AU idea: what if the kids took the Escafil Device with them, noticed that disabled people were passed over by the Yeerks, and started recruiting the Auxiliaries right away?
• The Pediatric Long-Term Rehab Center of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles has a secret. It’s an open secret, to be sure—any of the kids who aren’t directly involved nevertheless know something about something—but none of them have ever breathed a word to their parents or friends or caregivers about where James and his friends go when they sneak out every few nights. Certainly no one has ever so much as hinted about the way he and his friends leave, because who would believe them? The nurses shut the window every time they come by; Faith or Pedro or one of the others left behind always opens it again.
• They’re divided into units: Craig’s team, Erica’s team, Jake’s team. Jake and the five friends who fight directly under him all live across town, operating semi-independently, but they always find their ways to come by and check in with James.
Ax becomes a volunteer entertainer for the unit, swooping in every week to sing pop songs or play instruments for the children. He’s delighted enough by mouth sounds that Collette and Liam actually start teaching him to sing for real after a while, so that he can perform Britney Spears and the Rolling Stones on command for the nurses.
Rachel brings home brochures for a gymnastics camp that meets twice a week after school every day, makes a big show of convincing both her own mom and Cassie’s parents to let them join, and then simply doesn’t bother signing either of them up for the camp in reality. Every Monday and Thursday Naomi drops them off, clad in leotards and leggings, at the community center downtown. Every Monday and Thursday, an osprey and a bald eagle can be seen soaring out the skylight and heading downtown.
Marco takes a bus to the hospital any time he feels like; Peter never notices his disappearances. He’s a frequent enough visitor that the nurses know his face, but by then Marco is already dating Collette so that’s his excuse ready-made.
No one notices Tobias disappearing into thin air, and certainly no one notices the red-tailed hawk that can sometimes be seen circling the hospital’s rehab center.
Jake makes the daringest move of all when he simply joins The Sharing, which sends volunteers to the hospital every weekend to read to the patients. He slouches around the edges of meetings making noise about how he’s only there for the free food and the college application boost, and eventually everyone concludes it’s not even worth the waste of time to ask him when he’s going to become a full member.
• Jake might be their founder, but James is their commander.
“Doesn’t it bother you?” Jake asks one day. “Ax calling you ‘prince’ all the time, I mean. It would drive me nuts.”
“The last prince he had was his big brother,” James points out. “He knows I could never fill those shoes, but I’m honored he’s asking me to try.”
And Jake shuts up about the subject of titles.
• The thing is, it’s a big group. There are over 20 of them directly involved in the war, another 30-odd who know something about something. The leak is inevitable.
The young man who walks into their rec room on an ordinary Tuesday bears a passing resemblance to Jake—same long nose, same dark eyes, same lanky build—but you could never mistake them, because the overt cruelty twisting those features is the kind of expression Jake would never wear. “Which of you is James Connerton?” he asks. James has him out cold on the floor before the yeerk has time for another word.
The next several minutes are a frantic hurricane of life-or-death decisions made too quickly with not enough information. James gathers everyone who can morph, everyone who can fly and fight, and he’s sending them out the window as droves of pigeons before they can do more than ask what’s going on. In the chaos, there is no time to grab anything, no time to leave messages for family or friends.
Liam says “I’m not going with you,” and in the long silence that follows everyone figures out what he means.
“You traitor,” Tricia spits. James holds up a hand to stop her. It takes maybe the greatest effort of willpower he’s ever exerted, but he watches with dry eyes and clenched jaw as Kelly morphs and kills Liam on the spot.
The brutal thing is, Liam’s not the only one who can’t come with them. There are several others who cannot survive on the run, away from respirators and morphine and palliative care. “Do as they tell you,” James tells the ones he leaves behind. “Give them everything they for ask about us, cooperate with everything they ask for, and try not to get yourselves killed. That means…” And now the tears threaten harder, but again he forces them back. “If they ask you to become controllers, you do it. We will end this war, and we will be back for you. Until then… Survive.”
