I PROMISED I WOULD ASK YOU AGAIN.

"Uh-oh," Marco said.

I WILL SHOW YOU WHAT YOU NEED TO UNDERSTAND.

55 CHAPTER 14

I WILL SHOW YOU WHAT YOU NEED TO UNDERSTAND.

In an instant, we were gone from the barn. The five of us and Ax stood side by side in the middle of an empty field of scruffy, unkempt grass. There was a long, low, tumbledown building a hundred yards away.

The Ellimist was nowhere to be seen. We were the only people around: five humans and one Andalite. Five real humans.

"Tobias!" I said.

"Yeah," he said, looking down at his hands. "This routine again."

Jake looked angry. Cassie marveled. Marco tried to smirk nonchalantly, but wasn't succeed ing. No one looked tired anymore.

Ax skittered nervously on his dainty hooves and stretched his tail, as if preparing to use it.

"The Ellimist again," I said. "Did you guys hear - "

"Yeah, we heard," Jake said. "So we get another chance to change our minds."

"Where are we?" Cassie wondered. "I mean, something about this looks familiar. But I can't quite place it."

I had the same feeling. Like this empty, dusty, blasted landscape was familiar. It was Tobias who saw it first.

"The school," he said.

"What?" I said. "No way." But he was right. I looked again and realized that I knew each of those tumbled-down, destroyed buildings.

"Okay, I don't like this," Marco said. "I don't even halfway like this. I mean, normally I'm all for seeing the school blown up, but I really don't like this."

"When did this happen?" I wondered aloud. "I skip one day and the place burns down?"

"I don't think so," Cassie said in a strange, distracted voice. "I don't think this is something that's happened, past tense. I think we're talking future tense."

"Or just tense," Marco muttered.

I looked over at Cassie, wondering what she was talking about. She was staring intently up at the sky overhead. Then off toward the horizon.

"The sky," she said. "Have you ever seen it that color before?"

"It does seem slightly yellowish," Jake said.

56 "And the air. Doesn't it smell funny? And look, over there. The trees over behind the gym.

They're dying."

"The Ellimist said he would show us something," I muttered. "So what's he showing us?

Ax? You understand any of this?"

"There is a time distortion. I sense it. But I don't know what it means. "

"It's the future," Cassie said.

A chill crawled up my spine. I wanted to think Cassie was losing it. But I sensed the truth of what she said.

"Okaaaaay," Marco said. "So, what are we supposed to do now? Stand around here until the Ellimist comes back for us?"

Jake shrugged. "I guess we look around. The mall's just a quarter mile or so. It should be open."

So we walked. Across the scruffy field. Beneath a sky that seemed to add yellow to blue and make patches and wisps of green, unlike any sky I had ever seen. We passed the school and I looked morbidly through the blast holes to see if we could recognize anything.

"YAAAAHHH!" Marco yelled.

He reeled back from one of the dark holes. I ran to look inside. It was a classroom. There was a skeleton lying crumpled across the teacher's desk.

"Oh, my God," Cassie whispered. "The body was just left here."

"That's Paloma's classroom," I said. "History class."

It took a few seconds for the significance of that to sink in. The body had been left there to rot. It must have taken years for it to be reduced to nothing but bones.

"Cassie's right. We're in the future," Marco said. "But that's impossible."

"Impossible for humans." Ax said. "But not impossible for Ellimists. "

"Oh, I get it," I said angrily. "It's a little lesson. The Ellimist is showing us what happens in the future. How cute. How clever. But how do we know this is really the future, and not just some little show he's putting on?"

"Let's try the mall," Jake said. "Although I don't have a good feeling about this."

We left the school behind us. I tried not to think about who that skeleton might have been.

Some teacher? Some student? Some person who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?

57 "Maybe we can check the bookstore at the mall," Marco said. "Find a World Almanac for whatever year this is. See who won all the Super Bowls. Then when we go back to our own time, we can bet on the games. Make a fortune."

I forced a laugh that came out like a grunt.

We needed to keep our spirits up. Marco was trying.

We reached the highway. Eight lanes of concrete, dead silent. Not a car. Not a truck. Empty.

On the far side of the highway was a rusted wreck of a car. Bony white hands clutched the steering wheel. We stayed away from it.

I saw something that gleamed brightly, off to the east. It seemed to run in a straight line from the far horizon to a point much closer. I squinted to see what it was.

"Too bad we don't have your hawk eyes now," I whispered to Tobias.

"It's a tube, I think. Like a long, long glass tube. There! Something is moving down it."

"It is a conveyance of some kind." Ax said. He had turned all four of his eyes toward it. "It seems to be a glass tube that goes on for many miles. Inside it are fast-moving platforms, like your trains. Only faster. They are going perhaps three hundred or more of your miles per hour."

"They're everyone's miles," Marco said. "You're on Earth, Ax. We all have the same miles."

"What about nations that use kilometers?" Ax asked smugly. "See? I am learning."

"Some kind of very high-speed train system," Jake said. "That's why no one is on the highway."

"The question is, who built the system?" I pointed out.

A few minutes later, we reached the mall. But it had changed. It had changed quite a bit.

"Oh, man," Marco said. "Look at that! Oh, man."

The mall was still standing. Even the sign that said "Sears" could still be seen. But holes, perfectly round and about six feet across, had been drilled into the sides of the four big department stores. There were six or eight holes in the Penney's. The same with Sears. And from the holes emerged Taxxons.

They crawled in and out of the holes. They slithered down to the ground and up to the roof.

Some were carrying boxes from a squat, bulky spacecraft that sat in the parking lot. They were unloading it like a truck, carrying silvery packages in through several of the holes.

"It's a hive," Cassie said. "It's like a beehive. Or an ant colony. They've taken it over. The mall is a Taxxon hive."

"The future the way it will be if the Yeerks win," I said. "Taxxons using the mall for a 58 hive. I guess that means I can forget about any good sales today."

I wanted to sound tough. Like I wasn't impressed. But that was a lie. Worms larger than a grown man were crawling through holes in the mall. Skeletons lay across desks in the shattered ruins of our school, and clutched the wheels of rusted cars.

The air felt strange. The sky was no longer the sky of Earth. The trees were dying.

As we circled around the mall, we could see that the tube train made a stop there. The glass tube was raised above the ground about twenty feet, like the monorail at Disneyworld. But there did not seem to be enough supports to hold it up. It was as if it were just hanging there.