What if someone other than Tobias became a Nothlit?
• When Cassie finally finds him after the first battle, she discovers that she couldn’t have timed it much worse if she’d tried: she interrupts him in the middle of eating a kill. She’s a tiny blunt-nailed primate, and he is a 650-pound predator that she has just caught in a moment of vulnerability. By the time she registers the carcass of the mountain lion at his feet, though, he has already jerked his head up, a growl rumbling softly in the back of his throat. He takes a step toward her, lips drawn back from blood-darkened teeth, unhurried and unhesitating.
“Jake.” Her voice emerges tiny with fear; she takes a breath and tries again. “Jake.” She’s been working with predators since she was six years old. Her mother taught her to look them in the eye. To show no fear. To be firm and unflinching, to force them to be the ones to hesitate. Funny, how fast common sense flees the mind when the tiny animal brain faces down the hunter and demands the behaviors of prey.
“Jake. STOP!” Her fists are clenched, her knees locked, her spine drawn up straight. Her entire body trembles. “It’s me. It’s Cassie. Stop moving, right now!”
He does stop, ears coming forward, tail lashing at the air. He’s no longer growling, but he’s crouched now, ready to pounce.
Excellent, Cassie thinks with an edge of hysteria. All she’s done is made him curious; now he’s going to play with his food before he eats it. “Jake, I need you to stop. To sit down. It’s Cassie. Rachel and Marco and Tobias and I have been looking for you ever since the battle. We’ve been worried. Your parents are worried too.”
She can see the moment it happens: his ears drawing back, his posture stiffening. «Cassie?» he whispers. And then, all in a rush, «Cassie, I can’t, even though I keep trying to— Cassie, it’s been too long, I don’t think I can—» He whips around, staring at the carcass of the mountain lion. He freezes there, staring at it.
“We’re gonna be okay. We’re gonna figure this out. But I need you to calm down, okay?” She takes a step forward, because apparently she’s lost her mind. Sneaking up on a stressed-out tiger is probably the stupidest thing she’s ever done. “Just… calm down. And we’ll figure this out.”
«Cassie,» he says, «I think I’m stuck.»
• The very next day, Rachel does what she always does: she figures out what needs doing for the good of the team, and she sets about getting it done with no fuss, no drama, and no room for self-doubt. In this case, what needs to be done is this: she acquires a dolphin morph. She steals Cassie’s dad’s truck. She drives down to a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean — and she drives through the guardrail at almost 70 miles an hour.
The truck sails in a long arc before crashing into the ocean with shocking force. Rachel was half-morphed in midair, door open, seatbelt off; she’s out and swimming for shore before it’s even done sinking.
Tobias came along to spot her. He’s the one who pulls her up onto the rocks once she reaches the shore. Sitting next to her as she shivers and coughs in her soaked morphing outfit, Tobias unscrews the cap to the cheap bottle of gin he stole from his uncle’s pantry earlier that day. It takes all four of their hands to brace the heavy-bottomed Barton bottle as Rachel takes an enormous gulp, gagging on the taste. After the first six or seven swallows, Tobias gently holds her hair out of her face as she vomits. And then he leans her back against his chest, picks up the bottle, and helps her force even more of the foul liquid down her throat.
By the time the cops arrive twenty minutes later — even faster than Rachel expected, given that she made sure to stage the crash with witnesses on the road — the scene is all in place. Rachel’s apparently alone on the beach, lips blue with cold, shaking as she sits with arms wrapped around herself next to the puddle of her own puke. She doesn’t have to fake glassy eyes or slurred speech as she tells the officers that she doesn’t remember what happened, not really, there was a car, her cousin was driving, they were just joyriding, he had more to drink than her, has anyone seen him around, it was just a stupid dare, she’s not sure where he is now…
The cops must buy Rachel’s non-story, because two of them immediately dive into the ocean while a third frantically calls for Coast Guard backup. Her BAC, when they check, is a whopping 0.28%. She feels a little bad, through the thick gin haze, for wasting so much of their time and worry. At least there’s no making the polyester of their uniforms any worse with exposure to sea water, she comforts herself.
