Images of wolves and giant ants and gorillas. Images of all the animals I had been, all the minds I had lived in.
I couldn't grab that human image and hold onto it. But then, floating up in my disintegrating consciousness, came the image of my mother.
I guess that's not a surprise. They say dying soldiers on the battlefield often call out for their mothers with their dying breaths. And I guess that's what I was doing, too.
But this was my real mother. The way she'd been when she was truly alive. Not the Controller. Not the Controller known as Visser One, but my own real mom.
She was smiling at me. She was much taller than me, but she bent down to pick me up. I flew, up in the air, up to her face. She kissed me.
"You are going to grow up to be so cute," she said.
"My little Marco."
Marco. The human boy. I saw myself clearly then, like I was looking through her eyes at the little toddler I'd been. Not the Animorph Marco, but the little kid Marco.
Suddenly . . .
The pressure was growing. Growing. I was squeezed from all sides. I felt muscle tensing to restrain me, but then, the muscle weakened and quivered.
A ripping, tearing sound! Light! Light! I was demorphing. Demorphing and growing. I had burst through the throat of the crow! And now, I was falling! "Marco!" Tobias yelled.
Muddy, distorted vision showed me the crow falling alongside me.
I was falling. Falling through the air, a vile mix of crippled spider and emerging human.
I was the size of a baseball, I guess, and getting bigger. I hate to even think of what I looked like. I know I wasn't pretty.
WHAMMMMM! I hit the ground. I bounced. I hit the ground again.
I lay there, not knowing where I was, or what I was. But I knew one thing for sure. I was going to demorph. I was getting OUT OF THAT MORPH! If I'd had a mouth, I would have started screaming and never stopped. But my mouth reappeared late.
Four of my spider legs withered and disappeared. My remaining legs became human arms and legs. My tiny claws became toes. My fangs and jaws became teeth and lips.
My eight spider eyes shut down one after another, leaving only two. And slowly, those two eyes became fully human.
I looked up through human eyes at a blue sky. At the high branches of trees looming above me.
And then, I looked up into the face of my former schoolmate, Erek.
Erek the android.
Marco?" Erek said. "Didn't you used to have longer hair?"
The hair thing again. Anyway, to my human eyes Erek looked completely, one hundred percent human. I knew it wasn't true, but even so, it was almost impossible not to believe the holographic projection that surrounded the android.
Could I remorph into something powerful enough to ...
to make sure he wouldn't be a problem? Probably not. There were Controllers all around the area. All he had to do was yell for help.
Just then, a girl came running up. She looked down at me, then at Erek.
"Who is this?" the girl asked.
"His name is Marco," Erek said calmly. "You know the "Andalite bandits" Chapman is always talking about? The ones who use Andalite morph-+ technology to carry on a guerrilla war?"
"Of course," she said.
Erek pointed down at me. "I think this human is one of them."
There it was: the end. The end of our existence as Animorphs. We'd always known that if the Yeerks ever discovered our true identities, or even that we were humans, they would wipe us out within a matter of days.
I felt sick. Sick with fear for myself, and for the others. I'd blown it. I'd given away our great secret.
Erek jerked his head toward the girl. "This is my friend Jenny."
I was not pleased to meet her.
I heard the sound of people rushing through bushes.
"Nothing over here," Erek said loudly. "Jenny hurt her ankle. I'll help her. Keep searching. I think I heard something over there."
Erek must have noticed the extremely shocked and puzzled expression on my face. He grinned.
"There are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.""
"Shakespeare?" I said, amazed.
"Yes.
Hamlet.
I saw the very first performance."
"But ... but that would have been like centuries ago."
Erek nodded. "Do you know where I live?"
I nodded, with my head still down in the dirt.
"Morph into something small enough to escape from here,"
Erek suggested. "Come to see me at my house, you and your friends. We have a lot to talk about."
For some stupid reason I said, "You're not human. We know you're an android."
"And you're not an Andalite bandit," Erek said.
"How do I know I can trust you?"
Erek shrugged. "I could turn you in, right now.
I'd be Visser Three's new best friend. Even the Visser knows how to reward those who carry out his orders well."
"Maybe you want to catch all of us at once,"
I said. Don't ask me why I was arguing with him.
Maybe it was the humiliating position I was in.
Maybe I felt like I had to act tough since I was on my back in the dirt, wearing severely unattractive clothing.
Erek squatted down. "Marco, if I gave you to Visser Three, he would get the names of all your friends from you. I know you're a brave person. You'd have to be, to do all you and your friends have done. But you are not brave enough to survive the Visser's torture. You would tell."
I took a couple of seconds to think about that. He was right, of course. I had a healthy respect for the kind of torture Visser Three could inflict.
"We'll be there," I said. "I guess we don't have a choice. You have us by the ... you have us cold."
Erek shook his head. "It's not like that. It will be a meeting of allies, Marco. You see, we, too, fight the Yeerks."
My dad made chicken for dinner that night. I'd spent the afternoon with my friends, debating the mess with Erek. We'd gone round and round, but in the end we knew we would show up for the meeting. We had no choice, really.
Barbecued chicken, skin-on mashed potatoes, roasted corn on the cob. This was the absolute height of my father's cooking ability. So I had to eat it. I had to.
But man, there is something about popping out through the throat of a bird that totally destroys your appetite for dead bird.
"How is it?" my dad asked.
"Great," I answered.
We were on the deck in our backyard. It was a house like the house we'd lived in long ago when we were a complete family. After my mom's "death" -- that's still how I thought about it- my dad had spiraled down for a long time. He'd lost his job. We'd moved out of the house and ended up living in a pretty terrible apartment on the edge of a bad part of town.
It was okay, really. I mean, having a lot of stuff and a nice house is cool, but it wasn't being poor that bothered me. It was being alone. My father had been off in some world of his own for a long time. I'd been the one who had to cook and clean and all that.
It was nice to have a house and a yard and a barbecue again. But it wasn't about the house. It was that my dad was my dad again.
I know that sounds corny, coming from me.
"Another piece?"
"Sure. Breast." I held out my plate and tried not to think about exploding crows, or the fact that I'd come very close to having beetle for lunch.