| #41: The Familiar |
Detailed Plot: After another bloody battle, Jake has to deal with his friends fighting and Cassie acting traumatized and Tobias acting withdrawn. He stumbles home, exhausted, and doesn't bother to dress in his usual outer clothes, which means he comes home in his morphing suit. Tom seems to think this is suspicious, and also notices that he has blood on his leg. He makes excuses and goes to sleep, wondering if Tom buys it all. And then when he wakes up he's about ten years older and in an unfamiliar room. A device on the wall is telling him to report for work and he can see unfamiliar territory out his window, including buildings that suggest he's in New York and ships suggesting the war is over and the Yeerks have won. He figures he's finally gone insane. Jake ends up getting ejected from the room he woke up in and herded into the hall with a bunch of other people dressed like him. He finds himself on a mass transit vehicle being talked to by a guy in a green suit who calls him Essak-Twenty-Four-Twelve-Seven-Five, a Yeerk name. They think he's a Controller? Uh-oh. This guy wants to know when the launch is, and Jake doesn't know the answer so he just doesn't speak. The guy teases him good-naturedly and then gets off at his stop with the other green-suited people. He continues to ride, wondering about his situation, and finds himself insisting that his name is Jake, aloud. Others react to him and he pretends it's just a reaction of his host, and that he still has trouble controlling sometimes. Another passenger says they have pills for that now and tells him to visit the clinic, so he uses that as his excuse for not getting off at his expected stop. He decides he has to get a grip and figure out what's going on, and deal with it. Wandering around the post-apocalyptic Times Square, Jake sees an advertisement for the "High Council Division for the Relocation of Unfit and Insurrectionist Hosts." Someone's graffiti-tagged it with the letters "EF." Jake wonders about it, and hopes it means there are allies to be found, but then Taxxons arrive and start attacking him. After sighting an ancient-looking red-tailed hawk and wondering if it's Tobias, Jake retreats and runs into the subway. He finds some refugees there, most of them with bodies that are maimed so they are unsuited to be Yeerk hosts, but when he tries to leave, Taxxons arrive in a strange racing mass on train tracks, and two of them peel off and come after Jake. He barely makes it back up to the surface, and gets accosted by weird seemingly transparent-skinned aliens called Orff who demand to know why he is not at work. He tries to make up answers but they don't believe him and cuff him. But then an explosion distracts all of them and a skyscraper begins to fall, and Jake gets away in the confusion but blacks out briefly. When he awakes, his handcuffs have mysteriously vanished, and he notices that Taxxons are putting injured people into transports while eating the dead. Jake then runs into a woman in a purple suit who has a weapon, and she looks like Cassie, but isn't responding to him. Taxxons are chasing her, so Jake tries to pursue and help her, but she doesn't make it easy. He finally is able to help her fight off the Taxxons and frees her when she gets pinned underneath a dead one. He's overjoyed to see her, but when she meets his eyes it's not Cassie's expression she's wearing. She notes that he's not dead, and he keeps asking questions but she still isn't acting like herself, and asks him whether he's with the EF. She explains that EF is the Evolutionist Front, dedicated to making Yeerks turn away from parasitism to embrace symbiotic host bodies instead. But Cassie is a Controller herself, who has a Yeerk named Niss, and they are both in the EF together. The two of them engineered the explosion that killed a bunch of people earlier, and that's why Taxxons are after her. Jake can't believe Cassie would be involved in anything like that, and she says she now believes that in a war anything is justified. But after they argue and Cassie says she believes/behaves the way she does because she understands war now, she suddenly notices what his name badge indicates his job is and starts trying to recruit him for a sabotage mission. She and the other EF folks are trying to stop a plot to turn the moon into a sun that radiates Kandrona rays. And apparently Cassie can tell from Jake's designation that he is working on the project. She wants his help to mess it up for them so they can deal a blow to their enemies. But he wants to know what she knows about how they GOT to this future, so she says that Tom had figured out Jake was in the "Andalite bandits" group, plotted a capture, and got all of them made into Controllers except Rachel and Tobias. Tobias escaped. Rachel was killed. Jake notices an issue of Sports Illustrated that his dad had just gotten