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Jake survived. Cassie found a way to jab a big syringe of adrenaline into him. Enough to wake him up just as her mom was scrubbing up for surgery back at The Gardens. He demorphed to human and calmly walked out of the zoo. He had to wait two hours for a city bus, but fortunately, Cassie found him a pair of shoes to wear.
...
Ax was fine. He’d only been stunned. He demorphed, terrified some person driving by, remorphed, and came looking for me.
As for Marco ... well, Marco awakened to find David standing over him with the baseball bat. He’d been tied up and locked in his closet. It took him the rest of the night to get loose.
It had been a bizarre night. But the most bizarre thing was that when it was all over, we had to go to school.
That’s right, school. On zero hours of sleep.
-Rachel, #22: The Solution
Rachel found me at my locker before the first bell, her eyes sunk so deep into their sockets that I knew she hadn’t slept, either. She beat me to the punch, asking, “Late night?”
I groaned. “Took me two hours to get home on the bus.”
Rachel raised an eyebrow. “You couldn’t catch a ride?”
I shook my head. “Not with… all that going on,” I said, hoping she’d fill in the blanks. I was too tired to come up with a sufficiently descriptive code phrase for like hell was I going to morph a bird when David specifically targets us in bird morph and also killed Tobias, our best flier.
Whether she caught my meaning or not, Rachel let it go, announcing, “I didn’t finish the assignment.”
I could feel the underlying accusation in her words, but I didn’t have the energy to address it. “Did you have any help?”
Rachel pulled her backpack straps tighter across her shoulders. “I checked with Marco, but he was no help,” she said carefully. “He even… distracted …Philip from helping me.”
That got my attention. “That doesn’t sound like Marco,” I said, watching her closely. “Is he…uh…”
Rachel shrugged, going tense all over, and something in my chest went cold.
Okay, so David had gotten to Marco – had used him, somehow, to get to Ax, too. My tired brain was staggering through the possibilities, trying to guess at the details Rachel couldn’t say in the hallways at school. A hostage situation, maybe? Or…
David had undeniably killed Tobias. But Tobias was a bird. He’d said he wouldn’t kill a human, hadn't he?
But then, Ax wasn’t a human – and who knows what morph he might have caught Marco in. He’d been eager enough to kill me when I was a tiger.
My pulse was pounding. Did I have three dead Animorphs…?
I leaned my forehead against my locker, just to feel the cool metal against my thoughts, trying to come up with something to say – anything – to get more information without giving us away. Rachel must have seen me lose that fight, because she settled against the locker next to mine, looking out across the hall, and added, “I did get some help from T, though.”
My spine straightened of its own accord. I stared at her.
“T?” I asked, weakly. “But I saw…”
“Kinda racist,” Rachel murmured, “getting him mixed up with someone else like that.”
I put my forehead on the locker again, allowing myself the briefest moment to close my eyes.
Tobias was alive. Alive! I had seen David kill some other red-tailed hawk. That was– that was good, yes, but: Ax? And Marco…?
It was too much at once. I couldn't hold it all.
Rachel nudged my arm, and when I looked over I could see a hint of a smile on her. I followed her gaze, to where–
“I swear to God, if either of you laughs at D-dog’s jokes about hitting home runs or being in the closet today, I am going to lose my goddamn mind,” Marco spat, arriving at our bank of lockers with a great deal more irritation than usual.
Relief hit me like a boxer, clocking me across the jaw and making my head spin, so I missed whatever wordless conversation passed between the two of them as Marco nudged Rachel aside and knelt to viciously spin the dial on his locker.
“D-dog? Really?” Rachel taunted, bumping Marco with her knee. He swatted her away. Then, with slightly less venom, she added, “Did you hear from Philip?”
Marco paused in his assault on the dial. “No,” he said warily. “I didn’t see… any of him.”
Sluggishly, my brain fought through the translation: Marco hadn’t seen any of Ax’s morphs, but Rachel had last seen Ax with Marco. Did that mean Ax was okay…? Or did it mean David… had him, somehow?
