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Eva wakes up Chapman, in the early hours of the morning after the children left for their final assault on the Pool ship. “Come on,” she whispers. “Let’s go.”
He sits up, looks around the hork-bajir valley. “We’re supposed to stay here. To…”
To be ready to grab the civilians and run for it, if the battle really goes to hell. Because then even if the Animorphs don’t survive, even if the planet doesn’t, there will still be some free humans and hork-bajir left in the galaxy.
“It’s been thirty-six hours,” Eva says. “Radio chatter is still wall-to-wall peace negotiations. It’s over, I’m going. And I need a copilot.”
Clumsily, Chapman rolls to his feet. He doesn’t argue further. She knew he wouldn't.
Eva leaves a note for Peter, but doesn’t wake him — it's not worth the risk of also rousing Naomi or Michelle. The captured Bug fighter is still perched on the upper edge of the valley, battered but functional enough to hum to life when she throws it into gear.
The trip passes in silence. Ex-hosts don’t tend toward chatter, especially not when the air is thick with anxiety. She handles the controls; Chapman navigates.
It’s not hard, with an Empire comm on board, to find out about the Pool ship parked on the Washington Mall. To discover that the yeerk fleet now answers to one War-Prince Jake Berenson, Commander in Chief of the Earth Resistance. To find that their new overlord is currently located at a processing center outside Washington D.C., but he’s not taking calls at this time.
Eva drops the Bug fighter on the lawn of the Resistance's temporary headquarters. Abandons it there to be someone else's problem. She leaves Chapman at the entrance of the main hub of the processing center (“M-E-L-I-S-S-A, blond hair, this tall, she’s fif— shit, she just turned sixteen…”). She opens doors without hesitation, walks down halls like she belongs there. No one thinks to stop her; everyone’s got too much to do.
Their Commander in Chief is sitting on the cement floor of a back office, legs pulled up to his chest, face pressed into his kneecaps. Marco leans against his shoulder.
“Cariño,” Eva breathes, and they both lift their heads.
Marco has been crying. Jake has not. Marco surges upright, throws himself into her arms. She grips him hard, heart squeezing, rocking where she stands.
“Who,” she whispers.
“Rachel.”
And oh, oh, may God forgive her for the surge of relief she feels. May he look kindly on her gratitude that it is Naomi and not she who must live with this pain.
“Tom as well,” Marco says, face buried in her shoulder from where she presses a hand into his hair. “Jara. James. Kelly and Tuan. Don’t know about Collette, but, uh.” A wet breath.
No surprises there. She expects the list of dead hosts to be innumerable, and they knew the Auxiliaries were on the front line. Peter is safe. Marco is safe. Jake is safe. Eva has room in her heart for three people only; any more and the world will eat you alive. She’ll need a moment to find it in herself to care about the others.
Marco pulls back enough that they can glance at each other, and then both look at Jake.
His eyes are dull, but he stares up at them. That tilt of the shoulders, that openness to his face — it’s the stance of a starving man watching a feast, of a hypothermic leaning toward a dying fire. Eva has been glimpsing that hunger for months, but she can’t satiate it. She isn’t Jean, isn’t Steve, isn’t Tom.
All she can do is nudge Marco forward, and let him shove his way back into Jake’s arms. All she can do is leave them their space to grieve, and to hope that Jean will learn to forgive.
She’s in a refugee center, she realizes as she shuts the door on her boys.
Two hours later, Eva’s guarding the door against everyone's questions and demands. A harried-looking woman rushes up, dodging around Eva and raising her hand to knock. Eva steps into her path a second time, crowding closer now.
“We need someone who speaks Galard.” The woman tries a third time for the door. “If you’d let me through—”
“I speak Galard,” Eva says.
For the first time, the woman looks at Eva.
Eva looks back. White lady, tall and unassuming. Windswept gray hair, bags under eyes, ex-host stiffness.
The woman blows out a breath. “Yeah. Okay.”
The woman (Diedre, she says) runs Eva through a brisk summary of the clusterfuck as they make their way back to the processing room: “Over half a million ex-hosts, twenty thousand and counting in the D.C. area alone, some claiming to be yeerkless but we don’t know, some who are still controllers and we’ve got no kandrona, casualty count unknown… We’ve got nowhere to put them. No way of knowing who to trust.”
It’s too much. That much horror, in numbers that high, simply becomes so incomprehensible it’s boring.
“Galard.” Eva cuts her off. “Tell me what you need Galard for.”
Diedre takes her to a computer console, one of the human ones back-fitted by the Empire to run on yeerk software. Scrolling across the screen is a list of file paths.
