The Ellimist Chronicles Read online

  This I knew.

  And I knew one other thing as well, a lesson hard-learned from millennia of war: My foe would find me.

  An absurdly rare event, a cosmic coincidence had fashioned me. The odds? The odds were billions to one, trillions to one, incalculable.

  But those were odds of this thing happening once. The odds of it happening again were great. Crayak learned. Crayak watched. Once I revealed myself to him, once I acted in such a way as to show myself, Crayak would find the way to follow me here. And as I was unchanged in mind and morality, so he would be unchanged.

  Carefully, frightened at last into true humility, I began to study this new environment. I found I could see into the real world, see the events and peoples who made up these space-time strands.

  They seemed to rise and mature and age and fall in the blink of an eye, and as I watched and studied and learned I knew that hundreds of thousands and finally millions of years were passing in real space.

  I saw Crayak out there, still at his evil work. I saw lines go dark, unravel, coil up into nothingness as he massacred planets. Billions of lives become nothingness.

  I had planted a great deal of life, and my Pemalites still lived to spread more, but the tide was turning once more in Crayak’s favor.

  At last, knowing I had so much more still to learn, knowing my own deep inadequacy, I struck back.

  Crayak entered a system of nine planets orbiting a medium yellow star. Two of the worlds, a red planet and a blue, were populated. The red planet was already doomed, its atmosphere was oozing away, and Crayak could do no real harm there.

  But the blue planet teemed with life. The dominant species type were huge, brutish beasts in a fantastic array of forms. Giant, slow-moving plant eaters and violent, rapacious killers with tearing teeth and deadly talons. There was intelligence there, but no sentience, I could see it so clearly.

  Not in the great, domineering brutes, but in a handful of small, swift, fur-bearing prey animals did the future of this world lie.

  They had only to be left alone and in forty or sixty million years there would emerge a great people.

  Crayak saw none of his, he saw only that there was life there. He aimed his weapons at the blue planet and fired, and I drew gently on the fabric of space-time and his weapons struck nothing. The planet was gone, halfway around its orbit.

  He tried again, and each time I applied my crude but powerful countermeasures.

  And then, in confusion, Crayak withdrew to consider.

  I knew he would be with me soon.

  “So here you are, Ellimist.”

  “I’ve been expecting you, Crayak.”

  He appeared to me as he always had. As a dark monster. I knew how I appeared to him: I had mastered the simple trick of projecting myself in whatever guise suited me best. I appeared to him as a simple Ketran.

  “Your advantage is gone, Ellimist.”

  “We are equals now,” I agreed. “You can no longer harm me personally. You understand that?”

  “I cannot harm you, Ellimist, but I can hurt you. I can kill the things you love.”

  “You can try, Crayak. But in the end you are a fool. Do you not see that everything you do I can undo? You can slaughter and I can reverse time itself to restore life. But I tell you this: If we carry on our war inside the bowels of space-time itself we will end by collapsing this universe and killing ourselves as well as every thing in it.”

  “It’s a pointless game that has no winner,” Crayak admitted. “But what else is there for the two of us?”

  “We could watch. We could admire the advance of evolution.”

  “Unacceptable. I would choose my own destruction over that. To live for all of eternity as a passive observer? There must be a game. If there is no game there is nothing for me.”

  “Then let us play a game, Crayak.”

  “There will have to be rules.”

  “Yes, there will have to be rules.”

  “And a winner?”

  “That, too, though it will take millions of years.”

  Crayak smiled his hideous smile. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Then come,” I said, “let us play the final game.”

  I told the dying human, “Now you know who I am. What I am.”

  “Yeah. You were a kid. Like me in some ways, a kid who got in way too deep and couldn’t get back out.”

  “A kid.”

  “You were trapped. You still are. I’ve been trapped.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Was I one of your game pieces? Were all six of us just game pieces?”

  I considered that for a moment. Who is to say who is piece and who is player? How often had I wondered whether I myself was just a game piece in a still larger game whose players laughed at my pretensions?

  “I did not cause you to be one of the six. You are … you were … a happy accident. An unwitting contribution from the human race to its own survival.”

  The human was silent. No begging, no pleading for life. At the end, acceptance came even to this strong, turbulent spirit.

  “You said I could ask one more question.”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t ask if we win, I can’t ask if it will all turn out okay.”

  “I don’t know those answers.”

