We'll do what we can to get you back to them." Gav looked up with a bright smile in his huge main eyes.

< Top! > he exclaimed, all pretense of formality gone. < Well then, I'll show you around! >

--

I had to admit, being in an alien spaceship for the first time was pretty fucking cool. Gav had explained to us that for the first couple of weeks, he'd been able to keep the Dome Ship (that was what it was called, shit you not, they may be technological geniuses but good namers Andalites were not) climate-controlled. But then the backup power cells had run out of juice, which was when he decided it was about time to start calling for help.

Not to mention, he'd added with a pout that we could feel, the grass had all started drying up (which, well, duh, what do you think grass does in a desert?).

The tour was made a little more awkward by the fact that we were all kind of standing there with our dicks out, but I had the sneaking suspicion that Gav probably hadn't been the top student in his human anatomy class, because he seemed like the kind of guy who would definitely say something about it if he had any idea.

"What do you think?" Michael whispered to me.

"Can we keep him?" I asked under my breath. "I'll give him walkies and keep him fed." Michael let out a bark of laughter at that that made everyone all turn and look at us. Gav in particular looked spooked, his many-fingered hands curled up close to his chest and his tail arched over his head.

< Wot was that? > he asked.

"Have you never...heard somebody laugh before, Gav?" I asked.

< 'Course I have! That wasn't a laugh! >

"It wasn't a thought-speak laugh," Michael corrected. Gav's main eyes narrowed, but his tail relaxed.

"This all seems very elaborate for a spacecraft. Why do you go to all the trouble of replicating part of your home planet?" Ryan asked curiously, deftly changing the subject.

< It makes it healthier to spend a long time without returning to the home planet, > Gav explained. < And besides that, it really minges off the Yeerk filth, > he added, a mischievous gleam in his main eyes.

"It what?" Geoff asked. "Minges off the Yeerks?"

< You know, it bloody annoys them. >

"Why are they so annoyed?" Jack asked. Gav faced him with first his stalk eyes and then his main eyes, disbelief clear on his face.

< If they had a chance, they'd destroy it, > he said, his thought-speak voice quieter than it had been before. < Don't tell me you didn't know! >

"Know what?" Ryan asked hesitantly.

< The Yeerks are destroyers of worlds, > Gav said. < Yeah, they come in and turn any intelligent species into brain slaves, but once they've gotten everything off the world that they want, they... > he glanced around at us. We'd all stopped walking to stare at him. < ...They destroy it. Nobody told you? > he asked.

"Uh, no," I said. "No one mentioned that part." I didn't particularly like the outside (and believe me, flying/running through the desert all night hadn't exactly changed my mind), but the thought of someone else coming in and destroying what was ours to take advantage of rubbed me the wrong way. It was hard to tell with how dark it was, but I thought Jack looked slightly green at the thought.

A flash of light distracted us from our thoughts, seven pairs of eyes all looking out the side of the dome. The light swept past again, the same tall pillar of light that we'd seen in the desert.

"We've got company," Geoff said. "Let's blow this joint." A trill of distress filled our minds from Gav, and without words we knew that he didn't want to leave the Dome Ship behind. He didn't protest, though, galloping past us toward the same hatch we'd come in through.

"You're gonna need something a bit more subtle than that," Ryan noted, eyeing up the Andalite's very, very distinctive body.

< Oh, I acquired a native species, > Gav said proudly. < Didn't have much else to do, really. >

"Then morph it and let's go!" Geoff ordered. Despite the urgency in his words, we all stopped and stared as Gav began the transformation. His stalk eyes sucked themselves into his head like big sloppy spaghetti noodles, and his wide green eyes shrank and spread out on his face into buggy black eyes. His pointed ears melted into his head, leaving two holes on the side of his head. His shoulders stretched down away from his neck, as his body contracted and his back legs folded into the rest of his body.

Blue fur turned into the pattern of black feathers, which then popped out of his skin like a really bad case of acne, sprouting from his arms as his hands and fingers shrank and were swallowed up into two broad wings stretched out to either side of his body. The fur on his head disappeared, and the skin turned angry red and wrinkled, like a particularly irritated baby or a grumpy old man.

Crrrunch! Gav's jaw popped open and bone jutted forward, piercing through the red skin in a tiny pearl-white point.

It was one of the grossest things I'd ever seen. Stupid me had thought that watching an actual Andalite use Andalite technology might be cool, like maybe we were just dumb humans and doing it wrong, but no. No, that was just as gross as when we did it. Well, all of us but Ryan. Ryan could make almost any morph look pretty.

Probably not a turkey vulture, though, which was exactly what was standing where an Andalite had just been a couple seconds prior.

"Well fuck me," Michael said, in the pregnant silence following Gav's transformation.