“Break in,” Diedre says. “Any contact information about hosts, anything with numbers or names or who can morph, will help.”
Eva sighs, looking at the scrolling text. Yeerks rarely record anything about hosts, outside of quantity. But Diedre probably knows that already.
No use complaining. Eva drags the keyboard toward her, gets to work.
“Hedrick Chapman,” she says at one point. “Can someone find Hedrick Chapman and tell him I need his help with the Sharing rosters? He’s forty-five, six-one, thinning brown hair.”
No less than four people scurry off, moving as urgently as… as if Visser One herself had issued that request. Eva resolves to save the identity crisis for later, and gets back to typing.
“I’m not getting involved in this,” Chapman says, when he gets herded back into the room, Melissa in tow. “I’m out.”
“Uh-huh.” Eva hands him an inch-thick stack of paper. “Underline the voluntaries and cross out the deceased.”
Grumbling, Chapman sits down and scrounges a pen.
Anything that looks remotely useful — memos on troop movements, Sharing logistics, notes on cover stories for hosts — she flags as being of interest and runs through a rough auto-translate. It’s one hell of a haystack, and most of the needles are mislabeled; she looks up at one point and discovers night has fallen and that she’s been here long enough for her wrists to ache.
“Does anyone here know andalite programming?” she yells into the hallway for the fourth or fifth time.
Everyone looks up. They’re up to eleven people crammed into this room, ranging in usefulness from Zachariah who’s fluent in four alien languages to Melissa, who has gamely taken on the task of alphabetizing print-outs.
“I may be able to assist in that regard,” a familiar voice says.
Every ex-host in the room jumps. Chapman shoots to his feet, eyes wide, body suddenly between Melissa and the man standing at the door.
Well. Not quite a man.
“What’s with the sudden interest in helping non-andalites?” Chapman says acidly.
Alloran looks him over. “Thank you for your concern. I must congratulate you on your newfound loyalty to your own species.”
"Putting your own species over everyone else is overrated, if you ask me."
"So is allying with the yeerks. How did that work out for you?"
"Ask Arbron what—"
“Nope!” Eva claps her hands. “No, I do not care what history you two have. You will be sitting down, you will be keeping your traps shut, and you will be handing me a Unix-compatible list of yeerk deployments to the greater D.C. area by tomorrow, or so help me God I will— will put you both in time-out.”
That definitely came out in Visser One’s voice. Changing her threat mid-sentence doesn’t do much to mitigate it. Eva wants not to care. There isn’t time to care.
Alloran and Chapman both settle in meek silence at their consoles. That’s something, anyway.
Eva types, until her eyes blur, until her thoughts are all in Galard. The next interruption comes in the form of a cup of coffee being set on the desk next to her. Searing hot, acidic, cut lightly by two creams and a surface coating of cinnamon.
“You are a blessing to every one of your ancestors,” she says with real feeling, looking up at her son. She has no idea how many months it’s been since she’s had hot coffee, had no idea Marco remembered how she takes it.
Marco gives an over-causal shrug, but he’s flushed with pride. “We were feeling kinda useless, to be honest.” He tilts his head over to Jake, who is handing around snack cakes to everyone else.
“Have you tried getting him out of here?” Eva asks in an undertone.
“Can Tiger Woods golf?” Marco mutters.
Eva nods. Jake’s waiting for news about his parents, no doubt, and she can appreciate his not wanting to be alone.
Speaking of which. She might as well try again, since it’s been a few hours since the last attempt. Eva pulls up the ever-updating list of hosts in custody, and enters ‘Berenson.’
This time, the computer comes back with a result.
She glances over. Marco’s drifted across the room, saying something to Melissa that causes her to break into giggles and her dad to glare. Jake is standing next to them, staring into space, empty-handed. Eva angles her monitor a little more to the left.
Jeanette Berenson, the entry says. Held in Annapolis, MD. Uninfested, voluntary exit.
Eva blows out a long sigh.
Memory surges. Eva pushing a stroller along sidewalks that cut between manicured suburban lawns, feeling as self-conscious as a cygnet in a duck pond. The genuine warmth, in the way Jean had stood from her front porch and rushed to meet a fellow mother. Toddlers playing in the yard: one loudmouthed four-year-old throwing a nerf ball, one barely-walking baby watching them over the thumb jammed into his mouth.
There had been no hesitation, no guile in Jean. She’d cooed over Marco’s two-tooth smile, asking when Eva had moved in and if tomorrow would be too soon to arrange a play date. Eager to befriend, regardless of Eva’s brown skin and foreign accent.
A good person. A good parent.
