Applegate, K A - Animorphs 27 - The Exposed Read online

  97 This made me feel better. Having a helpful dolphin around is like having a couple dozen lifeguards on hand.

  «Come on in, Jake,» she called, giddy from the dolphin brain. «The water's fine!» She dived and shot up through the air, then twisted and nosed down for a no-splash dive.

  One by one, we did the same. The passage through human morph was not fun. Seagulls ride the waves. Humans end up swallowing saltwater and imagining sharks rising up from the depths.

  I don't think Ax enjoyed it any more than we did. He can swim, but it's an awkward thing to see.

  Tobias landed on Cassie's back, demorphed to hawk, then waited for me to catch up, riding Cassie's back with his talons dug sharply into her rubbery gray flesh.

  «Whale time,» Tobias said to me.

  "Yeah," I yelled, treading water and spitting brine. "Let's do it."

  «l had a premonition she'd say that,» Marco teased.

  Okay, here goes nothing, I thought, as Cassie and Marco swam up alongside me and I summoned a mental picture of the whale.

  Saltwater splashed my face. Again and again. I swallowed it. Gagged.

  My bones stretched and grew heavy, my

  98 feathered arms flapped frantically until fingers sprouted and I could tread water.

  I was tired. Eyes burning, I glanced over at Tobias.

  His red-tailed hawk form was already shifting. He slipped from Cassie's back into the water.

  I closed my eyes and visualized the sperm whale.

  And felt the changes begin.

  99

  Big. Bigger. Enormous.

  I was expanding, stretching in every direction at once.

  Huge!

  Only I wasn't a whale.

  I've mentioned that morphs get weird? That things don't happen in some nice, neat, gradual way? Well, this morph was ridiculous.

  I was growing, growing, growing! My skin had turned leathery graphite gray. There was a blowhole in the back of my neck. My head was monstrous and out of proportion.

  But the rest of me was still Rachel. I had a head the size of Iowa. And about an acre of floating blond hair.

  100 «0h, man!» Marco groaned. «0h, I didn't need to see this! Rachel, you have pores as big as potholes!»

  «This is definitely bizarre,» Cassie said. «And not in a good way.»

  I glanced at Tobias. He seemed to be morphing normally. If any morph is ever normal. If a creature with feathers melting into flesh is normal.

  «This is ridiculous,» Jake complained. «l am tangled in your hair!»

  «She's sinking!» Ax said. «Her buoyancy has not adjusted. She has dense human tissues.»

  «l do not,» I said, vaguely offended. But he was right: I was sinking.

  And if I didn't finish morphing, I was going to drown. Probably sink to the bottom and float past the Pemalite ship. A big, drowned, female Gulliver.

  That got me back on track.

  My legs blended. My feet flattened.

  My head bulged into a huge rectangle. My eyes slid apart . . . apart till they were in separate zip codes. My neck thickened and a triangular dorsal hump grew out of my back along my spine.

  My skin shriveled.

  My arms slithered back into my body. Flippers sprouted.

  101 I bobbed to the surface. My blowhole inhaled. My lungs filled.

  I felt the water ripple as the dolphins surged and danced.

  I sensed their joy and felt a deep, thousand-generation-old kinship with my lithe, sleek brethren.

  My instincts were sure. Calm. Confident.

  I had no fear. No questions.

  I asked for nothing. I explained nothing.

  I drew a deep breath, expanding my lungs to their full capacity and dove, arching my dorsal hump and flipping my triangular fluke into the air.

  The ocean was no longer a cold and hostile place.

  It was home.

  I knew its temperatures and depths, its floors and crevices.

  I fired off a blast of pulsed clicks and received a "picture" of everything around me. Like a black-and-white sketch that traced across my mind and was erased like an Etch-A-Sketch.

  I was echolocating. I had natural sonar.

  I "saw" the dolphins and they "saw" me.

  And then another large creature was moving toward me.

  «Rachel, I sure hope that's you,» Tobias called.

  102

  The whale brain wasn't hard to control.

  The thing was, I hadn't even tried.

