kicked my elegant hammerhead tail and I went for the nearest, biggest shark I could see.
We closed, like two colliding cars. Face-to-face. Hammer-to-hammer.
I twisted my hammer head and planed sideways, then twisted instantly back. My foe had tried to react. But he was only a smart shark, while I was a human. I knew how he would react, and I was ready.
Too late, he saw my mouth open. Too late, he saw the rows of serrated triangles. I bit. I closed my jaws down with enough power to sever a leg.
I ripped a chunk out of that shark and yelled, "Yes! Yes! Come and get some more!"
"Marco! Stop it!" Jake shouted.
I twisted till I was upside down, kicked, turned my head, and grabbed the tail of my opponent. I sawed my teeth and removed the upper lobe of the shark's tail.
"Marco! I said stop it!"
Suddenly a shark body slammed into me. It knocked me sideways. My opponent swam away, definitely not interested in fighting anymore.
I turned toward this new shark.
"lt's me, Marco," Jake said. "lt's me. They're leaving. They've broken off. They've lost the signal from the facility and they are escaping." I just stared at him. At the shark he was.
"lt's over, Marco. Let's get out of here."
The blood lust faded. I looked around and saw the last of the engineered sharks heading away.
Huge bubbles were erupting from the underwater facility. Explosions rocked the sea, like echoing hammer blows through the water. The hologram that disguised the facility shimmered and disappeared as we swam away from the absolute horror.
We saw Visser Three, a distant yellow ribbon, snaking away.
I felt a tingling, watery feeling in my head. The control chip was being liquidated. Ax had said it would happen when the facility's computer decided the end had come.
The Yeerks are good at destroying evidence. The chips in all the sharks were liquidating. No fisherman would ever catch a shark with alien technology in its head.
"They're done for," Cassie said.
"Hopefully, at least Visser One didn't escape^ Tobias said. "l'd like to think she is down there, trying to figure out how to hold her breath right about now."
It was just the kind of thing I would have said.
Jake and Ax were silent. I knew Jake would tell Cassie now. If he didn't, Rachel would. They would all know. Jake and Rachel and Ax already knew.
They knew that my heart was ripping apart. They knew that I was crying. Or crying as well as any shark could.
I had lost my mother once. Now I'd lost her again. Unless . . .
I pictured the Leeran swimming toward her. Had she made it? No. It wasn't possible.
We swam away. We swam toward shore, where we would be human once again and go back to our lives. Back to home and homework. Back to saying good night to a picture of my mother.
But nothing would ever be the same now. How could it be? They would all know.
I felt the energy drain out of me. I was exhausted. Exhausted and defeated. I waited for someone to say something nice. Something sweet and comforting. Something that they would never have said to the old Marco.
"Hey. I just heard something," Rachel said. "Mechanical. Like . . . hey!
It's the same sound the sub made. That transparent sub. I heard its engines."
"l don't hear anything," Tobias argued.
"lt's coming from over in this direction^ Rachel said. "0ver closer to me." I didn't hear anything, either. Maybe Rachel was just making it up.
Maybe she was trying to give me some tiny hope to cling to. It didn't sound like something Rachel would do. But there
are hidden depths to Rachel. There are times she'll surprise you.
"Thanks, Xena," I said.
You know, if she'd said, "You're welcome," I'd have known it was a lie.
That she hadn't heard a sub. That she was just trying to be nice.
"Thanks for what? For hearing that sub? For paying more attention than you, Marco?" Rachel sneered in her usual Rachel sneer. "You know, possibly the reason I notice more than you do, Marco, is that I don't use half my brain making dumb jokes and the other half of my brain laughing at them."
It was a pretty good shot. It made me laugh a little. I don't mind when the jokes are at my own expense. As long as they're funny.
Was it true? Had my mother made it to the sub and escaped? I don't know, and I guess I wasn't totally sure what I wanted the truth to be.
If she was gone . . . really, really gone, then I could be a normal person again. I could be sad and then put it behind me. I could be free.
If she was still alive, still trapped, then I was still trapped, too. I still had to try and save her. I would still be a prisoner of hope.
"l'll ask you this just once more, and then never again, because I know how you are about people feeling sorry for you," Jake said privately so no one else could hear. "Are you okay, Marco?" Like I always say, you have to decide whether you think life is tragedy or comedy. I long ago decided to look for the joke in life.
And now I had to decide whether, in my own mind, she was dead or still alive. Suddenly I had this flash. This picture in my head. Me and her.
Me and my mom. My real mom, free, no longer a Controller. It would be far in the future. Years from now, maybe. Me and her and my dad would sit down together and talk about how it had been. About all the stuff that had happened. All the secrets and despair. All the fear. All the anger and hopelessness. We'd remember it all.
And then, slowly but surely, we'd talk less about how horrible it had all been. We'd start talking about the strange stuff. The weird stuff.
The stuff that we could laugh at, now that it was all over.
See, it was my mom who taught me that the world was funny.
And if she was alive, we'd maybe still get that day in the future to sit down and laugh together.
"l'm fine, Jake," I said. "And I'll be better. When she's free again."