This was not starting off right at all. The bad feeling in my stomach was just getting worse. Cassie missing. Tobias already morphed.
Everyone was looking at me, waiting for me to decide.
"Yeah, we're doing it," I said.
The school was locked up for the night. But Marco had taken care of that little problem. He knew of a window in the science lab that didn't lock.
We crawled into the science lab through the window. It was dark, except for the dying light of the sun that glinted off the glass beakers and test tubes. Tobias drifted through and landed neatly on the teacher's desk.
"Let me take a look," I said. I opened the door as slowly as I could and peeked out through the crack. I could see down the nearly dark hallway to the janitor's closet. Instantly I pulled back in.
"There are people out there!" I said. "Three people heading into the closet."
"Controllers," Rachel said. "I guess it's dinnertime for Yeerks."
None of us thought that was very funny.
"How are we going to get in there?" Marco asked.
"Wait a minute," Rachel said. "Do all the Controllers know each other by sight? I mean, maybe we're Controllers, right?"
"So we just walk right on in like we belong there?" Marco asked. "Wonderful plan, Rachel. I have a better idea — let's just kill ourselves now and get it over with."
"Maybe Rachel's right," I said.
"Big maybe," Marco pointed out. "Big, huge maybe. How about Tom? He would know whether you were a Controller."
I cracked the door again and looked out. "I think Tom's already down there," I said. "Besides, the hallway's empty now. I guess they all… " I fell silent. "Wait, here comes someone."
I stared. It wasn't easy to see faces in the gloom. I could tell there were two people. One was wearing a uniform.
It was the Controller policeman. And he was rudely yanking someone along with him. I could see that it was a girl.
I didn't really want to see any more.
"Tobias," I said. "I need you to use your hawk's eyes,"
Tobias fluttered over and stood on my shoulder. He peeked his fierce head out into the hall and then drew back.
<Yes,> he said. <It's her.>
I felt like the floor had opened underneath me. Marco grabbed me because I looked like I was about to fall over.
"They have her!" I whispered. "The Controllers. They have Cassie!"
"Who has Cassie… now?" Rachel stammered.
"That policeman. The Controller, the one who came out to Cassie's farm. The one who was at The Sharing meeting. He has her. He saw her at the meeting trying to get close to the full members."
Rachel let go a few choice words.
We hadn't even started and already everything was a disaster.
"Okay," I said grimly. "We go ahead, like Rachel said. We figure there are too many Controllers for all of them to know each other. I mean, they add new bodies all the time, right? So maybe we're new Controllers, right?"
"Oh, man," Marco moaned.
"You have a better idea?" I snapped.
"No," he said. "I think we go ahead. We take our chances. Let's rock and roll."
"Okay, then, everyone act cool." I looked at Tobias. "Too late for you to morph back now. But try not to let them see you."
Rachel, Marco, and I stepped out into the dark hallway. My legs were stiff. My knees were rickety. I was walking like Frankenstein trying to look casual.
We headed for the janitor's closet. Fortunately, no one else was in the hallway.
We entered the tiny room and stepped inside. I tried to recall the sequence for opening the door. Faucet to the left, then twist the second hook around right.
The door swung open.
There was more noise than there had been the other day. Or maybe it was just that my human ears heard it better than my lizard ears had.
There was a deep sloshing, swooshing sound, almost like gentle surf breaking on the shore. But that was the nice sound. The other sounds were horrifying — despairing cries, terrified screams, shouts, shrieking triumphant laughter.
"You sure this is just the Yeerk pool?" Marco said in a nervous, shaky voice. "I see a guy with horns and a pitchfork and I am outta here."
I stepped into the opening. The stairs were steep and there was no rail, so you felt like you were about to pitch forward with every step.
We descended together. The door closed automatically behind us.
At first I guess I expected there to be maybe a couple dozen steps. But the steps never ended. We just kept walking, and there were always more steps. The walls were dirt, then quickly became rock as we went down, down, down. It felt like those stairs would never end.
"Some superior aliens," Marco whispered. "You'd think they could have put in an elevator."
We all giggled a little. Very little.
Suddenly, the rock walls widened out. We had emerged into a huge cavern.
And when I say huge, I mean huge. They could have played the Superbowl in there and had room left over for a couple of malls. It was like a giant bowl turned upside down, all carved out of solid rock. At the very top of the bowl was the faint outline of a hole. I thought I could see stars through it.
All around the outer edges of the cavern I could see other stairways, like ours. They seemed to come from every direction, appearing out of the rock walls, and leading down to the floor of the cavern.
We clustered closer to the center of the stairway. It was a sheer drop off the side of the stairs. "This is gigantic," Marco said. "This isn't just under the school. This is under half the town. Those stairways must lead up to a dozen secret entrances." He shook his head. "Jake, they have this entire area set up with secret passageways. Oh, man. This is worse… this is so much worse… So much bigger… "
I felt the same despair. We were fools. This wasn't some little group of alien bad guys we were dealing with. To build this underground city, these guys had power we couldn't even imagine.
