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  The Mutation

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  Look for other titles by K.A. Applegate:

  #1 The Invasion

  #2 The Visitor

  #3 The Encounter

  #4 The Message

  #5 The Predator

  #6 The Capture

  #7 The Stranger

  #8 The Alien

  #9 The Secret

  #10 The Android

  #11 The Forgotten

  #12 The Reaction

  #13 The Change

  #14 The Unknown

  #15 The Escape

  #16 The Warning

  #17 The Underground

  #18 The Decision

  #19 The Departure

  #20 The Discovery

  #21 The Threat

  #22 The Solution

  #23 The Pretender

  #24 The Suspicion

  #25 The Extreme

  #26 The Attack

  #27 The Exposed

  #28 The experiment

  #29 The Sickness

  #30 The Reunion

  #31 The Conspiracy

  #32 The Separation

  #33 The Illusion

  #34 The Prophecy #35 The Proposal

  «MEGAMORPHS» #1 The Andalite’s Gift #2 In the Time of Dinosaurs #3 Elfangor’s Secret

  The Hork-Bajir Chronicles Visser

  ALTERNAMORPHS The First Journey AN APPLE

  PAPERBACK

  SCHOLASTIC INC.

  New York Toronto London Auckland Sydney Mexico City New Delhi Hong Kong Cover illustration by David B. Mattingly Art Direction/Design by Karen Hudson

  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 0-439-10675-3

  Copyright © 1999 by Katharine Applegate.

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc.

  SCHOLASTIC, APPLE PAPERBACKS, ANIMORPHS, and associated logos

  are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 9/901234/0

  Printed in the U.S.A. First Scholastic printing, December 1999 The author wishes to thank Erica Bobone for her help in preparing this manuscript.

  For Michael and Jake For Michael and Jake

  A phone call at three A.M. is rarely a good thing.

  When you’re an Animorph, the chance of good news ever - day or night - is zero.

  ”Jake?”

  Cassie’s voice sounded shaky. Frightened.

  ”What’s up?” I said, my own voice casual. At the same time praying that no one else in my house had picked up the phone. ”Those math problems giving you a hard time?”

  Cassie forced a laugh. ”No. Just can’t sleep again. You know, same old thing.”

  ”Try counting sheep. I bet before you get to thirty you’ll be asleep.”

  ”Good idea. Thanks, Jake. See you.” Cassie hung up the phone.

  I had a half hour to get from the subdivision where I live with my family to the farm Cassie shares with her parents.

  Who knew when I’d be back. Forget about getting any more sleep.

  I stripped off my pajamas in the dark.

  Opened my window wide.

  Gave one last glance over my shoulder at the closed door of my bedroom. No lights on in the hallway. Good.

  Then I looked out at the star-studded night and concentrated on the image of a bird.

  Peregrine falcon.

  I began to shrink. From a normal human kid, maybe a bit larger than average, to a one-foothigh human kid.

  I heard my internal organs changing. A squirmy sound, like a rumbling stomach, a sound you feel more than hear.

  It’s a big change going from human to bird. Nothing ends up where it starts out. You go from a system designed to eat a bit of this and a bit of that, all well-chewed, to a system designed to swallow whole mice and poop out the bones and fur.

  My own bones, my big, solid human bones shrank and hollowed out. Finger bones relatively longer, leg bones shorter, breast bone huge. My skin tightened over the new skeleton. Flesh melted, ran together, like hot wax. I had wings instead of arms. Skinny legs and dangerous talons.

  Gray-and-white feather patterns etched themselves onto my still semisoft skin, then raised into three dimensions.

  Fleshy human nose and mouth blurred, ran together, then extended out to become a hard beak. My eyes became smaller in absolute terms, but much larger in relative terms.

  I was ready.

  I hopped onto my desk. From there, onto the windowsill. And then I flew.

  My name is Jake.

