The Exposed Read online

  CCCRRREEEAK!

  Tobias yelled.

  I called back, charging down the street. I spotted Jake up ahead and followed him.

  he cried.

  Lourdes said.

  Tobias said, flapping hard for altitude.

  Marco said.

  I said anxiously, blinking in a futile effort to clear my eyes.

  Marco said breathlessly.

  The sound of sirens filled the air. Tires squealed as the cops gave chase.

  Tobias called.

  “Turn left, Rachel,” Lourdes said. “Follow the dead-end street to the junkyard. I can be hidden there until the signal from the Pemalite ship is turned off.”

  I gasped as I stumbled over a broken slab of asphalt.

  Cassie called weakly.

  I cried, barreling desperately down the deserted street and up to the junkyard’s padlocked metal gates.

  I held Ax safely out of the way under my front legs and, pressing my bleeding head against the gates, pushed until the lock sprung open.

  My head didn’t hurt anymore. Nothing hurt.

  I was swaying now. It surprised me when my front legs simply buckled. I hit hard, but I wasn’t feeling much anymore when my tusks dug into dirt.

  The Chee, Cassie, and Marco must have tumbled from my back. But I was too confused to know. Confused. Head spinning, eyes going dark.

  Nothing made sense. I was sinking. Sinking into a deep, deep, soft bed and … and someone kept yelling,

  We were a shaken-up bunch of animal-morphing freaks by the time we at last made it home. A situation that should have been a walk in the park had turned into a mess.

  The Chee were grateful to us. Me, I was grateful that Tobias and Ax had shown up when they did.

  I was definitely not in the best of moods. I was feeling brittle and tired and mad at the world. Maybe it was just one too many battles. Or maybe it was because I’d been thinking about what we had to do next.

  Dive fifteen thousand feet down into the cold, dark ocean.

  Deeper than we’d ever gone before.

  Deeper than a dolphin or a hammerhead shark could dive.

  Up against an enemy that couldn’t be fought: the deadly, crushing pressure.

  It worried me because I couldn’t think of a way to beat it, and if we couldn’t beat it, then it would beat us.

  Crush us.

  And all of it in a hurry. The time was counting down.

  Ticktock.

  We couldn’t go to Cassie’s barn. We couldn’t risk her parents making her do anything. We were all looking at plenty of parental trouble, but we had no time. Better a week of being grounded compared to losing this battle.

  We assembled in the woods near Tobias’s meadow.

  Ax said.

  “It is for us, Ax-man,” Marco said. “We’ll be crushed like a beer can on a frat boy’s forehead.”

  Ax wondered.

  “Forget it,” Marco said. “It was only a joke.”

  “Not really,” I said.

  Ax replied, nodding.

  “Not really,” I repeated, giving Marco a look.

  I was teasing Marco. But the truth was, there was nothing funny about being crushed to death. The image of it bothered me. The feeling of being squeezed on every inch of my body, pushed inward, internal organs squishing and …

  “I don’t know how we’re going to do this,” I blurted. “None of our morphs are capable of diving that deep and without one, we’re talking about a kamikaze mission, here.”

  <“Kamikaze”?> Ax asked.

  “It means suicide, Ax,” I said. “Death, to you and me.”

  “Saving the Chee isn’t going to be a suicide mission,” Jake said, glaring at me. “You’re overreacting, Rachel.”

  My jaw dropped.

  Worrying about something as lethal as atmospheric pressure was overreacting? Wanting to get home in one piece instead of dying a stifling, airless death on the dark ocean floor was overreacting?

  Since when?

  If Cassie had said it, Jake wouldn’t have told her she was overreacting. He would have agreed. He would have thought she was being sensibly cautious.

  Wasn’t I allowed to be cautious?

  No, of course not, I thought bitterly. I’m supposed to be a reckless fighting machine and fighting machines don’t feel caution or fear. And even if they do, they don’t advertise it.

  “Well, excuse me, I guess I’ll just shut up and follow orders,” I said.

  “Look, I’m sorry, Rachel,” Jake said tiredly. “You made a good point in a bad way, okay? But nobody’s gonna die because we’re not gonna dive unless we find the right morph.”

  Ax asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Cassie said, frowning. “I mean, the only deep-sea creature that even comes close is a sperm whale, and their record is like ten or twelve thousand feet, I think.”

  Tobias offered lamely.

  “Yeah, we could tell everyone we’re going to find the Titanic,” Marco said. “We could see if Leo DiCaprio is floating around down there. But what do we do if we get down there in a stolen sub? We still have to get inside this Pemalite ship.”

  “It was just an idea,” I said, defending Tobias.

  We each had at least one situation that still gave us nightmares. I had more than one. Sometimes they were all mixed up and fragmented, like shattered glass that just keeps on reflecting broken, jagged images.

  And we each had morphs we’d hated.

  Tobias’s worst moments all dealt with water.

  Tobias said glumly.

