The Departure Page 2

  18 Only the eyes, the faint glimmer of eyes, did not come from low to the ground. It came from higher up. Like human eyes.

  I stared for a while, and had the feeling that someone was staring back.

  Then I closed the window and went back to bed.

  19

  ?You weren't in school today," Jake said.

  They had me surrounded. At least that's how it felt. We often met at the barn. It was one of our regular places. But it felt so different this time.

  They were all there, all but Ax.

  Jake stood, arms crossed over his chest. He was trying to look calm and relaxed. He wasn't succeeding. Something has happened to Jake during the months we've been Animorphs. He used to be just a normal kid. Good-looking, but not the kind girls got all giggly over. H e had always looked solid and reliable and decent. The kind of guy to whom you wouldn't even suggest doing something wrong.

  But even though there had always been some-

  20 thing "adult" about Jake, there was always still the kid underneath. That had changed. He had faced too many dangers. Worse, he had made too many life-and-death decisions.

  That shows up in your face after a while. In your eyes. It showed up in the way Jake stood taller than before, and yet somehow a little worn-out. There was a ragged look to him.

  "Yeah, I wasn't feeling well this morning," I said. "So I stayed home."

  "Maybe it was something you ate," Marco suggested with a smirk, laughing at his own wit.

  Rachel snatched a towel off one of the cages and threw it at him. "That's not exactly helpful, Marco." She turned to me. "Look, everyone gets down about all this, okay? So take a couple of days to get your brain straightened out, take it easy, watch some tube, eat some cookies, and then you can come back."

  Rachel had not been changed. Not that you could see. Rachel is one of these people who can walk through a hurricane, followed by a mud slide, followed by a flood, and come out clean, dry and with every hair in place.

  She is still the tall, blond, perfectly-accessorized girl she's always been. But inside, she, too, is changed. She'd always been bold. Now she was reckless. She'd always been aggressive. Now there were times when she scared me.

  21 This war against the Yeerks had been a gift to Rachel. She'd found her true place in the universe. The world would probably never have allowed pretty Rachel to become the warrior she was meant to be. But being an Animorph, she'd become all that.

  "Look," I said, "I know what you all think. You think I'm just upset because of one battle last night. But that's not it."

  I opened a cage containing a goose whose wing had been mauled by a wildcat. I began to cut away the old bandage.

  «So if it wasn't the battle last night, what was it?» Tobias asked.

  Of us all, Tobias has suffered the most. He is a red-tailed hawk. At first he was trapped in that form, unable to escape, unable to morph at all. But then the Ellimist gave him back his power to morph. Even to morph into his old human body.

  There was just one catch. If Tobias stays in morph again - any morph, even his own human body - he will be trapped again. And this time the Ellimist will not save him.

  Tobias could become human again. But if he did, he would lose the ability to morph. He would be out of the fight against the Yeerks.

  I don't know why Tobias has chosen to remain a hawk. I guess he wants to stay in the war. Or

  22 maybe the truth is, he's happier as a hawk than he was as a human.

  I looked at him, sitting with his talons gripping a wooden cross beam high up toward the slanted roof of the barn. "I guess I'm not you, Tobias. I guess I'm not willing to make the sacrifices you've made."

  "What sacrifices?" Rachel demanded, getting angry now. "We have the chance to save the planet! How can you talk about sacrifices? There are thousands, maybe millions, of people still enslaved by the Yeerks. Who's going to save them if not us?"

  "I don't know," I said. I finished removing the goose's bandage and began cleaning the wounds.

  "This is bogus," Marco said bitterly. "You know, back when we started all this, it was me who didn't want to get involved. And you all acted like I was a big coward, or else selfish."

  I shrugged. "So I'm a coward. I'm selfish."

  Marco practically leaped at me. His eyes were blazing. "What's the deal with you, Cassie? Half the time you're giving us all crap over being too ruthless or whatever. It's always, 'Oh, is this right?" and 'Oh, should we do this?' I mean, you're Miss Morality, and then when you have a bad night you just bail on us?"