  I'd liked the calm confidence. The absence of fear.

  «It's definitely me,» I said, rolling and powering my gigantic, muscled body up, up, up toward dim light like a runaway train.

  Another train rushed beside me. We raced to the barrier between sky and sea.

  «Yah-HAH!» Tobias shouted as we exploded the barrier and erupted into the sky. Our massive heads surged into the crisp air, water shimmering down around us.

  «Okay, that was cool,» Jake said.

  «l wanna be a sperm whale,» Marco whined.

  «l don't think so,» Jake said. «Ticktock. We need to stay on track here.»

  «Just need to suck some air,» I said.

  I exhaled, spouting spray and drawing in enough air to last to maximum dive capacity. Passages in my massive head filled with water and, all automatically, the waxy deposits of spermaceti cooled the water and sent me plunging.

  Ten thousand feet. Maybe even twelve thousand feet.

  Into giant squid territory. I hoped.

  103 Where the atmospheric pressure could squeeze every last molecule of air from a human body.

  «Ready, Rachel?» Tobias asked.

  «Ready,» I said, sighing and shivering deep in my soul. The whale might not be scared. I was.

  104

  We arched our backs and sounded, slipping silently down into the living sea.

  We descended quickly, echolocating past shelves and hollows, our sonar drawing us sketchy, uncertain pictures.

  Murky shadows and then, total darkness.

  Total. Like being blind. Like having your eyes taped shut and being locked in an underground vault.

  Lightless.

  The whale's senses quickened. The whale did not hear, but it did anticipate. We'd soon be entering the hunting grounds.

  Where my prey sometimes fought me and won.

  105 «Hey, Rachel, did you know that not only do sperm whales eat squid, but some people think squid eat sperm whales?» Tobias said helpfully.

  «No one really knows what giant squid eat,» I said. «Except for the fact that they are cannibals^

  «0h, good. Well, we both did our research.»

  «Yeah. I feel so much better now.»

  From my memory I called up the brief bit I'd read about squid. They had sharp, parrotlike beaks and eight arms covered with grasping, needle-toothed suckers. And two long, powerful tentacles that worked to grab prey at a distance and draw it toward the arms and mouth.

  It occurred to me that I didn't know how whales killed squid.

  But I could more than imagine how squid killed whales.

  Still, we powered down into the darkness. Falling, falling forever through darkness.

  The whale did not fear what was going to happen.

  It hunted to eat every day. Someone would win the battle, someone would lose. The whale had accepted this fact since birth.

  I had not. Losing was not something I wanted to think about. This was not a situation where I could simply demorph if the whale was hurt.

  To demorph was to die.

  106 «So, Rachel, what's new?» Tobias called, sounding, if possible, even jumpier than I felt.

  I blurted out the only new thing I could think of. «Well, a guy named T. T. asked me to go to the movies with him,»

  WHAT? What made me say that?

  If I could've kicked myself, I would have.

  «T. T., huh? What does that stand for? Troubled Teen? Total Turmoil? Terrible Trauma?» Tobias said sarcastically.


  «l don't know and I don't particularly care,» I shot back, irked by his attitude.

  «Well, you should care if you're going out with him,» Tobias said.

  «Well, if I was, then I would,» I snapped.

  «0h.» Silence. «Why aren't you going out with him?»

  «Why do you want to know?» I countered. I could play that game, too.

  «l don't, I'm just making conversation^ he said. «We can't exactly turn on the TV and veg out.»

  «Well, if you don't want to know, then I'm not going to tell you,» I said, firing off a burst of pulsed clicks and studying the "picture" I got back.

  «Rachel -» he began.

  But I didn't want to talk about T. T. anymore and I especially didn't want to tell Tobias why I

  107 hadn't accepted the date. This was so not the time.

  «How are we supposed to catch this squid? If we even find one?» I said instead. «l mean, squid are fast and the whale can't exactly turn on a dime here. What do we do, just hang around with our mouths open and hope a squid swims

  «I'm not sure,» Tobias admitted. «The thing I read said maybe whales can use echolocation to stun prey. I think that's what it said. Wasn't it?»