That's almost what it was. A city.
There were buildings and sheds all around the rim of the cavern. And we could see yellow Caterpillar earthmovers and cranes at work on the far side of the cavern. They seemed weirdly normal in this incredible place.
And there were creatures everywhere. Taxxons, Hork-Bajir, and other things I couldn't even begin to guess at.
But mostly, there were humans. A lot of them.
At the very center of the cavern was a pool, like a small lake, maybe a hundred feet across, and perfectly round. Only the water wasn't exactly water. It moved more like melted lead, and was about the same color. The sloshing sound we could hear was the liquid of the pool being rippled and splashed by hundreds of fast-moving things below the surface.
I knew what they were. Yeerks. Yeerks in their natural, sluglike state. They were swimming and cavorting in the pool like kids on a hot day.
Near the edge of the pool were cages. In the cages were Hork-Bajir and human beings.
Some of the humans screamed for help. Some cried silently. Some just sat and waited, all hope lost. There were adults there. And kids. Women and men. More than a hundred, packed ten to a cage.
The captive Hork-Bajir were kept in separate, stronger cages. They paced and howled and slashed at the air with their bladed arms.
I almost lost hope. I felt like my heart had stopped. This was a place of unimaginable horror. And we were so few, and so weak.
Below us on the stairs I could see the Controller cop and Cassie. He was dragging her roughly whenever she stumbled. They had reached the bottom of the stairs.
"I'm going to morph," I said. "I'm going to get Cassie away from him."
Marco put his hand on my shoulder. "Not time yet, dude. Be cool."
<Cassie's okay, Jake,> Tobias said. <She isn't hurt. Just scared,>
"He'd better not hurt her," I said. "Keep an eye on them, Tobias."
There were two low steel piers built out over the pool. On one, Hork-Bajir-Controllers politely guarded a line of humans and Hork-Bajir and Taxxons.
This was the unloading station.
One by one the people knelt down, bent over, and dipped their heads toward the slimy surface of the pool. The Hork-Bajir helped them.
As we watched, a woman calmly bent over, her head just inches above the lead-gray pool. A Hork-Bajir held her elbow gently, to help her keep her balance.
Then we saw the thing dribbling, sliding, squirming, crawling out of her ear.
A Yeerk.
"Oh, no… " Rachel moaned. She sounded like she might be sick. "Oh, no. No."
When the Yeerk was all the way out of the poor woman's head, it dropped into the pool and disappeared beneath the turbulent surface.
Instantly the woman cried out. "You filth, let me go! Let me go! I am a free woman! You can't keep doing this! I am not a slave! Let me go!"
Two Hork-Bajir grabbed her. They dragged the woman to the nearest cage and threw her in. "Help!" the woman screamed. "Oh, please, someone help. Help us all!"
"Help! Please, someone help us!"
We had been hearing cries like that all the way down those steps. But now we were close enough to give the cries a human face. It cut straight to my soul.
There was a second steel pier. That was the loading station. There the host bodies were dragged from their holding cages to have the Yeerks reenter their heads. It was a pretty basic process. They grabbed the hosts, whether human or Hork-Bajir, and forced their heads down into the pool.
The people sometimes fought and screamed, and sometimes just cried. But they always lost. When their heads were yanked back up out of the pool, we could see the slugs still slithering into their ears.
After a few minutes they would become calm again, as the Yeerks regained control. Then off they went, once more slaves of the Yeerks.
It was a horrible assembly line, from the unloading pier, to the holding cages, to the infestation pier. They moved the poor victims through at a pretty speedy rate.
But there was another area we could only now see. There humans and Hork-Bajir waited on comfortable chairs, sipping drinks and actually watching TV. Taxxons squirmed around like gigantic spiny maggots.
I heard the faint sound of a television set. I was sure I could hear laughter from the humans. They were watching the show and having a good laugh.
<Those are the voluntary hosts,> Tobias said. <Collaborators.>
"What are you talking about?" I demanded.
<You remember, what the Andalite told us. Many humans and Hork-Bajir are voluntary hosts,> Tobias replied. <The Yeerks persuade them to let them take over.>
"I can't believe that," Rachel said. "No person would ever let this happen to them. No one would ever give up control of himself."
"Some people are scum, Rachel," Marco said. "Sorry to burst your balloon."
<The Yeerks convince them that taking on a Yeerk will solve all their problems. I think that's what The Sharing is all about. People believe that by becoming something different, they can leave behind all their pain.>
"Like spending all their time as a hawk," Marco pointed out.
Tobias had nothing to say to that. He spread his wings and flew up and away.
