The Journey 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

  CHAPTER 25

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SNEAK PEEK

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  My name is Rachel.

  And I was facing down a Controller in a purple-and-pink Dunkin’ Donuts uniform. He was holding a Dracon beam. Smirking. The little jerk.

  Tseeew! Tseeew!

  He fired at point-blank range. Hit me right between my three-foot-long tusks.

  “HhhhREEEEEuuuhhh!” I roared in pain and anger. Mostly anger. Like a couple of Dracon beam blasts are enough to take down a thirteen-hundred-pound African elephant.

  Yeah, an elephant. I can morph into animals whenever I want. I can also morph a cat and a cockroach and lots of other animals and bugs. Sounds like fun, right?

  Wrong. Like, about one percent of the time it’s not seriously unpleasant. Mostly morphing is a weapon. A weapon in the most desperate battle ever fought by human beings.

  Here’s the deal. Earth is under attack. The planet has been invaded by aliens called Yeerks. These guys aren’t into exploring strange new worlds. They’re into exploring strange new bodies. They’re parasites. Like lice or ringworm. Only intensely worse.

  In their natural state, Yeerks are nothing but gray slugs. Until they infest a host body, enter the brain, sink down into the little crevices, and take complete control.

  Once they have you, you can’t focus your own eyes, or draw your own breath, or decide when to pee. You are powerless. A slave of the most complete and hopeless kind.

  You can still do one thing. Just one terrible thing: You can watch in horror as the Yeerk in your head lies to your family, betrays your friends, plots to take over your planet.

  Frightening?

  Oh, yeah. And it gets worse.

  Me and my friends are all that actively stand between the Yeerks and their evil conquest of humanity. Just a group of five kids and a young alien.

  We’re trying to hold on until help gets here from a few billion light-years away. See, the Yeerks have enemies. A race of amazingly advanced aliens called Andalites.

  Andalites look like deer. If deer had blue-and-tan fur, humanoid arms, and scorpionlike tails tipped with wickedly sharp blades. Andalites also have two main eyes, on their face, and two on swiveling stalks that sprout from the top of their head. Beautiful and intelligent and cunning.

  Not too long ago — who am I kidding, what seems like a lifetime ago — an Andalite ship got fried right above Earth. Torn out of the sky while battling the Yeerks. My friends and I saw it fall. Saw the dying Andalite war prince named Elfangor crawl from the wreckage. Listened, stunned and just a little freaked out, as he gave us the technology that allows us to morph. To acquire the DNA of any animal we touch and then to become that animal. But there was one rule we had to follow: Stay in morph for more than two hours and you stay there forever. Become what the Andalites call a nothlit. Stuck in your morph for the rest of your life. Someone who means a lot to me knows about this firsthand. He’d stayed in morph too long and now he lives his life as a red-tailed hawk. He did regain his morphing ability, but when he demorphs he’s not a human. He’s a bird. The sad part — at least for me — is that he seems to like his life the way it is now.

  But even though it seems futile, we’ve been fighting ever since.

  Trying to hold on even though we’ve just about given up waiting for any more help out of the sky.

  So here we are: Jake, our leader and my cousin; Cassie, my best friend; Marco, Jake’s best friend and a totally annoying — never mind; Tobias, a lost soul with the body of a bird; and Elfangor’s younger brother, Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill. We call him Ax.

  Oh, there’s one important thing I forgot to mention: Yeerks feed on something called Kandrona rays.

  The Yeerks’ need for Kandrona is the one flaw in their strategy. A weakness, an opening we can exploit. Every three days, thousands of Yeerks gather together at the enormous Yeerk pool complex built under our town.

  Destroy the pool and the Yeerks will starve.

  We just found out from our android allies, the Chee, that the Yeerks were beginning mass production of portable Kandronas. The heads of the Yeerk organization have had access to these for a while now. But mass production? That meant each and every Yeerk, no matter how low down on the corporate ladder, would be able to feed in the privacy of his or her own home as easily as you nuke a frozen pizza. The Yeerk pool would be obsolete. Our enemies would be rid of their only flaw.

  We just couldn’t let it happen.

  So we’d attacked their factory, a dingy old industrial building on the edge of town, windows painted black. The Yeerks had disguised it as a Dunkin’ Donuts bakery. The human-Controllers were even dressed in the ever-so-stylish polyester fast-food uniforms.

  The Pepto-Bismol pink poly did not help my mood. Neither did the fact that we were way outnumbered.

  Thirty human-Controllers were working on a crude assembly line in the back of the building. Four more were pretending to make donuts up front. There were at least a dozen guards.

  I wrapped my trunk around a Controller’s waist, tossed my massive head, and let go.

  “Ahhhhhhhh!” he yelled, as he went flying. Then —

  THUMP!

  I didn’t see where he landed.

  “HhhhREEEEEuuuuhhh!” I trumpeted.

