The Encounter Read online

  ANIMORPHS™

  THE

  ENCOUNTER

  K. A. APPLEGATE

  To Michael

  The author wishes to thank the

  Raptor Center at the University of Minnesota.

  Anyone interested in learning more about

  the Raptor Center and birds of prey in general

  can visit the Raptor Center website:

  www.raptor.cvm.umn.edu

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Preview

  Join the Fight

  About the Author

  Copyright

  CHAPTER 1

  My name is Tobias. A freak of nature. One of a kind.

  I won’t tell you my last name. I can’t tell you my last name. Or the name of the city where I live.

  I want to tell you everything, but I can’t give any clues to my true identity. Or the identity of the others. Everything I will tell you is true. I know it’s going to seem unbelievable, but believe it anyway.

  I am Tobias. I’m a normal kid, I guess. Or used to be. I used to do okay in school. Not great, but not bad, either. Just okay.

  I guess I was a dork, kind of. Big, but not big enough to keep from getting picked on. I had blond hair, kind of wild because I could never get it to look right. My eyes were … what color were my eyes? It’s only been a few weeks, and already I’m forgetting things about being human.

  I guess it doesn’t matter, anyway. My eyes now are gold and brown. I have eyes that look fierce and angry all the time. I’m not always fierce or angry, but I look that way.

  One afternoon, I was riding the thermals, the upswelling hot air. I rode them way up into the sky. The bottoms of low clouds, heavy with moisture, scudded just a few feet above me.

  I looked down and focused my laserlike eyes. My fierce eyes. I could still read — I hadn’t forgotten how to do that. I could see the big red and white sign that said: DEALIN’ DAN HAWKE’S USED CARS.

  I pressed my wings back, closer to my body, and began to fall.

  Down, down, down! Faster. Faster!

  I fell through the warm, early evening air like a rock. Like an artillery shell falling toward its target.

  All was silent except for the sound of the air rushing over the tops of my wings. The ground came up at me. It came up like it was trying to hit me.

  I saw the cage. It was no more than three feet on each side. In the cage was a hawk. A redtail.

  Like me.

  The man was close by. I recognized him because I had seen him on his TV commercials. He was Dealin’ Dan Hawke. He owned the car dealership.

  He was the one holding the hawk prisoner.

  She was a mascot. On the commercials he called her Price-Cut Polly. It made me sick. It made me furious.

  I saw the camera. There were three guys standing around. They would be shooting a live commercial soon. I didn’t care.

  Dealin’ Dan went to the hawk’s cage to feed her. It was locked with a bike-style combination lock. Four numbers. I could see them as he turned the combination. 8-1-2-5.

  I was two hundred yards up, plummeting to earth at seventy miles an hour. But I could see the numbers as he turned them. And the human part of me, Tobias, could remember.

  He opened the cage and tossed in some food. Then he closed it again and spun the lock.

  Brilliant lights came on. He was starting the commercial. It would be live on TV all over the area.

  What I was planning was insane. That’s what Marco would have said. It was one of his favorite words. Insane.

  I didn’t care.

  A hawk was in a tiny cage, being used as a prop for some lowlife car dealer. That wasn’t going to go on. Not if I could help it.

  “Tseeeeeeeer!” I screamed.

  Twenty feet from the ground, I opened my wings. The strain was terrible. I absorbed most of the momentum and used the rest for speed. I shot across the parked cars to the cage.

  I landed on the bars and grabbed on with my talons. I used the hook of my deadly, sharp beak to click the first number into place.

  “Hey! What the —” someone yelled.

  The bright TV light focused right on me.

  “Well, ladies and gentlemen in TV-land,” Dealin’ Dan yapped in surprise, “I guess we have a bird trying to break into our Price-Cut Polly’s cage. Boys, you better shoo him away.”

  Yeah, right. Shoo me, I thought.

  I clicked the second number. There were people coming for me. I saw a mechanic swinging a long steel wrench. But I wasn’t going to leave without freeing this bird.

  Hawks do not belong in cages. Hawks belong in the sky.

  But they were all around me.

  “Get him, Earl! Hit the thing!”

  “Look out for that beak of his!”

  “Maybe he’s got rabies!”

  WHAM!

  The mechanic swung the wrench! It barely missed my head. I was dead if I didn’t get some help. Fast.

  I cried silently with my mind.

  Her voice was in my head. We call it thought-speak. It’s something we can do when we morph.

  I breathed a sigh of relief. Help was on the way.

  “HhhuuuurrHHHHEEEEEAAAAH!”

  “What in the world was—” the mechanic cried.

  I knew what it was. It was Rachel. Pretty, blond Rachel. Although right at the moment she wasn’t pretty — impressive, but not pretty.