No one finds the wreck of the car until the next day, which is why it comes as little surprise that, apparently, Jake’s body has floated away and probably won’t be recovered. Mission accomplished. Match and set.
• Jake listens to the total of charges against Rachel — underage intoxication, reckless endangerment, the utter loss of her mother’s good faith and trust — in grim silence, his tail lashing in agitation. «You didn’t have to do that,» he says at last. «I never would have asked you to—»
Rachel shrugs. “Too bad. I did it anyway. You’re welcome.”
“It was a good plan, actually.” Tobias smiles shyly at her. “Although we also appreciate Marco coming through on the fly to back our story.”
“Oh, fuck you,” Marco snaps. “‘On the fly,’ huh? That’s what you’re calling it?”
Tobias looks hurt. “If we’d realized they’d question you about what Jake and Rachel were doing last night—”
“The next time—” Marco points a shaking finger at Tobias’s nose. “The next time the fucking cops show up at my fucking door in the middle of the fucking night to ask…” He falters, swallows, continues. “To ask if someone I love has ever shown self-destructive tendencies, to ask me how well they know how to swim…” He draws a breath. “I’d like a little bit of fucking advance notice.”
There’s a long, horrible silence. Marco turns away from Tobias, from them all. He scrubs a hand over his own face as if trying to get something unpleasant off his skin.
“We’re sorry,” Tobias says, voice small.
Marco spins back around, rubbing his hands together brusquely. “Congratulations, you’re dead,” he tells Jake. “You wanna go to your own funeral?”
“No,” Jake and Rachel and Cassie all say at the same time.
• Jake does his best not to mope when the others take risk after risk without him there. Infiltrating Chapman’s house. Sabotaging a water truck. Rescuing Ax. The others all come out to the woods long enough to run their plans by him and ask his opinion, but he can’t tell if it’s because he’s still their leader or if they’re just being polite.
• «Marco,» Jake whispers in private thought-speak, as they huddle in a cell on the Pool ship and await execution. «Marco, if you make it out of this and I don’t… Never tell my parents. Not about what happened, not about anything. Ever.»
Marco thinks of his mom’s empty grave. Thinks of Visser One, standing somewhere just down the hall from them at this very moment. «You got it, fearless leader,» he says. «Not a word.»
• Leaning against Jake’s warm, furry side as they all huddle in her barn against a thunderstorm, Cassie frowns at the nearness of his ribs to the surface of his skin. Her mom feeds the big cats at the Gardens up to 25 pounds of meat a day; even a captive tiger can eat an entire 120-pound pig carcass in a single sitting. Jake plays coy about how many deer he catches and eats, probably because he’s shy — and maybe because he doesn’t want her to worry.
Cassie runs a hand over his back, feeling the knob of each vertebra even underneath the thick coating of fur. It’s an issue for another day. Right now they have more urgent problems: yeerks, and apparently robots called chee.
“So are the rest of us allowed to snuggle up with the giant heating blanket,” Marco asks, “or is that a privilege reserved for your honey-pie?”
Jake bares his teeth in a snarl, the faintest growl rumbling the back of his throat. He’s being more playful than not, which doesn’t prevent the effect from being terrifying.
“Fine, fine, can’t blame a guy for trying,” Marco says in a voice much higher than usual, holding up both hands in apology.
Cassie nudges the topic back to the question of what to do about Erek King and this pemalite crystal, perfectly aware why Jake was annoyed. He insists that he and Cassie are not anything to each other, or just friends, the way they’ve always been. Cassie finds it sweet that he so clearly wants to keep her options open, to let her find a human boyfriend if she wants… Or she would, if it wasn’t just a little bit patronizing as well.
• Two days after the Ellimist takes it upon himself to tell a couple escaped hork-bajir to “follow the black and orange cat” to freedom, Jake shows up at their high school as his human self. With a dubious strawberry-blonde dye job, a pretentious scarf masking most of his chin, and a thick pair of glasses, he’s thoroughly unrecognizable. Still, he only stays long enough for him and Cassie to sit in the back row of the auditorium and wave as Rachel receives her academic award, and then he ducks out before his aunt and uncle can get a good look at his face.