I glanced at Rachel, wishing desperately that we could thought-speak when out of morph.
“He must have missed you, then,” Rachel surmised. "I saw him this morning."
Oh. So Ax was fine all along. Thanks for the clarification, Rachel. Annoyed, I clicked my internal living Animorphs ticker back up to six.
Marco tucked his hair behind his ear and returned to the time-honored tradition of not knowing his locker combination.
“Well,” I said, trying to keep the irritation out of my voice, “if everybody’s–”
“Hey!” Marco flinched away from Rachel, and it took me a second to realize she’d flipped his hair back down over his ear.
“Are you wearing make-up?” Rachel teased, but her tone was pointed, and Marco’s hand shot to the side of his neck.
“Of course not,” he said, reflexively petulant. “I’m naturally this flawless.”
Rachel rolled her eyes. “Whatever,” she grumped. “Just remember to wash it off or you’ll get pimples.”
She turned her back on us, sauntering off down the hallway with only about 60% of her usual swagger, and I saw her catch Cassie by the arm at the end of the hall. Marco glanced up at me, brow furrowed, withdrawing his hand from his neck but leaving his hair in place.
“What–” he started to say, which was the exact point at which I lost the final shreds of my patience with the whole talking-in-code thing and slammed my hand against my locker.
The resultant CLANG interrupted the pre-class chatter as students turned to look at us. Marco sprung to his feet, laughing too loud. “Whoa, Jake, you’re such a big strong maaaaan,” he announced, curtsying prettily at me. That earned a few snickers from passersby, so he offered a dramatic curtsy to them, too. The chatter resumed.
“Bathroom,” I muttered. Marco nodded, trailing after me to the end of the hall, locker forgotten. We slipped into the boys’ bathroom just as the first warning bell rang, bypassing two guys from the swim team on their way out, and Marco checked under the stalls.
“Clear,” he said, turning to me. “You wanna use your words, big guy?”
I didn’t. Not really. I wanted to go to sleep for a thousand years.
Instead, I reached out and tapped the side of Marco’s chin, prompting him to tilt his head and tuck his hair again, showing me what Rachel had seen: streaks of dark red blood, dry and flaking, running from his collar up past his ear and into his hairline.
“Gross,” I muttered, grabbing a wad of paper towels and turning on the nearest faucet. Marco glanced at himself in the mirror, inspecting his neck.
“Huh,” he mused. “You’d think I’d remember hooking up with a vampire.”
I returned to him with the wetted paper towels, expecting him to snatch them away, but he didn’t. Instead he held back his hair, giving me a rueful smirk as I set about wiping the blood off his neck myself. It was a lot of blood.
“What happened to you, man?”
“I could ask you the same question.”
“Sure, okay, but I'm not covered in blood, so you first.”
He rolled his eyes. “Fine. I woke up to David standing over me with a baseball bat, which it turns out is not the kind of kinky fun I’m into.” He flinched, ever so slightly, when I wiped the skin over his temple. I frowned, but he waved me off. “He knocked me out and tied me up in my closet. Took me a while to escape. Okay! Your turn.”
“David left Cassie’s barn and attacked Tobias. Ax and I found him at his old house. I thought he killed Tobias, but he didn’t – Rachel says it was some other hawk. I sent Ax to get her, then fought David at the mall. He, uh – he won.”
Marco laughed joylessly. “Our fearless leader, beaten by the newbie,” he said. “I’m so proud.”
I stuck a wad of wet paper towel into his ear, which earned me a significantly less joyless squawk of indignation. Served him right.
“I don’t know exactly what happened after that,” I went on, ignoring his halfhearted glare and resuming my blood-mopping duties. “I woke up in Cassie’s mom’s surgery and morphed out. Took the bus home. Rachel says – uh, something about you helping David get to Ax?”
Marco pondered that for a moment, then swore bilingually. “Of course,” he growled, his skin flushing a shade darker in rage. “That's why there were feathers on my bat.” Registering my confusion, he elaborated: “David must have acquired me, then used my face to lure Ax close enough to hit him.”
It was my turn to swear.
