The Test Read online

  For a moment, glowing metal blinded my sensitive hawk vision. When my sight returned, the lock on the door was sizzling. Evaporating …

  Behind the door, heavy, punishing footsteps slammed down the hallway. A sound that meant only one thing.

  Hork-Bajir.

  The door burst open.

  Tseew! Tseew!

  Seven-foot-tall bladed bodies charged into the room! Video cameras disintegrated in flashes of Dracon fire.

  No time to morph!

  I pressed myself to the back of the cage. Tried to cover my reddish tail, tried to pretend I wasn’t there.

  They were on me instantly, scowling with fiery eyes. Holding weapons to my head.

  “You mine, Andalite!” asserted the Hork-Bajir with the worst breath. “Visser Three will give praise.”

  This guy obviously hadn’t been on Earth very long. Getting praise from Visser Three would be like trying to stop a brushfire with a glass of water. But I wasn’t about to burst his bubble.

  He hefted my cage into the air and ran for the door, banging me roughly. His henchmen, two in front, two behind, surrounded him. Their weapons were drawn, their eyes were searching. They were tense as we moved into the hall. On guard. Almost as though they expected …

  Tseew. Tseew.

  Three humans appeared twenty feet down the corridor. Their Dracon rounds ricocheted off the walls.

  What was going on?

  Humans firing Dracons at Hork-Bajir!

  Controller versus Controller?

  “Drop the bird,” a man with a mustache ordered. “Now!” The Hork-Bajir snorted a laugh at the wiry man. “Bird is visser’s. You rebel make mistake.” Quick as lightning, he raised his arm and opened fire on the humans.

  The human-Controllers were agile and dove for cover. They just weren’t agile enough. An abbreviated scream echoed down the hall. The mustached man vanished in a flash of light and heat, a silhouette scorched against the whitewashed wall. The other humans didn’t seem to notice the loss of their comrade. Or else, they didn’t care.

  Only Yeerks can lose a teammate and not bat an eye.

  BLAAAAM!

  Four more humans coming up from behind! Slamming the Hork-Bajir before they knew what hit them.

  I didn’t know who to root for. Hork-Bajir or human? Visser Three or … who? Who were these people?

  A long, sharp, Hork-Bajir blade caught my cage and lifted it. He ran swiftly toward the exit. This guy could move! Smashed over a stainless steel medical cart. Crashed into empty cages stacked against the wall.

  Blocked!

  Three more people! Large ones, dressed in dark leather, with straps and metal clasps covering their bodies. Bodies that blocked the exit.

  My captor halted, claws screeching across the polished floor.

  He turned back and moved toward a window. Three new Dracon-packing people moved in to block his path.

  Surrounded!

  My cage dangled precariously from the Hork-Bajir’s blade. Aliens and humans froze in a grim, momentary standoff.

  Suddenly, my captor leaped at the smallest person. A woman. It was a low move, a desperate attempt at escape. Foolish, too. The others were on him instantly.

  We crashed to the floor, my cage caving beneath the Hork-Bajir’s weight until the cold steel bars pressed tight against my feathers. Around me swirled a sea of hands and claws, clutching wildly. For me. The prize.

  I couldn’t keep track of what happened next. I just know that someone sent the cage careening across the floor. My frail, injured body tumbled like a rag in the dryer. The cage lodged under the large sink of a utility closet, my hawk body even more bruised and damaged.

  I heard frantic shuffling from the fight beyond, but from my position, I could see very little. Deafening Dracon fire was followed by a momentary stillness. Heavy footsteps marched my way. Four Hork-Bajir feet came to a halt before my cage.

  “Gafrash!” one roared. A hideous appendage reached for me. I cringed, waiting to be taken again, waiting to be seized.

  The Hork-Bajir arm jerked back.

  The feet tensed and turned to run, but there was nowhere to go.

  Because four more feet, twice as large, gigantic and familiar, landed with a thunder-thud.

  Rachel!

  One Hork-Bajir was down. The other snatched up my cage.