• A week after that, Rachel concocts a surprise of her own. Homer lets out a yelp of fear at the sight of the tiger, which turns into a whine of confusion as soon as he hears Jake’s voice assuring him that it’s all okay. The golden retriever stops squirming as soon as a soft paw nudges against his side and the acquiring trance begins.
Rachel and Tobias take the real Homer to the park for an afternoon of playing fetch and napping in the grass. Jake, meanwhile, runs through the doggy door and enters his own home for the first time in almost a year. Rachel was sure to pick a Saturday: Tom will be at the Sharing but both Jake’s parents are almost certainly home.
It’s getting dark, and both she and Tobias are getting worried even though neither one of them wants to say it, when finally a copy of Homer comes running up to join them. Jake’s ears are flattened, his tail tucked between his legs. He doesn’t say a word through the process of sending the real Homer back home, following them to the edge of the forest before he finally demorphs back to tiger.
«Thanks,» he says at last, an off note in his voice. «Really.»
“Any time,” Rachel says, meaning it.
«I won’t be doing that again.» Jake jumps with deceptive ease, landing on a branch over ten feet off the ground. There’s a faint rustle, and a flash of orange as he leaps to the next tree over. And then he’s gone.
• One of the injured horses in Cassie’s dad’s care dies in the night. She leaves the carcass on the edge of their property, knowing it’ll be gone by morning.
• «This animal attacked me,» Ax says, when he brings the corpse of the wolf to Jake. It’s the truth. It’s also true that Ax could have fended off the attack without killing, but he chooses not to mention that fact.
• A wildfire drives deer, mountain lions, even rabbits and raccoons from the national forest. After two weeks after gnawing her cuticles and glaring at the news, Rachel blows her entire allowance on a duffel bag’s worth of frozen chickens. When she plops them down in the middle of Jake’s meadow, she makes eye contact with him long enough to snarl, “You’re welcome” in a tone that books no argument about the nearly $300 she just spent keeping him alive. Then she turns and marches home.
• Marco’s the one who does the math about the bodies — hork-bajir, occasionally taxxon, probably human too — that they left behind after the half a dozen battles they’ve had in the woods so far. But then, it’s Marco. He has the good sense to keep his trap shut.
• They’re at the risk of fracturing, Jake knows, into separate teams. He and Ax hang out, map Yeerk Pool entrances in dog or human morph, watch TV. Rachel and Tobias seem to be living out of each other’s pockets, spending all their free time so entwined that Jake doesn’t know whether he should be worried. Marco and Cassie are satellites, isolated from the team except on missions. It’s not cohesive. It’s not coherent.
• And then David comes along, and changes everything.
“Who do you think would win a fight between a tiger and a lion?” David whispers, and in the moment, Jake just whuffs out a long kitty sigh, not bothering to dignify that with a response.
Later, on the roof of the mall, Jake will realize it comes down to a thousand little things. The fact that it’s night, and he can see almost as well in the dark as full daylight, while David’s morph is a daytime desert hunter. The fact that he’s had hundreds more fights in this shape than David has in his. But what it really comes down to is this: David uses cat-shape, and Jake is all cat.
«Stay down,» Jake snaps, after the third or fourth time he sends David sprawling across the concrete roof. «Do yourself a favor and just stay down.»
David staggers to his feet, lunges again. On instinct, on habit, on skill, Jake sees where he will pounce and twists out of the way, just far enough to slam into him in midair. There’s no point in going for the throat, not with that mane. Instead, locking both front paws around his neck, Jake brings up his back claws and slashes across David’s stomach. David whips around and gets his teeth around Jake’s ear, shredding it, but it’s already too late. Jake is dragging eight hooked knives through David’s soft underbelly.
This time, David collapses to the ground and doesn’t get up. He’s bleeding heavily, pale intestine peeking through the blood-matted fur that Jake has shredded. With a dismissive shove, Jake sends him off-balance enough so that he’s lying on his back. Defeated.