“Jake,” Marco went on, a little hysterically, “please tell me we’re going to kill him. I cannot have that psychopath running around with my DNA. He could use it to–” he faltered, realizing he was at risk of demonstrating actual concern for others, and finished with, “–to tank my reputation with the ladies.”
I didn’t have an answer for him, so instead I wiped the last of the blood from behind his ear and tilted his head toward the light, scrutinizing his hairline. I could still see dried flakes of blood, but they wouldn’t be visible underneath his dark hair if you weren’t looking for them. I glanced down at the muddy red wad of towels in my hands.
“This is a lot of blood, man,” I said. “How did you say David knocked you out?”
Marco shrugged, turning to the mirror to inspect my work. “Baseball bat,” he said. “That Louisville Slugger dad bought at the Padres game when we were nine. Remember?”
“The wooden one?”
“Bingo. Turns out morphing doesn’t do you much good during the three seconds it takes somebody to swing a bat. We should probably add that to the manual or something.”
I studied the timeline. “And then he tied you up. In the closet.”
Marco shrugged. “It was either him or my dad, and my dad has so far not shown interest in that level of child abuse.”
Too sharp. Too leading. He was lying. No, not lying – misdirecting. There was something he didn’t want me to notice. Something I was currently still missing.
“How long were you out?”
He shrugged again, more slowly this time, and made eye contact with me through the mirror. “Dunno,” he said. “Hard to note the passage of time when you’re unconscious.”
“And you were tied up. When you woke up.”
“Still yes,” he said, glaring now. “Did you have a point?”
“And you didn’t morph roach and escape immediately because…?”
He turned to face me, raising the corner of his lip in a sneer. Bingo.
“Sure, backseat drive my kidnapping experience. That’s helpful,” Marco groused. “I’d like to see you think straight when a psychopath has you locked in a closet.”
I sighed.
“Marco, I am really tired. Can we just pretend we’ve already done the thing where you whine and deflect while I give you the disappointed dad act, and skip straight to the part where you tell me whatever it is you’re not telling me right now?”
For a long moment he just stared at me, evaluating. Then, finally, he looked away, fixing his eyes somewhere on the ceiling. Through clenched teeth, he repeated, “David hit me. In the head. With a very heavy wooden baseball bat.”
He’d said it before, but something about his emphasis now made the image so visceral that I could almost hear the crunch, could almost see the chips of bone, the indentation in his skull. Entirely of its own accord, my hand crushed the paper towels into a messy ball. It was a lot of blood.
“You were brain damaged,” I said, sounding more matter-of-fact than I felt. “That’s why you weren’t thinking straight, wasn’t it?”
Marco let out a huff and grabbed my wrist. He didn’t meet my eyes.
“I’m guessing,” he said, gingerly extracting the paper towels from my fist one finger at a time. “But – yeah, I think so. All I remember for sure is suddenly being a very dizzy cobra who was late for school.”
Numbly, I protested, “But he said he wouldn’t kill humans.”
“I'm very much alive, thanks,” Marco pointed out, using a clean bit of towel to wipe his blood off my palm.
“A hit like that could easily have killed you,” I countered. “Which means we have to assume David is willing to risk killing humans, even out of morph.”
Marco gave me a look that clearly indicated I was the dumbest person alive for having taken so long to reach that conclusion, but what he said was, “Look on the bright side: Now we know that morphing can even fix brains! Will the wonders never cease?”
He let my hand go and dumped the paper towels into the trash, then tossed a few dry ones over them to hide the blood. “Although it does feel like there’s an ice pick in my eye socket,” he added cheerfully, “so maybe the jury’s still out on that.”
The bell rang before I could muster an answer, signaling that we were both officially late for homeroom. Marco turned to go, but I caught his elbow.
“What if – what if you hadn’t morphed?” I asked. “What if you couldn’t remember to?”
Marco fixed me with one of his most ironic smiles.
“The question that's gunna keep me up at night,” he said, “is what happened to get me thinking about snakes hard enough to morph one?”
He shook off my grip and opened the bathroom door with a flourish.