| #22: The Solution |
Detailed Plot: Rachel is dreaming when she's awakened by Ax in his bird morph. He explains that David is a traitor and that Jake wanted her to be brought in for reinforcements. Tobias may be dead and Rachel is the worst thing that could happen to David right now . . . and everyone knows it. Ax and Rachel arrive at the mall, where Jake is lying unconscious as a tiger surrounded by his own blood. He's breathing, though. Rachel asks Ax to demorph and help watch over Jake. But Ax is tricked by a clock David sets, and Rachel gets attacked by David in his lion morph. A gymnastic trick saves her, and David taunts her, saying he has no qualms about killing someone if they're not human. Rachel tells David straight up that she is going to kill him. And she means it. Medics and then Cassie's mom arrive and start taking care of Jake, and Cassie's mom of course thinks it's one of their tigers from The Gardens because that's where Jake got the morph. Rachel and Ax were hiding in his ear as flies, and as they're getting away they overhear some Controller cops talking about not wanting to tell Visser Three about the tiger because he'll have wanted them to do something about it. Off they go to see if Marco is okay. Rachel's bothered by the fact that Jake sent for her in case they needed to do something terrible. Rachel and Ax find Marco asleep in his bed and signal to him, and they come in the open window. But "Marco" is actually David in morph. He smacks Ax with a baseball bat and holds up three fingers like he's killed three of them. Rachel decides she's going to take him out. She tries to lead him toward power lines--because as an owl, she can see them while he probably can't in the darkness--but his morph is more powerful and he catches her. Then Tobias comes out of nowhere and saves her; turns out the bird David killed was an actual red-tailed hawk. David retreats, not wanting to take two at once. Turns out Jake revived and demorphed with Cassie's help (along with a shot that woke him up), and Ax was only stunned, not killed. They survived the battle with David, but then . . . they had to go to school. There they run into David in Marco morph. He tells them he wants the blue box, and they figure out he wants to use it as a bargaining chip to get his parents back. They won't play, and the Animorphs trade some intimidating words until David leaves. Rachel goes to chase him and Jake lets her go after David . . . she threatens him and his family, and shows him she's his superior even when they're a male against a female in their natural forms, and she realizes she's ashamed of herself because Jake knows what she's really capable of. Rachel tries to get some sleep but after school they have to work on a plan to interrupt the infestation at the banquet. They meet at Cassie's barn, and Jake details a plan but Ax tells Rachel that their plans will be different because they think David might be in morph in the barn overhearing them. They head out to the Marriott where the world leaders are staying. Bird morphs become useless when a terrible thunderstorm starts, so they morph to dolphin (using Cassie's quick morphing ability to have her go first and then support the others). They swim toward their destination, passing a rocky island that makes Rachel edgy. After morphing back to human and into large battle morphs (Ax, Cassie, and Tobias having acquired elephant morphs to join Rachel's, with Marco and Jake as rhinoceroses), they charge the hotel bungalows and start ripping everything up. They get shot at by people who are presumably Controllers but they hardly feel it. And when they've caused enough damage to figure the banquet wouldn't happen, they escape into the ocean again. But then they run into David in killer whale morph! He thinks he's killed Tobias, so he's expecting to only see five dolphins; Cassie hides and morphs a humpback whale so she can get rid of him, but the rest of them have to fight David until Cassie can chase him off. It works for the time being. The next day, Rachel and her sisters are told they can stay home from school because their cousin Saddler is not doing well and they think he's going to die. She tries to give one of her sisters a pep talk, but then once she's alone again she hears David thought-speaking to her, sending her a message that he knows where she lives and that she shouldn't have threatened his parents because now he's threatening hers. They have an uneasy truce to leave each other's parents alone, but she feels too creeped out to take a shower thinking he might be around looking at her. Rachel goes to Jake's, where most of the family is planning to go to the children's hospital to see Saddler. Rachel tells Jake what David did and starts interrogating him about whether he thinks she's a crazy violent psycho. He gives her some hope that perhaps he just thinks she's good at what she does, but based on his answers she's still bothered to feel that Jake understands her tendency toward violence and willingness to do terrible things, and if he sees it in her then it must be true. Off to the hospital they go to see Saddler, and when they get there they hear about how it's a