Jake will tell the others, when asked, that he was waiting for a second opinion. That he needed Rachel and Ax to approve his decision, and that’s why he was frozen in place where he stood over David when they arrived. The truth, however, is that standing with locked knees and clenched jaw was the only way Jake could keep control of the desperate desire to finish the fight, the way his tiger half and more than a little of his human self were dying to do.
It’s lucky, really, that backup — witnesses — arrive so quickly. David doesn’t have any idea just how lucky.
«Here’s what’ll happen,» Jake says. «You’re gonna morph human. A little of yourself if you want, and a little DNA from at least one of the rest of us. Ax will show you how to combine DNA. You’re gonna morph. You’re gonna wait two hours. And when you’re done, you’re going to go turn yourself in at the youth shelter downtown under an assumed name. If you try to fight back, try to tell anyone about us, try anything at all, then we will kill you. We will be watching you, ready. Is that clear?»
• One of Cassie’s Biology books compares the impact of an attacking tiger to that of a piano falling on an unsuspecting victim from a second-story window. Only, the text points out, the tiger is designed to drop on you where the piano is not. And if it’s a tiger… the impact is only the beginning. Yeah, Cassie thinks, that about sums it up.
Jake is their vanguard, their first defense, their protector. He is speed and agility and viciousness that can out-fight even Rachel’s elephant or grizzly. He’s the point of their phalanx, every time they fight. He cuts a hole through the front line of controllers time and again, leaving a path of carnage for the others to follow.
It’s more than that, though. The yeerks have to know that Ax is living in the national forest, that there are free hork-bajir hidden in the area as well. But yeerk patrols which go into those woods come back blooded and battered, on the rare times when they come back at all.
Defending his territory is as easy as breathing for Jake. It’s practically a game to the cat mind, prowling through the treetops and brush to stalk his prey (mountain goats and deer, hork-bajir and taxxons) or else simply sprawling out on a branch to wait in lazy silence for the kills to come to him. Don’t go into the woods, the controllers tell each other, and if someone makes you, you can kiss your butt goodbye. You’ll never even see your death before all six hundred pounds of it sink claws into your skin and close teeth around your throat.
• “Why didn’t you tell us you had the flu?” Marco asks, for the umpteenth time since Jake started acting feverish in the middle of their sucky eel field trip to the sewers.
“Sorry,” Jake mumbles, “Di’nt realize. Never been sick before. Sorry.” Never been sick as a tiger, he means.
Jake veers them both toward the left, until Marco course-corrects them back toward Tobias’s edge of the sidewalk. “Don’t throw up again,” Marco says.
“Where’re we goin’?” Jake asks, tone distinctly petulant.
“My place,” Tobias says. “Marco’s dad or Cassie’s parents would probably be alarmed if you came back from the dead, whereas my uncle doesn’t notice my presence most of the time, much less…” He stops, blushing.
“Much less all those times that Rachel has spent the night?” Marco raises his eyebrows, grinning.
“Yes,” Tobias says primly. “Also, shut up.”
“Wasn’t sayin’ anything,” Jake says.
“Romeo wasn’t talking to you, Hobbes.” Marco looks at Tobias again. “If he’s this out of it, he’s probably going to end up killing and eating someone in the middle of the night.”
“I’ll lock him in my room tonight,” Tobias says. “And anyway, if he eats my uncle it’ll be no great loss.”
“I don’t wanna eat any humans,” Jake whines. “Humans taste gross. They’re all covered in shampoo and detergent and stuff.”
Marco and Tobias digest this tidbit in silence for several seconds. And then they exchange a glance with each other and decide they’re both going to forget they ever heard that.
“Plus,” Jake continues, utterly unaware, “There’s testos… tosser… tessosserone.” He squints at Marco as if they are much further than six inches apart. “Girl deer taste better. ‘cause hormones.”
“Thank you,” Marco says solemnly, “ever so much, for making sure the rest of us share in the urge to puke our guts out. Really.”
“Shit like this the reason I’m a vegetarian,” Tobias mutters.