  We’re not supposed to like it, this power we have. We being me, my best bud Marco, my cousin Rachel, Cassie and Tobias and Ax. We’re not supposed to like it, but mostly I do. This power to morph. To touch an animal and by doing so acquire its DNA. To become that animal at will.

  In the wrong hands this incredible power can be seriously abused. In our own fumbling, uncertain human hands this power is both a privilege and a curse.

  We learned the truth about morphing the hard way, back in the beginning. Back when the five of us - Ax hadn’t joined the team yet – witnessed an Andalite spaceship land in an abandoned construction site. And a dying alien emerge.

  A pale blue deerlike creature with the torso of a muscular man. Two huge almond-shaped eyes in his face. Two more eyes on stalks that grew out of the top of his head and swiveled to look behind, right and left.

  No mouth. But what a tail! Long and strong. With a sharp, curved blade on the end. Deadly. Lightning fast.

  A warrior prince named Elfangor.

  With the last of his strength Elfangor told us of the galaxywide invasion of a parasitic species called Yeerks. Gray slugs that insinuate themselves into the brains of sentient creatures.

  That crawl through the ear canal and wrap themselves in and around the brain.

  Spread and seep into every crevice.

  Read and laugh at every painful memory and embarrassing desire you’ve ever had. Like striking out in your first Little League game. Like wanting so badly for the prettiest girl in class to smile at you.

  You are the slave of this thing. The real you rages then eventually cowers somewhere in the back of your skull.

  Watching as the Yeerk uses you, controls you, turns you into yet another instrument of Yeerk domination.

  The Yeerks are everywhere.

  Your parents. Your lab partner. The lead singer in your favorite band. Your regular garbage man.

  Any of these people might have a Yeerk in their head. Might be what we call a human-Controller.

  My brother tom is one. His bedroom is two doors down from mine. Marco’s mother is a Controller. We don’t know where she is.

  Our vice principal, Chapman, is one. How many more? We don’t know. More. Always more.

  We are not winning this war. We’re delaying the final defeat. No more than that. Maybe not as much as that.

  For some reason I’m the leader of this little band of warriors. I’m still not sure how it happened but I’ve stopped fighting the fact.

  Sometimes I’m secretly proud when AximiliEsgarrouth-lsthill, the Andalite cadet who joined us not long after we encountered
his older brother Elfangor, calls me ”Prince” Jake.

  Mostly embarrassed, but there are times when it feels okay.

  I’m proud when we’re winning. When we’re ”kicking Yeerk butt” as Rachel would say. I’m also proud when we don’t win but have done the best we could. Acted with courage and honor.

  Most of the time I’m also terrified.

  Like when I heard Cassie’s trembling voice on the other end of the line. I flew to the barn that houses the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center Cassie’s dad operates.

  I landed out back and when I was sure it was safe, began to demorph.

  Voices. From inside the barn. Low and worried.

  Cassie . . . and Hork-Bajir. CHAPTER 2.

  This is a terrible thing he has done.” Toby Hamee’s voice was grave.

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t understand, yet.

  Cassie knelt by the side of a Hork-Bajir. He could no longer speak. He could barely breathe. He was laid out on the stainless steel table Cassie’s dad uses to perform operations.

  He was seven feet tall. Too tall to fit easily on the table. His legs hung off. His bladed arms hung off.

  He was clearly Hork-Bajir. Just as clearly he was something else, as well.

  The barn is a dark place even in the daytime. But now it was gloom inside of gloom. There were rows and shelves of caged, sick, convalescing an-

  imals. Mostly quiet. The occasional mutter or growl or chirp.

  ”Cassie?”

  She turned to look up at me. Her eyes were dull with agony.

  ”He can’t get enough air,” she said. ”His pulse is weak.”

  ”Make fish! He try to make fish-people!” Jara Hamee cried.

  I turned to Toby. A seer of her people. More intelligent and articulate than her fellow HorkBajir, including her father, Jara.

  ”Who?”

  ”Visser Three,” Toby said. ”Who else?”

  ”What happened?”

