Chapter Text
My name is Cassie.
And this is what happened to me four weeks ago:
My parents had seemed normal right up until we’d been let into the McDonald’s dining room after they’d closed late one night. I thought it was pretty cool that they had let us in, but then my mother and father had each taken one of my arms, and started pulling me behind the counter. I hadn’t resisted at first, not sure what was happening. Then I looked at their faces and saw how cold they were. How empty of emotion.
“Mom? Dad?” I’d asked, starting to struggle. I’d started trying to be more mature by calling them that.
They ignored me. They dragged me to the walk-in freezer. None of the employees seemed to care, except for one that opened the door for them.
“M-Mommy?” I’d asked, forgetting about maturity. “What’s going on? Daddy?”
They ignored me. A door opened in the freezer, revealing stairs leading down. By now I was panicking. I’d started trying to get loose. They held me tighter, tight enough to hurt. I’d cried out in pain, and they hadn’t cared. I started crying out in fear, and they hadn’t cared.
They dragged me down the steps, down towards a glowing light. I heard it before we reached it, though – because of the screaming, and the crying. It sounded like what I imagined Hell to sound like.
The cavern they dragged me to was huge, and when I say huge, I mean it was big enough across for a couple professional soccer fields lined end-to-end. There were buildings, carved into rock. There were construction vehicles at work, and other ones I didn’t recognize, that didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen. Some of them were hovering. At the very center there was a pool a hundred feet across, but not filled with water. The sludge inside was lead-colored and moved and rippled slowly.
Ringing the pool were cages. And in those cages were people – some screaming, some crying, some shaking the bars and trying to get out, but the ones that scared me the most were the ones who just lay in the cages, curled up in balls, eyes wide but not seeing anything. Men, women, boys, girls, old, young, Black, White, Hispanic…
And there were monsters. Ten-foot long worms with dozens of scuttling legs and claws and a mouth full of teeth ringed by four eyes. Huge reptiles covered in horns and blades that looked like a cross between a dinosaur and a lawn mower. Small, strange, blue-furred, lopsided apes.
Hell. I honestly, genuinely believed I’d been dragged down into Hell. By my own parents.
“What’s going on?” I cried. Tears were streaming down my cheeks. My parents didn’t respond. They just pulled me along like I was a toddler throwing a tantrum instead of an almost-twelve-year-old girl terrified for her life. They were making straight for the pool in the middle. There were two lines. One line were people walking up to the pool, bending down over it, tilting their head. Something fell from their ear. And then those people would collapse, or start screaming, or try to run, but they would be grabbed and dragged over to the cages.
And the other line, the one my parents took me to, were people from cages, who fought back, unless they were too dead inside. They were grabbed by the huge reptiles and pulled along a steel pier towards the pool. I saw a woman who actually tried to bite her captors, until she was forced down and her head dunked into the sludge. There was a few seconds of shuddering…and then she was released, and pulled herself from the pool, suddenly calm and taking a ready towel like she’d just stepped out of a shower.
“Wh-what happened to her?” I asked. “Did – did I do something wrong – what’s going on?!”
My parents didn’t respond as I was pulled forward. My legs had given out. I was eleven years old but being dragged by my own parents to that pool made me feel like I was collapsing into nothing more than a scared toddler.
“M-mommy! Daddy! Don’t do this, don’t – whatever I did, I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’ll be good! Don’t – ”
My mother let go of me. My father shoved me into the grip of one of the dinosaur monsters, who grabbed me by the back of the neck and caught my arm when I tried to flail against it. Out of the corner of my eye I saw my mother and father watching. They looked bored.
I was forced to my knees, then onto my stomach. The monster grabbed the back of my head. Made me look down. I saw something swim by near the surface, something that looked like a three-inch long slug.
“Let go! Daddy! Help me! Let – no – NOOOOO!”
The monster pushed my head into the liquid and held me under, and I screamed the whole time. I felt something, one of the slugs, crawl into my ear, and then keep crawling, right into my brain. I felt it slide over my mind, flatten itself out, sink into the wrinkles and hook into me. My mouth had been open and screaming still, but it closed. I didn’t make it close; it just did. I rose from the pool. I wanted to do that, but I hadn’t been the one to do it. I rose calmly instead of hurling myself away from the sludge. Stepped away instead of bolted, running and screaming. Even my eyes moved on their own, glancing around calmly. My hands reached out without my wanting them to and grabbed a towel that was handed to me and started wiping my face.
