What if Tobias hadn't gotten stuck as a bird in the first book? Alternatively, what if one of the others had gotten stuck in morph?
Their first mission. The Yeerk Pool. Tobias is crouched in a hidden alcove above the hork-bajir cages, shaking from head to talons, longing for this nightmare to end. Every molecule of color in the battle, every whisper of sound in between the screams, assails his enhanced senses with so much force that he thinks he’s going mad. There’s no way out. There’s nothing he can do. He doesn’t know if any of the others are even still alive out there.
And then a clawed hand touches his talon. Tobias nearly startles into taking off, but stops himself when he realizes that one of the fierce-looking hork-bajir has reached up through the slats in the ceiling of the cage to get his attention.
“Hruthin,” the hork-bajir says. “You go. We make yeerk look.” He’s male, enormously strong, and his sire and dam called him Jara Hamee. His bloodline is one which produces more seers than any other. Tobias doesn’t know any of this. All he knows is that he has gone from having no hope to having a tiny thread.
Tobias takes off, beating the air as hard as he can with wings made strong by terror. The yeerks would spot him, but from behind him there is an enormous CRASH. Half a dozen hork-bajir have thrown themselves against the front of a cage all at once, tipping it clear over to smash on the ground. All the controllers are running in that direction.
Tobias never finds out what happened to them. Later, even after they free several hork-bajir, he’ll never see Jara Hamee again.
Afterward, he can’t stand the thought of going back to his uncle’s place, not when he doesn’t even know if the others are okay. He walks for a long time, the streets silent and so very flat. Eventually he finds himself outside Jake’s neighborhood. He morphs again, flies up to tap at Jake’s window. When Jake sits up, Tobias pretends not to see the tear tracks’ dried salt residue on his skin. They talk for a long time, sitting side-by-side on the end of Jake’s bed, and then Tobias leaves.
He goes back to wandering until the library opens at 7:00 the following morning. The librarians are used to seeing him there for several hours a day; they don’t mind when he slumps on one of the reading room couches for a nap. Afterward, he checks out a battered copy of The Witches for the fourth or fifth time and takes it to school with him, just to see whether it’s still scary after everything that’s happened.
Rachel becomes the one to ask Tobias out, as they’re coming out of Algebra together one afternoon. She’s normally so confident that it takes him a while to figure out that she’s just as nervous as he is. They go out to a movie, get dinner afterwards, kiss twice on the long walk home. When Tobias shyly asks her why she asked, she laughs. “Because,” she says, “we could die at any moment.”
When Tobias starts having strange dreams, he takes forever to mention it to Jake, but when he does Jake admits that Cassie has been having the same dreams. They all morph dolphins together and go to find Ax.
Inside the Dome ship, Tobias becomes the first one to greet the strange new andalite. He follows Ax around for over three hours, pestering him with questions about everything from how andalites eat to what that configuration of the pond and the tree is called. Ax is cagey about the details of most of the technology, but far more willing to let Tobias poke at the strange plants and to translate the writing which covers the hatches and floor.
Later, Ax takes DNA from all five of them. His resultant morph is a little taller, a little rounder-faced, a little more floppy-haired. It’s still beautiful enough to turn heads everywhere he goes.
Tobias and Rachel kiss before every battle, and they kiss after each time they demorph after having survived another fight. Marco usually makes loud gagging noises while Jake and Cassie blush and avoid each other’s eyes.
For three days, while Jake’s tied up out in the woods starving out a yeerk, Tobias has a mom and a dad and a brother and a dog. For three days, he learns what it’s like to have someone lean over and kiss him on the forehead before he goes to sleep. For three days, he walks through the halls of his school without fear, and half the people in his grade wave or shout hello as he passes. He eats three home-cooked dinners during which someone asks about his day and actually listens when he answers. He wakes up on three different mornings to the scent of toasting bread and the soft sounds of Jake’s parents singing along to the radio in the kitchen.