  Rachel cried, baring her massive, flesh-tearing teeth. Her wild grizzly bear claws flashed like giant steel rigatoni and lashed my captor’s arm.

  she huffed.

  “Gafrash horlit!”

  The Hork-Bajir let go. My cage hit the floor with another painful crash.

  Rachel cried.

  Marco, in gorilla morph, was the only one with an opposable thumb, an often undervalued appendage. He reached for me, but a downed Hork-Bajir grabbed his leg and yanked him backward.

  So Rachel nudged me with her massive front paws, pushing my cage across the floor, down the hall, away from the fight.

  Suddenly, the cage stopped. We’d run into something. We’d hit human feet.

  Rachel froze, sniffing the air hard. I looked up. Sleek, suede boots. Fashionably worn jeans. The torso and head were in shadow. Who was this? Some innocent vet student, trapped by the battle?

  Her arm appeared from behind her back. Her fingers clutched a Dracon beam …

  My heart stopped.

  The girl’s fingers glistened and sparkled in the semidarkness. The way real flesh fingers never do.

  Rachel hissed, her voice rough with rage.

  “Make one move, bear, and your next stop is the taxidermist.”

  Rachel leaped, claws slashing.

  Tseew!

  Taylor seared a hole in Rachel’s flank.

  “HhhhoooRRRAAWWRRR!” Rachel dropped, groaning with pain.

  And Taylor grabbed my cage with her artificial hand. The hand she had accepted in exchange for her freedom. Taylor’s story was a sad one. A story of a girl who’d lost her face, arm, and leg in a terrible fire. The Sharing, the Yeerk front organization, had been there for her. Offering her a new face and arm and leg. All she had to do was agree to be infested. A voluntary Controller. All she had to do was let a vile gray slug wrap around her brain. But the Yeerk that infested Taylor was nuts. Taylor had pretty much lost it, too. Not a very stable situation. And there I was.

  I couldn’t believe what was happening. My torturer had captured me. Again.

  No.

  The fingers of her real hand poked through the bars of my cage, threatening to touch me as she lifted the cage right up to her face.

  NO!

  She didn’t speak a word but her icy stare said it all. Thought you’d seen the last of me, Andalite fool? Well, you thought wrong.

  Taylor straightened her pearly, plastic fingers. I knew what she was going to do. I’d known since the moment I recognized her in the shadows.

  “I love surprises,” she whispered. And without any further warning, snowy particles frothed from the fingertips of her prosthesis.

  Gas!

  She was gassing me just like the time she’d captured me under the grounds of The Sharing’s new community center. In moments, I’d be paralyzed. The only difference was that she didn’t realize I was the same “Andalite” she’d previously captured. I could only hope she didn’t remember.

  I stretched out my talon. I gripped the fleshy fingers of her real hand. Then I closed my eyes, shut my ears, shut it all out. The animal screams, the grunts, the human shouts. The horror of reliving a nightmare.

  Acquire her. Acquire her. Become her.

  A nauseating idea. Necessary.

  I clutched her fingers tighter. To Taylor, it must have seemed like a pitiful attempt to fight back, but she didn’t know the truth. She didn’t know that I felt her DNA flow into me. Felt her body relax, slacken under the acquiring trance.

  The gaseous powder stung and tingled, pricking my skin like invis
ible nettles.

  But Taylor, too, was immobile! Paralyzed! For an instant, I’d slowed her down. Incapacitated her.

  Not enough. Not nearly enough.

  My talon went limp. My body fell numb. Taylor’s eyes buzzed back to life just in time to watch me realize that this gas was different from the stuff I’d experienced before.

  “Version 2.0,” Taylor laughed. “Enough general anesthetic to knock you out completely.”

  Blackness rushed in from all sides as my vision dimmed.

  I called weakly.

  If they answered, I didn’t hear them.

  Why me? What had I done to deserve this? Foolish questions, useless self-pity … I was a warrior.

  All I could do was look straight ahead. Into the dismal depths of Taylor’s mad, hypnotic eyes.

  In that moment, I saw clearly. I saw that I was just a blob of mud bobbing through the raging stream of her thoughts. The stream couldn’t be stopped and it would destroy me.