  Jake, Cassie, Ax, and Tobias were back by the assembly line, on the other side of a false wall. I couldn’t see them but the elephant’s ears were picking up moans and roars and cries and Dracon beam blasts. Also, something that sounded like equipment smashing to the floor.

  Marco was on my side of the wall, in gorilla morph. Three Controllers surrounded him. He lashed out with his ham-sized hands but the Controllers were slowly backing him against one of the three commercial ovens.

  I shouted.

 

  The Controllers had their backs to me. Didn’t see me coming.

  I grabbed the middle one. Tossed.

  “Aaaahhhhhhh!” he yelled.

  Now they knew I was there.

  The right one turned his handheld Dracon beam at me.

  Too slow.

  I grabbed him. Tossed.

  “Nnnnnoooooo!” he shouted.

  Marco moved forward. Knocked the Dracon beam out of the third Controller’s hand. Whacked him a solid gorilla punch to the jaw. The guy went down. And stayed there.

  Marco and I looked around. Our part of the factory was littered with downed human-Controllers. Yeerks who wouldn’t be causing us any headaches for a long, long time.

  Jake shouted.

  I powered through the main entrance, taking most of the door frame with me. Three minutes to demorph or be stuck as an elephant for the rest of my life.

  The others were right behind me. Ax in his own Andalite body. Jake moving fluidly in his tiger morph. Cassie as a wolf, fast and low. Tobias, the red-tailed hawk. And Marco, a gorilla, bringing
up the rear.

  We ran. Down the deserted alleyway where we’d left our outer clothing. The pavement was damp. Strange misty halos ringed the sodium-vapor lights way overhead.

  Not a minute to spare. Crowded in around the stinking Dumpsters and piles of oily, wet rags, we stopped.

  Jake said.

  I focused on my own body, and felt the changes begin.

  My tusks went flaccid, like two overgrown pieces of spaghetti. They slurped up into my face, slapping side to side as they retracted.

  Morphing is not attractive. Actually, it’s pretty much a freak show.

  My eyes sort of moved up and down as they traveled from the sides of my shrinking head to the front. Things went blurry for a second until human sight blinked on. And then —

  “Hahooo wwwas that?” Cassie demanded with a mouth that was half-wolf and half-human.

  Ax said.

  “WHAT?” Marco exploded. “Someone took a picture of me? Not cool. Do you see what I’m wearing? I’m Spandex-boy. Totally not cool.”

  I heard a garbage can tumbling over. Squeaky footsteps on the wet pavement. Someone was running away!

  “Everyone stay put,” Jake said. “We can’t let anyone see us. Tobias?”

  Tobias flapped his wings and rose up over Marco’s head.

  “Well, this is great, isn’t it?” Marco said. “We close down a Yeerk-run operation only to let some tabloid photographer sneak up on us. I bet we’re on the cover of the National Enquirer tomorrow.”

  “You don’t know it was a professional photographer,” Cassie argued.

  “A kid can hope, can’t he?”

  “Not funny.” Jake, his mouth pressed into a grim line.

  One of the reasons we’ve survived as long as we have is that the Yeerks don’t know who we are. They think we’re a group of “Andalite bandits.”

  If they found out we were a bunch of human kids we’d be dead or infested within hours. No doubt our entire families, too.

  “I’m going with Tobias,” I said grimly.

  I concentrated on the bald eagle DNA buried somewhere deep inside me. Demorphing and morphing — especially after battle — is exhausting. But I couldn’t just stand around and wait. So much easier to do something. Anything.

  The first thing to change was my mouth. My lips bulged out. Grew hard and stiff and turned yellow.

  THUD! I fell forward as my legs rapidly shrank. The slimy bricks of the alleyway rushed up at me.

  A feather tattoo started at my fingertips and covered my arms in a few seconds. Suddenly, the pattern sprang up and my arms and legs were covered with actual feathers. The feathers were dark brown, except for the snowy-white ones that replaced my blond hair and the skin of my face and neck.

  My feet split open and formed yellow talons, each of which ended in a hooked claw. Claws that could grab a swimming fish out of a rushing river. My human bones became hollow and light.

  Moments later, I was airborne, cruising soundlessly over the deserted streets. I could see the “Dunkin’ Donuts” bakery a few blocks away. Rubble spilled out the door. Nobody was stirring.

  The whole neighborhood was quiet. Which was good. No commando force of Controllers. Not yet, anyway.

  There! I spotted Tobias maybe two hundred yards ahead and to my right, flying over some mid-rise buildings.

  I called.

  he said.

  I asked.

  Tobias said grimly.

  I said.

 

  Neither did the bald eagle. But by then I knew the others were on their way. When Jake felt it was safe they’d gone owl and followed us. The six of us circled the building, waiting for the kid to come back out or appear in a window. Nothing happened except that the strange mist turned into a steady downpour.

  Jake made the call. he said.

  We arranged a quick schedule then split up.