  “Okay, then answer this, Ellimist: Did I … did I make a difference? My life, and my … my death … was I worth it? Did my life really matter?”

  “Yes. You were brave. You were strong. You were good. You mattered.”

  “Yeah. Okay, then. Okay, then.”

  A small strand of space-time went dark and coiled into nothingness.

  My name is Rachel.

  I knew what was coming. I knew.

  I’d seen it in Jake’s eyes.

  And you know what? I was scared.

  I never thought I would be. Cassie thinks I’m fearless. Marco thinks I’m reckless. Tobias … well, Tobias loves me.

  I guess they all do, in different ways. Jake, too. But Jake had to do the right thing.

  I felt sorry for him, you know? He’s carried the weight so long. He’s made hard decisions. None as hard as this maybe. I didn’t blame him, not even for a minute.

  But I was scared.

  I guess no one wants to die. I guess everyone is scared when the time comes.

  We were so close. We were right there, right at the finish line, I’d already survived so many times when I shouldn’t have. It seemed unfair. To come this far, get this close …

  Jake gave me the job because he knew that only I could do it. Would do it. Ax might have, sure, but he was needed for his skills. Me, I’m not the computer genius. I’m the one you send when you need someone to be crazy, to do the hard thing.

  I don’t know whether I’m proud of that or not.

  I was Jake’s insurance policy. He thought maybe he wouldn’t have to use me. He hoped, anyway. But down deep he knew, and I knew, and we both hid the truth from the others because Cassie couldn’t let Jake make that decision, and Tobias couldn’t let me, and those two, by loving us, would have screwed every­thing up.

  It was a war, after all. A war we had to win.

  We hadn’t asked the Yeerks to come to Earth. They made that call on their own. They’re a parasitic species, not very big or impressive to look at, just these snail-like things that can enter your head through your ear. They have a capacity to anesthetize the inner ear enough to allow them to burrow through the soft tissue. It still hurts but not as much as it should.

  They dig their way straight to your brain and then flatten themselves out, spread themselves down into the crevices, tie directly into your synapses. They take control. Absolute control.

  They read your thoughts, they sense your emotions. What your eyes see, they see. What your tongue tastes, they taste. If your hand moves, it’s because they moved it. If you speak, it is the Yeerk who has spoken through you, made you into a ventriloquist’s dummy.

  Over the course of year
s they spread like a virus. Invisible. Undetectable.

  They are your teacher, your pastor, your best friend. They are the police officer, the TV newsman, the soldier. Anyone.

  Jake’s parents had recently been taken; they were human-Controllers — people controlled by Yeerks.

  Jake’s brother Tom, my cousin, had been a Controller for a long time. He was a powerful Yeerk. Jake still cared for him, still hoped somehow he could be saved.

  Jake had sent me away with Tom.

  I understood. I approved. If Jake hadn’t sent me I’d have gone anyway.

  Still, though, I was scared.

  I had power myself. We all did. The strange, unsettling power to absorb DNA from any living creature, to then alter our physical bodies to become that creature.

  I’ve been a whole zoo, you know. Everything from a fly to an elephant. Bat. Owl. I’ve flown, way up in the sky with eagle wings. I’ve flown up there with Tobias. Way up in the clouds. If there’s something better than that, well, I never found it.

  It’s not magic. Just technology. Of course technology always seems like magic at first. Haul a tenth-century knight into the modern age and show him your cell phone or your TV or your computer or your car. Magic.

  This technology came from the Andalites. The Andalites are enemies of the Yeerks, and I guess allies of ours, though right at the moment they were more likely to annihilate Earth than the Yeerks were. You know the old saying, “With friends like these, who needs enemies?”

  Anyway, it began with a chance meeting. An Andalite prince named Elfangor crashed his shot-up fighter in our path. Coincidence? No, history. And a helping hand from the Ellimist who of course never lends a helping hand.

  Elfangor died, but not before he told us what was happening and gave us the morphing technology.

  I’ve been a rat. A dolphin … oh, man, do they have fun. That rush when you’re zooming straight up through the water, when you see the ripply surface of the sea, when you blow through that barrier and soar through the air … And then, splash! And do it all over again.

  So, anyway, we decided we had to try and stop the Yeerks. Jake and Tobias and Cassie and Marco and Ax, who is Elfangor’s little brother, and me. We lived this secret life. We fought and mostly lost, but we survived. We frustrated the Yeerks. We ruined Visser Three’s life, though he still managed to be promoted to Visser One.