  It would break me apart.

  Skrrr-eeeek!

  The sound of a metal spoon dragged across the bottom of a pan. The smell of canned tomato soup warming on a stove. These ordinary things drew me out of darkness. I opened my eyes.

  I was still caged, but now there were half a dozen Dracon beams aimed at my head, clamped to my cage with vises. Not high-tech mechanisms fresh off the Yeerk drawing board, but the kind of clamps you pick up at Ace Hardware.

  It didn’t matter. Point was, I didn’t have any hands. My captors knew that hawk beak and talons couldn’t unscrew anything.

  Blinking beneath each mounted Dracon was a red light. A sensor? I didn’t move. I didn’t dare.

  The thought of more torture set my bones knocking. I couldn’t take any more.

  I started to tremble, uncontrollably. I watched the sensors with both minds, hawk and human. Each had been almost destroyed and both parts of me remembered … the pain, the hopelessness! Impossible to escape … red light, blue light. Agony … endless …

  Morph. I could morph to something small and crawl away. Undetected. Steal away. Do it, Tobias. Do it.

  “Morph, my friend,” Taylor warned, her voice cold and confident, “and the beams will fire automatically.”

  I hadn’t seen her there, sitting at a kitchen chair, mug in hand, sipping soup.

  I’d felt her, though. Her evil had a way of dominating the very nature of a room, of coloring everything around her and stoking my fear.

  I couldn’t escape. I never really thought I could. Not then, not now. Taylor was back, just as I guessed she would be.

  “The computer controlling the Dracon beams is sensitive to basic changes in shape. You cannot escape.”

  Wait. That wasn’t true. I could escape. I could morph. Morph and die!

  “Yes, you could choose death,” Taylor said, answering my thoughts. “I’ve deliberately given you that option.” She paused to take a slurp of soup, her eyes still fixed on me.

  I looked at the kitchen, and at the small, shoddily built, low-ceilinged structure. Something was definitely wrong with this picture. Yeerks choose the best. They take the best of everything we humans have, and when the best we have to offer isn’t good enough, they use stolen alien technologies to make it shine. This was … what? Some sort of hovel. My cage rested on a Formica table scarred with cigarette burns.

  “Choose death,” she repeated casually, “or … listen to what I have to say.” She rose, dropped her mug in the sink of the strange little kitchen, and returned to her seat. “I have a deal for you, Andalite.”

  She was so casual. Not the Taylor I’d known.

  What trick, what scheme did she have up her sleeve?

  “Good,” she said, seeing that I’d decided to postpone death. “It would be much harder to solicit help from an Andalite who’s dead.”

  Help?

  Yeah, and Rachel will pass up a sale at Express, Crayak will win the Nobel Peace Prize, a Yeerk slug will turn down a promotion.

  What did she have up her sleeve?

  “Civil war is coming, Andalite,” she began. “Yeerk versus Yeerk. We’ve had enough of the petty visser fights, the favoritism, the punishments … the Council makes us sick.”

  Anger flushed her face. She’d said the last sentence with such vehemence that for a fleeting instant, I knew I could believe her. The Council did make her sick.

  But then, her guard went up again. The spark in her eye made her look part politician and part actor, part trial lawyer, and part scheming teenaged girl. It was a face shrouded in lies.

  “The Yeerks must move on as a race,” she continued. “The time has come.” She got up again and opened the ancient refrigerator. “We need to make a civilization with the hosts we have.” She glanced at me. “Many of us realize that the eternal wars have to end and that the loss on Leera, the stalled offensive on Earth, and now the apparent bungling on the Anati planet have discredited the current leadership enough that it cannot survive.”

  She pulled a bag of carrots from the fridge. Seriously bizarre. She was talking political strategy while she snacked. Like we were hanging out at her house after school, planning the rigging of the homecoming queen election.

  She continued. “We want to be more like you, Andalite. We need a structure that will transform us from rebels to leaders. We want to be more like Andalite society. Even more like the humans.” Her teeth snapped a crisp carrot in two. Her eyes stared at me. “We want to move toward democracy and we need your help to do it.”