I tried to speak but I couldn’t. I tried to move, but I couldn’t. And then I felt something tear open my mind.
My life flashed before my eyes. I saw everything that had ever happened to me, everything that I’d ever dreamed, everything that I’d ever said or done, everything I could remember or even only half-remember.
But mixed in was another life. A life I hadn’t led, thinking and feeling things I had never imagined. The whole of my life was laid out like a quilt but stitched in here and there were patches from another, a life of servitude to the Yeerk Empire (what was that?), fighting in the body of a Hork Bajir (the reptile monsters!), expanding the Empire against the Andalites (the Andalite filth). Fighting, and fighting, and fighting, and fighting…
<Cassie.>
The voice was in my head. A voice that wasn’t mine. A voice I knew, I just knew, belonged to the slug that had slithered in through my ear and wrapped around my brain. The one who had been making me do all these things. The one who’d just seen my entire life, and whose life I had seen parts of myself.
<My name is Aftran Nine-Four-Two of the Hett Simplat Pool. And you’re mine.>
This happened three weeks ago:
<Please stop, please!> I begged as Aftran stripped me down in the bathroom. My fingers touched my skin even though I didn’t want them to. My own hands turned the knobs of the shower, set it pouring. Aftran glanced my eyes into the mirror and I saw my naked body and she saw it and I felt absolute horror at being so exposed, so thoroughly visible, to my slaver.
<Shut up,> Aftran snapped. <I’m not even doing anything. It’s just a shower.>
<Please stop. Don’t touch me, please don’t – >
<I have to be clean – >
<Get out of me! Stop touching me! Stop – >
<SHUT! UP!>
And with the words came force. It felt like getting kicked by a horse, except my body stayed still. Even as Aftran stared at my eyes in the mirror I felt like I was falling away from my own perception of everything but pain. I couldn’t breathe. I was drowning. I was being held down, forced down, my mind folded away, and it hurt, it hurt so much…
And it hurt, it hurt so much, I was on my side, beneath a yellow-orange alien sky with three moons, and I was holding my stomach as blue-green blood poured from my host. I was in the body of a Hork Bajir, but he’d been sliced open by an Andalite tail-blade and we’d been left to die and we were both screaming in his head, I was lying on his side and it hurt so much…
The alien memory was snapped away from me. Aftran moved my body, stepped me under the shower, I felt water on my skin and she felt it too, tried to enjoy it even as she crushed my mind. Reached for the bar of soap.
<No,> I begged as my fingers closed around it, begged through the pain as she brought the soap to my chest. <No, stop – stop!>
<Shut up.>
<Please, let me do this, please let me be the one to just – >
The pain doubled. I felt like I’d been forced to suck in a lungful of water. White-hot anger from Aftran hit me, burned my mind as I couldn’t breathe –
I was lying on my back, gasping for air, choking in the planet’s weak atmosphere, my rebreather’s tube severed. I managed to roll over, crawling across the dust and dirt towards another fallen Hork Bajir Controller. I got to her, tore her mask from her face and placed it to my own, taking deep breaths from the air that still flowed. I looked down at her. Her eyes were open but staring at nothing. Probably because everything below her upper torso was just gone, disintegrated by Andalite shredders…I realized after a second that I knew her, Lacsar Five-Eight-Four, a pool sister…dead…
Aftran snatched her memory back from me.
<Shut up. Just be quiet, Cassie, be quiet and I’ll stop hurting you.>
<Please – >
<Shut up! Stop crying, stop begging! My other hosts weren’t like this, they were quiet, why aren’t you? I didn’t need to do this. I didn’t need to fight in my own head – >
I stood above fallen Kaa in the sands of their homeworld, my blades dripping with their blood, my Dracon beam hot in my hands. The last of the resistance was being mopped up. Visser Eight, as he was not so long ago, wasn’t far away, his Andalite host’s tail-blade slicing through the pitiful remaining Kaa with impunity. I saw one fall, throat slashed open, orange blood flowing. He stared at me with glassy eyes that grew dark and lifeless and took some of me with it…
I returned to myself. The pain had doubled again. I couldn’t even think words anymore. The pain was too much. I could only sob in my mind. Sob and feebly struggle to try and stop Aftran from washing me, touching me, violating me…
Aftran leaned my body against one shower corner, my eyes closed. Focused. The pain didn’t get worse, but it became more precise. I’d broken my arm once. Aftran recalled that pain and shoved it against me, adding it to the feeling of drowning.