  Maybe we did too good a job frustrating the visser. The Yeerks grew tired of infiltration. Visser One had been craving open war. And when we blew up their ground-based Yeerk pool, the source of their food, the center of their lives, it was gloves off.

  So much the better as far as I was concerned. The time had come to settle things.

  The Yeerks obliterated our town to create a dead zone around their construction of a new Yeerk pool. They were in a hurry. Without a functioning pool they were getting hungry.

  But there was a worm gnawing at the Yeerk race. They had acquired morphing technology themselves — in part because of what Jake thought was Cassie’s betrayal.

  Cassie sees further than I do. Further than any of us. She sees deep. The girl cannot dress or accessorize to save her life, she’s a girl who wears manure-stained Wal-Mart jeans for crying out loud, but Cassie sees connections and possibilities that others don’t.

  She let Tom take the morphing cube. And that changed every­thing. Some Yeerks began to see a way out of their parasitic lives. The hunger-crazed Taxxons — a race held captive by the Yeerks — began to dream of a life without their Yeerk overlords. A revolution was brewing.

  At the same time, the Andalite fleet was closing in, ready to obliterate Earth as the only way to stop the Yeerk infestation. They had watched the Yeerks concentrate their forces on Earth. They were ready to bring down the curtain: Obliterate Earth and the Yeerk Empire would be gutted.

  Too bad about those creatures who got in the way. What were they called? Oh yeah, humans.

  But Tom betrayed his visser, betrayed the Yeerk race. Not for the sake of poor old humanity, but for his own ambition. He would escape with the morphing cube and with a hard core of faithful Yeerk supporters. He would abandon the Yeerk people to the Andalite vengeance, destroy the hated Animorphs, and if H. sapiens was annihilated, too, well …

  That’s where Jake saw his chance. Tom’s Yeerk is smart. Jake is smarter.

  Now Jake and the others had control of the Yeerk Pool ship. Tom had control of the visser’s own personal Blade ship.

  Tom — the Yeerk in Tom’s head — was closing in for his final act of betrayal: He would kill his master, Visser One, and doom his fellow Yeerks. He thought we were already dead.

  Surprise, Tom.

  My favorite morph was the grizzly bear. Seven feet tall standing erect. You cannot imagine the power, especially when united with human intelligence and knowledge. Compared to my grizzly morph a human being is like something made out of glued-together Popsicle sticks.

  How many times have I felt that change as muscle piles on muscle, as the thick brown fur covers me, as the rail spike claws grow from my fingers?

  The grizzly bear and I had been through a lot together.

  I would go to grizzly to kill Tom.

  About the Author

  The Animorphs series, written by Katherine (K. A.) Applegate with her husband, Michael Grant, has sold millions of copies worldwide, and alerted the world to the presence of the Yeerks. Katherine and Michael are also the authors of the bestselling Remnants and Everworld series. On her own, Katherine is the author of Home of the Brave, Crenshaw, Wishtree, and the Newbery Medal–winning The One and Only Ivan. Michael is the author of the Gone and Front Lines series.

  The invasion has begun.

  Catch up on Newbery Medal–winner K. A. Applegate’s world-conquering series.

  #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

  #36: The Mutation

  #37: The Weakness

  #38: The Arrival

  #39: The Hidden

  #40: The Other

  #41: The Familiar

  #42: The Journey

  #43: The Test

  #44: The Unexpected

  #45: The Revelation

  #46: The Deception

  #47: The Resistance

  #48: The Return

  #49: The Diversion

  #50: The Ultimate

  #51: The Absolute

  #52: The Sacrifice

  #53: The Answer

  #54: The Beginning

 

  #1: The Andalite’s Gift

  #2: In the Time of Dinosaurs

  #3: Elfangor’s Secret

  #4: Back to Before

  The Andalite Chronicles

  The Hork-Bajir Chronicles

  Visser

  The Ellimist Chronicles

  ALTERNAMORPHS

  The First Journey

  The Next Passage

  Text copyright © 2000 by Kathe
rine Applegate

  Cover illustration by Romas Kukalis

  Art Direction/Design by Karen Hudson/Ursula Albano

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc. SCHOLASTIC, ANIMORPHS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  e-ISBN 978-1-338-27193-5

  First edition, November 2000