  It was like the world’s weirdest press conference.

  I didn’t believe a word she said.

  Not a word.

  So I tested her.

  Taylor laughed. She was a violent, aggressive, and ruthless personality. Personalities don’t change. Not much, anyway. I waited for her to prove me right. I waited for proof that she was still working for Visser Three. That this talk of rebels was all a ruse.

  “Nice to hear your voice again, Andalite. The Andalite with the power to stay in morph for more than the two-hour time limit. Your voice brings back such sweet memories.” The tone in her voice set me shaking again. “I learned a lot about you during our time together, Andalite. I saw your mind. I saw your courage dribble away. I would enjoy finishing you now. Breaking you.” She slinked toward my cage. “Right here and right now. You think you’re strong, but I know you’re weak. It would take seconds!” She paused just enough to let the thought rattle me. “But this time, Andalite, it’s your cooperation I require. I need you and your fellow Andalites. I need you to help me destroy Visser Three.”

  She wasn’t working for the visser. She was out to destroy him. That’s what she’d said.

  Unguarded anger seethed from her face. If she was lying, it was impossible for me to tell.

  “You’ve fared badly as a bird.” She looked at my bandaged wing, at my matted feathers, my twisted neck. “You have Visser Three to thank for that. His Hork-Bajir aren’t big on gentle.”

  She wanted me to become angry, too, and take revenge, get back at the visser, join forces with her …

  “Don’t answer now.” She pulled a scrap of paper from her pocket and pushed it through the bars of my cage. “Here.” It was a Web address. “Talk things over with your comrades and leave me a message there. Sign it ‘Bandits.’”

  Then she unlatched the cage door, threw open the nearest window, and disappeared behind a curtain, leaving her dirty dishes in the sink.

  The red sensors flickered out.

  I hobbled from the cage, hopped to the window. The ground was a few feet below me. I fell outside. Taylor. Visser Three. Civil war. Weakness …

  She’d let me go.

  It was too much to sort out. I needed my friends. I needed Rachel.

  I dragged myself into the shadows, morphed and demorphed to repair injuries. Injuries which by this time were so
painful they bordered on torture themselves. I lifted off. Free, but my mind was weighted.

  As I rose into the air, I saw the place I’d been held. An old trailer, parked by a junkyard. A rebel hideout. Far from the city and the Yeerk pool. Could she be telling the truth?

  I flapped toward town, toward the lights, toward Rachel’s. Over buildings topped by digital dishes and cell phone relays. Suddenly, I cut the gas, strained my wings, dropped to a roof.

  If she weren’t telling the truth, if she were feeding me lies …

  She’d have planted a tracking device on my body. Of course! The Yeerks were tailing me. I was bringing them straight to my friends. Straight to the Andalite bandits.

  When I’d finished kicking myself, I picked the smallest morph I had. Flea. I focused on the tiny blood-sucking body.

  SCHWOOOP!

  The roof rushed at me. Slate shingles became slick and huge as glaciers. My vision fractured like light through a prism and my hearing cut. It was all about the other senses. Taste, smell.

  Feeling. I waited for the corner of a tiny chip to bust out of my skin. Any tracking device would fall away from a flea’s body. It would prove that Taylor’s words were meaningless. That I could write her off forever. I wanted to.

  I grew smaller and smaller. Nothing snagged, nothing stretched my stretchable skin. Nothing bulged from my body. No global positioning chip. I was unmarked.

  Okay. Okay. No easy answers. Just complications.

  I demorphed and rocketed past streetlights, car headlights, and neon signs to Rachel’s house. Her window was open. I shot through and planted my talons on the bedpost, swishing my feathers as I came to a stop. She jolted out of sleep.

  “Thank God!” she whispered. I fluttered down next to her. She touched me gently. A smile filled her face, then was replaced by rage. “That jerk!” Her voice hardened. “That scum.”

  I said. I felt safe in Rachel’s presence, but my voice still sounded raw.

  “We searched for you for hours. I wanted to kill her.”

 

  “What’s her deal?”