I let my mind drift, even as my shattered body struggled to go on. I felt my mind floating back. To the barn, and all the animals there. To my father, my mother. To Jake.

I remembered good things. Riding the high thermals with Tobias and the others with wings spread wide. Good days. Sitting at my grand mother's feet as she told me the story of our family, of all the generations who had lived on and worked the farm.

And then a more recent memory surfaced. The whale. I remembered his huge, gentle silence filling my mind.

I could even hear his song.

Wait! I could hear his song. That wasn't memory. I was hearing his plaintive, haunting song, reverberating through the water.

He was not far away.

I opened my mind and let my human consciousness slip away. I let go. I invited the dolphin mind - the mind that loved to play and loved to fight and loved the feeling of soaring out of the water right up into the air like a bird - to surface in my head.

I fired echolocating bursts, a thousand quick clicks compressed into a few seconds. And more than that, I cried for help.

It was foolish. It was ridiculous. But I cried out in a silent plea, like a child with a nightmare calling for her mother.

The monster is after me! The destroyer! The evil one!

Help me.

"We have used eighty percent of our time," Ax managed to say.

"Twenty-four minutes left," Marco gasped.

"lt doesn't matter. I'm done for," Rachel admitted. "l can't keep going. And he's too close. It's time to turn and fight."

WHUMP, WHUMP, WHUMP.

"We cannot possibly win," Ax said.

74 "We know," Jake said. "But if I have to lose, I'd rather lose fighting than let him catch us one by one."

"That is a very Andalite thing to say," Ax said. "We have a lot in common. I wish it had ended differently."

"On the count of three," Jake said.

"One."

"Two."

"Let's go."

We stopped. We turned to face the mardrut.

"Jake?" I said. "l wanted to tell you . . ."

"Yes. Me, too, Cassie," he said.

WHUMP, WHUMP, WHUMP.

The red-and-purple behemoth rushed at us.

I shook with terror. But I was too tired to swim away.

Help me! I cried one last time. But I knew there was no one to help.

And then I let it all go ...

. . . and said good-bye.

75 Chapter 23

"I' ve made up my mind what to do with you," Visser Three said. "After this long chase I am really quite hungry."

He rushed at us.

We rushed at him.

Something dark came hurtling up from the ocean floor.

Something dark and long and bigger even than the mardrut.

FWOOOMP!

Visser Three shuddered and stopped dead in the water.

A second dark shape, as fast as the first.

FWOOOMP!

"The great ones," I whispered.

" It's the whales!" Marco yelled.

There were five of them in the water.

The two big males who had struck first had heads like sledgehammers. Sperm whales. Sixty feet long. Sixty-five tons. The weight of fifty cars.

They had dived deep and come tearing up at awesome velocity to slam into the creature from another world's ocean.

The mardrut was big. The mardrut was strong. But nothing living can survive for long, being slammed by creatures weighing a hundred and thirty thousand pounds.

Then, the whale - my whale, because that's how I thought of him - began to lash the mardrut with his tail. Hammer blows. Hits that could have knocked walls down. Again and again, as two smaller females joined in and the two sperm whales circled back for another attack.

"Rrraaaggghhhh!" Visser Three's cry of pain and fury echoed in my brain.

"He's retreating!" Jake crowed.

"He's running!" Rachel said. "Hah-hah!"

"I don't think Visser Three likes whales very much," Marco yelled. "I don't think he likes them at all!"

The whales chased him for a while, but they let him go in the end.

76 Whales are not very good at killing. They don't really have much of a talent for hating and destroying.

My whale, the big humpback, returned in a few minutes and rested in the water beside me.

I wanted to thank him, but, as I said, whales don't think in human words or human thoughts.

Still, I tried, anyway.

Thanks, big guy.

People who argue about how smart whales are, or whether they are as smart as humans, kind of miss the point. Whales will never read books or build rockets or do algebra. In all those areas, humans are smarter.

Humans are the great brains of planet Earth.

But it isn't necessary to believe whales are as smart as humans to believe that they are great.

They don't have to know words to sing songs. They don't have to be anything but what they are to be magnificent. And even though I don't really know what a soul is, I know this - if humans have them, then so do whales.

I wanted to thank him for responding to my call for help. But I had a strange feeling, as he opened his great heart to the dolphin mind that was in my own, that he hadn't just come in response to me.

I had the feeling - and that's all it was, a feeling - that in some way the sea itself had called him to respond to the presence of an abomination.

Of course I never told that to Jake or any of the others. They would have laughed. At least, Marco would have.

"Morph time is almost up," Ax said.

"l think if we morph, the whale will carry us until we are ready to morph again," I said.

So we morphed back to our human bodies, and Ax morphed to his Andalite body, and we crawled up on the whale's huge back.

I fell asleep. I know that sounds pretty incredible, but I did. I was exhausted. Physically.

Emotionally. In every way you can be tired, I was tired.

When I woke up, it was sunset. We were near shore. I could see the beach, and just a little farther down the shore, the mouth of the river.

We were wet, of course, covered with splash ing water and the spray from the whale's blow hole. It was a little cold, especially now that the sun was going down.

But then again, I wasn't Visser Three's lunch, so I wasn't going to complain.

Jake was sitting cross-legged on the whale's back, smiling at me.

77 "Some day, huh?" he said.

I smiled. "Yeah."

"We did it. We saved the Andalite. And we got out alive."

"Barely," I said.

"You know something? You were right. You trusted your feelings and we followed you and we're all safe."

I nodded. "Yes, I guess so. Only ... as Marco would say, let's not do this again any time soon, okay?"

Jake smiled his slow smile. "It's fun being a dolphin, though, isn't it? I know you were worried about it. You know, thinking maybe it wasn't right and all."

I shook my head slowly. "I'm still not sure it's right. But I guess we don't have much of a choice. The Yeerks started this fight, not us. And after what Ax said ... I guess it's not just about one species, human beings. It's about all the animals. It's about all of Earth."

Jake nodded. "I think if you could ask the dolphins, they would say it's all right to use them.

Since what you're trying to do is save them."

"Nah, they would just think it was all a big game. They would never understand."

We both laughed. Even if they could talk, the dolphins would never really understand what we were so upset about. We knew that better than anyone.

"I guess that's true," Jake said. "But we do understand." He met my gaze. "We do understand what's at stake. And we'll do whatever we have to do to win."