  BOOM! Cr-u-u-u-nch!

  “Oh. My. Lord,” Dealin’ Dan gasped. “Forget the bird! There’s an elephant stomping over the convertibles!”

  I would have smiled. If I’d had a mouth.

  I finished turning the lock. I yanked open the cage door.

  The hawk was wary. She was a true hawk, with only a hawk’s mind and instincts to guide her. But she did know an open path to the sky when she saw one.

  Out she came, in a rush of gray and brown and white feathers. She didn’t know that I had freed her. That kind of concept was beyond her thinking. And she felt no gratitude.

  But she flapped her wings and rose into the air.

  Free.

  And right then I had the strangest feeling. Like I should go with her. Like I should be with her.

  Rachel asked.

  She was bellowing loudly, tossing her big trunk around and stomping various cars. Having a very good time, by elephant standards. But it was time for us to leave. For Rachel to resume her human form.

  I looked up again. I saw the sunlight shine through the hawk’s red tail. She flew toward the setting sun.

  CHAPTER 2

  I hear sirens,> I said urgently. Rachel snapped.

  We had reache
d a patch of woods behind Dealin’ Dan’s car dealership. It was really just a few scruffy trees between the car place and a convenience store.

  I watched from a low tree branch as Rachel morphed back to human again. If you’ve never seen someone morph, you have no idea just how incredibly weird it is.

  When she began, she was a full-grown African elephant. Ten feet tall. Almost twice that from head to tail. She weighed at least six thousand pounds. I say “at least” because we’ve never exactly tried to stick her on the bathroom scale.

  She had two curved tusks, each about as long as a child. And a trunk that dragged the ground when she walked and could pick up a big, slashing, yelling, dangerously angry Hork-Bajir warrior and throw him twenty feet.

  I’d seen her do it.

 

  I said.

 

  Controllers. There’s a word you need to know. A Controller is anyone with a Yeerk in his head. Yeerks are alien parasites. They are evil little slugs who live in the bodies of other species and enslave them. All the Hork-Bajir are Controllers. So are the Taxxons.

  So are more and more humans. Human-Controllers.

  As I watched, Rachel began to shrink. The ropy tail was sucked up like a piece of spaghetti. Her trunk grew smaller.

  Blond hair began to sprout from her massive gray forehead. Her eyes wandered across her face toward the middle. The vast leathery ears became pink and small and perfectly formed.

  I said.

 

 

  She was small enough now that she could stand on her hind legs. As she did, her front legs grew smooth and human. Her back legs lost their clunki-ness and became her own long, coltish legs.

  Her morphing clothes, a skintight black leotard, emerged.

  The tusks shlooped back into her mouth and divided into sparkling teeth. She was a very pretty girl, beautiful even, except that she still had a two-foot-long gray nose.

  At last, the trunk seemed to roll up and became a regular nose.

  She was a girl again. Barefoot, because no one had figured out how to morph shoes. Her mouth was back to normal. She spoke in her normal voice, no longer in my head. Thought-speech is only for morphs.

  “Okay, I’m back. Let’s bail!”

  The siren sounds were coming ever closer.

  “I hope they have some flip-flops for sale in there,” Rachel grumbled. “This shoe situation is a pain.”

  The elephant was gone. The girl had emerged.

  See? I told you it would be hard to believe.

  It began at a deserted construction site, when we found the crashed spaceship of an Andalite prince. He was the last surviving Andalite in our solar system. He and his fellow Andalites had fought a great battle to drive away the Yeerk mother ship.

  They fought and lost.

  And now the Yeerks are among us. And they are now trying to enslave the human race.

  Before he died at the hands of the Yeerk leader, a terrible creature called Visser Three, the Andalite gave us a great gift—and a great curse.

  The gift was the power to morph. To absorb the DNA of any living animal and to become that animal. Never before had anyone but the Andalites themselves been given the power to morph.

  It meant a life of secrets. Of terrible danger.

  The Yeerks think we are a small band of escaped Andalites. They know that morphs had attacked their Yeerk pool. They know that morphs had even infiltrated the home of one of their most important Controllers—Chapman.

  But they don’t know that we are just five normal human kids who’d been walking home from the mall one night.

  Visser Three wants us caught or dead. Visser Three usually gets what he wants.

  But I was glad to fight the Yeerks. Maybe I just had less to lose than the others. Or maybe something about the lonely, defeated, yet courageous Andalite prince touched me so deeply that I could never regret fighting to settle the score.

  But there has been a price to pay. You see, there is a limit on the power to morph. You must never remain in a morph for more than two hours. If you do, you are trapped.

