Chapter Text
My name is Tobias.
My last name doesn’t matter. It hasn’t mattered in a long time. There aren’t even that many people who’ve known my first name, in recent years: a few doctors at the mobile clinic, maybe. Some guys I used to hang out with sometimes in a sheltered lot in the warehouse district. A few staff members at the shelters in town—not that I used to go to shelters a lot. I’ve always liked it better when the open sky was above me. Which works out pretty well, now.
I guess I could put Jake on the list of people who knew my name back then. His office was next to the construction site where I used to spend my days, and he used to walk by me on his way to work, freshly showered and shaved in his collared button-down. He asked my name once early on, and after that he used to smile and say hi when he passed. Not a big deal, but you’d be surprised how few people do that, when you’re sitting in scruffy clothes by the side of the road.
I think maybe that’s how it all started. If Jake hadn’t taken the time to talk to me, I might not have followed that night when he and his friends were crossing through the construction site, and I wouldn’t have seen the thing that changed my life.
Or maybe I’m lying to myself. It probably would have happened either way. There’s not a lot to distract you when you’re sitting outside for most of the day, and I used to do a lot of staring at the sky. I probably would have gone to investigate anyway, when I’d seen the spaceship.
That spaceship was what changed life for the four of us—for me, Jake, Jake’s best friend Marco, and Jake’s cousin Rachel. It landed in the construction site, and we met the dying alien named Elfangor who called himself an Andalite and told us that the Yeerks were here. Yeerks: slug-like aliens who crawl into your ear, spread out inside your brain, and take over your life. The Andalites had been fighting them in space, but they had lost, and the Yeerks were here on Earth. They had already taken over a lot of humans and were planning to take us all.
I know. This sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory. I don’t have a lot of credibility when it comes to things like that, living the way I do. Usually I don’t mind. It can be easier, not having anyone take you too seriously.
But now I want you take me seriously. I would love to lump the Yeerks in with the fake alien stories I’ve read about over the years—the doctored tabloid photos, or stupid Area 51 memes. But the four of us were there, and we saw them. Their Bug Fighters landed alongside the Andalite’s ship, and they poured out in their stolen alien bodies: the huge bladed Hork-Bajir, the long snakelike Taxxons, like something out of a nightmare. And we saw humans, too. Controllers, just like the Hork-Bajir and Taxxons, slaves to the Yeerks in their brains.
Then the Blade ship landed, carrying the leader of the military invasion of Earth, Visser Three. The only Yeerk ever to take an Andalite body. We watched as Visser Three transformed into a horrible alien monster, picked Elfangor up, and ate him whole.
I still see it every time I close my eyes to sleep. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.
It would have been nice to think that those were the only Yeerks on Earth. But later the group of us went down to the Yeerk pool, the secret cavern they’ve built beneath the city, and saw Yeerks by the hundreds. Maybe the thousands. We heard the screams of the involuntary hosts, and we tried to save some of them, but we failed.
We did manage to escape with our lives, though. See, Elfangor didn’t just give us the warning about the Yeerks. He also gave us a tool to fight them: the power to morph. The power to absorb the DNA of any animal we can touch and then turn into that animal.
It’s an amazing power. Mind-bending. It means that we can draw on all the resources of Earth in the fight against the Yeerks: the huge predators, the tiny insects, the fish in the sea, the birds in the skies. We can use them all to disguise ourselves and strike blows against the Yeerks.
Marco calls us the Animorphs. The five of us—Rachel, Jake, Marco, and I, along with Elfangor’s younger brother, Ax—went into the Yeerk pool in morph. We rescued Jake’s wife, Cassie, and destroyed evidence that might have betrayed our identities to the Yeerks. And we got out alive.
But not unchanged. That’s another thing about the power to morph: it has limits. You can only do it for two hours at a time. After that, you have to demorph to your own body, or you’ll be stuck. You’ll become what the Andalites call a nothlit, a person trapped in morph.
Most of the Animorphs got out of the Yeerk pool within the two-hour time limit. But I wasn’t with them as they raced up the stairs. I was caught in the air above the main part of the cavern, trying not to get hit with the fireballs Visser Three was throwing—because Visser Three, unlike any other Yeerk, has an Andalite body, and that means he, too, has the power to morph. He morphed a giant fire-breathing monster, and in the chaos, I was separated from the others.
I think they wanted to wait for me. Rachel told me they did, anyway. But they didn’t have a choice. And it wasn’t the tragedy it would have been for any of them. I’m not being self-pitying, saying that; it’s just true. They all had homes, jobs, families who would notice they were gone. I didn’t have any of that. I didn’t even have a human body that felt like mine, most days. If one of us had to fall behind, it was right that it be me.
I had morphed a red-tailed hawk to get into the Yeerk pool. When the others escaped, I managed to hide in an air shaft that I hoped would lead me to the surface. But it was blocked at the end. By the time the others found me, it was too late: it had been over two hours, and I was still a red-tailed hawk.
I will always be a red-tailed hawk.