The Test Read online

  For Michael and Jake

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SNEAK PEEK

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  My name is Tobias. Still a freak of nature. Part human. Part bird. Confused? Don’t worry, it gets better.

  I am flying over the forest. The air is thick. A storm is approaching. It is only early afternoon, but the sky is growing black as the front moves in on the city. A towering wall of rain, wind, and cumulus clouds.

  I had to find food before the storm. I was hungry. But then, I’m always looking for food. That’s life for a bird of prey. Hunger.

  A shrew stepped out from its burrow. It loitered nervously, sniffing the moisture. We had the same thought, me and the shrew. Hunker down against nature’s wrath, but fill your belly first.

  I was higher on the food chain. I tucked into a dive.

  My wings pressed tight to my body. Air whistled past. Mountains, forest, and sky. All a blur, a flashing streak. Everything but the shrew, shifting agitatedly, chomping on a seed …

  My talons struck, embedded, and squeezed. Drained life instantly.

  Wonder what it’s like? Dig your fingernails into a too-ripe peach. Rip sections off with your teeth. Gulp them without chewing. The kill is something like that.

  I downed the shrew and lifted off.

  I don’t think about the kill anymore. I’m hawk and human. I’ll explain later. Just try to understand that the hawk must feed the human. It has to happen.

  I don’t think about it anymore.

  That’s a lie.

  “You vile little bird! Do you realize what you’ve done? Do you realize what you’ve become? You’re trapped! You have to live out your life as a bird!”

  Her name was Taylor. My Yeerk torturer. Her voice screeching. Bruising my ears. Tormenting me after every kill. Other times, too. Still, after all this time …

  THWOK! THWOK! THWOK! THWOK!

  A helicopter! Hovering low over the trees, dispersing terrified crows in all directions. If I were a true hawk, I’d have cleared out with the other birds. Instead, I circled around and flapped toward the turbulence.

  My friends, the Animorphs, the ones who fight the Yeerk invasion of Earth, say that since my capture, I live too much of life in my head. They must be right. I’d almost missed everything.

  Not just the helicopter. The humans below, streaming across rough forest floor, the tires of their ATV’s scoring the soil. The searchlights streaking the trees in the daytime darkness, making rabbits and deer dart in alarm.

  I flew to the nearest ranger station. It was ringed by squad cars and TV news vans. I swooped down, closer to the action. Landed on a low branch. A blond woman in a raincoat held a microphone close to her lips and swatted wind-whipped hair away from her face.

  “Bobby McIntire,” she shouted above the noise of the vehicles, “missing now for two full days since he wandered away from his camping party. Hope that he’ll be found alive is fading. But it’s not just a race against time and the weather.” Lightning struck the sky above her, imparting urgency to her words. “Little Bobby is deaf and can’t hear the desperate calls of rescuers. Kelly King,” she concluded, looking skyward, “reporting live.” She held a frozen, concerned expression until the producer gave her the all clear.

  “I will break you.” It was Taylor’s voice again, whispering in my mind. “You can’t win.”

  I set a course for the storm front. A strange thing to do, to turn toward the lightning. To fly into the line of rain, the thunderclaps, the wind.

  But it made me feel like Lindbergh over the Atlantic. Fearless and strong. Maybe even a little heroic.

  I wanted those feelings.

  See, it wasn’t long ago that the Yeerks captured me. A crazed and insane human-Controller made my life a hell for several excruciating hours. I survived. I even thought the torture was over. I didn’t realize that torture doesn’t end when you’re freed.

  People think it does. People who’ve never been through torture think that when the physical injuries heal, you’re healed, too. They’re wrong.

  Torture plays tricks on your mind. “You’re weak and scared,” it says. “You think you’re in control? Hah!” it says. “Doubt yourself. Worry, and question, and fear,” it tells you.

  Pain can be very convincing.

  Sometime during my capture, my mind was assaulted with memories, images of all the times I’ve been weak. Or think I might have been …

  Like my first time at the Yeerk pool.

  My mind flashed back to it now, to the scene at Yeerk Central, that echoing underground dome with a sludgy pool churning at its core. The Yeerk pool. That’s where the Yeerks do their dirtiest dirty work, where parasitic, sluglike aliens dunk your head in the muck and force one of their kind through your ear.

  The Yeerks squeeze your brain and wring out your freedom. They control all thoughts and movements. They silence your howls and screams of grief until you are nothing but a slave. A stupid puppet. An unwilling soldier of the Yeerk Empire. A threat to all humanity.

  But you’ve probably heard about all this by now. Right?

  Tha-BOOM! Boom!

  A thunderclap roared and half brought me back to the present. The other half of me was still at the Yeerk pool that first, horrible time. Clinging to the rock face, praying for camouflage, searching the colossal cavern for a way to escape. A way to get past Visser Three’s men.

  I’d heard Rachel say, faintly.

  How long since I’d morphed to red-tailed hawk? An hour and fifty minutes? An hour and fifty-five?

  How long?!