Eva can be honest, in the privacy of her mind where now even Edriss cannot hear: she never liked Tom Berenson. He never really outgrew being too loud, too energetic, taking up all the attention. Never seemed to notice Jake’s agonizing case of hero-worship. Never gave anyone else reason to notice Jake either, although that was not his fault.
But her heart can still ache for his loss, looking at her beloved friend’s name on the screen and wondering who shall break the news that one of Jean’s sons has killed the other.
The computer beeps. It’s loaded more results.
Three more results.
Again, Eva glances over at Jake. He’s paying no attention.
Daniel Berenson, the next file says. No surprise there. Held in Bronx, NY. Infested.
Another parent. Another dead child. Eva struggles to find fondness for Naomi, musters at minimum sadness for her loss.
Thomas Berenson is the next file down. Eva jolts at the name, but it’s clearly a different Thomas Berenson, because next to this one is a listing about his current location rather than a deceased marker. Another glance over at Jake.
This time he looks back, frowning slightly.
Eva’s not proud of what she does next. She widens her eyes in concern. Mouths: “You all right, honey?”
It has exactly the intended effect. Jake’s expression closes off. He gives her a stiff nod, and walks out of the room.
Steven Berenson, the final entry under the name. Held in Annapolis, MD. Uninfested, voluntary exit. With any luck, he and Jean have already found each other.
Eva looks around for Marco, hoping to let him deliver the good news about Jake’s parents. Before she calls him over she hesitates, and takes one more look at that third entry.
She wouldn’t want a misunderstanding causing Jake pain. So she can go through and confirm that it’s a nasty coincidence, maybe update the file with a middle name or a suffix so that Jake will know at a glance this isn’t his brother.
Thomas Berenson. The entry has notes about his being taken by human authorities outside of Gainesville, Virginia. Held in Arlington. And then she sees the warning tag down at the bottom.
Eva switches off the monitor and shoots to her feet.
“Diedre?” She’s pleased with how level her voice sounds. “Diedre, I’m going to need you in the next room.”
Diedre stands as well, moving to set down the yeerk tablet.
“Bring that,” Eva says.
She’s moving fast down the hall before she even confirms Diedre is following, opening doors at random until she gets to an empty supply closet. Diedre steps in after her, asking no questions. Bless her heart.
“I need you to pull up everything you have on Thomas Berenson,” Eva says. “From the host files.”
Awkwardly, Diedre shifts to type one-handed into her tablet. “Okay, this him?” She holds up the entry.
“That’s the one.” Eva’s eyes once again lock on that note at the bottom.
WARNING: suspected morpher.
Because suddenly this is looking less like a coincidence… more like Marco’s own ability to use morphing to get out of near-certain death.
“What do you need?” Diedre asks.
“Anything.” Eva’s voice is less steady now. More breathless. Shakier, thinking of Jake’s bloodshot eyes and blank face. Of Jean’s effortless love. Of Steve’s dorky laugh. “Everything there is on this host. I need all of it.”
“Okay.” Diedre taps her tablet. “Sending an inquiry to the Arlington facility now. They’re going to be as overwhelmed as we are. More, even — that’s where the most senior yeerks are being held.”
The lightheadedness increases. “Including Visser Seventeen?”
“Yeah, he’s on the list.” Diedre keeps tapping. “Oh, here we go! They have video stills of all the controllers, including… this.”
She holds out the tablet. Filling the screen is a color photo of the host, suspected morpher, possibly Visser Seventeen, allegedly Thomas Berenson.
Eva’s knees give out. She catches herself before she goes down, and then she’s throwing open the closet door and screaming Jake’s name.
Two years later, Eva’s perfecting the folds on a post-it note paper airplane when it occurs to her that Tom has been a terrible influence. She’s a grown woman, and yet here she is… taking aim… getting ready…
She throws. It nails him squarely in the back of the head.
Tom yelps, spinning around and grabbing at the airplane. “What? What?” he demands, sounding the way he always does when trying to pretend he wasn’t completely lost in his own head.
“Thank you,” Eva says.
Tom pushes off his desk, causing his chair to roll across the room, ricochet into the far wall, and spin to a stop directly next to Eva’s. “It was one senator and one phone call,” he says. “You did the last, like, bajillion. And besides, it’s your birthday.”
Eva feels her smile go soft. She’d meant the reorganization he just finished for their entire database, had no idea he picked up the daily annoy-a-senator chore, or that he even knew it was her birthday. “Thank you,” she says again.
He salutes. “Yes, ma’am, happy birthday, ma’am.”
And Eva can be honest, in the privacy of her mind where now even Edriss cannot hear: she may have found space in her heart for just one more.