  Forever.

  And that is the curse of the Andalite’s gift.

  That is why, when Rachel returned to her human body, I didn’t.

  It would take Rachel a while to get home on the bus. I traveled a little faster. So I had time to waste.

  The sun was setting, and in my mind I could still picture the freed hawk heading into the sun.

  I hoped she had found a nice patch of forest to spend the night. That’s what a redtail likes: a nice tree branch with a clear view of a meadow full of little mice and rats and shrews and voles as they scurry below. That’s how we … they … hunt.

  I headed toward the tall buildings of downtown. I caught a beautiful thermal that billowed up the face of some skyscrapers. A thermal is like a big bubble of warm air. It rises beneath your wings and makes it effortless to just go soaring up and up.

  I caught the thermal and went shooting up the side of the skyscraper like I was riding an elevator.

  A lot of the offices were empty, since it was Saturday. But around the sixtieth floor I saw an old man looking out the window. Maybe he was some big, important businessman, I don’t know.

  But when he saw me he smiled. He watched me soar up and away. And I knew he was jealous.

  I was half a mile up when I finally turned away from the sun and headed toward Rachel’s house.

  The sun was going down. The moon just peeked over the rim of the world.

  Then, I felt … I don’t know how to describe it. It was in the air above me. Huge. Vast! Bigger than any jet.

  I looked up. But there was nothing there.

  And yet, I felt it in my heart. I knew it was up there. Coming toward me, but perhaps a mile higher than me.

  I focused all the power of my hawk’s eyes on the sky.

  A ripple!

  That’s what it was. A ripple. Like the ripple you make throwing a stone into a calm pond. The faint twilight stars flickered as it passed by. The sun’s light bent. And for just a split second I was sure I could see … something.

  But no. No. It was gone.

  If it had ever really been there.

  I tried to follow the hole in the sky, but it was moving too fast. I tried to see which way it was going. And where it had come from. It seemed to be moving away from the mountains and picking up speed.

  But I lost it over the suburbs as it accelerated away.

  I flew on to Rachel’s house. I watched as she got off the bus far below me. The others—Jake, Marco, and Cassie—were all up in her room, waiting for us. I was not surprised.

  I said, floating above her.

  She could only wave up at me. You can “hear” thought-speak when you’re human, but you can’t make thought-speech.

  I told Rachel.

  She gave me a little wink.

  Rachel went in through the front door. I flew in an open window. There we were, all together, the five of us: the Animorphs.

  The other three must have seen the commercial and were not at all happy.

  Marco started the conversation.

  “Are you INSANE?!!” he said.

  CHAPTER 3

  Marco yelled for a while. Jake made us promise never to do something that stupid again. And Cassie, being Cassie, got everyone to make up and be friends again.
>
  “We aren’t supposed to be rescuing animals,” Marco said. “We’re supposed to be rescuing the entire human race from being enslaved by the Yeerks.”

  I pointed out.

  He scowled at me. But there’s no point in scowling at me. With my face, I can out-scowl anyone.

  “You’re right,” Marco said. “But since all of you guys think you have to save the world, and since you’re all my friends, more or less, I figure someone has to keep you from being total idiots.”

  Marco is the most reluctant of the Animorphs. Although actually he’s the one who came up with the word “Animorph.” And he’s been in with us from the start. Marco just thinks we should look out for ourselves and our own families.

  Marco and I will probably never be very close. He’s a typical smart-aleck kind of guy. Always confident. Always has some funny or sarcastic thing to say. He’s short, or at least he’s not very tall. I guess girls think he’s cute because he has this long brown hair and dark eyes.

  Jake grinned at Marco. “So you’re the one who has to rescue all of us from being idiots?”

  “Boy, if Marco’s the sensible one, we’re all in serious trouble,” Rachel said.

  Everyone laughed.

  Jake gave Marco an affectionate punch in the shoulder. “Just the same, it’s nice of you to want to save us all. It’s almost sweet.”

  Marco made a face and grabbed one of Rachel’s pillows to throw at Jake.

  Marco and Jake are absolute opposites, although they’ve been buds forever. Jake is big. Not football-player big, but solid. Jake is one of those people who are natural leaders. If you were ever trapped in a burning building, you would turn to Jake and ask, “What do we do?” And he would have an answer, too.

  You can tell he and Rachel are cousins. They’re both kind of determined people.

  “I have to get going,” Cassie said. “I have horses to feed and birdcages to clean.”

  “Don’t say the word ‘cage’ around Tobias,” Marco said. “He’ll do some guerrilla-commando-ninja-SWAT-team-hawk-from-hell attack on the Center. And he’ll talk Rachel into stomping your house flat.”