I was in my Hork Bajir body again, I was fighting through the corridors of a Pool Ship. Andalites had boarded. The air stank of blood and ozone and the burning smell of shredders and Dracon beams. My host’s blades ran blue with Andalite blood, but it wasn’t enough, they’d made it to the Pool, and I had to get there, I had to get to Hett Simplat, because if I didn’t then…
Aftran had sunk down to my knees in the shower, my hands and my head against the wall. After another moment, the pain let up, disappeared, and I felt exhaustion. Not my own – Aftran’s.
“Stop,” she begged with my voice. Took in a ragged breath with my lungs and continued. “Stop. Please. Stop fighting, please, Cassie, stop and I can stop fighting you and…please stop, please…”
Two weeks ago, the stupidest question ever slipped from my thoughts.
The question wasn’t out of the blue. We were at school. Aftran was pretending to be me, and my friend Rachel had asked ‘me’ what ‘I’ was planning on doing for ‘my’ upcoming twelfth birthday that weekend. Rachel wasn’t infested. She didn’t know she wasn’t talking to me, even if I could hear everything.
Aftran had threatened me with Rachel’s infestation to get me to comply, to get me to finally go quiet in my own head. She had sent me images of her, in me, tricking Rachel into the arms of other Controllers, being there, making me watch as she was dragged kicking and screaming to the Pool, her head dunked into the liquid and a Yeerk crawling into her as Aftran made me watch…
It had worked. I’d begged and pleaded with Aftran to leave Rachel alone, to leave her family alone, that I’d be quiet and would stop screaming at her all the time if she’d only do this one thing for me. The infestation would happen eventually, of course – I knew what the Yeerks were planning, that they wanted every human they could get. But surely Rachel could be saved for later?
Aftran had agreed, and I’d fallen as silent as I could, save when I couldn’t stop myself and broke down in my head at watching my own life become nothing more than a role for Aftran to play out. Watching in horror as Aftran impersonated me so easily. She had my mannerisms down, my way of speaking. She could see my every memory and act on what she saw there. Rachel could look right into my eyes and yet not see anything wrong.
I was quiet, but not enough. My turmoil ate at Aftran. My pain and terror. She hadn’t ‘won’ the battle with me, she’d only traded constant screaming for a low, steady grind. One she tried to ignore but felt every hour of every day, one that eroded her. Sometimes she ordered me to stop and I tried but I couldn’t, and she’d start to hurt me again, but then stop before too long because of how it just made me quiver more…
Then Rachel had asked about my birthday. Aftran was taken by surprise, having not even considered the need to feign my birthday. She made up some quick excuse about my parents taking me somewhere. Rachel bought it.
Rachel’s question, though, had just conjured up one of my own. And so, I’d asked. Curiosity broke through my pain.
<Do Yeerks have birthdays?>
Aftran had turned her attentions to me, and if I could have controlled my own face I might have cringed, and if I’d had control of my body I might have curled up, shrunken down, tried to make myself small. But instead of trying to push me down, instead of trying to torment me for speaking up…
<What kind of question is that?> Aftran asked.
Aftran never asked me anything. Everything I knew, she could know with barely a second’s effort. But…she didn’t this time. She’d just asked and waited for me to answer. Maybe the stupidity of the question amused her and made her want to hear me explain myself in my own words.
So eventually, I told her.
<I’m just curious,> I said. <Yeerks…have to be born somehow, right?>
The voice, my own voice in my head, seemed small. Small, but not gone.
<Have you seen me celebrate a single birthday in the Pool?> Aftran asked. <Seen me wish a single Controller ‘happy birthday’?>
The question lingered, and I once again realized that Aftran wasn’t just ripping my answer from my mind. And it wasn’t…it could have been sarcastic. It could have been contemptuous. Instead, it just seemed like a question. Aftran just as curious as I was.
