53 "It's over, Cassie," Marco said. "You saved us. It's over. And we have other problems now."

"I'm good," I said. "I'm fine." But my skin was crawling. Evil, terrible memories were crowding in on me.

"I have access," Ax said. "Accessing. Urn ... Marco or Rachel, I need a human to help me understand the meaning of what I am seeing here."

Marco climbed up off the floor. Rachel stayed with me. She was stroking my hair, like my mom would have done if I'd had a nightmare.

It was hard to think of Rachel as being nurturing. But she did the right thing.

I heard sounds in the next room. Human voices. And Hork-Bajir, speaking their weird mix of their own native tongue and human speech they'd learned for duty on Earth.

"Some kind of commission," Marco mused, looking at the computer screen. "Three members.

They vote on what happens to the forest. They decide if the logging can go forward."

"Dapsen Lumber Company," Ax said. "That's what the Yeerks call this logging company.

Very funny. "

"What's funny?" Marco asked.

"Dapsen. It's a Yeerkish word that means . . . well. Never mind what it means. It isn't polite.

"

"Look at this document," Marco whispered. "Preliminary permission to examine feasibility of. . . " Hey. The Yeerks don't have final permission to begin logging. There's this commission that still has to decide. Three people. One has already said yes. Probably a Controller. One has voted definitely no. There's one guy left. Some guy named Farrand.

Yikes!"

"What yikes?" Rachel asked.

"Yikes, as in he's coming for a visit to check the scene," Marco said. "End of the week. Then he'll vote. If that guy votes yes, the Yeerks are in business and we're in trouble."

"He'll vote yes," Rachel said darkly.

"I'm afraid that is true," Ax agreed. "The Yeerks will make him a Controllers "Not if we stop them," Marco said.

"One thing at a time. We need to get out of here," Rachel said. "And we're not going back out the way we came in."

No one argued with that.

54 "I am making a slight change in the programming that may let me access this computer from Marco's home computer. And I can temporarily shut down the defenses from this computer," Ax said.

"But there are still guards outside. And Hork-Bajir in the next room. "

"Yeah. We'll have to move fast," Rachel said. "Cassie, can you morph? Can you morph the wolf? I'll stay right beside you the whole time."

Could I morph? The very idea made me sick. But even in my quaking fear I knew anything was better than going back down into that termite colony.

Five minutes later, Ax turned off the outer defenses, and we ran from that building.

I guess the Yeerks counted on their high-tech defenses too much. Without them, no one even shouted an alarm. By sheer, dumb luck we raced between the paths of two Controller guards.

No one yelled. No one fired a shot. We ran into the woods where Jake joined up with us.

No one said much on the way home.

55 Chapter fourteen

My parents expected me to be at Rachel's house. Her parents expected her to sleep over at my house. My house was easier to sneak into, so that's where we went.

It was almost dawn by the time we de-morphed. We crept through my dark living room and up to my room, trying not to make the stairs squeak.

I loaned Rachel a big flannel shirt. She grabbed a blanket and a pillow and simply fell down on the floor beside my bed. I think she was asleep before she landed.

I crawled into my bed. My own, familiar bed. The sheets were cool. The comforter was my comforter. I belonged here. This was my place. And yet nothing seemed familiar. The shadows cast by dim starlight on the walls . . . the shapes of shirts and overalls hung from big hooks on the walls ... the bindings of books I'd read, right here in this room . . . none of it seemed real.

I closed my eyes, then opened them quickly.

How could it be? How could I remember what that chamber looked like, what the termite queen looked like when I'd had no eyes? But still, I remembered it all. I saw the chamber dug from the rotted wood by hundreds of workers. And I saw the huge queen.

I felt my pincers.

I hadn't just destroyed her. I had destroyed the entire colony. I had done it to save myself and my friends.

I wanted to throw up. But I would have had to get out of bed to run to the bathroom. And I felt like I never wanted to leave that bed again.

I love animals. I've been raised all my life around them. I love nature. But what did I really know about it?

I have been more animals than many people ever see in a lifetime. I have flown with the wings of an osprey. I've raced through the ocean in the body of a dolphin. I've seen the world through the eyes of an owl at night, and smelled the wind with all the keen senses of a wolf.

I've flown upside down and backward in the body of a fly. Sometimes I go out into the far fields at night and become a horse and run through the grass.

And everything I've been, every animal, is either killer or killed.

In a million, million battles all around the world, on every continent, in every square inch of space, there was killing. From the great cats in Africa that cold-bloodedly search out the young and weak gazelles, to the terrible wars that are fought out in anthills and termite colonies.

All of nature was at war.

And, at the top of all that destruction, humans killed each other as well as other species, and now those same people have been enslaved and destroyed by the Yeerks.

56 Nature at its finest. Cute, cuddly animals who slaughtered to live. The color of nature wasn't green. It was red. Blood-red.

I realized tears were running down my cheeks and soaking my pillow. I would have cried out loud, but I didn't want Rachel to wake up. I would have screamed but my parents would have come running. And what could I have told them? Lies. More lies. Because in my world, I, too, was prey. The Yeerks were hunting me. I was scared. I was alone. I didn't know what was going to happen to me.

And then I thought of the lost skunk kits. Unlovable little creatures, to most people. But they were scared and alone, too. If they were still alive.

I guess I fell asleep eventually, because I dreamed. It wasn't a nightmare, though. It wasn't even about the termite world.

I was a mother. In my dream I was a mother, looking for her babies. I searched everywhere, even though I was hurt and in pain.

At last I found them. And, in my dream, they snuggled next to me.

When I woke up, the dream quickly evaporated. But it left behind a feeling of peace.

The sun was high in the sky. It was ten-fifteen in the morning. Late. Rachel had already showered and dressed.

"I can't believe you slept so well," Rachel grumbled. "I had a seriously bad nightmare. Look, I gotta get home. Are you okay?"

"Sure," I said, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. "I mean . . . you know, last night and all ... it wasn't like I was having some kind of breakdown or anything. It's just, you know. It creeped me out."

"Tell me about it," Rachel agreed. "But it's really no big deal if you think about it, Cassie.

Termites get killed all the time. They were just termites. Bugs."

"Yeah."

She left. I don't know if she just had to get home, or if I made her uncomfortable. Rachel isn't usually a huggy kind of person. Having to treat me like a baby probably gave her the willies.

My mom was at work. My dad was off somewhere, I guess, because his truck was gone. 1 made some toast and drank some orange juice. Then I ate a piece of leftover veggie pizza.