"...Right!" Ryan said, clapping his hands. "Coyote's probably our best bet for now. Gav can follow us by smell, if his night-vision is terrible." Geoff was already halfway through his Wolfman transformation, thick fur sprouting all over his still plenty human body. His nose stretched out into a snout at the same moment that his hands turned into the canine paws. Me, Jack, and Michael started morphing at the same time. Jack's started with a tail shooting out of his ass (technically, you know, right above his ass, but there were plenty of full moons on the horizon tonight I didn't need to pay that close attention), while Michael was practically thrown to the ground as his legbones changed shape.

Ryan, graceful as always, started with his nails turning into claws, fur sprouting on the backs of his hands to make the way that his fingers shrank in and turned into callused pads look more natural. The fur traveled up his arms and down his back, and the hair on his head turned into the thick fur of the coyote before his face started to change shape.

My night vision clicked on like something out of a spy movie, and I glanced at my fellow freakshow rejects, then down at my human hands splayed on the brittle grass of the Dome Ship. I could smell Gav - it had to be Gav, technically, but to the coyote brain all he smelled like was prey - in the air all around me. I still had patches of human skin on my belly and arms, even as my hands turned into paws. My lips curled around the sudden protuberance of my teeth, effectively cutting off any chance at human speech.

< Look, Ma, I'm a chupacabra, > I joked.

< Wot's a chupacabra? > Gav asked.

< It's a big gross thing that sucks the blood out of goats, > Michael explained. < Supposedly. >

< Does the blood of a goat have special properties? > Gav asked.

< Not that I know of, > Ryan said. We had to pause to all get hold over the coyote instincts, before the outside door to the airlock opened and let us out. Gav took to the sky with a few labored flaps of his massive wings, coasting over our heads. We all ran beneath him. The sound of the helicopter was deafening, almost directly overhead. The light barely caught my tail.

< Andalite! > It took all we could to keep moving. The voice that boomed in our heads like a cannonball felt like the personification of pure evil.

And it pretty much was. The universe's only Andalite-Controller.

Visser Three.

Gav made a noise in our heads, a sharp keen of distress. Yeah, that pretty much summed up how we all felt about the guy.

< Shhh! > Geoff hissed. The helicopter was hovering over the Dome Ship now, doing lazy laps in the air. A few yards away, we stopped and turned to look.

Visser Three's roar of frustration overtook our heads, blocking out all higher thought for a moment. A bright light, blinding to the coyote's night vision, shot out from somewhere over the helicopter and hit the Dome Ship.

Suddenly there was no Dome Ship anymore. Gav squawked.

Suddenly, the helicopter light swept our direction. The five of us were able to turn tail and run, but with no thermals Gav had a harder time moving as quick as we'd like.

< Get them! > Visser Three yelled.

< Ah fuck, > Ryan said flatly. Bright red Dracon beams sizzled the air around us, smaller than the one that had destroyed the Dome Ship. Other than getting a little bit of fur singed, it was pretty easy for us to dodge. Gav tumbled out of the air and disappeared from sight.

< GAV! > Michael yelled. A pained whimper answered him. Michael scampered toward where Gav had disappeared. Without thinking, I changed course to follow him.

< Whoa! > Suddenly, there was no ground under my feet. I saw Gav in a sprawl of wings deep at the bottom of the ravine. Whether it was the dark or what, I couldn't see Michael.

< Destroy them all! Anything that moves! > A glance around for Ryan, Geoff, and Jack yielded nothing. The helicopter was bearing right down toward where I was standing.

< Jump! > Gav yelled from below me. The coyote brain balked at the idea. I set my front paws on the edge of the ravine, and then kicked with my back paws so that I started skidding, twisting so I skidded sideways down the slope. Gravity is a bitch, and when I lost my footing I started tumbling head over heels every which way.

I hit the ground with a SNAP that couldn't be healthy. Blinding pain lanced through my back leg and my side, and I let out a yelp of pain. My night vision tried to adjust to where I was, but it was quickly obscured by a large swath of feathers that covered my vision.

Gav was sprawled with both wings fully outstretched, one draped over me and the other, I could smell, draped over another coyote who had to be Michael.

< Oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god, > I rambled. < Fuck, I think I broke my leg, fuck, fuck, fuck... >

< Ray? >Michael called. < You're a fucking idiot, what the hell did you jump down here after me for? > he asked.

< It seemed like a good idea at the time, > I shot back. Searing pain shot up my bad leg when Gav barely shifted his wing. < Ow, oh fuck me, > I swore.

< You're both bloody idiots, > Gav said, panic rising in his tone. < This morph has wings, yours don't! >

< Yeah, well, what kind of first impression would it be if we ditched our new partner on his first day on the job? > Michael asked sarcastically.

< ...Partner? > Gav asked.

< Yeah, you know, the sixth musketeer. The blue ranger. We're a team, > I said. It was harder to mask the pain in my thought-speak voice than it would've been in my regular. Occasionally, I saw the bright light of the helicopter swoop over us, but we were all laying so still we might as well have been dead.