  “Hello!” Cassie cried suddenly. “That’s it! Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea! Hah! I think we may have a solution!”

  “Wasn’t it Journey to the Bottom of the Sea?” Marco asked.

  “No, it was Voyage,” Jake confirmed.

  “Journey sounds better,” Marco said.

  Jake sighed. “Hey, time marches on, right? We’re in a hurry. What are you thinking, Cassie?”

  “Calamari,” she said with a grin.

  “Snails?” I said, frowning.

  Ax said.

  “Wait, that’s not —” Cassie said loudly.

  Ax continued.

  “You ate a snail through your hoof?” I asked. That picture temporarily replaced the image of me being squashed to the size of a Barbie doll on the ocean floor.

 

  “Ooookay, I think that’s probably enough about snails,” Jake said.

  “Yeah, especially since calamari does not mean snail,” Cassie pointed out. “Escargot means snail. I was talking about —”

  Tobias grumped.

  “Squid!” Cassie yelled suddenly. The birds in the trees around us fell silent. So did we.

  Until Tobias said,

/>   “Oh. Who. CARES?” Cassie cried. “Squid. We can morph a giant squid! Giant squid dive really deep. And they have arms, so we could maybe get into the Pemalite ship.”

  I met Marco’s gaze. “Why didn’t she just say that to begin with?”

  “Could have saved a lot of time,” Marco agreed, playing along.

  Ax wondered.

  Cassie threw up her hands. “It’s a book. Journey to —”

  “Ah HAH! It was Journey!”

  “I mean Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,” Cassie grated. “Captain Nemo was attacked by a giant squid.”

  “Who won?” Marco asked.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “It wasn’t Journey or Voyage. It was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Jules Verne.”

  Cassie looked like she might strangle me. Then she said, “Oh yeah. Voyage was a TV show. They run it on the Sci-Fi channel.”

  “I thought it was on Nick at Night,” Marco said.

  At which point everyone started giggling.

  “Someone call the Chee and tell them they’re doomed,” I said. “Their only hope is a collection of idiot kids, standing around in the woods debating cable channels.”

  “We are in a hurry,” Jake said, tapping his wrist where a watch would be. “So? What about giant squid? Where do we find one to acquire?”

  Cassie shook her head, suddenly glum. “I don’t know. I hate to say this, but I’m pretty sure there aren’t any in captivity.”

  “Well, then that’s not very helpful, is it?” Marco said.

  Cassie shrugged. “No. And it’s not like we can go dolphin and find one. The only thing that eats giant squid is the sperm whale.”

  Pretending to be more nonchalant than I felt, I said, “Okay, so we acquire a sperm whale, dive down, and grab us a big squid.”

  Cassie shook her head. “No sperm whales in captivity. There never have been.”

  “There has to be a way,” Jake said. But he sounded doubtful. “Anyone have any suggestions?”

  No one did.

  “You’re kidding,” I said. “That’s it? We’re beat?”

  “We have till ten P.M.,” Jake said. “What’s that? Eight hours? Not exactly enough time to go whale hunting. Cassie?”

  She held up her hands, helpless. “That was my one idea: squid. The Pemalite ship is just too far down.”

  “And time is too short,” I said.

  “The alternative is trying to bust into that nuclear facility and get the Chee out. The safe is too strong for us. And one other huge problem: The guards there are normal humans, as far as we know,” Jake said. “We can’t exactly go busting in and just kick everyone’s butt.”

  “Anyway, that only solves the problem of that one Chee,” Marco pointed out. “What about the others? We can’t just leave them sitting around as stiff as lawn ornaments.”

  But in the end, it looked like that was our only choice. We broke up and headed home with no hope.

  It was depressing. I mean, we’d messed up missions before, but we’d never been lame enough to fail before we’d even started.

  Now the Chee would be lost and the Yeerks would possess technology that would stump even Ax.

  Atmospheric pressure, our own Earth force, had beaten us.

  Cassie headed toward her farm. Jake and Marco headed to Erek’s to tell him the bad news.

  Tobias and Ax melted back into the woods.

  I walked home alone.

  My neighborhood looked normal.

  Kids playing street hockey. Adults sweeping driveways.

  Gossiping about the gorilla who’d been at the mall.

  “And by the time the news van arrived, the gorilla was already gone,” one woman said.

  “Someone said they saw him abduct a child,” the other woman said nervously. “I’m afraid to let my kids out of my sight.”

  I kept my face carefully blank as I passed, but inside my heart was pounding. A news van had shown up? Had they found out anything? Had they tracked our movements somehow?

  Were Jake and Marco walking into an ambush at Erek’s?

  I started to jog, then to run. I bolted across my front lawn and into the house.

  “I’m home,” I yelled, slamming the door behind me.

  “I was beginning to think you’d been abducted by this so-called gorilla haunting the mall,” my mother called. “And now on the news there’s something about an elephant at a flophouse.”

  “Yeah? Elephants with drug problems?” I said, entering the kitchen.

