Chapter Text
“You can't be serious,” Jake said, staring at me. He wasn't the only one – Marco was sitting bolt upright on his bale of hay to stare, Rachel's look was more of a glare but just as disbelieving, and Ax had actually put down the pen he was chewing on. Tobias, of course, stared at everything. He didn't bother morphing for barn meetings – a hawk, unlike an andalite, was relatively easy to hide.
“Look at it this way,” I said. “Just what, exactly, have we accomplished in this little crusade?”
“We've made them scared,” Jake said.
“Slowed them down,” Marco added.
“Fought back,” Rachel scowled.
“Scared them? Slowed them down? We're an inconvenience at most. Sure, we tick off Visser Three a lot, but so does everything, I think. No. What we've accomplished with these powers is to kill a whole lot of people. With teeth, with blades, with claws. And we've all been kind of assuming that a body count translates into victory against the yeerks, but I'm not sure that's true. Even if the end can justify the means, has it? Has what we've accomplished been worth all the innocent slaves we've had to kill?”
<We've done good,> Tobias protested. <We saved Leera. We kept the Pemalite Crystal out of yeerk hands. We saved Ket and Jara and little Toby.>
“We did,” I said, inclining my head. “We made excellent shock troops for various random aliens in all of those circumstances. I'm not denying that we can do the whole shock troop thing, which is actually kind of weird now that I think about it because we were never trained for any of this. But those were other people's plans that involved us because we can shapeshift and sneak and kill people. As for our own plans? We slow them a little bit, sometimes, at huge risk and the cost of lots of innocent lives, but it's never worth it. The only thing we seem to have gotten right on our own was rescuing Ax. I can't think of anything else. Not a great track record.”
“We had some impact,” Rachel said angrily.
“At what cost? How many lives?”
“Better dead than a Controller,” Jake growled. There was a quiet fury in his eyes; not fury at me, I realised, but fury nonetheless. The muscles in his neck were taut with pain.
Irritation shot through me, reminding me somewhat jarringly of my last kill; standing above a hork-bajir, annoyed at the distraction, bringing my blade down either a moment before or a moment after Jake's order to break off...
I met Jake's gaze and very almost asked why, if that was the case, he hadn't killed Tom yet. But I bit back the comment at the last moment. Instead I merely cocked my head, forced back the hot anger inside me and asked, “Is it? We've made that decision, yes, because we can't afford to be caught. We can't afford to let the yeerks learn of the chee, and of where the hork-bajir are, and give them morph-capable hosts. That's not true of the people who die at our teeth and claws.”
“And this is all occurring to you now?” Marco asked, raising his eyebrows. “Right when you already want to quit? How convenient.”
“Marco,” Jake said quietly.
“No, Jake, if she wants to play moral rhetoric then fine, so do I. These people you're so insistent on protecting are aiming guns and slashing wrist-blades at us, Cassie. I know it's not their fault, but we still have to defend – ”
“They're being forced to do that because we're going out there and attacking,” I snapped. “We attack the yeerks. The yeerks throw their slaves at us. We kill them and shrug and say 'oh, well, it can't be helped'.”
“Because we're fighting for the freedom of the entire planet!” Marco snapped. “You know what? Sometimes the end does justify the means. I think saving free people is worth a handful of – ”
I slapped him. I wasn't even aware I'd done it until the sharp, hard sound of flesh on flesh registered. And I'd slapped him hard; all that time in battle without a permanent scar to show for it had left me a lot less concerned with things like subtle pressure. He blinked at me, stunned, a mark already rising on his cheek, while I got a hold on myself.
“Several of my ancestors were slaves,” I said quietly. “You want to sit there and tell me that their lives were worth less for it?”
Marco blinked. “Cassie, I didn't – that's not what I meant. You know that's not what I meant.”
I turned away from him, opened my hands, appealed to the group at large. “I'm not saying the planet isn't worth saving. I'm saying what we're doing isn't saving it. Did you notice the cages?”
Jake frowned. “The what?”
“The cages. Down at the Pool. I noticed it the very first time I saw them, but I kind of... didn't think about it much, until now.” I looked around at the assembled Animorphs, waiting for one of them to see what I was getting at. They just looked puzzled.