• Jake’s great-grandfather dies. Rachel doesn’t know all of the details, other than the fact that her mom hears from his mom that there was some kind of drama or something around who would attend the funeral. She doesn’t tell Jake, because honestly he’s already homesick enough without her giving him news that won’t make him feel any better. What she doesn’t know, however, is that he’s in the habit of checking up on his family all on his own.
He’s quiet for several days after. He spends most of their next several meetings sitting in silence, chin propped on his front paws, mind clearly elsewhere. Rachel’s no good at this kind of thing, which is why she points it out to Cassie. Cassie has, of course, already noticed, but it takes her nearly a week to catch him alone.
“You want to tell me what’s going on?” she asks.
They’re walking through the woods behind her house. It always makes her feel romantic and mysterious to be stalking through the dusky forest with a tiger at her side, like she’s that princess from East of the Sun and West of the Moon.
“Is there at least anything I can do?” Cassie prompts.
With a small shake, Jake seems to arrive at some conclusion. «Could…» He hesitates. «This would be, like, a really major favor. So I want you to say no if you think it doesn’t make sense. I want you to be honest with me.»
Cassie’s not sure what they’re talking about, but his tone gives her chills. “Tell me what it is, and I’ll tell you whether I can do it.”
«It’s Homer.» Jake is looking away from her as he walks. His tone is casual in a way that doesn’t fool her at all. «I was wondering if, y’know, if you’d be willing to check on him a couple times a week. Maybe… Maybe ask your parents if they’d be willing to take him in. Just if you can. If you have the time.»
“Yeah, sure.” Cassie frowns, wishing he’d look at her. “That’s no trouble at all, seeing as we’ve already got an entire menagerie at home. Jake… did something happen?”
«I appreciate it, really.» He glances at her, and then turns away again as if unable to bear eye contact. «It’s a huge weight off. It’s just, see, I don’t think he’s really being taken care of these days. Not when he’s living in a house with no one but controllers.»
• Later, Rachel will feel like an idiot for not having figured it out. Sure, she doesn’t see that much of Jake’s family, but it’s obvious in hindsight. They’re not pretending that hard. Jake’s dad quit his job and transferred to a local hospital that’s rotten with yeerks, whereas his mom can suddenly be seen at the main marketing office for the Sharing. All three of them leave the house together once every three days like clockwork, back two hours later to resume their lives like nothing happened. None of the Animorphs know exactly what happened or when, other than the fact that Rachel’s pretty sure that that funeral had something to do with it. Maybe the travel plans, maybe the wrong kind of questions, maybe something else entirely caused the yeerk inside Tom to infest his parents.
Cassie adopts Homer. It’s the least she can do.
• Rachel outright tells Jake, more than once, to stop being a selfish prick and just go out with Cassie the next time she asks. Every time he asks her, nicely but firmly, to drop the subject. At least until after the war.
• Jake doesn’t expect the ground to literally drop out from under him in the middle of a battle outside a yeerk compound. He lands on his feet, of course, all four sets of claws at the ready. But he’s also alone, lost, and surrounded by what must be hundreds of taxxons.
Before panic can set in, a single taxxon slithers forward to regard him critically, and with only a moderate amount of visible hunger. «What’s your name?» the taxxon says.
Jake stiffens in surprise. The voice sounds andalite. «I’m Jake,» he says. «You’re…»
«A fellow nothlit, yes.» The taxxon gives a small, mocking bow. «Arbron. We chose you because we’ve seen you go straight from that form to other morphs, even though it is evident you were not born a tiger. So we know you’ll be sympathetic to our cause.»
«That might be true,» Jake says. «What cause, exactly?»
• The taxxons’ proposal sounds, to Jake, like the first true spot of hope they’ve had since the war began. After hammering out the details with Toby and the other Animorphs, they agree: the taxxons can have access to the morphing cube, as can any yeerks who want it, provided anyone who uses it agrees to become a nothlit. It’s not bad, Jake assures them, even nice in a lot of ways to be nearly-invincible and super-strong.