< I don't - I never... >

< How old are you? > Michael asked. < I mean, you said you were too young to fight. We are too - well, except for Geoff. Are you like, Jack and Ryan's age? Or more like me and Ray? > Gav gave a thoughtful noise.

< Like you and Ray, I think... > he said hesitantly. < ...Ray? >

< Yeah, Gav? > I asked.

< Has anybody called you 'X-Ray?' > Michael and I let out a simultaneous thought-speak laugh, the ridiculousness of the question combined with the pain I was in and the uncertainty about where the other three even were was all too much.

< Not yet, > I said. < You gonna start? >

< Well, since you all won't call me by my full name, I might as well, hadn't I? >

< Sure, go for it, > I said. < ...Shit. >

< What? > Michael asked.

< How long have we been in morph? > I asked. < Jack's still got the watch. >

< You've been in morph for fifteen of your minutes, > Gav supplied cheerfully, happy to be of service. < ...Wot? You mean you can't tell how long you've been in morph for? >

< Uh, no, > I said. < But that's gonna come in handy, I bet. >

We laid there in a pile of fur and feathers until we could no longer hear the helicopter, mine and Michael's labored breathing the only audible sound. When Gav withdrew his wings, I saw just how messed up my leg was. It was bloodied and twisted sideways.

< Oh fuck me, > I said. Michael crawled out from under Gav's other wing, back legs dragging uselessly across the ground.

< Good fucking thing we can demorph, > he muttered. I had already started, watching in fascination as the wound knit together and the bones shifted and realigned into human leg bones. Michael demorphed as well, staring at his legs like he was surprised that he could feel them again as they straightened out and de-furred into human legs.

SPROOT! Gav's long Andalite legs suddenly sprouted from the vulture's body, nearly smacking me in the head. I didn't even have the energy to be mad - it took everything I had to keep focusing on the morph.

"We've got to find the others," was the first words out of Michael's mouth once he had one again. "And then we're going to get the fuck out of here before those assholes come back to finish the job." Dread unfolded in my stomach, as I looked up the side of the cliff face we'd slid down. Michael seemed to be thinking the same thing, and that thing was a resounding "I don't wanna climb that shit."

< I found them! > came a voice from the top of the cliff. My human eyes were useless trying to see, but the moon haloed a furry head with two pointed ears. Michael and I broke out in matching grins.

"Geoff!"

< Yeah yeah, babies, hold on, > Geoff drawled. He looked like he was contemplating jumping down, and then thought better of it. < I'm going to try to find a way down there. Give us one sec! > he called.

< It's been one of your seconds, > the fully-demorphed Gav said.

< Shut the fuck up, > Geoff said, although there was no sharpness in his tone at all. He disappeared from the top of the ridge. I briefly considered sitting down, but decided that a sandy asshole didn't sound like fun. Michael thought better of it too, but he leaned his back heavily against the dusty ridge. Gavin morphed back to the turkey vulture as soon as he had demorphed, finding the tiny space a little cramped for his giant blue alien deer ass.

"Man, I am looking forward to getting home to a fucking blanket," I said, rubbing my arms and stamping my bare feet on the ground to keep warm. As the adrenaline was leaving my system, so too was any hope of temperature regulation.

As Geoff would put it, it was cold as dicks.

"Thank god!" I jumped at the sound of another human voice, turning toward Ryan.

"What the fuck, dude, you scared the shit out of--" My words cut themselves off, along with the rest of my brain, while I processed the chilled skin that I was being held against, and the arms around my shoulders. Before I could unclench and respond to the hug, Ryan had pulled me back to arm's length, running his big, warm hands over my cheeks and tilting my head up to face him.

"Are you okay?" he asked. I nodded stupidly. Between the moonlight and the time that my eyes had had to adjust, I saw him smile in relief and then look at Michael and Gav. The only way it could've been more cliche was if he would have kissed me.

I was fully prepared to go to the grave hiding the fact that I probably would've let him.

His hand was still warm on my skinny-ass shoulder when Geoff and Jack came running up behind him.

"You're not hurt, are you?" Geoff asked, worry making his voice practically crack.

"We're okay," Michael said. "Gav hid us." Geoff breathed a sigh of relief.

"Sounds like you lads took care of each other pretty well," he said. "Come on, let's go the fuck home."

"Fucking signed," Michael agreed. I glanced at Gav, who had gone silent, and was shifting from one vulture foot to the other.

"...There's forest around my house," Ryan said quietly. having seen where I looked. "Gav, I know it's not home, but it's the best we've got for now."

< Okay, > Gav said. < I swore to follow Prince Geoff. >

"...Don't call me Prince," Geoff said.

< Yes, Prince Geoff, > Gav said. We could all feel the smile in his voice. Michael laughed first, but a second later the rest of us followed. It wasn't how we thought we'd be making a new friend, but having an Andalite around - even a kid - couldn't hurt.