It was Tom.
All alone, he charged at Visser Three, armed with nothing but his fists.
One of the Visser"s arms came down and swung at him.
"Tom!" I cried. My tiger body roared with all its might. But the sound was lost in the noise of crying humans and whistling Taxxons.
I saw Tom stagger from the Visser"s blow.
I saw him fall from the edge of the stairs.
I went a little crazy.
I was on the Visser before I knew what was happening. On him, digging my claws into his flesh. I twisted up and behind one of his eight heads.
The tiger in me knew what to do. I sank my teeth into his neck and clamped my powerful jaws and held on.
Another head turned back and aimed a fireball at me. I dodged the first fireball. The second burned my flank. I jumped clear.
The Visser roared in pain. I roared in hatred.
And we ran, ran, ran up those stairs with a hundred nightmares on our heels.
CHAPTER 27.
We ran. Exhausted and burned and terrified, we ran.
Visser Three had made one mistake. He was too large in his morph to follow us much farther up the stairs.
I heard Visser Three yell something as we finally got away. He said", "I"ll kill you all, Andalites. Run away, it doesn"t matter! I"ll kill you Actually, I think it did matter. We hadn"t exactly destroyed Visser Three, but we had come out of it alive, we Animorphs.
The final count was exactly one human freed - the woman who rode Ca.s.sie"s back up out of that h.e.l.lish pit.
And Ca.s.sie had gotten away clean. It had been the suspicious Controller policeman who had grabbed her. He was the only Controller to know her name, where she lived, and that she had been spying on The Sharing.
Ca.s.sie said we didn"t have to worry about him anymore. She didn"t want to talk about what had happened to him.
As for Tom . . . My brother.
Tom was not freed.
I was lying in my own bed, shaking and shivering and crying from the aftereffects of terror, when I heard him come home later that night.
He never knew that I was the tiger. He never knew how close I had come to freeing him. He was a Controller again. The Yeerk was in his head once more.
Ca.s.sie and Marco and Rachel and I had all made it up those stairs. We had emerged into the hallway of a school that would never seem the same to us again.
And Tobias? He survived, too.
It was almost morning when I was awakened from dead sleep by feathery beating on my window.
I opened it and Tobias flew in.
"You made it," I said. "Oh, man, you had me scared. I figured you were still trapped down there. I mean, I thought you could probably find somewhere to hide in that cavern, but I knew you"d been morphed for a long time. I was worried you wouldn"t be able to morph back without getting caught. It"s good to see you."
"Good to see you, too, Jake," he said. "How are the others?"
"Alive," I said. "Alive. I guess that"s all that counts."
"Yes. That is all that matters."
"Come on, Tobias," I said. "Morph back. You can stay here. I"ll even let you have the bed. I could sleep on nails, I"m so tired."
He didn"t say anything. And I guess in my heart I"d known it all along. I just didn"t want to admit it.
"Come on, Tobias," I said again. "Morph back."
"Jake . . . "
"Just come on, back to human now, dude. No more flying tonight."
"I hid in the cavern for a while," he said. "They didn"t see me. But I had to stay out of sight till I could get out. Jake . . . it took too long. Too long. More than two hours."
I just stared at him. At his laser-focus eyes, at his wicked beak and sharp talons. And at his wings. At the broad, powerful wings that let him fly.
"I guess this is me from now on," Tobias said.
I knew there were tears falling down my cheeks, but I didn"t care anymore.
"It"s okay, Jake. Like you said, we"re alive."
I went to the window and looked up at the stars. Somewhere up there, around one of those cold, twinkling stars, was the Andalite home world. Somewhere up there was . . . hope.
"They"ll come," Tobias said. "The Andalites will come. And until then . . . "
I nodded and wiped away my tears. "Yeah," I said. "Until then, we fight."