It was a race between falling Hork-Bajir and me.
Tseeewww!
ZzzzaaaaPPPP!
The Dracon beam stabbed at me, missed, and boiled a bright blue cabbage into steam.
Just a few more feet!
Suddenly, my hands were pressed on the cold metal. The code! What was the code?
My fingers flew.
Tssseeewww! Tseeewww!
"Het gafrash nur!" a Hork-Bajir screamed.
Tsseeewww!
8Aaaahhh!"; I felt a burn across my back, a glancing blow from a Dracon beam.
The code! The code! I entered it. Was I right? Had I remembered?
Then ...
8System armed."; The cool, thought-speak voice of the computer. 8Warning. This system is armed."; I collapsed, leaning back against the cylinder.
Galuit had said once they got confirmation that we had armed the system, they"d wait half an hour to give us time to escape.
Half an hour would be too long. The Yeerks would be able to disarm it by then.
A huge Hork-Bajir hit the ground right in front of me.
I punched the built-in communicator on the cylinder. 8This is Aristh Aximili,"; I said. 8Do it now. Do it now! Blow the Yeerks off this planet!"; "Filshig Andalite!" the Yeerk inside the Hork-Bajir screamed.
I was calm. Shockingly calm.
8Detonation in ten seconds,"; the computer warned.
"Disarm that weapon!" the Hork-Bajir commander yelled, switching to Galard, the interstellar language.
8Seven ..."; 8I don"t think so, Yeerk. This time you lose. This time, you die."; 8Five ..."; The Hork-Bajir raised his Dracon beam in rage. "You"ll die first, Andalite sc.u.m!"
8Three ..."; He squeezed the trigger.
The Dracon beam fired. Point-blank range. Five feet from my face.
8One ..."; I literally saw the Dracon beam stop. The beam stopped in midair as time froze. I heard a "pop!"
And suddenly, I was no longer there.
CHAPTER 28.
I felt the warm, human skin beneath my six legs. 8What?"; I yelped.
8What the ...?"; Rachel yelled.
8Whoa! Whoa, I am serious: Whoa!"; Marco cried. 8This is way too strange."; I was back. On Earth. In mosquito morph.
We were all back. All back! And all at the same exact moment.
We were in the hospital room, surrounded by human-Controllers who were busy firing human guns out the window at the bushes below. Still trying to kill the Andalite.
Me.
But that was not the biggest problem I had. Because right then, as I sat on vibrating human flesh, surrounded by giant hairs, a huge, sky-filling object came hurtling down toward me.
8ationo way!"; Rachel yelled. 8Ax, move out!"; I fired my wings.
The object, five fingers each as big around as a large tree, came slapping down at me.
"Ow!" said Hewlett Aldershot the Third, as he slapped the spot where I"d been busily biting him.
"Ow!" he said again.
"The human! He"s awake!" one of the human-Controllers said.
"He"s not supposed to wake up yet!"
another moaned. "He"s in a coma!"
"What do we do?"
"The Visser will kill us!"
"The police are coming. We can"t be taken!"
"Run! Run!"
"What do we do with this Aldershot human?"
"We have no orders."
"Run!" someone yelled again. And this time, the rest agreed.
There came a loud vibrating thunder as the human-Controllers all raced from the room in a panic.
Moments later, a frightened nurse came in.
"Mr. Aldershot! You"re ... you"re conscious."
"Of course I"m conscious," he said.
"Nurse, are you aware that this room is full of mosquitoes?"
CHAPTER 29.
"So wait a minute here," Rachel said.
"We get zapped back here through Zero-s.p.a.ce, one by one, at different times. But when we get back here, we all arrive at the same moment?
And no time has pa.s.sed?"
I nodded my human head. We were at the mall. At the place where the excellent food places are. I was in human morph. Behaving perfectly like a human. "Exactly, Rachel.
Eggs-Act"-lee. Zactly. We arrived back at the precise moment when we were s.n.a.t.c.hed away. We were all yanked away at the same moment, so naturally we all arrived back at the same moment. Yanked. Yanked is a strange word. Yank. Yank-kut."
"Yeah," Marco said. "That"s what"s strange: the word "yanked." Us turning into mosquitoes to suck some guy"s blood so we could morph into him and instead ending up in the middle of some war to control psychic yellow frogs, and oh, by the way, blowing up a small continent full of Yeerks, saving an entire species, then getting back here to find out Coma-man woke up from a mosquito bite delivered by a morphed alien-slash-deer-slash-scorpion-slash-four- eyed centaur, that"s all totally normal.
That"s just an average day. Dear Diary: another boring average day, till someone said "yanked.""
I recognized his tone. Sarcasm. It is a form of humor. So I laughed using mouth-sounds.
"Hah. Hah-hah. Hah. Hah." I considered, then added, "Hah."
Prince Jake, Ca.s.sie, Marco, Rachel, and Tobias, in his own human morph, all stared at me.
"What was that?" Rachel demanded.
"I laughed."
"Don"t ... don"t do that, Ax," Prince Jake said. "It"s disturbing somehow."
"Yes, Prince Jake."
"Don"t call me prince."
"I will call you "The Jake formerly known as Prince.""
Marco made a horrified face. "Oh, no. Now he"s making jokes. Bad, bad jokes."
"Actually, that was my joke," Prince Jake said stiffly. "Oh, fine. I get it. You can"t laugh at my jokes. Okay. Great. I don"t even care."
I was an Andalite, all alone, far, far from home. Far from my own people. Except that sometimes your own people are not just the ones who look like you.
Sometimes the people who are your own can be very different from you.
"Can we eat cinnamon buns now?" I asked hopefully. "Bun-zuh?"
THE END.