But he reacted very quickly after that. He went back into the cave and came back out with Ket. I still couldn't really tell one of them from the other. At least not in the dark.
"Dark," Ket said, looking around.
"Yeah, I know. But I guess that won't stop the Taxxons. So let's get going." But how exactly we were supposed to move through the pitch-black forest, I had no idea. I couldn't see. And to my disappointment, the Hork-Bajir were not all that good at seeing in the dark, either.
It was tough going. I couldn't exactly drag my feathers through thorn bushes. The Hork-Bajir couldn't fly. And it was totally dark. The kind of dark you only get when you are a long way from the lights of homes and cars and streetlamps. It was so dark you couldn't see a tree till you ran into it. It was like being blind.
I rode on Jara Hamee's horns, just like I had with Rachel. Only we were moving more slowly and trying not to leave tracks.
"Where?" Jara Hamee asked. "Go where?"
"l don't really know," I grumbled. "l guess the little voice in my head will tell me."
The Hork-Bajir grunted, like that made perfect sense to him. "My head voice told me to run."
"When? What voice?"
I couldn't see his face, so I couldn't see his expression. Not that I would have known what a Hork-Bajir expression meant, anyway. "Ket Hal-pak and Jara Hamee at Yeerk pool. Yeerk drained out. Yeerk in pool.
Head voice say, 'Run. Go that way!'"
I sighed and narrowly avoided getting slapped
in the face by a branch. Talking to Hork-Bajir is frustrating.
"You're saying the idea just popped into your head to run away from the Yeerk pool?" I asked.
"Head say, 'Run, Jara Hamee. Take Ket Hal-pak. Run and be free. Run from Yeerks.' I ask how? How will Jara Hamee and Ket Halpak be free? Head say, 'I will send a guide.'"
"What?"
"Head say, 'Run, Jara Hamee -'"
"No, that last part. About a guide."
"Head voice say, 'I will send a guide.'"
"Who? Me?"
The Hork-Bajir didn't answer. I was quickly coming to realize that Hork-Bajir don't really get a lot of things. Speech seems unnatural to them. And it's true, they are not the geniuses of the universe. Which was fine.
But I was getting more and more annoyed by the whole thing. I had been moved around, put in one place or another. Things I couldn't possibly know had popped into my head. I was being used. And I really didn't like the idea of that.
I deeply didn't like the idea of that.
"0kay, that does it. Stop," I told the two Hork-Bajir.
They stopped. The two big monsters just stood there in the dark between trees and waited.
"We go now?"
"No."
"Taxxons coming."
"Yep," I said. "l know."
"We go now?"
"Nope. Not until I get some answers," I said defiantly. "This little parade stops right here until I get some -"
By the time I'd said "answers" I was not in the forest anymore. I was not anywhere. Not anywhere I could understand, at least.
I felt myself floating. Hanging in the air, only there wasn't any air. I wasn't flying, just floating.
There was light, a beautiful blue-green sort of light. It didn't come from any one place, though. It just seemed to be coming from everywhere at once.
One thing was for sure - I was not in the forest anymore.
HELLO, TOBIAS. WE MEET AGAIN.
The voice was huge, but not harsh. It filled my brain and seemed to resonate throughout my body. My feathers quivered. My fingers tingled.
Fingers?
And only then did I begin to realize that I was changed.
I looked down at my body. And somehow, in a way I can't explain, I seemed to be seeing through my body, too. It was as if I could see
everything, from every angle at once. Like I was seeing myself through a million different eyes.
I was no longer a red-tailed hawk. But I was not human, either. At least not the way I had once been human.
I had arms that were wings. I had legs that ended in talons. I had a beak, but it was a mouth, too.
I know this all sounds crazy. I know it's impossible to really imagine it very well. But somehow I was both a human and a bird and some third thing that was in between the two.
We had seen many incredible things since we'd first found a dying Andalite prince in an abandoned construction site. I've seen Yeerks and all their tools - the Taxxons, the Gedds, the Hork-Bajir. I've seen Andalites and met the Chee, the androids in human form. I've traveled through time and to the Yeerk pool and into orbit in spaceships.
But there was only one species that could do this. Only one species that could own that huge head-filling voice.
"The Ellimist," I said in an actual voice that came from my own mouth.
Then, from the vague turquoise fog around me, I saw it flying toward me.
It was a bird of prey. A raptor. Some undefinable shape, part falcon, part eagle, part hawk. It had a snow-white belly and reddish-brown back and a tail that spread to show a dusky rainbow of colors.
The bird flew to me, then stopped and floated in midair.
YES, TOBIAS. ELLIMIST. OR AT LEAST AN ELLIMIST.
It laughed and the whole turquoise universe laughed along.
"So you're the puppet master," I said. "I should have known. But this isn't how you looked last time we saw you."
The bird shape smiled. Don't ask me how it smiled with a beak. It just did. I chose a shape
YOU WOULD IDENTIFY WITH.
"Baloney. You know better than that. You know I'm human."