in the mail the last week of their old life that he remembers, at which point Cassie explains that human civilization pretty much fell to the Yeerks very shortly after they were all captured. Marco's Yeerk is Visser Two and is in charge of Earth. Ax's Yeerk was used to take the Andalite world and kill millions of Andalites while enslaving tens of thousands of them. Visser Three took over the leadership of the Yeerk Empire, up on the Council. It's more than Jake can process, but Cassie is still insisting that he try to help the EF destroy the moon instead of transform it. He agrees to help and lay low until she contacts him, and they decide on the code word "Animorphs." Jake goes to work and acts like it's just business as usual, but he's trying to figure out what he does and how to disrupt the moon ray. But then the office transforms into a gaggle of corpses from enemies he's fought in battle, displaying the wounds they received from a tiger. They all start coming toward him chanting his name, and he freaks out and screams, startling back into reality (which is still a pretty grim place), and sees he's attracted attention. Then a Controller orders guards to get Jake, and he can see that the ordering person is his own father. He doesn't understand why so many coincidences could have happened, and begins to believe this has to be a dream or a setup. But still Orff guards forcibly drag him away, with his father informing him that him being late to work and in the vicinity of the morning's explosion suggest he's involved with it. As he's taken by the Orff, he wonders whether their transparent skin really shows where their organs are, and decides to punch one of them in a clear space . . . which turns out to be a smart gamble. Then Jake realizes he can still morph, and starts turning into a tiger. The enemies don't know what to think because they thought only Andalites could do that, but he's doing it all the same. . . . But Jake hesitates in taking his father out, so he gets knocked out and captured. Then Marco, the Controller, shows up to interrogate him. Jake notes that Marco claims to be Visser Three, not Visser Two as Cassie claimed. He threatens that Jake will be given a better Yeerk who is not part of the EF. Then they show that they have Cassie and they use threats of torturing her to break Jake, which doesn't take long. He lies and says he's in the EF and waiting for more instructions, so Marco releases him and tells him to just go about his EF business while they watch and spy on him. He finds himself inexplicably back at his computer with the work day ending, Controllers standing up to go home. So he leaves work and isn't sure what to do, and ends up getting some food with some Yeerks at happy hour. He meets a Hork-Bajir who pretends to be a bully but actually whispers some instructions for him, identifying himself as being with the EF. Jake pretends he's going to follow the instructions but then doesn't follow through, ending up in the kitchen . . . and then he runs into Rachel, who everyone thought was dead but is actually just horrifically maimed. In a wheelchair and missing three limbs and covered in scars, she still manages to joke with Jake about why he doesn't recognize her. She tells him a contact will meet up with him and he just needs to go about his business. When he leaves the building, he knows he's being followed by Marco's men. He tries to morph but can't make himself become a peregrine falcon for some reason; he doesn't know if it's his own fault or the fault of some kind of anti-morphing technology. But then he ends up having to lose five Orff pursuers. He runs inside what appears to be a sports store and then ends up falling through the floor into a black hole that opened up just for him. And he finds himself in a utopia of sorts, with people chanting and children laughing. Creatures of several species are hiding out there, and one greets Jake and says Cassie must've wanted him to find them if the floor opened for him. The woman explains that their young adults are in the EF and they liberate children who are raised in captivity for Yeerk infestation. He meets a child artist named Justice who respects Jake for being in the EF and says he's going to save people when he's older too. Justice wants to save his friends first, and Jake says sometimes you have to worry about everyone before you get to choose who to save. He insists he'll save his friends first. Then Jake is led to a tree and told to go through, and when he does he's back in the city. He wanders into a library and ends up finding Elfangor standing around in one of the aisles. He greets him and they have a conversation about war and self-sacrifice, but as they talk Jake realizes it's actually Tobias, not Elfangor. He says he used his morph of Ax that he acquired a long time ago, and when he became an adult he ended up looking just like