There are reminders, of course, that it’s all a lie. Tom looks sharply at Tobias when Tobias gets up to duck into the bathroom to demorph for the third time in one afternoon, and Tobias feels the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. Mr. Feyroyan stops talking in surprise when Tobias casually comes out with an answer to an Algebra problem that (he realizes too late) Jake probably wouldn’t have known. Once Tobias gets caught out between classes an hour and fifty-seven minutes into his morph and no bathroom stalls free, and barely makes it in time.
The reminders aren’t enough to stop Tobias from wondering, just sometimes, what would happen if he left the morph just a little too long.
The first time Rachel takes Tobias home to meet her mom and sisters, it doesn’t exactly go according to plan. Naomi’s eyebrows raise when Tobias mentions the name of the street he lives on, and they draw together into a frown when he admits that he doesn’t so much have a curfew as he has a tendency to check in on his uncle every few days to make sure the old fart hasn’t yet drowned in his own vomit.
Jordan, who is old enough to discern her mother’s barely-concealed snobbery but young enough to lack all tact, bluntly asks whether Tobias is from “the wrong side of the tracks,” because “Rachel’s not allowed to date guys from there.”
The quality of the conversation doesn’t exactly improve from there on out, especially not after Rachel throws a blob of rice at Jordan and starts shouting at her mother.
It’s an ordinary Tuesday when Tobias snaps. For everyone else it is, anyway; for the Animorphs it’s the morning after a nasty, exhausting battle where they were an inch from dying eight times over while struggling to destroy the Anti-Morphing Ray. Andy Valentino shoves Tobias up against the wall of lockers full-force on his way down the hall—and Tobias shoves back.
Tobias isn’t sure how it descends so fast from there, just that he is sick to death of being shoved around and picked upon by everyone from cosmic powers to twerps like this, just that it feels so good to cut loose, to take a hit and then hit back. Andy’s got friends on the lacrosse team, though, and before Tobias knows it the fight has become three against one… And then Rachel flings herself on Tap-Tap from behind, and now it’s two against three.
Half the school is watching them, or that’s what it feels like; they’re back-to-back, flinging wild punches at anything that gets too close, and there’s an entire circle of chanting losers surrounding them.
Their teammates are drawn by the noise, because of course. Jake sends Cassie to find a teacher and Marco to make sure that Principal Greene beats Chapman to the scene. He’s planning on staying put and trying to disperse the crowd himself—but then Evan Murphy gets both hands around Rachel’s throat and before Jake knows it he’s already waded in to fling him off.
The three of them are fighting half the lacrosse team by now, and they’re just about holding their own. They fight like wild things, like savage creatures, unafraid to dig teeth or nails into tender places, unafraid to fight dirty. They have no technique, no training, but that doesn’t matter, because they don’t go down. These kids can fight through severed limbs and bullet holes and punctured arteries. Compared to what they’re used to, a few cracked ribs or concussions are nothing at all.
John Spencer lands a punch that sends Tobias slamming back into the nearest locker so hard that he bounces off, ears ringing. He spits two of his own teeth at John in a spray of blood and flings himself forward again, feeling all the while like he’s watching the battle from an enormous distance. Andy throws himself onto Jake’s back and Jake rolls forward to fling him off with catlike grace; Andy hits the ground with breath-stealing force and doesn’t get up. Rachel roars like an animal, paste-on nails snapping like claws as she jabs them into the soft meat of the lacrosse captain’s chin and stomach.
Mr. Tidwell isn’t the first teacher on the scene, but he—or maybe Illim—is the first one brave enough to wade in and drag Jake away from Sean Richardsen. After that Ms. Paloma gets between Rachel and Evan, and Tobias has the good sense to back off before Chapman has to force the issue. They all get dragged to the office—or the ones who aren’t due for a trip to the nurse’s or E.R. do—and interrogated for the next two hours. The Animorphs don’t talk; the lacrosse team does. Rachel and Jake each get a month’s suspension, whereas Tobias (who everyone knows doesn’t have irate parents who will come to his defense) gets ten weeks.
Jake’s mom shouts, literally, until she loses her voice. He listens, he nods, and he agrees with every word she says without irony or guile. He knows how irresponsible it was to get involved.