  ”This is Hahn Tunad. He was not a free HorkBajir. Not one of our colony. Now Hahn is free of the Yeerks but he is dying for it.” Toby paused before going on. ”Hahn and forty-nine other Hork-Bajir were the subjects of an experiment. I have come to understand from Hahn that the visser is obsessed with rediscovering the Pemalite ship. He is very angry that his last attempt was foiled by the being called the Drode. And by the so-called Andalite bandits.”

  ”Okay,” I said, watching Cassie wipe a cool cloth over Hahn’s bladed forehead. ”Go on.”

  ”The visser attempted to produce an amphibious creature. To aid in this deep-sea mission. He failed. When he realized the fifty test subjects were useless to him, he ordered their Yeerks to abandon the now-useless host bodies. They were to be fed to the Taxxons. We found Hahn ... the others were already dead.”

  Toby nodded toward her distraught father. ”They were friends. Long ago.”

  I tried to slow my racing heart. To breathe deeply. To keep from vomiting.

  I knelt by Cassie.

  She pointed to Hahn’s left shoulder. Just below the blade was - a gill. I’d already seen it. I’d seen the webs between the Hork-Bajir talons and fingers, too.

  ”Jake, the visser just grafted these gills onto the body,” Cassie whispered. ”It’s as if he and his medical team had no idea of Hork-Bajir physiology. It’s all wrong. Totally botched!”

  ”Feet! Feet!” Jara, more agitated than I’d ever seen him, pointed to Hahn’s feet.

  ”Jake, he can’t breathe. I don’t know what they did inside, to his lungs . . .”

  I grabbed the oxygen mask from the ground where Cassie had dropped it in defeat. Yanked the oxygen tank closer to the makeshift bed of hay bales.

  ”Jake! You can’t. . . it’s too late!”

  Pushing past Cassie I held the mask to Hahn’s mouth. Opened the valve on the tank.

  ”Jake, you’re not doing him any good. He’s in pain. No one can help him.”

  She gently pulled the mask away.

  From behind me I was dimly aware of Toby’s voice.

  ”Hahn was able to tell us of a powerful new seagoing vessel the visser has built specifically for the purpose of locating the Pemalite ship. It is known as the Sea Blade.”

  A horrible gurgling rose from Hahn’s throat.

  ”Cassie! Something’s caught in his throat!”

  ”A valve of some sort,” she said. ”It’s malfunctioning. I tried to open it. Tried to keep it from closing further. I couldn’t.”

  Jara stepped forward and gracefully took one of Hahn’s hands. ”Hahn not die!” he pleaded. ”Hahn come with Toby and Jara and be free!”

  ”No, Father. It is time for Hahn to go Beyond. Our friends, Tobias and the others, will help us destroy the evil that is Visser Three. Help us avenge Hahn’s death.”

  With a terrible sob, Jara knelt and gently laid his bladed head on Hahn’s body.

  And then there was one less sound in the barn. One less creature breathing.

  I moved away. Jara needed privacy. I turned to look up at the window in the rafters. Tobias’s favorite passage into and out of the barn.

  10

  The sky was beginning to lighten. Dawn was approaching.

  A new day. A day Hahn and the other mutated Hork-Bajir would never see.

  ”Jake?”

  I looked back to Cassie. Opened my arms. She came to me and we held each other.

  We held each other until Toby and Jara had wrapped Hahn’s body in blankets and taken him into the sunrise.

  11

  CHAPTER 3

  It was after school the next day and we were in Cassie’s barn. Where only hours earlier a mutated Hork-Bajir lay dying.

  ”We have to go after the Sea Blade, period,” Rachel said angrily. ”We definitely can’t let the Yeerks get hold of the Pemalite ship. Or Pemalite technology.”

  ”A plan would be nice,” Marco said.

  «We don’t know enough to make any plans,» Tobias argued from his usual perch and lookout in the rafters.

  Tobias is a nothlit. Someone who stayed in morph for longer than the two hour limit. Now he’s a red-tailed hawk first, all other creatures second.