  "That's not what it's about," I said. I could feel something like pressure on my heart. Like

  23 something was pushing to get out of me. Something explosive.

  "Oh? So what then? You just want to spend more time playing with your animals?"

  "The Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic is going to be shut down," I said. "No money."

  I guess that just puzzled Marco. He fell silent.

  "So no, I guess I won't be spending my time playing with the animals," I said sarcastically.

  "Cassie, we need to understand this," Jake said wearily. "We need to understand you."

  "She's scared," Marco sneered.

  "Marco, shut up," Rachel snapped. "She's not scared."

  "Yes, I am," I said.

  "You are not," Rachel said, waving her hand like I was some annoying fly. "You're as brave as any of us. Just because you have all these moral qualms and feel bad over stuff, that doesn't make you a coward."

  "I destroyed that Hork-Bajir," I said.

  Rachel's blue eyes went cold and seemed to look past me. "It's a war. They started it. Of course you feel bad over -"

  "No," I said. "I didn't feel bad. I heard Jake say to back off. And after he said that, after he said that, I did it."

  I wasn't sure that was true. But I needed to say it. To make them understand.

  24 No one had anything to say for a while. I started putting the new bandage on the goose.

  "So you feel bad about it," Rachel said with a shrug.

  "No. I feel bad because I felt nothing. I felt. . . nothing, Rachel. At that moment I felt like I was just doing my job, you know? And now they're shutting down the clinic, and my dad tells me and I feel . . . nothing. It's been going on for a long time. Each day, each battle, each mission, I just feel less and less."

  I looked at Rachel. She looked away. I turned to Jake. He made the ghost of a smile and nodded his head. He understood. He knew. It was happening to him, too. But then he looked away as well.

  I spread my hands, open, helpless. "I can't not feel anything when there's violence. I can't not care about living things. I can't be like that."

  Marco laughed a short, brutal laugh. "Fine. You have your morals and your fine feelings and all that. We'll go off and risk our lives to save the world. You just sit here and feel righteous."

  He left. I heard the flutter of wings and realized Tobias was gone, too.

  Rachel had an expression I've almost never seen on her face-. She was hurt.

  "Rachel, we can still be-"

  "No, we can't," she said, cutting me off.

  25 "See, you've just said the whole world can drop dead, so long as you, Cassie, don't have to end up turning into me." She stormed from the barn.

  I should have said something. But it was true. It was true I didn't want to turn into Rachel.

  Jake and I were alone. He looked down at the ground. "Don't morph," he said. "If you're not an Animorph, don't use the power."

  "I won't."

  "You'll want to," he said. "But if you do, you run the risk of getting caught. Those risks are acceptable if you're going to help us. But if you're not in the fight anymore, you can't use the weapon."

  "I said I wouldn't morph anymore, Jake. I'm not a liar."

  He left. I stood there, all alone with the animals. The goose was still half-bandaged. Animals needed their meds. Some needed feeding.

  And I didn't care.

  26

 
I had fallen behind on a lot of my chores. One was the water trough made of an old claw-foot bathtub that we kept in a far corner of the pasture for the horses. It had gotten overgrown with algae and was crusted with windswept leaves.

  I rode one of the horses out there. Riding a horse has always made me feel better, and besides, I'd gotten slack about exercising the horses. I took my favorite mare.

  It was a cool, gusty afternoon with clouds rolling in again, threatening an early sunset. I rode at a trot most of the way, feeling chilly air on my face and trying to think of nothing.

  But when I got to the old tub, I found it perfectly

  27 clean. No leaves, no algae. It had even been propped up to sit more level on the ground.

  I swung down out of the saddle and looked around for an explanation. I found it in the mud: a narrow hoofprint, not much different from a deer's. You'd think it was a deer print if you didn't know to look very carefully.

  It was an Andalite hoofprint. Obviously Ax had seen that the trough needed work and had taken care of it.

  This part of the pasture was right up against the forest. The grass stopped just a few feet past the fence, and there the line of trees began. I looped the mare's reins over the fence and looked around.

