The Change Read online

  AN APPLE

  PAPERBACK

  SCHOLASTIC INC. New York Toronto London Auckland Sydney

  1 For Michael

  Cover illustration by David B. Mattingly

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

  No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 555 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

  ISBN 0-590-49418-X

  Text copyright © 1997 by Katherine Applegate. All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc. APPLE PAPERBACKS and the APPLE PAPERBACKS logo are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc. ANIMORPHS is a trademark of Scholastic Inc.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2789/9012/0Printed in the U.S.A. 40First Scholastic printing, December 1997

  My name is Tobias.

  The other Animorphs can't tell you very much about themselves, but I can. See, I don't have an address. I can't be found. I live in an area of forest by a meadow. That's my territory.

  My territory includes the meadow, which is maybe a hundred yards across in one direction, and half that in the other direction. My territory also includes the trees around the meadow, and the woods heading north for about another hundred yards.

  Of course, my territory is also the territory of other animals. Owls, jays, foxes, raccoons, on down to ants and spiders. But no red-tailed hawks.

  2 Except me.

  My name is Tobias, and I am human. Partly. Most of my mind is human. At least I think it is. I mean, I remember human things. I can read and use language. Most of my close friends are human. And I was born a human, in a human body with arms and legs and hair and a mouth.

  Now, though, I have wings and talons and feathers. And instead of a mouth I have a hooked beak.

  I can make sounds with my beak. But nothing that sounds human. To speak with regular humans I use thought-speak.

  But there were no people nearby right then in the early morning, as I waited patiently in the branch of a dying elm tree.

  I kept my eyes focused sharply on the meadow. I knew the pathways and homes of the mice and rats and rabbits who lived there. And I knew what it meant when the tall, dry grass twitched just the smallest bit.

  With my hawk's eyes I could see what no human could hope to see. I could see the individual stalks of grass barely tremble as a mouse brushed between them.

  And with my hawk's ears I heard the faint sound of mouse teeth, chewing on a seed.

  The mouse was seventy or eighty feet away. An easy target.

  3 I opened my wings slowly, not wanting to make a sound. I released the grip of my talons on the branch and fell forward. My wings caught the cushion of air and I swooped, almost silent, toward my prey.

  The grass twitched.

  Through the grass I saw a flash of brown. The mouse was running.

  Too slowly.

  I raked my talons forward. I swept my wings forward to cancel my speed, dropped one wing to turn, and fell the last foot like a rock.

  It was all over very quickly.

  But this time as I dragged the mouse away to a safer spot, I stumbled on a faded magazine someone had thrown away. The wind whipped the pages by, one at a time. Advertisements. Graphs. Pictures of the president with some foreign leader.

  And then one page stayed open. A photograph of a classroom. Kids my age. Some of the kids were goofing off in the back of the class. Some looked bored. Most looked more or less interested, and three were practically leaping from their seats, waving their hands for the teacher. All that, frozen in a photograph.

  A classroom like any classroom. Like the classrooms I used to attend. I would have been one of the kids paying attention, but too shy to

  4 volunteer. I was never very bold or aggressive. I was a bully-magnet, to tell you the truth. The kid most likely to get pounded. The kid from the home so screwed up that I ended up being shuttled back and forth between aunts and uncles who didn't even remember my name half the time.

  But that wasn't me anymore.

  5 1 his is my life now. I accept it. And there are some very nice things about being a bird.

  Some very nice things.

  Well-fed and full of energy, I flapped across the meadow, gaining altitude the hard way - with sheer muscle power.

  I swept above the trees and fought my way higher still. Out beyond my own territory. Higher and higher. And then I felt the air billowing up beneath me.

  A beautiful thermal. A pillar of warm air that rose up from the ground as it was heated by the sun. I swept into that warm air and it lifted me up like an elevator.

  I turned and turned within that warm current,

  6 twisting higher and higher, till I was nothing but a speck to the tiny humans on the ground. Up and up, till the only sound was the wind ruffling across my feathers.

  I caught a glimpse back down behind me. A glimpse of a strange creature that looked like a blue deer at first. Until you saw the head with its extra stalk eyes mounted on top. And the slashing, scorpion tail.

  Aximili-Esgarrouth-lsthill. The only Andalite alive on Earth. My friend. Or as much of a friend as you can be, when one of you is a Bird-boy and the other is an alien.

  «Ax-man!» I called down. He kept running. That's how he eats. He runs across grass and leaves, and the crushed vegetation is absorbed up through his hooves.

  «Tobias! Out hunting?»

  «Nope. I had breakfast. See you later.» I flapped and glided and soared till I was over houses. They were just little squares of gray and orange and brown roofs. Tiny swimming pools glittered an unnatural blue. I saw trimmed green lawns and parked rectangles of cars and roads with dotted white lines down the middle.

  I flew on, across the homes, across the roads, to the school. Maybe it was because of the picture in the magazine. Maybe that's why I wanted to go there.

  7 It was late morning now. The light was sharp and clean. I could see through the windows of the classrooms.

  There was Jake, unofficial leader of the Ani-morphs, looking like any normal guy. He was lounging at his desk, feet stuck out in front. He was sleepy and trying to keep his eyes open.

