| #48: The Return |
Detailed Plot: The Animorphs mysteriously happen to be touring the White House when the Yeerks finally risk open warfare to attack. Rachel sees Tobias get shot, and Jake gives the order to do battle morphs. As the Secret Service tries to get everyone out, Hork-Bajir-Controllers begin to pour in. Rachel gets ordered around by Jake one too many times and begins to become enraged at being told what to do. After disobeying his orders and helping the President escape in his helicopter, she finds herself facing off with Jake, fighting him for control, and losing--knowing she's inferior because she isn't thinking clearly. She hates him for it, and then she wakes up. Another nightmare--one she apparently has often. Rachel wants to talk to Cassie about her problem; she's ashamed of the fact that she likes the war, and thinks perhaps this has all gone too far. But she's tired of her friends shunning her and treating her like she's a bloodthirsty monster, so she tries flying around as an eagle to talk to Tobias about it, and he admits that none of them understand where she's coming from with enjoying her role in the war. She wants to talk to Jake because maybe he'll understand, then realizes perhaps he is threatened by her and might be behind all this misunderstanding. Suddenly she realizes she's flying straight for the radio tower and can't turn, and wakes up from yet another nightmare. She's unsure this time of whether she's really awake. While getting ready for school, she finds herself thinking about the ruthless way the Animorphs had had to trap David as a rat after their first experiment in making more Animorphs had gone terribly wrong. Coincidentally, that's when Rachel's mother alerts her that a rat is in one of the traps and she needs Rachel to get rid of it. (Yet again, Rachel is the one used to do the dirty work when other people are too squeamish. Even her mother thinks of her that way.) At school she's having trouble remembering what only happened in her dreams and what's reality, and then in class she keeps seeing a red glare and hearing rats in the walls. She takes a break from class and from studying a story about guilt--Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart"--and she hears a voice that seems to answer her thoughts, challenging her to ignore what Jake thinks of her because leaders don't care about such things. She leaves a note for Cassie and leaves school. But soon all hell breaks loose. Hundreds of rats attack Cassie and Rachel, and Rachel runs to the lake to try to get rid of them. She manages to drown or loosen the rats, but she gets captured and pulled under the ground. Once in the sewer, she finds herself locked in a box, and she can't climb out of one of the airholes because insecticide coats the bottom of the cage. Facing her are a couple of human stooges and David the rat. He explains to her how he got off the island--along with rats he'd recruited--and he explains what he intends to do to her. He intends to get his revenge by forcing her to become trapped as a rat too. She claims she'd rather die, so David takes the liberty of bringing Cassie into the prison and putting her in a box with no airholes. He says he'll open an airhole for her if she morphs to rat for him, and after she does so, he taunts her with a clock and tells her she has to stay that way for two hours. Rachel wrestles with her own guilt and fury, especially ticked when David says she couldn't have been human if she'd been able to do what she did to him. She doesn't bother to tell him that actually Cassie came up with the plan; she was just the one who'd carried it out, knowing that David hated her the most. While Rachel sweats it out in rat morph, David's thugs give her rotten food to eat and David eats fresh food in front of her on the other side of the clear wall. David explains that he intends to rule the world by wiping out half the human population with bubonic plague, and that he'll control the other half by threatening to infect them. As David talks about getting rid of Jake and the Yeerks, Rachel starts to realize that he's making some sense, and she's lulled by the promises he's making, but all too suddenly she realizes something's wrong. A lot of what she's been through--especially the rats mobilizing and assisting in her capture--is just not natural. It's not long before she realizes that Cassie was never there and this is all a trick of Crayak and the Drode. Crayak shows itself and explains that David has to tell her the truth now that she's figured out David's story is a lie. He says Crayak got him off the island and promised him a companion--and Rachel was his choice. But Crayak also has plans for Rachel, and offers her the chance to be a giant godlike being. He toys with her perceptions by letting her briefly experience an alternate form--she thinks of it as "Super-Rachel"--and then zapping her back to her rat morph, in which she will still be trapped if she doesn't escape within the time limit. She and David have a tussle and he's bigger and more experienced being a rat, so he has her pinned. Rachel can't stand feeling so powerful balanced against being so powerless. After she gets very tired of the yo-yo act, Crayak promises her she can be Super-Rachel--and not a rat--for good if she'll promise to kill Jake in retaliation for his ruining the Howlers. Rachel insists that she can't because she's a good guy, and immediately there's Cassie, trapped again. For Cassie, "good and evil" is easy, according to Crayak, but Rachel doesn't know what Cassie would do. Then Crayak brings Visser One face to face with Rachel. She has no trouble intimidating him, and the visser has no idea what to make of suddenly being teleported to a dungeon to fight a giant supergirl, but Crayak tells him he has to fight Super-Rachel and will be given Earth for his own if he wins. On the other hand, if he loses, he'll have to leave Earth, and he doesn't have a choice about this. So the battle begins, and the visser uses some crafty morphs to get the upper hand, eventually becoming some red goo that suffocates Rachel. She manages to turn into a treelike creature that doesn't need to breathe--apparently she can become anything she imagines--and finally Visser One begins to beg for his life, protesting that the fight is unfair. All Rachel has to do is kill him, but then she realizes this is not what she wants to become. She'll be a tyrant if she lets her dark side take over. She refuses to finish the deal with Crayak, and ends up back in the cage opposite David the rat--back to being a rat herself. Crayak and the Drode chastise her and tell her she's an idiot for giving up the chance she had, and they put her back in the box with David and leave them alone. Now she has no choice but to be trapped as a rat. She manages to get David's goons to free her by tricking them with promises of money, and she just barely makes it out of rat morph before her time is up. Instead of making good on her promise to get David's money for the punks, she turns into a grizzly and frightens them away, and she also frees Cassie. But then she has to figure out what to do with David, who will probably go to the Yeerks if she doesn't kill him. After consulting with Cassie, she pretends she's just going to take him back to the island and abandon him there, but truthfully she doesn't know what to do. She understands that she does the dirty work so the others can continue to feel like good guys, and she understands that her association with them makes her one of the good guys as well, but even though David insists he wants to die instead of continuing as a rat, she just can't decide what she should do, and the book ends there. Narrator: Rachel New known controllers:
New morphs acquired:
Cassie: None Marco: None Rachel: None Ax: None Tobias: None Notable: This book is ghostwritten by Kimberly Morris. It's credited to Lisa Harkrader, but that was a mistake. David claims that Crayak got him off the island "in exchange for a companion." This whole concept makes little sense because it seems there is no "exchange." David got the favor of being taken off the island AND he got the favor of being promised a companion of his choice. Obviously Crayak has his own reasons for doing what he did for David, but this whole setup is poorly explained. At one point there's a badly punctuated sentence: ". . . I began to shake. The-human and the rat-me." The sentence would read better as "The human-me and the rat-me," or even without the hyphens. There's also an incorrect use of "it's." "Crayak went on, it's voice low and powerful" should be "its." There's some thought-speak confusion in Chapter 24 as well--Rachel flips back and forth from speaking to using thought-speak, with no explanation. Best lines: Rachel: Was it the grizzly in me that wanted to kill? Or was it the me in me? Rachel: The secret was that whatever we'd been doing, I did like it. And the good guys aren't supposed to like it.
Rachel: "I'm confused." Rachel: I'd been protecting her. Them. Jake. Cassie. Tobias. Even Marco and Ax. Helping to protect their innocence. Letting them see themselves as the good guys. It was a symbiotic relationship. Or co-dependent, whatever. They needed me to be the bad guy. And I needed them to be the good guys.
|