  I didn’t sleep well that night. I spent two hours dreaming I was on the cover of Time magazine as a half-human, half-elephant freak. Not exactly the kind of fame that makes Mom and Dad proud.

  At three o’clock, I morphed owl and flew back to the apartment building. Tobias and Ax reported that they hadn’t seen anything. Cassie and I spent the next two hours flying in endless circles.

  Jake and Marco relieved us at five.

  I went back to my bed and my nightmares of exposure and infestation.

  By eight-thirty Saturday morning, I was awake and heading to Cassie’s barn for a meeting. I was tired and grumpy. The weather was rainy and cold. I wanted a nap. Maybe after we got the film.

  Tobias was in his usual spot in the rafters. Cassie was mucking out a stall. Marco was sitting on a stool, looking all conditioned and blown-dry. Jake kept yawning. He looked rumpled, like he’d just crawled out of bed. Which he probably had.

  Ax was back on watch at the kid’s apartment building.

  “Let’s try to keep this meeting short,” Jake said. “I don’t want Ax on surveillance alone.”

  “I don’t get it,” Marco said. “What was that kid doing all night?”

  “Probably sleeping,” I grumbled.

  Tobias said.

  “Easy. We steal the film,” I suggested.

  “That’s not a plan, O reckless one,” Marco said snidely. “That’s obvious. But I’m ready.”

  Jake nodded. “I spotted the kid around dawn. His apartment is on the fifth floor. The bedroom faces an empty lot in back.”

  “Did you see the camera?” Rachel asked.

  “I think so,” Jake said. “On his desk.”

  “We get it now,” I said. “Before he hands it over to someone or takes it to Photos ‘R’ Us.”

  Cassie leaned against her rake. “Probably a hundred people live in that apartment building,” she pointed out. “Some of them could be Controllers.”

  “Yeah,” Marco said. “So maybe the kid is in the elevator with a neighbor and he just happens to mention these weird creatures he saw in a dark alleyway last night. Before you know it, there’s a knock on your door. And it isn’t someone with a check for a million dollars.”

  Tobias said.

  “We’ve got to go in,” Jake said with another yawn. “We could try —”

  ZZZZZiiiiipppppp!

  “What the — ?” Marco jumped to his feet.

  A radio-controlled toy car blew into the barn. More precisely, a slightly damp, pink-and-aqua Barbie 4 x 4. Only instead of Barbie, a very small spaceship sat in the driver’s seat. The ship was three or four inches long, shaped like a baton with two big “engines” at the back and a death’s-head bridge in the front.

  The ship looked way too familiar.

 

  “Oh, man,” I said. “You’ve got to be kidding. Not these guys again.”

  O Most Powerful Emperor, Lord of the Galaxy! Bad news. Our ship’s engines have again malfunctioned! The treacherous popinjay males pushed the red button instead of the blue one! Weaker and less worthy servants would be vanquished by this disaster! But the brave Helmacron females are undaunted! We alone will capture the blue box of transforming power! All the galaxy shall tremble before us, rightful leaders of our race!

  — From the log of the Helmacron Females
r />   Tseeew! Tseeew!

  I felt two pinpricks on my neck. Like mini mosquito bites. “Ahhh! Owww!”

  Maybe it was the lack of sleep, but I was already extremely ticked off. I wanted to pop those little jerks.

  “The Helmacrons,” Marco said with an amazed shake of his head. “I can’t believe someone hasn’t blasted these maniacs out of the universe by now.”

  The Helmacrons are a race of tiny aliens. About a sixteenth of an inch tall, tops. But it’s a sixteenth of an inch of egomania. They sound pretty harmless, right? Wrong. They have this shrinking ray. The technology to make you very, very tiny. To bring you down to their size.

  This makes them both annoying and dangerous.

  the Helmacron voice in my head blustered.

  “I don’t get it,” Jake said. “We already gave them one jump start. Why are they here again?”

  “Who cares?” I asked. “Let’s just get rid of them.”

  “Maybe something went wrong with their ship,” Cassie said. “Hey — where are they going?”

  The Barbie-mobile backed up, did a 180, and zipped toward the back of the barn.

  “Let’s go!” Marco said.

  We got up and trotted after them. I could hear Tobias flapping above us. We caught up in time to see the truck’s rubber tires bounce off a battered freezer chest in one of the empty stalls.

  Jake met Cassie’s eyes. “Is it in there?”

  “Yes.”

  “It” was the blue box. That’s what we call it. The Andalites have another name for it. Several actually. Anyway, it’s the device they use to transfer the morphing power to an individual. Kind of like a super-advanced alien battery. Elfangor used it on us.

  Last time we saw the Helmacrons, we made a deal with them. They could use the blue box to power up their engines. Then they had to get off Earth. Pronto. And stay off Earth. Forever.

  Obviously, they hadn’t kept their half of the bargain.

  Tobias announced.

  I couldn’t see anything, but hawks have amazing vision. You’d have to have outstanding eyesight to see what the Helmacrons were doing with their tiny energy beams.