  More than any other person alive, Jake held the future of the human race in his hands. Strange to think, huh? That some big, sleepy kid in sneakers and a jacket was the leader of the only resistance to the Yeerk invasion of Earth?

  As I watched, he nodded twice and slumped. The girl sitting behind him leaned forward and gave him a gentle poke in the shoulder.

  That was Cassie. Another member of our little group. Cassie has never met an animal she didn't like. And she's never met a fashion she cared about. She's small, compact but strong-looking. Not like she's muscular. More like she's part of something bigger than herself. Like she's some living extension of the earth.

  Anyway, that's how I see her. Like some gentle soldier in the service of nature itself. Corny, isn't it? Sorry, but I have a lot of time to think. And I guess that makes me get too serious sometimes.

  I swept by, high above, and turned the corner. In another classroom I spotted Marco. He was

  8 talking. This was not a surprise. The class began to laugh. The teacher laughed, too, then looked exasperated, like she didn't want to laugh. This was also not a surprise. That's Marco. The boy loves to be the center of attention.

  It took a while before I spotted the last human member of the Animorphs. She wasn't in her usu
al classroom. In fact, I spotted her first in just a brief glimpse, walking down the hall.

  Then she stepped outside. Out into the empty quad that separated the main building from the gym and the temporary buildings.

  She stepped out into the sunlight, and her blond hair became a flame of pure gold.

  Rachel.

  Have you ever known a person who seems to walk through life with her own private spotlight shining on her? That's Rachel.

  «Hi,» I said in thought-speak. «What are you doing? Skipping school?»

  She couldn't answer. See, you can only do thought-speak when you're in a morph (or if you happen to be an Andalite). Although you can hear it just fine.

  Rachel stopped walking and shielded her eyes with her hand, scanning the sky for me. Then she gave just the smallest wave, just a twinkling of two fingers.

  9 She jerked her head toward the gym. That's where she was going. She opened her binder and revealed a piece of yellow notepaper clipped inside. Ah, so she was delivering a note for some teacher.

  But Rachel must have forgotten that I can see things no human could ever see. Beneath the note was a fancy-looking sheet of stationery. It was a letter, addressed to Rachel. It read: "Congratulations! You have been named a Packard Foundation Outstanding Student."

  I was about to add my own congratulations, when I noticed the date. There was to be an awards ceremony Monday. This was Friday. It was the kind of thing Rachel would have invited everyone to.

  Everyone but me. I can't exactly go to things like awards ceremonies. Rachel hadn't even told me about it. And I knew why.

  «Hey, I have something to show you after school,» I said, trying to sound perky. «My Yeerk pool mapping project is paying off. Want to go for a fly after last period?»

  I saw her smile. She nodded her head again, just a slight movement no one else would notice.

  «Cool,» I said.

  I soared away and she walked on to the gym.

  There are definitely some nice things about

  10 being a hawk. And flying with Rachel is probably the nicest. But it would have been nice to see her get the Packard award, too.

  Sometimes I asked myself if I had it to do all over again. ... If I could never become Tobias the hawk, and only be Tobias the boy, would I actually do it?

  I didn't think about that often, though. Maybe I didn't want to find out the answer.

  11 I spent the day drifting around on the breeze and checking everything I had learned in the last couple of weeks.

  See, we knew the Yeerk pool was a gigantic underground complex beneath the school. We knew it extended at least as far as the mall. But we had never figured out where all the entrances and exits were.

  That's what I'd been doing with my days - following people we knew were Controllers, watching them come and go. From them I learned the extent of the Yeerk pool.

  Maybe I should back up and explain. I know you're probably someone living a nice, normal life. You go to school, hang out with your friends,

  12 have dinner with your family, watch a little TV. Normal.

  And if I told you that maybe your teachers aren't really your teachers anymore; and maybe your friends aren't your friends at all; and maybe even your parents have become something totally different, well, you might think I was nuts.

  I understand. You wouldn't believe how often I have these dreams that maybe none of it's real. That there is no Yeerk invasion. That Yeerk slugs are not inside the heads of so many people. That maybe I have my own hands and toes. . . .

  It all started when Jake, Cassie, Marco, Rachel, and I took a different way home from the mall. In a dark, eerie, abandoned construction site we saw the spaceship land. And we met the strange part-deer, part-scorpion, part-humanoid creature called an Andalite.

  His name was Elfangor. Much later we found out he was Ax's big brother.

  He told us about the Yeerks, the race of parasitic slugs. The Yeerks, who, like some awful galactic disease, are spreading secretly from planet to planet.

  They steal bodies. They make other creatures into Controllers - absolute slaves. The entire Hork-Bajir race has been enslaved. As well as the incredibly gross Taxxons, although they went along

  13 voluntarily. They've gotten the Gedds and other races, too.

  And now, it's our turn.

  They are here. The Yeerks are among us. Inside the people you least suspect. Cops. Teachers. Friends. Parents. Reporters. Pastors and priests. Your own brothers and sisters.

  The Andalite Prince Elfangor warned us. And he gave us the weapon - the power to morph. To become any animal we could touch and acquire.