And that’s how hosts start disappearing from the Yeerk Empire. Mostly they’re taxxons at first, free to wander off long enough to meet Jake and Ax in the woods so that they can morph and transfer. But there’s a trickle of humans and gedds and hork-bajir that start flowing in as well, ones who escaped — or whose yeerks let them go.
It’s not long before yeerks themselves start showing up. They wander into the woods, most of them with human hosts who agreed to give a ride for this exact purpose, and call up at the trees, asking the andalites nicely if they could please morph and leave this stupid war. Ax is floored the first time it happens, and pleasantly surprised the second. By the fifth or sixth batch of yeerks, he starts to suspect this thing is for real.
• Visser Three issues an announcement that any yeerk found deserting the empire to become a nothlit will be executed. Which is very considerate of him, because that’s how the 90% of yeerks who didn’t already know end up finding out that that’s an option.
• Within three months, the Yeerk Empire has been peacefully decimated, and there are nearly four thousand new whales repopulating the Pacific Ocean. Within four months, Toby has to double the size of the hork-bajir valley to account for the sheer number of former controllers of all species who have opted to remain in their original forms and live in her colony. Within six months, yeerks’ efforts to recruit new human hosts are becoming ever more desperate, because taxxons and hork-bajir keep disappearing. Visser Three’s attempts to control his shrinking empire are ever harsher, ever stricter, ever more terrifying.
• The Animorphs never find out who does it, whether it’s a Peace Movement yeerk or just a disgruntled underling. What Erek does report back to them is this: one of Visser Three’s own bodyguards opened fire, as the other three guards stood by and watched. He was dead before he even had time to cry out — and the new leader of the yeerk invasion of Earth would very much like to negotiate a surrender.
• The day after the U.N. and Council of Thirteen and Andalite Electorate representatives sign the armistice, Jake leaves behind his role in negotiations. As all his friends watch, he plunges into the Pacific surf. Cassie morphs dolphin to join him, while Rachel and Tobias both just wade in as humans. For nearly an hour they roll and duck and splash each other in the sandy water. It’s maybe too intense, too solemn, for them to be playing, even though they try. Eventually Jake wades back out to dry land. He shakes himself off, fur glittering in the sunlight, and with a soft sigh he begins to morph for the very last time.
• “And you seriously spent almost three years like that?” Tom asks again.
“You know that’s, like, the four hundredth time you’ve asked, right?” Jake says.
“I’ll stop asking when it stops being weird,” Tom says. “Ergo, probably never.”
They’re sitting on the grimy concrete floor of a California warehouse, converted into a temporary government processing center. There have to be over five thousand other people waiting with them in tiny clusters and clumps, all there for the same reason: the hope that the next name of a newly-freed yeerk host the man with the megaphone calls out will be the right one. The crowd has undulated, swelling with new arrivals and shrinking every time someone finds a loved one and leaves, the entire eight hours Jake has been here.
He’s already gotten lucky once. Tom is sitting with his back propped against a wall, eyes half-lidded with exhaustion. Twice, if you count the fact that Marco left along with his mom just half an hour before.
“So did you have a set of those little mouse-shaped toys with the bells in them?” Tom asks, smirking. “You cough up any hairballs?”
“Dude.” Jake rolls his eyes. “Tiger, not a housecat.”
“Does that mean you won’t be running into the kitchen every time Mom opens a can of tuna from now on?”
“No tuna. Just depopulating the local forest of deer and risking shotgun pelts to the butt by occasionally going after livestock.” Jake gives the simple version.
Tom chuckles, the sound weary. “Nah, still fuckin’ weird.”
“Yeah.” Jake looks down at his soft hands, his small and clumsy body. He still feels off-balance, days later. “It is weird.”
“That’s…” Tom cuts himself off, suddenly surging to his feet. Jake tenses, following him, wishing for claws that will never again slide to the ready with a moment’s thought.
Even clear across the room, Jake’s human vision lets him see as the very familiar shape walks through the door. As his mother’s eyes scan the room, then stop on him. As they go wide with shock… and then fill with tears.
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