Rachel’s mom cries when she gets the call, which in its own way is even worse. She asks Rachel if this is because of the divorce, voice so tired that Rachel falls over herself to come out with denials.
“Ten weeks, huh?” Tobias’s uncle says. “They better not expect me to feed you during ten weeks’ worth of no free lunches.”
Tobias lies to his uncle about it being in-school suspension, and spends most of the next two and a half months hanging out in Ax’s scoop during the day. The other four come by as often as they can, bringing Pop-Tarts and class notes and homework and Lunchables and news. Ax, who Tobias barely knows, takes Tobias flying more than once to try and map yeerk pool entrances.
Marco handles the situation with his usual style: he makes jokes about it being a crime to keep nerd-boy from throwing off the grading curve for so many days on end. His class notes tend to be filled with rambling asides (his summary of the themes and motifs in Great Expectations contains four pages’ worth of marginal notes on how Dickens is a bombastic moron who was clearly hoping no one would notice all those impossible coincidences) but at least he takes notes which are more-or-less coherent.
Jake, on the other hand, has an approach to most classes which consists of zoning out for up to 20 minutes at a stretch before jerking back to reality long enough to scribble down a few key phrases that sound like they might be on the test later. (His summary of the themes in Great Expectations is just “death, talking gravestone, class struggle… prison ship = class… card names = class… word choice = class… Which class?… wittles = ??? [probably class].)
Tobias winces every time he sees Jake during that first week, because whereas Rachel can just tape her no-longer-broken fingers and redraw her bruises every morning with eyeshadow, Jake definitely can’t get away with making his broken nose or spectacular pair of shiners disappear without his dad especially asking too many questions. Tobias himself stopped and fixed his concussion and broken teeth on the way home from school; he has no one in his life who will ask awkward questions.
After that, they all fall into a pattern of doing each other’s homework to save time for missions.
Jake completes everyone’s take-home U.S. history quizzes, Cassie writes up several different versions of the same Biology experiment, and Rachel regularly performs a small miracle by writing five different essays that actually argue five different positions on whatever novel their English class has to read that month.
Marco might grumble about filling out page after page of Algebra problems, but not only does he have a knack for math but he also has the easiest job, since he can find each answer once and then simply copy it four times.
Ax’s primary contribution to the group effort consists of writing gushing reviews of the bad cooking projects Cassie and Tobias churn out for Home Ec.
Tobias bats cleanup for the rest of the team, finishing Rachel’s and Cassie’s French assignments in between Jake’s Econ homework and Marco’s Art History projects. If Marco is doing the least work (even when he occasionally fills in for Jake or Tobias on their Spanish work), then Tobias is doing by far the most. He insists he doesn’t mind, and he really doesn’t; of all of them, he’s the only one still making an effort to learn things despite the war.
Tobias coasts into his own neighborhood one afternoon with a whopping 90 seconds left before he’s trapped in morph. He’s tested that boundary before, teased his finger close to the edge of that particular candle flame, but he’s not planning on going over today. That’s why he lands behind the sparse cover of an empty dumpster and demorphs in the alley between houses—and the woman walking her dog catches him there.
Tobias straightens up, fully human, heart pounding, wondering how on earth he’s going to talk his way out of this one. The dog is whimpering in fear—or maybe in eagerness to eat the strange bird-human creature—and the woman says softly, “You all right there?”
Tobias is about to stammer out some kind of excuse when he registers, with a guilty rush of relief, that the woman’s not actually looking at him as much as she’s tilting her head in his general direction. That her dog is wearing a service vest. That the handbag over her shoulder has a collapsible white cane sticking out of its pocket. That she hasn’t taken off her sunglasses, even though they’re standing in a dark alleyway in late evening.
“I’m okay,” he says, stepping toward her. In the glow of the streetlight he’s suddenly assailed with several other details: the round curve of her cheeks, the slope of her shoulders, the blond hair still thick between the scars. The long nose he’s seen in the worn photograph next to his bed at home. The pointed chin he sees in the mirror every morning.
He opens his mouth to ask if her name is Loren. What comes out instead is “Mom?”
