The two workers plodded along before me. I could feel their hind ends with my feelers. And I knew the queen's head was just to my right. Just a half inch. Less.
The queen's head . . . feelers . . . eyes . . . like an ant!
One chance . . . focus . . . focus ... I had to trick the termite mind. I had to draw on every ounce of my strength.
If I failed, I would live out the rest of my life as a mindless slave of the termite queen. Now!
Do it now!
I swerved right. It was like moving through molasses. The queen had ordered me to go after the workers, and I was disobeying.
Ant! Ant!I screamed the word in my own head. Ant! Destroy! Destroy! Destroy the ant!
I clambered over a half dozen termites who were tending the queen. I could feel my will weakening. I couldn't get rid of the queen. I had to kill an ant.
That was my purpose -- to keep ants away from the queen.
I scampered toward the queen's head. I felt my antennae touch her. I opened my massive pincerjaws. . . .
Termites ran around insanely. They were racing, out of control, lost, confused. For a moment I did the same. The queen was gone.
I think in some way I wanted to forget who I was. What I had done. I wanted to become one of the lost, panicked termites.
"We're free! We're out! Cassie, where are you? Get out of there!" I heard a far-off voice cry.
Was it Ax? Marco? Rachel?
"Demorph!" I cried with my last shred of control.
52 "No! Cassie, no!" a voice screamed in my head. "You're inside a piece of wood!"
"Demorph!" I screamed again. Human. I wanted to be human again. Let me be human! Let me out of this place. Out of this body.
I grew. Walls pressed in around me. I filled the tunnel. I couldn't grow anymore!
Trapped! Pain. Nothing but pain! I was a swollen, vast termite. Larger than any queen.
Huge.
I couldn't grow anymore. And I couldn't stop. I was trying to become human again, to fit a human body into a space no bigger than the inside of a walnut.
Then . . . explosion!
The walls opened up. Splinters! Fresh air rushed across my hard termite skin. My head was free of the wood and growing. But my body was still trapped. Squeezing with terrible pain.
I had eyes now. They could see, but only dimly. I was still tiny, and in the air above me a huge blade as long as a passenger jet slashed downward. The wood splintered again and my body was free. I grew and grew. Arms . . . legs ... my own head.
I was on my knees on a wooden floor. Marco and Rachel stood over me. Ax had used his tail to slice open the wood. They had all escaped the colony. They had demorphed.
It was dark in the room, but there were glowing red-and-green indicator lights. And there was a computer monitor showing neat screen-saver triangles floating and reforming.
"Are you okay?" Rachel asked. She bent down and put her hand on my shoulder.
I gave her a hug. Then, just as suddenly, I pushed her away. "Let me go! Don't touch me!
Don't touch me! DON'T TOUCH ME!"
Rachel was on me in a flash. She clamped her hand over my mouth. Marco grabbed my ankles and held them still.
"Cassie!" Rachel hissed. "Shut up. We're inside the Yeerk building. We're in a side room, but we can hear people in the next room!"
I was beyond caring. I struggled and fought and tried to scream.
"Ax, whatever you can do with that computer, do it!" Marco whispered urgently.
Rachel and Marco held me pinned against the floor. And slowly . . . very slowly ... my bunched muscles relaxed. I stopped fighting.
"Are you okay now?" Rachel asked.
Okay? I would never be okay again. But I nodded my head anyway. Rachel took her hand away from my mouth.
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.