miracle and Saddler recovered without any explanation. Supposedly he flatlined and the doctors were rushing to get him to surgery, when suddenly he opened his eyes and said "Hi." Everyone's relieved and shocked and trying to figure out how come he doesn't even have bruises, but of course Jake figures out that "Saddler" is really David in morph. He's done this because he wants a place to sleep and a place to call home. When passing by Jake and Rachel on the way to the bathroom, they call him out on it and he says there's nothing they can do about what he's planning, and he wants the blue box. They don't know what really happened to Saddler. While David is in the bathroom demorphing and remorphing, Jake confesses to Rachel that he does believe something dark lives inside her, and that she's the best person to have in a fight. He also confesses that he thought he was above asking Rachel to do his dirty work, but he isn't. Now they have to work together to use their strengths to take David down. Rachel hasn't really been able to process Jake's words entirely, but she's relieved that he's said them. The Animorphs go to Cassie's barn and make a plan. They leave Tobias out on purpose and stage a conversation that they are assuming David is listening to, hoping he'll assume they're telling the truth if they fight amongst themselves and whatnot. They say Rachel and Cassie have hidden various parts of the blue box and discuss getting David a rat morph so he can go get it, sending Cassie with him to prove it isn't a trap (supposedly). After the meeting is over, Tobias reassures them that he's almost sure David was in the barn overhearing, just like they hoped. They meet with David (who's morphed as Saddler) at a Taco Bell, and they claim Cassie will take David to the blue box since she's the only one who knows the way. But since David overheard their decoy conversation, he believes Rachel also knows and insists that she be the one to lead him there. They fly to the construction site, where David gets the other Animorphs to morph into cockroaches as he threatens Rachel in rattlesnake form, so they have to do what he says and then crawl into a Pepsi bottle, which he seals. That way they'll be stuck in cockroach morph if Rachel does anything stupid, and they can't interfere with what David thinks is the plan. Then, with her friends trapped, Rachel has to crawl in rat morph down the construction site's piping to show David the blue box pieces. There, Rachel leads David on a wild goose chase and keeps pretending to have been beaten and humiliated, leaving just enough anger in her responses to make him not get suspicious. But then Rachel manages to chase and battle David out into a cage the others have ready. Tobias was the one who let them out, which David didn't anticipate because he thought Tobias was dead. While David is stuck in a cage too small for him to morph, the others reveal that they anticipated his actions and emotions and figured he would get off on humilating and controlling Rachel. David does one more fake-out, trying to pretend he was bested and now was willing to follow Jake's orders, but of course they don't believe him and they intend to let him get trapped in rat morph. It's revealed that Cassie came up with the whole plan because she was able to understand how to manipulate David. Everyone leaves but Rachel and Ax. Ax keeps track of time and Rachel stays to make sure this is finished. When it's over and David is trapped for good, Ax and Rachel take him out and leave him on the rock that made Rachel feel uneasy before, figuring since other rats live there there must be a food supply. Ax and Rachel agree not to speak of this again. Narrator: Rachel New known controllers:
New morphs acquired:
Cassie: Elephant Marco: Rhinoceros Rachel: Rat Ax: Elephant Tobias: Elephant David: Human (Marco), whale (orca), human (Saddler), rattlesnake, rat (white) Notable: Rachel says that the lumpy, rocky island makes her nervous for some reason, and this is foreshadowing considering what later happens on that island. Cassie is usually the one who sort-of foresees significance before it can be known, but here Rachel is doing it. It's not said what happened to the real Saddler's body. It seems odd that David could get rid of it as easily as he did. At the end of the book Rachel's narration says "We never heard from David again," with a qualifier about how some people heard ghostlike thought-speak coming from where David was stranded. But if you look at a much later book, that most certainly shows that this was NOT the last they heard of David. Best lines:
Rachel: "Marco. You know you're a toad?" Rachel: I guess if you think about it, hanging out with a bunch of politicians talking about peace must be kind of dull. After a couple days of that, maybe you kind of welcome massive, enraged animals barging through your living room. Rachel: "I mean, you don't want to think it could happen to you. So you have to come up with excuses. Ways it could never happen to you. You end up blaming the person who got hurt. Because then you don't have to think about what if it was you it happened to."
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