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.
I felt restless and weird. Like I was on the edge of something. Like life had gotten unbalanced since the day before.
"Rachel's right," I said out loud, just to hear a voice. "They're bugs. Termites. And besides, I got away in the end."
57 I walked outside to feel the sun on my skin. My human skin. Without really thinking much about it, I went into the barn to the refrigerator we use to store perishable food for the animals. I took out a frozen grasshopper and stuck it in my pocket. And then I headed toward the edge of the forest.
"Hey, Cassie," a thought-speak voice said as I crunched noisily through the woods. "What's going on?"
I looked up and saw Tobias go skimming by. He flared, turned on a dime, and landed on a branch. He dug his ripping talons into the soft bark.
"Not much," I said.
"I heard it was pretty bad last night. "
"Yeah? Who did you talk to?"
"Ax. Who else? He was definitely weirded out by the whole thing. " I stopped walking. It was something in the way he said "weirded out." "Tobias, who else did you talk to?"
"Maybe Marco," he said.
"And Marco told you I went nuts, right?"
"Actually, the word he used was "insane." Also "Looney Tunes." And "wacko." But he meant it all in the nicest possible way. "
I laughed bitterly. "Well, I guess I did go a bit wacko," I said.
"Welcome to the club," Tobias said. "None of us is going to come through all this completely normal. You know that. Too much fear. "
"Well, I'm pretty sick of it," I said. "I had to destroy the termite queen. I know, she was just a bug. But you know, who am I to decide that it's okay to kill one animal and not another? Here I am, the big Earth Mother, tree-hugger, animal-lover, as Marco would say, and when it gets down to it, I'm just like ..."
"Just like me?" Tobias asked.
"Just like any predator," I said lamely.
"You feel bad because you had to kill the queen in order to survive. "
"I shouldn't have been there. It's their world, not mine. Those little tunnels in a rotten piece of wood -- that's their whole universe. I invaded it. And when they got in my way, I reacted.
Who does that remind you of?"
"Look, you are not a Yeerk, and termites are not human beings," Tobias said. less-than 58 There's no comparison."
I didn't bother arguing. "Look, I have to morph. There's something I need to do."
"What?"
I sighed. "It's something stupid, all right? There's this mother skunk we have who's injured.
She has a litter of kits who are going to die. I think I know where they are, more or less, but I can't get there walking like a human."
For a moment Tobias said nothing. less-than Skunk kits? Near the edge of the Yeerk logging compound?"
"Yes."
"I can show you where they are. "
For a frozen moment of time I refused to understand what he'd just said. I didn't want to think of why Tobias . . . why a red-tailed hawk would know the exact location of a litter of skunk babies.
I took a couple of deep breaths. I tried to keep my voice level. "Are they still alive?"
"There are four still alive," Tobias said.