  Grassland sweeping back toward my house, which was invisible from this angle. And trees which I knew swept all the way back to the distant mountains.

  I hadn't thought about not morphing anymore. I hadn't realized I'd be giving that up. The ability to become a bird and fly. The ability to become all the animals I had loved for so long. To see the world through their eyes and hear with their ears.

  I sighed. Jake was right, of course. I couldn't run the risk. Not now. Not if I wasn't going to contribute.

  "Who cares?" I asked the breeze.

  28 But as much as I didn't want to care, I did. About this one thing, I cared. Life just seemed so cramped and small without being able to morph ever again.

  Then I saw it. Just a movement behind the front row of trees. I didn't see what had moved, just that there was a movement.

  Was it Ax?

  "Nee-EEEE-he-he-he!" The horse whinnied. She tossed her head.

  My mind flashed to the escaped leopard. Could he have made it this far? No. Not likely.

  Besides, what I'd seen moving in the trees wasn't a leopard. You didn't see leopards unless they wanted to be seen. And whatever I'd seen, or almost seen, had not moved with the liquid grace of a leopard.

  "Ax!" I yelled.

  No answer.

  I mounted the mare again and tried to ease her into a trot. But she reared up and neighed loudly.

  Something was bothering her. But what? And where was it? I licked my finger and held it up to feel the breeze. It was blowing from the direction of the trees.

  "Easy, now. Easy," I said.

  The wind shifted direction. The mare calmed. This just worried me more. It confirmed that she

  29 had smelled something in the woods. Now that the wind was coming from a different direction, she no longer smelled what had been bothering her.

  Then -

  CRASH! CRASH .'CRASH!

  "Aaaaahhhhh!"

  A flash of red hair, running.

  And behind it, a much bigger creature, running like a bowling ball, almost seeming to roll.

  A bear!

  A black bear was chasing a girl with red hair.

  The girl ran, but the bear was far too fast. The girl leaped toward a low branch, snagged it and scrambled wildly up into the tree.

  But it wouldn't help. If the bear wanted her, it would climb right up the tree after her!

  Before I knew what I was doing, I tightened my grip on the reins and urged the mare forward.

  "Giddap! Hah! Hah!"

  We ran along the fence, hooves pounding. I could see the girl dangling, barely holding on. And then I saw what I had feared: Behind the black bear was a cub. Bears are seldom aggressive toward humans. Unless the human makes the big mistake of somehow getting too close to a cub.

  The black bear was ripping at the slender tree. The girl screamed in terror.

  30 I yanked the mare away from the fence, backed off a hundred feet, then said, "hee-yah!" and dug my heels in, urging her to run toward the fence.

  We galloped, tearing up clods of damp dirt and grass behind us. I tucked down, held on tight and hoped the mare knew how to jump, because I sure didn't.

  Up! Up! We sailed high -

  WHAP!

  Her back hooves caught the top rail and then landed hard but safe. "Come on, girl!" I yelled, and we raced toward the tree.

  The horse was terrified, eyes wide, mouth foaming. But she was in a panic run now, and horses never have been the geniuses of the animal world. So she ran straight for the bear.

  I screamed, twenty feet

  The girl was hanging from a branch by her fingertips.

  "Hang on, I'll get you!

  Thirty feet more . .

  ten

  feet

  The girl screamed.

  She dropped.

  The bear roared.

  I grabbed at the air. One hand found the front of a Levi's jacket. I held on, yanked her toward me, and sped on.

  Twigs whipped my face. One foot was out of its stirrup and I was gasping for breath.

  31 I scrabbled desperately, trying to find the stirrup without being able to look down. The girl was strangling me, holding on for dear life. I dropped the reins. The mare was in a blind panic.

  And with good reason. Because the bear wasn't done with us.

  The bear was chasing us.

  In open country we'd outrun the bear easily. But in the brush, the bear was keeping up.

  Then, quite suddenly, the bear gave up the chase and calmly walked back to her cub. The mare, however, was not ready to stop running. And I could not reach the reins. All I could do was hold on. Hold on to a handful of mane and the girl's jacket.