<No…but it’s only been a couple weeks.>
I could feel something rolling out of Aftran, the little drip of her mind reaching mine. She was exhausted, but mixed in with it was curiosity. Maybe a moment’s hesitation. It’s so strange, to feel an emotion inside of you and know it’s not coming from you.
But finally, I heard Aftran’s voice again.
<Yeerks are born when three of us merge together and then split apart into grubs, a hundred or so at a time. It kills the parent Yeerks. It’s not something to celebrate. It’s the end of three lives we knew and the beginning of a hundred we don’t. Why would I wish someone ‘happy birthday’ when the only reason they’re alive is because people we knew died? We’ll never know them, hear them, again?>
I thought about that. Turned the idea over in my mind while Aftran watched me do so. Watched me, but didn’t rip my thoughts from me. But even still, she felt it when I processed that Aftran had basically just admitted that she had friends…that Yeerks were capable of having friends. That they were capable of missing others of their kind when they were gone.
<What happens to the grubs?>
Aftran seemed to sink into me a little more. Her own emotions became clearer. It was like she was settling into my curiosity.
<They swim in schools through the Pool. We teach them. We teach them Yeerkish, how to communicate. They…learn. That’s all a grub does, is expected to do. Just learn. Learn and grow. Chase each other around or other games. Hide and seek – >
<Hide and seek?> For just a moment, I didn’t – couldn’t – feel pain and terror. The idea of Yeerks playing hide and seek in their Pool was just too much, too ridiculous compared to everything I knew about them.
And Aftran seemed to plunge right into my feeling of surprise and bafflement and even amusement, her relief palpable to me, washing over me, buoying my own feelings. I felt desperate exhaustion give way to cautious optimism.
<Yes! Hide and seek. Just like humans…well…not just like, but similar. You hide among the adults. Try to stay out of echolocation range of whoever’s seeking. If you’re lucky an adult might let you latch onto them, shield you with their body.>
If I’d had control of my body, I might have swallowed out of nervousness. Instead, I focused on the fact that Aftran felt something like happy, for the first time since she’d entered my head. All because I’d…asked a question?
No – all because she was finally getting something from me other than hate and terror and misery. She was desperate for it, after two weeks of constant battle or grind in my head…and a long, long time before that, too. I was supposed to have been an escape from battle…
I cast about for some way to keep the conversation going. <I – I thought you said you hate the grubs.>
<No, I didn’t. I said that we don’t celebrate their birth. It’s not their fault their tripartite died, though. It would be wrong to hate them when three people gave their lives so they could live.>
<I guess…I guess that makes sense.> A thought snuck up on me. <And anyway, with a hundred siblings all celebrating the same day, you’d never get any good presents.>
<Ha!>
I hadn’t known Aftran even could laugh.
By one week ago, we were talking.
Aftran was out in the barn in my body, carrying out my chores. My whole family was infested, but the Yeerks needed to keep up appearances. For the ones in my parents, the ones Aftran called Derane Three-One-Three and Odret Two-Five-Nine, that meant their ordinary jobs, my mother as the head veterinarian at an amusement park/zoo called the Gardens, and my father at the Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic that he ran for sick and injured wild animals out of the barn our family owned, my home being an old farm. For me, that meant tending to the needs of our horses, and looking after sick or injured wildlife in the clinic.
It meant spending a lot of time in the barn with the Yeerk pretending to be my father. Watching as Aftran and Derane did everything that my father and I ever did, but with simple machine efficiency, none of the warmth that had once existed between us.
Derane had finished, and now Aftran and I were alone in the barn.
<Why do you even care about these creatures?>
She was using my eyes to look at an injured opossum female. She was asleep. The opossum had been clipped by a car, her head bashed and skull fractured. And yet, against all odds, she was pulling through. She had been brought to the clinic only a week after I’d been infested, and Aftran had considered just letting her die…but I had pushed my knowledge up inside my head, just opened up everything I knew about how to save her, everything I’d ever watched my father do and what I’d done myself.
