67 I found the others already waiting inside the barn. Prince Jake was sitting on a bale of hay.

Marco leaned against a stall, standing with arms crossed. Cassie, as usual, kept busy, feeding an injured baby goose with an eyedropper. Rachel paced back and forth, her cool eyes narrowing as she noticed me.

And Tobias . . . Tobias perched in the rafters overhead. I met his intense, intimidating hawk's gaze. And I saw that from his talons there hung a strip of bloody cloth. I knew where it had come from. And now I knew the reason for this meeting.

"Hi, Ax," Prince Jake said. "How's it going?"

"I'm fine," I answered.

"I figured we should all get together," Prince Jake said wearily. He seemed to be averting his eyes from me. "We need to think about what this thing with the Controllers means. We saw the guy at the mall. Then there was Mr. Pardue. And in the paper this morning there was a story about some guy, some business guy, who's in a meeting and freaks out. The paper made it seem like he just went nuts. I'm pretty sure he was another Controller losing it."

He looked at me. I said nothing.

"See, it's like this, Ax," Marco said suddenly. "We're tired of you giving us a runaround.

Tobias shows up and he's dragging around some bloody shirt. I ask him what it is, and he won't tell me. Why won't Tobias tell me? Simple. He must have promised someone he wouldn't. And who would that someone be?"

There was no point denying it. "I made Tobias promise. Puh-romise. It is my fault."

"So now you're not just keeping secrets from us, you're getting us to keep secrets from ourselves!" Rachel yelled. "You need to get some thing straight, Ax. We're not your little action figures here. We're not toy soldiers. This is our planet. And this is our fight. You don't control us, just because you're some mighty Andalite ."

"I am not trying to control anyone," I said.

"Yeah, right!" Rachel snapped. "The information all goes one way. We tell you everything, you tell us squat. Oh, you sound like you're being straight sometimes, but you never tell us any thing useful."

"You said you knew the Yeerks would probably destroy any Controller that went bad on them," Marco pressed. "How did you know that? Has all this happened before, on some other planet?"

Rachel took over. "We show you our world. We take you in. You see our families, you read our books, you even go to our school. And then you keep secrets from us."

I felt battered by their words. They were all true. But I had my orders. I had the laws of my people.

"We're inferior, aren't we?" Marco said. "That's it, right? We're not good enough. Back ward little humans. We don't deserve to be treated like equals."

68 "That's not it," I said.

"Sure it is!" Marco yelled. "Sure it is! We're just some bunch of cavemen, aren't we? That's what we look like to you."

Maybe I would have done better if I had been in my own body. My human body was awash in adrenalin. I was frustrated and afraid and guilty. "I can't answer your questions!" I yelled.

"I can't!"

"You mean, you won't\" Marco yelled. "Rachel's right. We're just pawns in the big game. It's Andalites versus Yeerks in the big game and we're what? The towel boys?"

"Look . . . look ... I have to follow the rules."

"Do you?" Cassie asked. It was the first time she had spoken. Her voice was soft and reason able. "Did Elfangor follow the rules when he gave us the power to morph?"

"I'm not Elfangor!" I yelled. "Can't you see that? I'm not some big hero. I'm just a young Andalite, all right? You want the truth? Here's some truth for you: I'm not a warrior. I'm an aristh. A ... a trainee. A cadet. A nobody."

"Yeah, yeah, boo-hoo," Marco sneered. "I'm not impressed. We don't want your sad story, we want the truth. What were you and Tobias doing? Why did you swear him to secrecy? What's going on?"

"I can't tell you," I said softly. "There's a law against giving aliens ... I mean, any non-Andalite ... our technology. And part of that law is we can't explain why. Can't. Tun. Can't."

"I am sick of this from - " Rachel started to raise her voice to me again, but Prince Jake stood up and took her arm. I saw him look at Cassie. Cassie nodded.

"I can almost understand the part about not giving us advanced technology," Prince Jake said.

"But why all the other secrets? Why can't you tell us other things, like how you knew what the Yeerks would do? Okay, so you don't want to give us megaweapons or whatever. Fair enough. But to refuse even to tell us how we fit into this whole Yeerk-Andalite war? I mean, what's that about?"

"It's about keeping control of us," Marco said.

"It's about power," Rachel agreed.

Cassie was looking at me strangely. "No," she said. "That's not it. It's not about control. It's about guilt. Shame. That's it, isn't it? That's what you said the other night. You said every species carries some guilt."

"Guilt? Shame?" Marco asked, looking at Cassie like she was foolish.

But Cassie had found the truth.

"What did you guys do to be ashamed of?" Prince Jake asked me.

69 "Once we were kind when we should not have been kind," I answered.

"And that's all you're going to tell us?" Prince Jake asked.

I nodded, the way humans do.

"I can't accept that, Ax," Prince Jake said sadly. "If you're with us, you have to be honest with us. Otherwise ... I guess you'll have to be on your own. I hate to do that. But you can't be one of us and then lie to us."

"I understand," I said. "You have been . . ." Once again, I was feeling that strange choking in my throat. "You've been very wonderful to me. I will always be grateful. Wonderful.

Grateful. Ful. The truth is ... the truth is we would not have been together much longer anyway."

I looked up at Tobias. Only he knew what I meant.

Slowly, feeling as if my clumsy human legs were made of a heavy Earth metal called lead, I turned and walked away from my human friends.

70 Chapter Eleven

"You can't always get what you want. But If you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need." A famous human named Rolling Stones said that. I thought it was very wise, for a human. - From the Earth Diary of Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill

The morning ritual is for normal times. The next morning was not a normal time.

This was the day I would die.

"I am the servant of the people," I said, and bowed my head low.

The people! The people were billions of miles away.

"I am the servant of my prince," I said, and raised my stalk eyes to the sky.

My prince? Elfangor had been my prince. He was dead. Now a human, Jake, was my prince, and he had discharged me. I wasn't even telling him what I was doing.

The ritual was a lie.

"I am the servant of honor," I said, and raised my face to look at the rising sun.

Honor. To die avenging my brother. I felt my insides quiver. It was fear. I know fear. I've felt it often enough in battle. But I'd never gone into a fight I knewwould lose.

This wasn't honor. It was running into the hands of death.

"My life is not my own, when the people have need of it." Couldn't I ask the others for help? Couldn't I go to Prince Jake and tell him?