  My mother had half the table covered in legal papers. The other half was set for dinner.

  I grabbed the phone and dialed Jake’s house. Let it ring thirteen times. Hung up.

  Called Marco. Got his answering machine and hung up.

  What now?

  “Did you hear about the gorilla who was riding an elephant into some abandoned house?” my sister Jordan asked, switching on the TV.

  “Shut it off, Jordan,” my little sister Sara whined. “You know we don’t watch TV while we eat.”

  “But they’re gonna show the gorilla on the news,” Jordan said, blocking the TV so Sara couldn’t touch it. “Mom!”

  “Sara, watching TV this once won’t hurt anything. Now, sit down and eat,” my mother said absently, shuffling through her papers. “This is the last weekend I have to prepare this case and I’d appreciate your cooperation.”

  “Yeah,” Jordan said, smirking at Sara.

  “You’re ugly when you do that,” Sara said.

  “Look, here’s the story,” I interrupted, pointing at the TV as the familiar front of the mall covered the screen.

  “In local news, a publicity-seeking gorilla kicked up quite a stir at a mall today,” the anchorman announced. “Some say the primate was an actor promoting a soon-to-be-released movie. Others, however, insist it was a real gorilla.”

  The camera flashed to the sales kid at Spencer’s Gifts.

  I caught my breath.

  “Sure I saw it,” the kid said, shrugging. “It was just some guy in a gorilla suit. No big deal. But he dropped a lava lamp on my head.”

  “What about the rumors that it had abducted a child?” the reporter asked solemnly.

  The kid laughed. “Look, we get all kinds in here, like folks into alien abductions. We get a lot of college kids, too.”

  “So you think this was a fraternity prank?” the reporter asked.

  The kid shrugged again. “Probably.”

  The camera flashed back to the studio. “Adding to this mystery is that all of the security cameras malfunctioned while the gorilla was in the mall, so there is no videotape for police to review. However, there have been no reports filed in connection with any missing children. And police deny reports that a bust at a stolen goods warehouse turned up a small zoo full of exotic animals.”

  “Man, I’m never around when the good stuff happens,” Jordan complained, plopping down at the table. “Burritos. Yum.”

  My stomach growled and I started eating. I snagged two volumes of our ten-year-old encyclopedia and started reading as I ate.

  The volumes covered the “Sq” and “Wh” entries: squid and whale.

  So there really was no videotape. Good. No problem.

  But wait. We’d taken a bus home. What about the bus driver?

  If the Yeerks got him, they’d tap into his memories and know exactly who we were and where we’d gotten off the bus.

  I shut the encyclopedia. And I almost missed the next news story.

  “The entire town is trying to save a fifty-nine-foot whale that beached itself on the coastline less than fifteen minutes ago,” the anchorwoman chirped. “This is the first marine mammal stranding in the town’s history. Let’s go live to the scene.”

  The burrito lodged in my throat. I swallowed hard.

  The reporter was standing on the beach.

  And behind him was a massive, wrinkled wall of whale.

  I didn’t hear much of w
hat the reporter was saying.

  Something about volunteers and the whale surviving.

  “What kind of whale is that?” I croaked.

  My mother glanced up from her paperwork. “Hmmm? Oh, they just said it was a sperm whale.”

  And then the camera zoomed in, and suddenly the whale and I were looking straight at each other.

  His dark, solemn gaze locked onto mine.

  I pushed back my chair.

  This was no coincidence.

  Someone or something wanted us out there bad. And was willing to sacrifice a whale to do it.

  “Aren’t you going to finish your dinner?” my mother asked as I grabbed the phone.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said, punching in Cassie’s number.

  “Hi,” I said, when she answered. “What’re you doing?”

  “I just came in from the barn,” she said. “Why?”

  I chose my words carefully. We never trust phones. “Well, we were just watching the news and they had some bizarre stories about a gorilla tearing through the mall and a sperm whale beached down at the shore. Weird, huh? How come we always miss all the interesting stuff?”

  “A sperm whale,” she said slowly. “Uh-huh. Well, it’s a shame, but there’s nothing we can do about it. We already have plans for tonight.”

  “Oh, yeah, I know,” I said and then, in case anybody was listening, added, “you’re gonna learn how to cartwheel if it’s the last thing I do.”

  She laughed. “Sure. See ya.”

  I hung up and yelled that I was going to Cassie’s.

  My mother barely looked up from her paperwork.

  Sometimes having a busy mom is a good thing.

  I walked out into the evening, steaming. Someone was playing games with us. Someone was treating us like a bunch of sock puppets. Jerking us around.

  I was mad. But it was a cold anger. A calm, cold anger.

  We’d see who jerked who.

  I went around the back of the house and slid into the shadows between the hedges and the fence. Pulled off my running shoes, jacket, and jeans. Concentrated on my bald eagle morph.

  Instantly I felt the changes begin.

  I was falling like an elevator with a snapped cable.

  My bones crunched, hollowing out and remolding themselves.