I didn’t beg Aftran to save the opossum. I had known even a week in that it wouldn’t work. So, I just showed it was possible. She could have ignored me…but she didn’t. Maybe she just wanted to maintain the Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic’s reputation. Keep up appearances. It didn’t matter – two weeks after the opossum had been brought in, three weeks since Aftran had first slithered into my skull, and the opossum was down an eye but was going to make it.
And Aftran had asked her question.
<I can’t not,> I answered. <She doesn’t deserve to die. She’s alive. She’s never hurt anyone.>
<It’s foolish. The opossum doesn’t even serve a useful purpose to your species. It’s frankly hideous, even you think that. You could wipe them out and no one would care. When we take this planet, we will wipe them out.>
And she showed me. She sent me an image, the Yeerk plan for Earth once they had taken the planet. The Yeerks would keep humans alive, and keep alive the plants and animals we needed to survive, to eat. The rest would be wiped out as unimportant, unnecessary, and most of all a drain on their limited resources. There weren’t a lot of Yeerks, and they were at war. They needed to strip-mine Earth for resources beyond just human slaves if they were ever going to beat the Andalites.
I would have gritted my teeth if I could, at the thought of what the Yeerks planned to do to Earth. And yet – and yet I thought I sensed something, along with the image. Some emotion had slipped through to me from her. Regret?
<Do you…not want that to happen?> I asked.
Aftran tensed, and I would have flinched. But she didn’t lash out at me. Instead, she looked around the Clinic, at the animals – a sick deer, an eagle with a broken wing, a snake we’d found covered in ticks. She made my eyes glance over some posters we had on the walls, things my dad had put up to make the Clinic feel more lived-in, less like a sterile hospital. Mostly they were posters from the Gardens, showing animals, peacocks and tigers and elephants and others. My eyes focused on the colors of the animals.
<It…has to happen,> Aftran said. She looked back down to the opossum. <It doesn’t matter what I want. And it won’t save this species. They’ll be gone and no one will care.>
<I’ll care. And you’ve been in my head long enough to know that there’s plenty of other humans who will, too.>
I felt Aftran’s attentions turn more fully to me, and I almost shrank down, but didn’t. I wasn’t defying her. She’d asked the question. I was just answering it. She couldn’t get mad at me for that, could she?
<But why? Why care for this…thing?>
<It’s a thing humans do. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a habit we picked up. We were kind to wolves once and those wolves became dogs, and both of us are better for it. Maybe some part of us hopes it’ll happen again. Or maybe we just don’t like seeing something small and helpless in pain. I know I don’t.>
I saw a flash in my mind. The Yeerk Pool through my eyes, after Aftran had slithered into me. Her seeing her fellow Yeerks within. Small and helpless.
I fought back revulsion at the memory. Then I fought back panic because I knew there was no way to hide that revulsion from Aftran. I braced for her anger, and I definitely felt it, but she didn’t act on it. Maybe some part of her remembered that Yeerks weren’t exactly helpless.
After a few minutes, I spoke up again.
<Touch her.>
<What?>
<Just touch her…please. Put your – my…>
Aftran knew what I was going for. She opened the cage and reached in slowly, simply laying my hand on the opossum’s back, who by now recognized me – or Aftran controlling my body – as not a threat, not something to be afraid of. Not when she was being provided food and water and safety. She twitched and stirred a little, but didn’t feel the need to rouse herself.
I could still feel everything, the fur, the warmth of the opossum’s body. I just couldn’t do anything about it. But Aftran could feel it all too. After a few seconds, checking what she was supposed to do in my mind, she started lightly stroking the opossum’s back. Feeling the soft fur. The warmth underneath it. Watching the opossum’s ear flick. She took the ear between my finger and thumb and rubbed a little and watched the opossum’s leg give a small kick.
<This is stupid. Pointless.> Aftran noted.
<Yeah,> I agreed, my voice small. It was also the closest thing I’d felt to physical affection in weeks. I didn’t delude myself into thinking Aftran was fooled by me, that I’d somehow tricked her into letting me feel this affection. She’d known full well what I wanted.
But she still indulged it. I think I felt a trickle of contentment come from her. Even she had to admit that it felt nice. She indulged herself in stroking the opossum’s fur for a full five minutes before closing the cage again, going back to the other chores that needed doing.