  «l guess we'll find out. See that shape, that bunch of dots all moving together?»

  «See? I don't see anything. Oh, you mean on echolocation. Yeah. Like a school of fish.»

  «Could be squid. Little ones, not giants. The whale brain wants them. Maybe they're squid. »

  «This is no way to hunt,» Tobias complained. «You need to see your prey. I mean, that's basic. »

  «For a hawk, anyway,» I said.

  «For any sensible predator. This is nuts. Chasing an echolocation pictures

  «I'm going to see if it's true. That we can stun them.»

  CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK.

  I fired a round of clicks, maximum volume, directing the sound toward the sketchy tornado of squid. Suddenly a part of the swarm stopped moving. «Cool.»

  108 «It doesn't last long,» Tobias commented.

  I had noticed that, too. «And these squid are, what, maybe a foot long? We're talking about something that can stretch out and grab both baskets on a basketball court. Let's see how stunned the big boy is. If we ever find him.»

  «Hey, Rachel,» Tobias said. «How long you figure we've been down?»

  «Twenty minutes? Four hours? Who can tell?» I said gloomily. «I'm starting to feel the pressure. My whale's brain is getting edgy.»

  The whale part of me wanted to surface. The human part of me had wanted to do that for a longtime.

  «Let's split up,» I said. «Maybe spread out.»

  «0r maybe surface and come back down again.»

  «l don't want to have to do this again,» I said. «This gives me the major creeps.»

  «You got that right. I'll veer off. We need a big squid and a bigger spaceships

  We searched, echolocating for what felt like forever. Back and forth and always, always down. Once I picked up something that might have been a giant squid. But I lost him.

  It was madness! We were blundering around blindly. The sun's rays had never reached this depth. Never. If the water had been rock and dirt, it could not have been any darker.

  109 We were buried alive!

  Buried alive in water.

  «Gotta surface,» Tobias said at last, his thought-speak voice faint, his tone shaken.

  «Yeah,» I agreed.

  We turned and headed up. And now the panic grew. You can walk through a graveyard at night and be afraid, but the terror doesn't begin to get you till you start to run away. When you acknowledge fear, it grows. And although I tried to tell myself it wasn't terror sending me to the surface, that it was just a need for air, I knew better.

  We raced. We barreled madly toward the surface. It took forever. Up and up and up.

  Air! Where was the air?

  We'd been down too long. We'd never reach the sky again. We were going to die in darkness, to sink and sink back to the cold, lightless, lifeless ocean floor.

  Buried alive in water.

  110

  I kicked hard, every muscle in my massive body straining, desperate now. Desperate!

  Then . . .

  FWOOOOOSH!

  I exploded into the air, exploded out of the water, blew the stale air from my lungs, and crashed back into the sea.

  Ka-WHUMP!

  Tobias erupted a quarter mile away.

  I sucked air. I exhaled and inhaled and sucked air like I was never going to breathe again.

  The others in dolphin morph were nowhere around. I was actually surprised, though I should have known better. You can't travel miles down

  111 through water and come popping back up in a straight line.

  Tobias wallowed in the waves beside me.

  «We could morph to something with wings,» he suggested. «Find the others.»

  «And tell them what?» I demanded, angry at myself now. «Tell them we gave up?»

  «You want to go back down there?» he asked like I was crazy.

  «l don't know,» I admitted.

  «0h, man. So we find the others, tell them we failed? Then what?»

  I knew then what. So did Tobias. Jake would take us all back to the beach. This time he'd acquire and morph the whale, along with Cassie or Marco.

  So one of them would be back here. With even less time. With even less chance of success.

  «This is so not fun,» Tobias said.

  «Yeah. I know. Sorry I got you into this.»

  «0h, shut up,» he said tolerantly. «Let's go.»

  Down again. Down and down and down. Into the water like ink.

  Ten minutes down we split up again. «Don't go too far,» Tobias called after me.

  I probably should have listened to him.

