The Visitor Read Free Page B

her and realized that she was crying.
    â€œAre you okay?” I asked.
    She shook her head. “No. Are you?”
    I sighed. Flying around in the sky had been a wonderful distraction. But my head was still full of awful memories. “I guess not,” I admitted. “Last night I had a terrible nightmare about the Yeerk pool. I was back down there. Down there in that vast open cave. And I was hearing the screams and cries of the people being dragged to the pool.”
    Cassie nodded. “You know what’s worse than the screams? The way they stop screaming once the Yeerk is in their heads. Once they’ve become Controllers. Then you know they are slaves again. Lost.”
    â€œLike Tom.”
    We both turned. It was Jake. He and Marco had seen us stop and had come back.
    Tom is Jake’s brother. Tom is a Human Controller —a human being enslaved by a Yeerk in his head. We’d found the Yeerk pool and gone down into that hell to get Tom. We’d failed. We’d barely escaped with our lives.
    Cassie put her arm around Jake’s waist. “Someday we’ll save Tom,” she said.
    Jake kind of stroked Cassie’s head. I guess he got embarrassed, because he instantly pulled away.Cassie didn’t mind. She knows how guys are about showing their true feelings.
    I looked across the construction site and saw Tobias come fluttering down out of the sky. I couldn’t see where he landed, because that part of the site is hidden from the road, but I knew right where he was—on the spot where the Andalite had died. Somehow, in those brief moments when the Andalite had been with us, Tobias had formed some kind of special bond with him.
    We started walking again.
    â€œWe need to find another way to get at them,” I said angrily. It bothered me, imagining Tobias back in that maze of never-finished buildings mourning for the Andalite.
    â€œGet at who?” Marco asked suspiciously.
    â€œThe French, Marco,” I said sarcastically. “Who do you think? The Yeerks, duh.”
    â€œWhoa, whoa, whoa!” Marco said. “We tried that, remember? We went down into the Yeerk pool after them and got our butts kicked. Yeerks ten, humans zero.”
    â€œSo you figure you should just give up?” I demanded.
    â€œWe lost one game,” Jake said. “You don’t quit the sport just because you lose one game.”
    â€œSome game,” Marco said bitterly. “Some sport.”
    â€œWe didn’t lose, anyway,” I said. The others looked at me like I was crazy. “Look,” I explained, “I know we didn’t save Tom, and we sure didn’t stop the Yeerks. But we gave them a reason to be afraid, at least.”
    â€œYeah, they’re terrified of us. Visser Three probably can’t sleep at night, he’s so worried about five kids,” Marco said sarcastically. “Look, Visser Three doesn’t think we’re a threat. He thinks we’re lunch.”
    â€œHe doesn’t know who — or what—we are,” I pointed out. “The Yeerks are convinced that we’re Andalite warriors because they know that we can morph. And they know that we found the Yeerk pool, and infiltrated it, and took out a few of their Taxxons and Hork-Bajir while we were at it. I think they’re probably a little nervous, at least.”
    Jake nodded. “Rachel’s right. But just the same, I don’t think we want to try to go back to the Yeerk pool. Besides … the door is gone.”
    We all stopped and stared at him.
    He shrugged. “Look, I just wanted to see if the door still worked, okay? Just in case. But it’s not there anymore.”
    The door leading down to the Yeerk pool had been hidden in the janitor’s closet of our school. There were dozens of doors to the underground Yeerk pool,spread all over the city, but this was the only one we knew about.
    â€œSo we find another way to get at them,” I