As the others either brace themselves or flee, James walks back into his room. He kisses Pedro on the forehead, whispers “Take care of them.” And then he morphs falcon, leading his reduced flock away from the building as the black limousine pulls up outside.
• When they land in the woods, they take nearly an hour to let it sink in: they were twenty-six this morning, and right now they are fifteen.
Julio screams at the sky. Craig calls Liam names that most fourteen-year-olds wouldn’t even know. Erica doesn’t morph, but her howl of rage and pain does credit to her wolf shape. Pedro was the little brother James never had; Ray was Erica’s first love.
And then they pick themselves up, take inventory, and start planning where to go from here. These children’s lives have all touched loss, from the accident that took James’s father and his legs, to the three roommates Jessie has seen die throughout a lifetime spent in hospitals, to the twenty-year limit doctors have put on Collette’s lifespan. They know how to categorize, how to cope, how to adapt around scar tissue and amputation. They adjust, and then they go back to work.
• Jake’s team appears to be secure—for now. James and the others make it to the hork-bajir valley with their help, and with Toby’s help they start planning their next attack.
• It’s a routine reconnaissance mission on the outskirts of a Sharing meeting, one that’s not meant to turn into a full-blown attack until suddenly it does. They are an army, the twenty-one of them who remain, and there are so many frantic messages shouted back and forth in thought-speak that when Jake gives the order to retreat, Cassie doesn’t hear until it’s too late. They are an army, and so it’s not until they do a headcount mid-retreat that they realize they left one behind.
The yeerks never took her. It’s a small reassurance, but it’s the only one the Animorphs have.
Forty-eight hours later, Cassie’s parents paper the town with missing posters. Her image makes it to the local news, next to a segment of Michelle tearfully begging for any word at all about her daughter. The adults’ search goes on for over three months, hope waning steadily.
Jake spends most of that time sitting in his room staring at the wall. Jean tells him that if he wants to talk she’s here. Steve reassures him more than once that they’ll find Cassie soon. Tom—or the appearance of Tom—mutters about how Jake didn’t even know her that well so he should probably get over it. Homer, who doesn’t know much but still understands human emotion better than Temrash 114 ever will, curls up at Jake’s side and growls at anyone who gets too close.
Jake thinks of pieces of a wolf’s body, cut clean down the middle by a dracon beam, buried at the edge of the farmland Cassie’s family has owned for over a century, marked only by a boulder Marco’s gorilla hands rolled over the fresh earth. He tells James, “I’m out,” and James doesn’t argue.
Rachel, however… Rachel shows up in Jake’s doorway after his fourth missed meeting, her perfect makeup almost enough to hide her red-rimmed eyes. She sits on the end of Jake’s bed (growling right back at Homer when he objects) and says, “You know what I’ve been asking myself more and more since the war started? ‘What would Cassie do?’ Because she was the best of us at keeping herself. And if I can figure out what she would do, then most of the time I can figure out what I should do.” She leans close, not letting Jake look away. “We have got to keep her around, or I don’t even want to know what’s going to happen to the rest of us. We’ve gotta keep figuring out what she would do, and we’ve gotta keep doing it, or by the end of the war we’ll all be more like me than like her.” She sticks out her hand, palm up in offering. “So come on. The yeerks are shipping portable kandrona generators through the garment factory downtown, and according to Marco I’m in charge of this little team for now. So we’re gonna do this raid, and we’re gonna do it right. Like Cassie would insist that we did.”
Jake takes her hand. The raid goes according to plan, as much as these things ever do. Afterward, he leaves a pebble on top of that unmarked stone.
• While all of this is going down, Kelly stops breathing in her sleep. Timmy resuscitates her, and she morphs, but two days later it happens again. The thing is, cystic fibrosis is progressive, and it’s not fixed by morphing.