  Suddenly -

  No more trees ahead of us. The river! White water, swollen by the recent rains, bounding and crashing over rocks.

  The mare was pelting toward it. I tried once more to reach the reins. I slipped. I grabbed a handful of mane and yanked myself back up.

  And in a split second I saw the low branch.

  WHAM!

  I felt myself flying, flying, flying . . .

  But by the time I hit the water, I wasn't feeling anything at all.

  32

  ?Aaaahhhh!"

  I woke up screaming.

  I was in a boiling, mad, lunatic current. Water rushed around me, over me. Water filled the air. It twisted me over and over like a corkscrew.

  I flailed my arms, but they barely moved. I couldn't feel my hands or fingers. My legs felt dead. I was freezing. Freezing to death.

  THUMP!

  I hit a rock and barely felt the impact on my side.

  Then . . . falling, falling! I saw trees that seemed to fly up and away from me. I saw a glimpse of explosive white water beneath me. I was falling, the water vertical around me.

  33 PAH-LOOSH!

  I was all the way underwater, and being pounded viciously by the waterfall. It sounded like some monstrous engine, throbbing, beating, hammering at me.

  FWOOSH! FWOOSH! FWOOSH! FWOOSH! FWOOSH!

  I tried to swim, but my arms were made of jelly. My fingers were stiff as sticks. Morph! I told myself. But I couldn't concentrate. Couldn't hold the thought in my brain.

  Suddenly, I shot clear of the beating waterfall, but I was still underwater. Far underwater. Too far.

  I tried to hold my breath, but I was becoming more and more confused. What. . . where . . . which way should I ... arms . . .

  I sucked air into my burning lungs.

  Only it wasn't air.

  I gagged and writhed, helpless. Suffocating! My head bumped on something. A rock? The surface! I could see it. Now it was just inches over my head.

  Just inches of water separated me from the air.

  But it was too late
. I closed my eyes. My muscles relaxed. I went to sleep.

  I didn't feel the arms that hauled me up out of the water. I didn't feel the mouth that breathed air into me.

  34 "Hah! Wah?" I woke up! Then instantly felt my insides heave.

  "Buh-buh-leaaahhh!"

  I threw up. I was on my back in the dirt. I vomited all over myself.

  I rolled my head to one side and sucked in air, coughed, breathed, coughed some more. I hacked away for several minutes, gasping for a good clean breath with lungs still wet from the river.

  A sharp pain in my side. A splitting headache. Pins and needles in my frozen hands and feet so intense it made me want to scream.

  But I was alive!

  Only then did I notice the girl. She was squatting just a couple of feet away. Her red hair was wet and bedraggled, plastered against her forehead and hanging in long, soggy curls.

  She had brilliant green eyes that seemed unnaturally large. She was wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and a jean jacket. She was shivering.

  "You saved my life, didn't you?" I said to her in a hoarse, raspy voice.

  "You saved mine," she said. "That bear could have killed me. So now we're even. I don't owe you anything and you don't owe me."

  It was a strange thing to say. Too mature ... I don't know, too old to be coming from someone so young.

  35 I sat up, fighting the urge to cry from the pins and needles feeling. "My name is Cassie."

  "I'm Karen."

  "Where are we?"

  She shook her head. "I don't know. We were in the river for a long time. I was knocked out, too. But I came to sooner than you. And I was able to grab onto a floating log for part of the time."

  I looked around. The trees were very tall, mostly pines. I saw no obvious trails. No trash or other signs of humans. We were deep in the forest.

  I tried to form a mental picture of the course of the river. I knew it came down from the mountains, fed by melting snow and rain. It swept very near our farm, then doubled back, heading toward the mountains until the slope changed again and turned it at last toward the sea.

  But that didn't tell me where we were. We could be a mile from civilization, or we could be ten miles. But more troubling was that I didn't know what direction to go. If we went the right way, we might hit a road pretty soon. If we went the wrong way ... well, the forest was very large. You could be lost in the forest for a long, long time.