Elfangor. Tobias tells him that actually Tom killed him ten years ago--murdered his brother in his bed because he put it all together. But somehow Jake is also here in the future and only he can make the moon ray miss. He begs Tobias to help save Cassie, but Tobias says he needs to focus on the needs of the many, and that he needs to understand sacrifice when it comes to war. Jake runs away and morphs a peregrine falcon--able to do it this time--and takes off. He gets lost in thought, thinking about being with Cassie and trying to get her to run, but then he thinks about that kid Justice and how he wanted to "save his friends first," and he realizes that is a childish thought. He flies toward the Chrysler Building where the moon ray is about to fire, about to turn the moon into an everlasting Kandrona. Cassie is prisoner up there, and she thought-speaks to him somehow--it doesn't make sense how she can do so, or how she can even see him--but she says to misalign the spires that are transmitting the energy since even a small change will mess it up. She manages to escape her bonds well enough to tweak one of them, but says Jake needs to disable the computers or they'll adjust it quickly and resume. He flies into a doorway and injures himself mortally, but a red-tailed hawk appears and thought-speaks to him, telling him to demorph immediately. He does, and remorphs as a tiger. Jake barges into the ring of Yeerks who are about to transform the moon, and they say throwing a terrorist from the sky will be part of their celebration. Jake fights his way through the Hork-Bajir and Orff, and he can clearly see that there is a red button marked "abort" which he can push to stop the moon transformation. But they throw Cassie out the window, and though she catches herself with one hand, it's not going to be long before her strength gives out. Who will he help? Cassie or the world? He leaps, and the chapter ends without telling what his choice was (despite being technically ambiguous, all signs point to his saving Cassie instead of the world), but suddenly he's yanked away to blackness, where a voice that's not the Ellimist or Crayak is telling him he made an interesting choice. It also says humans will bear more study, and then he's back in his life. He springs up and grabs the phone, and calls Cassie to ask if she's okay. He's realized "what he's made of" and the limits of his ability to sacrifice. Narrator: Jake New known controllers:
New morphs acquired:
Cassie: None Marco: None Rachel: None Ax: None Tobias: None Notable: This book is ghostwritten by Ellen Geroux. This book came out about a year before the September 11th tragedy, so the New York skyline included the World Trade Center, named specifically as a way that Jake recognizes he is in New York. The Yeerk name Jake gets called by in his future world is Essak-Twenty-Four-Twelve-Seven-Five. Awfully big number. It suggests the Yeerks are much more plentiful now. Aliens called the Orff are introduced here. They have single eyes with pupils that orbit the iris, and they have seemingly transparent skin, long necks, and three legs, and the appearance of organs under their skin are actually decoys. It's odd that Jake would be so sure Tobias must be dead after he'd already seen an ancient red-tailed hawk and even wondered if it was Tobias. Even though it turns out Tobias wasn't that hawk, it seems like an inconsistent thought for Jake. Marco is described as having battle scars on his face. That seems unlikely if he is still able to morph. Same with Rachel, who's much worse off; why is she crippled if she can still morph? It's never explained why their morphing abilities were taken away, but since the world has many inconsistencies perhaps this was engineered to make Jake wonder about the reality. His own inability to morph at one point could have been part of this as well. Jake describes seeing purple-blue Hork-Bajir blood. Because this book is a constructed reality, it's not necessarily true that everything has to be true to life, but in a previous book Hork-Bajir blood is green-blue, not purple-blue. Jake describes walking in a library and stopping when he gets to the E aisle. Libraries aren't organized by letter. They're organized by Dewey Decimal--by subjects. There shouldn't be an E aisle. Best lines: Jake: "Jake, you didn't plan this one, but now it's time to deal."
Cassie: "In a war, Jake, anything is justified. I'm not a kid anymore. I'm not concerned with the nonsense I used to be."
Tobias: "Victory without self-sacrifice? You know better than that." Tobias: "Save one or save many? The choice wasn't so hard for you at the Ragsin Building, when you left Marco and Rachel to save themselves. This is war, Jake. Sacrifices must be made." Jake: I'd set the example. I was to blame for Cassie's hardness and Tobias's indifference.
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