Invasion

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,

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 Cassie's back up out of that hellish pit.

And Cassie 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.

Cassie 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.

Cassie 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."

he said.

"Alive," I said. "Alive. I guess that's all that counts."

"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."

"Just come on, back to human now, dude. No more flying tonight."

he said.