  The others had escaped already. The other Animorphs, I mean. They’d dodged the visser’s fireball gauntlet. They’d slipped out to safety, back through the janitor’s closet, back into the school. Rachel, Cassie, Marco, Jake.

  Had I missed the deadline? Had I been more than two hours in morph?

  Couldn’t have. Can’t have. No. I’d be trapped forever. A bird.

  Independent, free, alone.

  Forever.

  Images of the human life I’d led till then flooded my mind. The images were dark. My apathetic aunt. My alcoholic uncle.

  Then, something brighter, something powerful surged through my mind. Something else. Shoring me up. Drawing me in. A wave of …

  What? What had I felt then, at that moment, with the seconds ticking down? With the deadline chasing me …

  Weakness or strength?

  “You’ll never know,” Taylor said. “You won’t know who or what you are when I’m done with you.”

  Bobby McIntire needed to be found.

  I let a fading thermal lift me into the atmosphere.

  My name is Tobias. I’m a human. I’m a hawk. If you want to find something in the forest, you’d do well to ask me.

  There’s nothing I don’t see.

  Tha-BOOM! Boom!

  Thunderclaps. I let the warm air draw me up. Three hundred feet. Higher. I could see through the haze, from city’s edge to the mountains.

  The national park is a very big place. You
could hike for days and never see anyone. Spotting a boy from a helicopter would be like finding the needle in the haystack. And the haystack was about to get really wet.

  Binoculars, infrared goggles, and laser sights flipped on. I don’t mean to brag, but nature gave me excellent tools. I can see a hiker’s broken shoelace. A robin’s chicks.

  I can pick out deer poop.

  “You vile little bird!” Taylor’s voice, always humming in my ear.

  Quiet as a glider, my personal search plane swept huge, broad strokes above the trees.

  My friends, the other Animorphs — the other kids who knew the great Andalite warrior Elfangor, who’d been there as he died, and who’d accepted the Yeerk-fighting Andalite technology to become any animal they can touch — they were expecting me to show up at Cassie’s barn. There was a meeting scheduled for after school. If I wanted to make it, I had to travel east.

  I edged west, following the search party’s tire tracks. Tracing the lines as they crossed and converged in a half-mile section of sparse tree cover. I was guessing that this was the last place the boy was seen. Good place to start. I dove to fifty feet, skimming the treetops, looking for a sign, a clue. Anything.

  Nothing.

  A raindrop struck my wing. No, not yet! Three more drops hit me like BB’s.

  A whistling gale pushed me back into the air and blew me away from the search party tracks. I flapped harder to fight the strengthening wind. It was pushing me toward mudflats. Forcing me toward a dried up stream.

  The raindrops were starting to feel like war-game paint pellets. I remember. My uncle took me to do the paint-ball thing. I hated it, but it was one of the only things we’d done together. Anyway, I was going to have to stop. The downpour was starting.

  Suddenly — a splash of red against brown. A shred of bright cloth caught on a bramble.

  Yes.

  I chanced in open thought-speak. Brushing the treetops, I scanned the mud. Nothing.

  The wind was absurd. Violent one minute, dead the next.

  Then — a single footprint. A kid’s footprint.

  I called again.

  A faint rustling of brush. Then, more movement. I circled in to land. A dirt clod shot straight up into the air, grazing my beak.

 

  I didn’t see the giant sinkhole until I almost landed in it. It was a pit so invisible under the overgrowth, it would have taken searchers months to find it.

  I peered down at the kid. He was searching wildly for the source of my voice. His eyes were swollen from crying. His hands were raw from trying to climb up the vertical, featureless sinkhole wall. He stood in stagnant water a foot deep. And a flash flood was on the way.

  I said. But I didn’t have a morph that could haul him out. Hork-Bajir? I wasn’t practiced enough with the blades not to lacerate the kid and I definitely couldn’t let him see an alien. A lightning bolt sizzled the ground nearby. Not good.

  The trip to the ranger station was probably the worst flight of my life. The rain pummeled me. The wind screwed up my feathers. But the very worst part was the dead air. By the time I reached the ranger station, my body was burning ligaments for fuel.

  Through the windows I saw most of the search party, inside and drying off. Getting ready for another round of wet and nasty searching. Then I saw a guy who looked like he needed a miracle. He was sitting outside on a stump, letting the rain drench him through. The ink from his name tag was running down his chest, but I could still read the letters. “Mr. McIntire.” Bobby’s dad? He fixed his sad stare on the mountains.

  I touched down just feet from him. Didn’t once think about the consequences. I said,

  You can tell a lot about a person by the way they respond to a talking hawk. There’s the run-away-screaming type. The bring-palms-to-head-to-squeeze-out-demons reflex. Even the kill-the-animal maneuver. Most people don’t do too well when their reality’s challenged.

  But Bobby’s dad was cool. I mean, he looked kind of freaked at first. His eyes bugged out and he spun around frantically, looking for the prankster who was fooling with him. But once the initial surprise faded, he quickly regained his composure.

  “Okay,” he said. “Lead the way.”

