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mom.
She was smiling at me. She was much taller than
me, but she bent down to pick me up. I flew,
up in the air, up to her face. She kissed me.
"You are going to grow up to be so cute," she said.
"My little Marco."
Marco. The human boy. I saw myself clearly
then, like I was looking through her eyes at the little
toddler I'd been. Not the Animorph Marco, but
the little kid Marco.
Suddenly . . .
The pressure was growing. Growing. I was squeezed
from all sides. I felt muscle tensing to restrain
me, but then, the muscle weakened and quivered.
A ripping, tearing sound!
Light! Light!
I was demorphing. Demorphing and growing. I had
burst through the throat of the crow! And now, I was
falling!
Tobias yelled.
Muddy, distorted vision showed me the crow falling
alongside me.
I was falling. Falling through the air, a vile
mix of crippled spider and emerging human.
I was the size of a baseball, I guess, and
getting bigger. I hate to even think of what I
looked like. I know I wasn't pretty.
WHAMMMMM!
I hit the ground. I bounced. I hit the ground
again.
I lay there, not knowing where I was, or what I
was. But I knew one thing for sure. I was going
to demorph. I was getting OUT OF THAT
MORPH!
If I'd had a mouth, I would have started screaming
and never stopped. But my mouth reappeared late.
Four of my spider legs withered and disappeared. My
remaining legs became human arms and legs. My
tiny claws became toes. My fangs and jaws
became teeth and lips.
My eight spider eyes shut down one after
another, leaving only two. And slowly, those two
eyes became fully human.
I looked up through human eyes at a blue
sky. At the high branches of trees looming above
me.
And then, I looked up into the face of my former
schoolmate, Erek.
Erek the android.
Marco?" Erek said. "Didn't you used to have
longer hair?"
The hair thing again. Anyway, to my human eyes
Erek looked completely, one hundred percent
human. I knew it wasn't true, but even so, it
was almost impossible not to believe the holographic
projection that surrounded the android.
Could I remorph into something powerful enough to ...
to make sure he wouldn't be a problem? Probably
not. There were Controllers all around the area. All
he had to do was yell for help.
Just then, a girl came running up. She looked
down at me, then at Erek.
"Who is this?" the girl asked.
"His name is Marco," Erek said calmly. "You
know the "Andalite bandits" Chapman is
always talking about? The ones who use Andalite
morph-+ technology to carry on a guerrilla
war?"
"Of course," she said.
Erek pointed down at me. "I think this human
is one of them."
There it was: the end. The end of our existence as
Animorphs. We'd always known that if the Yeerks
ever discovered our true identities, or even that we
were humans, they would wipe us out within a matter of
days.
I felt sick. Sick with fear for myself, and for the
others. I'd blown it. I'd given away our great
secret.
Erek jerked his head toward the girl. "This is my
friend Jenny."
I was not pleased to meet her.
I heard the sound of people rushing through bushes.
"Nothing over here," Erek said loudly. "Jenny
hurt her ankle. I'll help her. Keep
searching. I think I heard something over there."
Erek must have noticed the extremely shocked and
puzzled expression on my face. He grinned.
"There are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt
of in your philosophy, Horatio.""
"Shakespeare?" I said, amazed.
"Yes.
Hamlet.
I saw the very first performance."
"But ... but that would have been like centuries ago."
Erek nodded. "Do you know where I live?"
I nodded, with my head still down in the dirt.
"Morph into something small enough to escape from here,"
Erek suggested. "Come to see me at my house, you
and your friends. We have a lot to talk about."
For some stupid reason I said, "You're not
human. We know you're an android."
"And you're not an Andalite bandit," Erek said.
"How do I know I can trust you?"
Erek shrugged. "I could turn you in, right now.
I'd be Visser Three's new best friend. Even the
Visser knows how to reward those who carry out his
orders well."
"Maybe you want to catch all of us at once,"
I said. Don't ask me why I was arguing with him.
Maybe it was the humiliating position I was in.
Maybe I felt like I had to act tough since I
was on my back in the dirt, wearing severely
unattractive clothing.
Erek squatted down. "Marco, if I
gave you to Visser Three, he would get the names of
all your friends from you. I know you're a brave
person. You'd have to be, to do all you and your friends have
done. But you are not brave enough to survive the
Visser's torture. You would tell."
I took a couple of seconds to think about that. He
was right, of course. I had a healthy respect for the
kind of torture Visser Three could inflict.
"We'll be there," I said. "I guess we
don't have a choice. You have us by the ... you have us
cold."
Erek shook his head. "It's not like that. It will be a
meeting of allies, Marco. You see, we, too,
fight the Yeerks."
My dad made chicken for dinner that night. I'd
spent the afternoon with my friends, debating the mess with
Erek. We'd gone round and round, but in the end we
knew we would show up for the meeting. We had no
choice, really.
Barbecued chicken, skin-on mashed potatoes,
roasted corn on the cob. This was the absolute
height of my father's cooking ability. So I had
to eat it. I had to.
But man, there is something about popping out
through the throat of a bird that totally destroys your
appetite for dead bird.
"How is it?" my dad asked.
"Great," I answered.
We were on the deck in our backyard. It was a
house like the house we'd lived in long ago when we
were a complete family. After my mom's "death" -- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]