Today, we were arguing. More, Aftran was allowing it – not simply shutting me up by pushing me down and inflicting pain on me.
<You don’t get it,> she said, <you don’t understand! Can’t understand!>
She used my eyes to stare at her ceiling fan, watching it spin in slow circles while lying in my bed, very early in the morning. We had been talking, in my mind. At some point talking had become shouting.
<You’ve stolen me! Enslaved me!> I cried.
< You’re an assignment. I can’t just ignore orders. I have no choice!>
<There’s always a choice!>
<Death! That’s my other option! When the Vissers tell you to do something, you do it or you die! What kind of choice is death?!>
<Don’t lie to me. I know you enjoy this. You enjoy keeping me as your slave!>
<You can’t understand. You were born with arms and legs. You were born with hands and taste and sight – sight! Do you know what it’s like to be born a tiny blind thing, swimming in sludge, and then to suddenly see?>
<Yes! I’ve seen that memory of yours, your first host. I see it every time you open my eyes after coming out of the Pool. I think it’s your happiest memory.>
<It is!>
<Your happiest memory is the day you first stole someone’s freedom!>
<It’s what I am. I’m a parasite. It’s what Yeerks are. I can’t change what I am any more than you could! You’re a predator. How many chickens have died for you, Cassie? How many cows and pigs?>
<That’s different – >
<How?! How is it different?! So they’re not sapient, so they’re just dumb animals, so what? Do you think they’d choose to be eaten? Do you think they’d choose to die for you? You’re not even hunting them, letting them live lives of their own! You trick them, raise them, make them think you care about them when you’re just fattening them up! You take advantage of the fact that they don’t understand what’s happening to them. That you’re raising them just to make them die! Your slaughterhouses are no different from our Pools!>
<But there has to be another way! The Gedd – your first hosts – you said they’re barely sapient, that they never had anything of their own without the Yeerks…you were symbionts with them on your planet…>
<There’s not enough. There’s never enough Gedd. A hundred Yeerks are born from every tripartite! What are we supposed to do, take turns? An hour a day? Less?>
<Yes!>
<What kind of life is that? Would you live that life, Cassie? An hour of freedom and twenty-three hours of sitting in a sensory deprivation tank? What could Yeerks achieve with that?>
<What have you achieved anyway? I’ve never heard any Yeerk music. You never talk to Odret or Derane about Yeerk celebrities or Yeerk movies. You go on and on about how sad it is you’re blind as a slug, but where are the Yeerk artists?>
I felt that Aftran had some comeback for that. When she argued like this, when her temper flared, the wall between her and me became thin. It became so easy to feel her emotions, and I felt anger and rage rolling off of her.
But then my alarm clock went off. Aftran used my mouth and my voice to groan and my hands to rub my eyes. I hadn’t slept, not really, and my body was tired, and the alarm and realization of the early hour seemed to suddenly drain the both of us. We’d been arguing for hours. Aftran roused me from my bed and began to trudge towards the bathroom across the hall.
Through my eyes, I saw the toilet, and the shower. I knew what was coming, things that should have been ordinary, would have looked ordinary from the outside if not for the fact that it would be Aftran moving my hands, Aftran touching my body as she cleaned me. Someone else making my fingers touch my skin.
I felt sick. Violation flooded my mind at what was coming, and I know that Aftran felt it, like she had every other time she’d walked me into a bathroom over the past month.
<Please, Aftran,> I begged once more. <please…can’t I…?>
Aftran stepped into the bathroom, used my hand to flip on the light, but paused. She looked into the mirror, and I saw my face. My expression was neutral, but I looked so tired. Bags under my eyes. I felt Aftran move in my mind. It wasn’t like she relished attending to my hygiene. It was just something that needing doing to her, a necessary chore. There was, at least, that much. She hadn’t weaponized my body against me. Hadn’t done any of the things I’d had nightmares about her doing to me – nightmares I know she’d seen.
Aftran put my hand on the door and closed it, but then looked back to the mirror.
<Fine,> she said, locking the door.
And for the first time in a month, my body was my own outside of the Yeerk Pool, all so that I could simply use the toilet and take a shower.