  He probably thought he was nuts, but I don’t think it would have mattered whether he was hearing voices or talking with aliens. He just wanted his son back.

  That kind of love … it made me feel … strange.

  I flew from tree to tree, a few hundred feet at a time, waiting for Mr. McIntire and three rangers he’d convinced to come along. All the while I gave him directions in private thought-speak. At least I could stay a good distance from the men, to keep it uncertain whether a hawk was really running the show.

  I pictured Bobby in the pit, the torrential rain funneling into channels, forming a raging arroyo. Racing like a hungry, deadly snake. A massive, silent snake that Bobby’s deaf ears wouldn’t hear.

  “You will die, Andalite.” Taylor’s hateful voice, droning in my head.

  I directed.

  Then we crested the rise and I saw something I didn’t think was possible. Sheets of rain punished the earth to our right and our left, but over Bobby’s sinkhole … unbelievable. A corridor of rainless clouds with two ends of a weak rainbow marking the borders.

  I was sure my mind was making the scene up. It couldn’t turn out this well. Nothing ever did. Taylor wouldn’t let it …

  I called. I pumped my wings and found him, the water rising around his knees. I perched on a low branch and watched as three powerful rangers pulled him to safety. Watched as Bobby collapsed in his dad’s arms, shaking, as joy replaced fear.

  Bobby’s dad glanced up at me, gratitude in his eyes.

  Ever have something work out so perfectly, you feel you could fly? That’s how I felt — and the cool thing was, I could actually do it. I could actually fly.

  I took off down the swath of rainless sky toward Cassie’s barn. It felt so good. I played in the air like a pilot at an air show, awed the audience with my death-defying stunts. I cut my engines, fell into a nosedive, ready to pull up just seconds before I hit the ground.

  And then …

  A golden eagle, twice my size, screeching toward me like a wrecking ball …

  WHAM!

  And all was blackness.

  I never even had a chance.

  “This hawk’s gonna feel that wing. Hero or not, when he wakes up, he’ll hurt like crazy.”

  My eyes snapped open. Through the links of my cage I spied the faces of two concerned, lab-coated veterinarians. Both women. One brunette, one blond. The words University Clinic were stitched on their pockets.

  “Do you think Superbird needs an epidural?”

  I tensed my extremities. Right wing not responding. A sore and twisted neck. That nasty golden eagle had banged me up pretty bad. The memory of the impact got my hawk heart pumping. Fear, territoriality, confusion.

  “No, I gave him enough medication to keep him comfy till morning. Hey, look, he’s awake. Feeling better, Mr. Hawk?” the blond one said, with the gentle condescension appropriate for wildlife who can’t make it in the wild.

  I could have found both vets extremely annoying. But as it was, with an ugly vulture in the cage next to mine, and a prehistoric egret two doors down, I was actually glad to hear a human voice.

  How much time had passed? What day was it?

  “Seen the headlines?” the brunette asked me, as if in answer to my question.

  Sometimes, not always, if you ask questions you want answers to, the universe will respond.

  It was the evening edition newspaper that she held in her hands, an
d it confirmed that I’d been asleep way too long. “‘Father Claims Hawk Led Searchers to Lost Boy.’” She smiled at me, then summed it up.

  “You da bird!”

  The vets chuckled. They didn’t know this was no laughing matter. They didn’t understand …

  It hit me, right at that moment. I’d messed up big time. That headline … the kiss of death … if the Yeerks found me first …

  I was stupid. So stupid!

  Any time you get an animal doing unusual stuff, you get Yeerks. To Yeerks, all animals are suspects, possible “Andalite bandits” disguised in morph.

  This was bad. What was I thinking?

  My friends, they’d be looking for me, too. I’d endangered our own security. By trying to fight Taylor’s ghost, I’d dragged my friends into danger.

  Stupid. Weak.

  I had to morph! Morph and get out before …

  But no. I couldn’t morph in front of the vets. And there were video cameras, mounted up in the corners of the lab, recording everything.

  Who’d get to me first?

  “What’s he doing? Flapping his wing? Hey, he’s gonna get hurt. Chloe, quick! We need to sedate him.”

  Sedate me?

  I fell back to the floor of the cage and lay motionless.

  No way would I be sedated.

  Not with two groups looking for me. Two groups I knew would take that headline very seriously.

  Group One: my friends.

  Group Two: my enemies.

  “Wait,” the vet said. “Forget it. He calmed down. He’s fine. I don’t know what that was about.”

  “Okay, Superbird. Stay out of trouble. We’ll see you in the morning.”

  They were going away? They were leaving me here!

  Why did everyone leave? Why …

  They walked to the door, switched off the main fluorescent overheads, deadbolted the door behind them.

  They were going home. They had homes to go to.

  They were leaving me to face my fate alone.

  The room was cold and sterile. Sick and injured birds squawked and cooed in the partial darkness.

  Alone.

  And all I could do was wait.

  Sccreeeeech!

  The sound jarred me from a restless half-sleep. I looked at the clock: 1:12 A.M. Scanned for the source of the sound.