Even now, the roach's jumpy instincts were barely under control. "Run!" it said. "Run!" I heard loud, crashing vibrations. Something huge moved over our heads. I couldn't see well enough to recognize him, but a few seconds later he began to morph down into our world.

"Who is it?" I asked.

"Me, Marco. What, you don't recognize me?"

After that came Ax, who had to morph back into his Andalite body and then into a roach.

Jake grabbed all the clothing we had shed, stuffed it into a bag, and took it away to store in one of the coin lockers out in the mall. Then he came back and morphed into his own cockroach form. His own outer clothing would be sacrificed, left in the dressing room. That would look strange, but not as strange as five separate sets of clothing.

"Okay, boys, girls, and bugs." Marco said, "this has taken about fifteen minutes, which means we are already down to an hour and forty-five minutes in morph. And this is NOT a morph I want to be stuck in. "

"Amen. Let's move out." Jake said.

We scampered like a very tiny, very gross army beneath the divider that separated us from the next dressing room. This was the dressing room Marco believed led to the Yeerk pool.

"We can hide up under the seat." I said.

One of the cooler parts of being a roach is the ability to walk right up most walls. We shot up the wall and cowered beneath the roof formed by the little triangular seat. I rested, facing straight up on the wall. Tiny spines at the end of my legs gripped the small bumps of the painted wall. I could see two of the others just above me, parked like low-slung tobacco-brown cars. Their antennae waved around, just as mine did, picking up scents, feeling vibrations.

28 And then, quite suddenly, it happened. The door of the dressing room opened. A shape so tall, it might as well have been a skyscraper, came into the room.

"We have company." Marco announced. As if we hadn't noticed. As if our little roach brains weren't screaming at us, "Run! Run! Run!"

Then, I heard a soft snap.

The mirror on the back wall of the dressing room swung open. I felt an assault of damp air, rich with a mineral scent. I had smelled that aroma before. Memories came rushing into my head. Memories I wished I could forget.

"Let's go!" Jake yelled.

We tore down the wall, hit the carpet, and blazed for the doorway. The feet of the Controller were just ahead of us, monstrous building-sized shoes that lifted and swung ahead, disappearing from sight.

In we went after the Controller. The door closed behind us.

"We're in." Jake said.

"Oh, goody." Marco replied.

Down into the Yeerk pool.

The very last place I ever wanted to go again.

29 Chapter 9

The first time we went to the Yeerk pool complex, we had taken an incredibly long stairway.

This time it was more of a ramp. It wound downward at an easy angle, no worse than walking down a driveway. And to our roach bodies, which barely experienced gravity, it was like walking on level ground.

Under our scampering feet there was bare dirt, covered by footprints. We climbed in and out of depressions that seemed to be several feet deep, by our cockroach standards.

We let the Controller pull away from us, even though we could have moved as fast as he was.

No point in taking the risk of getting stepped on.

It was dark all around, with only an occasional bare electric bulb, high, high overhead like some dim sun. Still, we wanted to be careful not to be seen. My antennae were tuned in for any vibration that might be another Controller on the path.

Down, down we went, curving and twisting between rock walls.

"Ax, how are we doing on time?" Jake asked. Ax has the ability to keep perfect track of time, even without a watch. It's a very useful talent.

"Twenty-eight of your minutes have passed since Cassie and Rachel entered morph."

"You know, Ax, they're your minutes now, too." Marco said, just to make conversation. "I mean, we are all here together on good old Earth where we only have one type of minute. " We had two hours total in any morph. At two hours and one minute, we would be stuck. Like Tobias. And this was one time I actually agreed with Marco. I was not interested in being a roach forever.

"Stairs up ahead." Cassie reported.

Over, down. Over, down. Over, down. Seventy-five steps.

At last we sensed that the walls were no longer hemming us in. The path had emerged into the cavern itself.

Our roach "eyes" could not see it, but I remembered the first time I had looked down on the Yeerk pool.

It was a vast underground cavern. Larger than one of those big sports domes. The stairways and paths emerged from all sides, right about where the upper tier of seats would have been in a sports dome.

In the center of the area was the pool itself, a sludgy, muddy-looking lake that seemed to see the with the mass of Yeerk slugs in it. But that was not the worst of it. Two piers were built out over the lake. One was where the Controllers - human, Hork-Bajir, Taxxon, and other species - disgorged the Yeerks from their heads. Hork-Bajir guards would watch carefully as each Controller knelt at the far end of the pier and held his head down close to the surface of 30 the lake. The Yeerk slug would then slither out of the host's ear and drop with a flat splash into the lake.

That's when you would discover whether the Controller was a "voluntary" host, or someone who had been taken against his will. See, the voluntary hosts - the ones who had chosen to turn themselves over to the Yeerks - would stand up and calmly walk away. The involuntary hosts would realize that they were temporarily free of the evil alien in their heads. That they once more had control over their own minds and bodies. Some would scream. Some would cry. Many would beg to be released.

A few would try to escape. But the Hork-Bajir were there to grab them and haul them to cages. That's where they would await the moment when they would be taken to the second pier. The second pier was the place where Yeerks, now strong from their swim in the pool and full of the nutrition of Kandrona rays, would slither back inside their hosts.

When I had nightmares about the Yeerk pool . . . and I had those nightmares a lot ... it would always be about that second pier. The voluntary hosts would kneel and receive the Yeerks back into their brains.

The involuntaries would struggle. They would fight. Curse. Some would dare the Hork-Bajir to kill them. We were on a ramp again. No one had said anything for a while as we still raced lower and lower, deeper and deeper, closer and closer. That memory was in all of our minds.

All except Ax, who had not been there.

"I wish I could see more clearly." Ax said. "I wish I could see all that is going on. "

"No. You don't." I told him.

We were at the end of the ramp. We reached the flat floor of the cavern.

"Okay, now what?" Cassie wondered. "We've used up at least three-quarters of an hour. "

"Forty-one of your minutes." Ax said.

"Okay." Jake said.

"You guys remember there were buildings all around the edge of the cavern, set back from the Yeerk pool? Most are probably storage. Some may be generators and air purifiers. But some may be offices, control rooms, or even hold the Kandrona itself. We need to check out some of those buildings. "

"Well, that's what bugs do best." Marco joked.

"I wish we could have found a bug morph with better eyes." I said. "How are we going to even find these buildings? I can't see more than a couple of feet in front of me. "