I sighed. “The cages,” I said, “have no obvious methods of suicide prevention. If the hosts believed that death was better than fighting, they would kill themselves. I was going to when they dragged me down that pier the first time, to protect you guys. We've all made that pact, when we get captured. It's not like suicide would be hard. And maybe some of them have done it, but the ones we fight? The ones we kill? They clearly chose to live. Most of the people we kill are hork-bajir, and they're covered in blades. Do you really think it would be hard for a hork-bajir restrained only by bars to kill themselves? It's not up to us to decide for them what's worth living for, what's worth fighting for. What we do is murder. Say it's a necessary sacrifice for our war, sure, whatever. But don't pretend we're doing our victims a favor.”
“So that's it, then?” Marco asked, rubbing his cheek. “You're just bailing on us? Miss 'we've got to protect the planet, this fight is easily worth all our lives' has decided that the price is too high?”
“Yes. I know I can't convince any of you to stop, so you can still come to me if you need morphs or whatever; I'd rather that than you getting killed. But I'm not fighting anymore.”
“Rubbish,” Marco said.
I narrowed my eyes. “You can't convince me to – ”
“Not that. Not the quitting thing. The part where you're pretending this is all part of a logical decision.”
<You don't need to try to back-rationalise your feelings,> Tobias added. <We all know what this war does to people.>
“We know you better than that,” Rachel added. “It's not like this is the first Animorph emotional breakdown.”
“Which is totally okay,” Jake added, raising a pacifying hand. “Cassie needs a bit of time. Maybe we all need a bit of time. Things have been pretty intense lately, and we should back off a bit and see how this oatmeal thing plays out. There's no need to be slinging about accusations of murder. Let's take a few days to ourselves, maybe a week, sleep on it for a while, and then we can regroup.”
I set my jaw. He didn't get it. None of them got it. I could see why; it was hard to think of ourselves in that way. We were freedom fighters, kids who'd never asked for this but who had answered the call, who'd stood up to defend our people. Not murderers. Not even I wanted to believe that.
But reality doesn't care what you believe. And with so much power in our hands and yet so little power to help anybody, we had a responsibility to be as right as we could.
“Sleep on whatever you like,” I said testily. “It's not my problem anymore. I'm done killing.” And with that, I stalked out of the barn.
I knew they’d break up the meeting soon after I left. It was kind of hard for them to justify being there if I wasn’t. I let my anger at them simmer under my breastbone. It was better than feeling nothing. I walked into the kitchen to see my Dad sitting at the table, drinking coffee and reading a book. Mom would still be at work. He offered me a glassy smile.
“You can probably have the barn back soon,” I said. “I think they’re done.”
“Oh! Good. And how… how are you, Cassie? Everything good?”
“Yeah. I quit and…” I stopped, eyeing my father suspiciously. The smile on his face was growing more strained. His voice was too chirpy. My Dad was a lot of things, but ‘chirpy’ was not one of them. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Wrong?” he repeated.
“Yes. Wrong.” I felt a stab of fear. “Did something happen to Mom?”
“What? No! No. I just…” he looked at my face and sighed. “I was waiting for her to get home so we could tell you together, but you look kind of worried…”
“I am kind of worried. You might as well tell me.”
“Right. Okay.” He took a sip of his coffee. “You know the pet food company that provides most of our donations?”
“Yeah, pretty much every pen I’ve used in the last couple of years has their logo on it.”
“Well not any more. They… they’ve pulled out.” He took another, bigger sip of coffee.
I took a moment to process this. “Pulled out.”
“Yes. They’re not funding us anymore. They said it was no longer viable. Sweetie, we have other donors, but none that big. Without that income I… I don’t know if we can keep the Rehabilitation Clinic afloat. We’ll probably have to close it. I’m… I’m sorry, sweetie.”
I thought about this for a few moments, and then nodded. “Right. Thanks for telling me.”
“You’re not upset?”
Dad was upset. I could see it in the way his eyes wrinkled. I thought fast, composing something comforting.
“We still have the barn and equipment,” I pointed out. “That stuff isn’t worth resale. There’s no reason the Clinic can’t open again later, when things pick up. It’s just a bit of a setback.” I summoned a smile, and did a pretty good job of it, I thought.
“Right,” Dad said. “Well. We can only hope, right?”
“That’s the spirit.” I headed to my room to catch up on the huge backlog of homework that being an Animorph had left me with. It seemed like I’d done nothing but homework since our last battle, and I still had some left. I kept my window shut and pulled the blinds to avoid being annoyed by intrusive red-tailed hawks and got to work hating my sadistic teachers and their love of really difficult homework questions.
Just like a normal teenager.