  12 Rachel gives him a hard time about staying hawk and not going back to being a regular human boy twenty-four seven. But the explanation is there if you want to see it. If Tobias gives up his ability to morph by trapping himself in human form, he’s out of the fight. And he can’t walk away from this war. He can’t - or won’t abandon us.

  Tobias is Elfangor’s son. Long story. Weird story.

  «Yes, though we can make use of the additional information we received from Toby’s spies this morning,» Ax pointed out.

  Right after dawn I’d sent Ax and Tobias to the secret community the free Hork-Bajir had established. Their information was sketchy. Hork-Bajir, with the exception of Toby, are not the brightest species around. It’s a little like asking a fouryear-old to describe a movie.

  But we’d also tapped into the Chee network. The Chee are a whole different story. Androids are very good at description. The Chee didn’t know much, but what they knew was different. They had seen different pieces of the puzzle.

  ”What do we know? That’s the question,” Marco said.

  I nodded at Ax. ”Ax-man? Give us a rundown.”

  13 «We know very little. We can extrapolate and guess a bit more,» Ax said.

  I smiled. ”So include the guesses and the extrapolation.”

  «The Sea Blade is a new type of vessel. It can travel in the air and in the water. Most spacecraft can travel under water for a short distance, and with limited effect. But in order for the Yeerks to travel to Earth’s deepest oceans they would need something radically different,» Ax said. «lt seems likely that both in the air, and in the water, this vessel will be able to cloak itself from normal hu-

  man sensors.»

  ”It would have to,” Marco interjected. ”Too many subs out there in the deep, blue sea. There are still sensors all over the ocean floor from the Cold War.”
<
br />   «Exactly,» Ax agreed.

  ”Echolocation?” Cassie suggested.

  ”Echolocation is a lot like what they call ’active sonar,’” Marco said. ”You bounce sound waves off an object and listen to the echoes. But subs don’t use active sonar, usually, because if you’re ’pinging’ someone with active sonar, they can hear you. Subs usually stick with passive listening.”

  ”Marco, are you just pulling all this out of the air? How do you know all this?” Rachel demanded.

  14 ”torn Clancy.”

  I nodded. ”torn Clancy. The Hunt for Red October.”

  ”You should read something besides Glamour, Rachel.”

  ”So would echolocation work, or not?” Cassie demanded.

  We all looked at Ax. «Maybe. Maybe not. But it is all we have to work with.»

  Cassie chewed her lip. ”I’m thinking giant squid, if we’re going real deep. Or dolphins or whales,” Cassie said.

  «The Chee have revealed the location of the Pemalite ship to us. It is deep, but not terribly deep. However, it is in an area designated as a Navy firing range. There are large numbers of exploded . . . and unexploded . . . weapons. Humans would be unlikely to frequent the area.»

  Tobias said, «Why don’t the Chee just get to the Pemalite ship and move it before the Yeerks show up?»

  ”The Yeerks will just keep looking,” I said. ”The Chee can’t get into a game of hide-andseek. Sooner or later they’d lose. And if the Pemalite ship is moving it’s easier to detect.”

  ”We have to sink the Sea Blade,” Cassie said quietly. ”We have to sink it, destroy it. Make them regret ever thinking about invading the ocean.”

  15

  I shot her a look. It wasn’t like Cassie to be bloodthirsty.

  She met my gaze, unflinching. ”What they did to the Hork-Bajir was evil,” she said. ”Over the line. Way over the line. We need to teach them a lesson.”

  I nodded. I understood her feelings. But this mission couldn’t be about feelings.

  Marco said what I was thinking. ”Hey, we don’t teach lessons. And we don’t do revenge. Besides, everything the Yeerks do is over the line. We stop them. That’s what we do.”

  Cassie looked unconvinced. Rachel was smirking in cocky agreement with Cassie. Rachel liked the idea of delivering a harsh lesson. I expected that from Rachel. But from Cassie it worried me.