Kelly and James have a long conversation. She says a lot of things she doesn’t mean, he says a lot of things he does, and at the end of it she acquires DNA from him. From Collette. From Elena. From every single one of her fellow Animorphs. Ax talks her through the process, and then she morphs for the very last time.
A teen runaway shows up at a shelter downtown, claiming her name is Kelsey James. Within two weeks she’s in foster care. Her fight is done.
Timmy doesn’t wake up when Julio starts struggling a month later, and the following morning Julio doesn’t wake up at all.
James calls a meeting of the entire team, because they can’t keep going like this, with no equipment or support or doctors’ assistance. Jake hesitates for a long time, but at last he says it: “My dad’s a pediatrician.”
• It was always only a matter of time before the yeerks’ investigations into James’s known associates turned up a connection to Marco or Ax; the time has come to evacuate the four families that remain ignorant.
Ax and Rachel convince her mom to take her sisters and follow them to safety. Marco takes Collette with him, and together they decide what to tell his dad. Tobias uses his own and Timmy’s gentler touch to approach Cassie’s parents with the news that they can’t bring their daughter back, but they can offer closure.
Jake, James, and half a dozen other Animorphs do with a sledgehammer what the others are accomplishing with a scalpel. Tom gets unceremoniously tossed in the trunk of the car, tied up with almost a hundred yards’ worth of duct tape. Jake holds his own mother at gunpoint as she drives with shaking hands where he directs her, glancing occasionally in the mirror at her white-faced husband and the full-grown lion draped across their back seat. Nothing any of them say will convince Jean and Steve that their son has been replaced by an alien, so they don’t even bother. Explanations will have to be sorted out at a later time.
Everyone arrives in one piece, more or less. James, who has a knack for this kind of thing, sits Jake’s parents down to explain. Jake leaves him to it, more concerned with negotiating for his brother’s life. He offers the yeerk a fast death, and makes it very clear that the only alternative is a slow one.
The yeerk chooses a fast death. Jake grants it to him. And then Tom pulls him into the longest hug Jake’s had in his life, clinging as if Jake is the only raft in a storm.
• Steve writes the most extensive shopping list Jake has ever seen in his life, and the Animorphs use it to rob a hospital for everything Erica and the others will need. James takes the morphing cube, goes to the nearest school for the blind, and comes back with over a dozen new Animorphs. Tobias disappears for almost a week, but when he comes back Loren is with him. Rachel leads her team of five on mission after mission, and at the end of each one the stack of pebbles on Cassie’s grave grows by one. Naomi writes the hork-bajir their own constitution. Loren starts an interspecies baseball league. Toby starts freeing human-controllers along with her hork-bajir, and the population of their valley swells to almost 500 people.
• There are about a dozen of them sitting around a fire, debating next moves, when Tom says, “I could steal you a Blade ship. But I’d need a hell of a diversion.”
Jake and Rachel smile at each other, nearly identical grins. And then they become the first two to volunteer for the suicide run.
The ensuing fight is bloody, and awful, because that’s the way that war works. Somewhere in the middle of it, Ax points out that the yeerk pool can be drained for cleaning. It’s Marco who says, “C’mon, man, what would Cassie do?” and stays his hand. Instead they fake an alarm indicating a hull breach in the Pool ship; in the end, it works just as well.
«Who exactly are you?» the andalite prince asks.
Marco cocks a thumb. “This is James. James Connerton. President of Earth.”
• James retires, more or less, retreating to work quietly as a volunteer in youth outreach in downtown Los Angeles. He leaves the limelight to Marco and Collette, the political wrangling to Timmy and Elena. There are just five Animorphs left, where once there were dozens, but James sees to it that the others are not forgotten. He pays for the monument erected on top of Cassie’s grave, the sports scholarship earmarked for teenage girls in Rachel’s name. Tobias gets a national forest purchased in his name; Ax gets a $500,000 anonymous donation to CinnaBon’s R&D department. To honor Jake, James writes a memoir, preserving all their stories exactly as they happened before history has the chance either to glorify them or to gloss them over.