  I swam hard. I fired off round after round of pulsed clicks. Picture after picture came back to

  112 me. Revealing nothing big enough to be the ship or the squid.

  And then, suddenly . . .

  A flash of light! A shimmering, rippling light!

  I almost laughed. Fish! Phosphorescent fish, their pale, chemical-reaction glow like a neon sign in the blackness.

  The fish were moving away from me, but at an angle. Like they were moving away from something else. From something behind me, to my left and -

  I fired clicks. The picture came back with startling clarity. The details were unmistakable.

  Coming toward me through the water like a dark, deadly torpedo was a hungry, angry, sixty-foot giant squid.

  So much for the question of whether squid are aggressive, I thought. Someday the six of us could write a serious update of zoology textbooks. If we lived that long.

  «Tobias!» I shouted. I fired off a frenzy of machine-gunned clicks at the squid.

  It staggered, stumbled in its charge.

  «Tobias!» I yelled again, as the whale's instincts took over. It wanted to kill the squid. It wanted to hunt.

  Where was Tobias?

  Hunt, yes. Kill, no. We needed the squid alive. The whale didn't care. This was core instinct.

  113 This was hunger and the urge to hunt. I fought the whale's brain. It had been so docile I'd almost not noticed it. But that was only because I'd done what the whale wanted me to do.

  Now I could feel the power of that huge, intelligent brain as it fought to carry out the instructions encoded deep in its DNA.

  And while I was doing that, the squid recovered and came at me with murder in its blood.

  From far away, a faint voice. Tobias!

  «l think I found the Pemalite ship,» Tobias called faintly.

  «Great. I found the squid.»

  114

  A whip in the darkness. I never saw it corning. It slapped against me, gripping, hugging, holding.

  Another!

  The two almost thirty-foot-long tentacles, iron-strong arms, tightened around my head.

  The squid used the tentacles to yank the
rest of its body toward me. I felt the tug. I felt the water moving. I could picture the photograph I'd seen of a squid mouth, a bizarre hawk's beak.

  Then an arm, thicker, stronger than the tentacle. And another!

  I thrashed wildly, tearing free one of the arms. The suckers ripped away chunks of my skin. I smelled my own blood in the water.

  115 My tail! I couldn't move it. And the squid was on me. ON me! Too close for echolocation to see anything. I was wrestling blind. And unlike the squid, I had no arms.

  The squid was smaller, much lighter, basically weaker. But it had agility. And it had arms. I had a mouth.

  Imagine a fight between a gymnast, small but with full use of arms and legs, and a three-hundred-pound linebacker who can only use his mouth.

  The squid was locking me up. And now I was sinking.

  Down to where the atmospheric pressure would crush even me.

  Down to where my burning lungs would force me to exhale.

  Down to black death.

  «NO!»

  I lunged and rolled. The squid hung on. I hammered it with pulsed clicks. Again and again! But my own body mass was helping to shield it.

  I echolocated again and again, but it was on me. Then, one burst of clicks caught a wall of denser water and bounced back. It drew me a fragmented, eerie picture.

  The squid was huge! Its arrow-shaped head, long as a small school bus, was pressed close to

  116 my head. Its sharp, snapping beak was only inches from my left eye. Eight twenty-foot arms and two longer tentacles clutched and tore at me. Sharp-edged suckers the size of saucers Super Glued the creature to me.

  I was weakening.

  It couldn't be!

  No, I begged. No, it couldn't happen!

  But the squid's grip tightened, tightened, relentless, like a python, imprisoning my tail, paralyzing me.

  CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK!

  Whale clicks. But not from me!

  «Tobias!»

  «Hang on, Rachel, I'm here!» Tobias cried and fired again.

  The squid convulsed. I felt its spasm of pain. Its arms fell away from me.

  «Tobias ... the fight.. . used too much air... I have to get to the surface!»

  «Go,» he said tersely. «I'll meet you there.»

  I wanted to stay. I should have stayed.

  If the squid killed Tobias . . .

  No choice!

  «Go!» Tobias yelled. He blasted the squid with another round of clicks, up close and personal.