  There was just one big drawback, see. You can't stay in a morph for more than two hours. After that you stay in morph forever. That's what happened to me.

  The Yeerks also have a weakness. Every three days they have to return to the Yeerk pool. They drain out of the heads of their host bodies and swim in the sludgy liquid of the pool. There they soak up the Kandrona rays that they must have for nutrition.

  We've been to the Yeerk pool. It's not a place you want to see. Trust me. The screams that we'd heard in that place will be with me forever.

  The Yeerk pool was where I lost my humanity. Where I passed the fateful two-hour time limit. Someday, somehow, we will destroy that place. But first, we have to understand it better.

  That's what I was doing. That's why I spent

  14 my days trying to discover every possible way in and out of it.

  I was in the air over the mall at just about two-thirty in the afternoon when I spotted the big bald eagle floating, serene and powerful, on the thermals. The brown body stood out against the clouds, while the white head seemed almost invisible.

  It was an odd place for a baldie. They usually like the shore.

  I flapped hard to change direction and gain speed toward the eagle. I knew this eagle.

  «ls that you, Rachel?» I asked.

  «Sure. Who else would it be? Is this great flying weather, or what?»

  «lt's perfect. You up for a little cruise?»

  «0f course. What's up?»

  «Well, while you and the others have been off saving the world, I've been busy, too.»

  I shot by, just beneath Rachel's big eagle wings, and swung out past her, then turned and moved in front of her. I was showing off. I'm more agile in the air than a bald eagle is. Although a baldie is quite a bit bigger than me. Kind of like comparing a turkey to a chicken.

  Rachel made a sighing sound in my head. «Tobias, just because you can't come along on every single mission doesn't mean you need to do extra work.»

  15 «Yeah, well, whatever,» I said. «The point is I've been watching known Controllers from the air. I started with Chapman and his wife and the reporter and the policewoman we know about. And Tom, of course. »

  Chapman is our assistant principal. He's a very big deal Controller. Tom is Jake's brother. He's a Controller, too.

  «l followed them and watched them and now I've found four separate ways into the Yeerk pool. Besides the one we know that goes through the

  «Cool. When we know the Yeerk pool entrances, we can start figuring out who more Controllers are.» Rachel sounded impressed. Even though all I'd done was fly around and keep my eyes open.

  «l have a lot of free time,» I said. I knew I shouldn't say what I was about to say next. But it was out before I could stop myself. «So. Congratulations, I guess, huh? Packard Foundation Outstanding Student. »

  Rachel was silent for a few seconds. «Did someone tell you? Oh, no, of course not. You saw the letter in my notebooks

  «Just call me old hawkeye,» I said lightly.

  «Tobias . . . you know how much I wish you could come. I mean, Cassie will be there, and she's great. But you know Marco will just be mak-

  16 ing snide remarks, and Jake will be trying not to laugh.»

  «No big deal,» I said. «The only thing is, don't hide stuff from me because you think it will hurt my feelings, okay? I can't h
andle you feeling sorry for me.»

  «l don't feel sorry for you,» Rachel lied.

  «Good. Because, you know, how you think about me is sort of important.»

  I winced. I'd sounded way too sincere.

  I mean, what was I thinking? Rachel's a human. A real human. I'm a hawk. You think Romeo and Juliet were doomed, just from being from families that didn't like each other? Well, you can't get any more doomed than caring for someone who isn't even the same species.

  «Anyway, congratulations,» I said as breezily as I could.«Now follow me, and I'll give you a little tour of the Yeerk pool entrances.»

  «0n a day like this, I'd follow you anywhere,» Rachel said.

  17 «We're not going far. Just to the car wash.»

  «They're using the car wash? No way.» Rachel laughed. «You have to admit, they are ingenious.»

  We flew. Not side by side, because that would have looked suspicious. Hawks and eagles don't exactly fly in formation like geese. We kept a hundred yards apart. But with our incredible vision and thought-speak, we might as well have been next to each other.

  We rose higher and higher on the thermals, then thermal-hopped. That's where you rise to the top of one pillar of warm air and glide to the next. Then you rise again and drift to the next. It's an easy, lazy kind of flying. You don't get

  18 where you're going very fast, but you don't get tired out, either.

  It was awfully nice, flying just under the bellies of the clouds with Rachel. I may have lost my human body. But I've gained wings. And flying is ... well, I'm sure you've daydreamed about it. I know I used to. I'd sit in class, gazing out at the sky, or lie back in the grass, looking up, and wonder what it would be like to have wings. To be able to fly up and up and away from all the stupid little problems of life.

  Flying is as wonderful as you'd think. It has problems, too, like anything else. But oh man, on a warm day with the mountains of fluffy white clouds showing the way to the thermal updrafts, it's just wonderful.

  «So where are we going? We're not heading toward the car wash,» Rachel pointed out.

  I snapped alert. I looked down at the ground, spotting the familiar road grids and buildings I knew so well from this angle. We were in an area bordering the forest. Not far from Cassie's farm. «What am I doing herel» I asked. «l must have spaced. Sorry. This way.»