The Message (6 page)
Authors: K.A. Applegate
I reached out with my echolocation sense and “felt” the sea ahead of me.
I was confused. What
did
I mean? The words
great one
had just popped into my mind. whale.
A whale. Being attacked by sharks.>
The four of us lanced forward, faster than ever, toward the whale in distress.
Tobias reported from the sky above.
We were steaming through the water when I caught sight of my first shark. He was bigger than me, maybe twelve feet long, with faint vertical stripes.
He was too excited by the hunt to notice me. Until it was too late. With every bit of speed and power I could get from my tail, I rammed the tiger shark in his gill slits.
WHOOOOMP!
It was like hitting a brick wall. My beak was strong, but the shark was made of steel or something.
I fell back, dazed. But as I tried to collect myself
I saw that a trail of blood was billowing from the shark’s gills.
I swam beneath him, and then I saw the huge shape of the whale. He was a humpback, more than forty feet long. Each of his long, barnacle-encrusted flukes was bigger than me.
He was trying to surface to breathe, but sharks were attacking, tearing at the soft, vulnerable flesh of his mouth.
It made me angry. Very angry.
Suddenly, from the murky depths, Jake and Rachel zoomed upward, like missiles aimed at the sharks.
WHOOMP!
Rachel hit her target.
Jake’s shark twisted just in time. Jake scraped across the shark’s sandpaper skin, and before he could get clear, the shark was after him.
They were as fast as we were, as maneuverable as we were, and the sharks had one terrifying advantage—they did not know fear.
It was no longer a game. I had gone rushing into a fight full of confidence and determined to help the whale. But now I was in a war. The sharks were killing machines. They seemed to be nothing but armored skin and razor-sharp fins and wide jaws with row after row of serrated teeth.
The water was boiling with twisting, turning, speeding sharks and us dolphins, locked in a high-speed battle to the death.
It suddenly occurred to me that we might lose. We might be killed.
I might be killed.
The water was dark with blood, still billowing from the shark I had hammered.
Suddenly two of the sharks turned away. They just turned and swam away. At first, I didn’t know why.
Then I saw that they were following the shark I had wounded.
They were following the trail of blood.
They were at the limits of my sight when they struck. They ripped into the injured shark with wild, uncontrolled fury.
The last shark turned from the battle and went after them. Robbed of his meal of whale meat, he would feast on his brother instead.
I said.
he said.
I looked for him. He was drifting in the water, almost motionless, twenty yards away. We all swam over, crowding around him.
Then I saw the wound. I think I would have screamed, if I could have. His tail had almost been bitten off. It was hanging by a few jagged threads. It was useless.
We were miles out in the ocean. And Marco could not hope to swim back.
12
H
e’s going to die if we don’t do something,> Rachel cried.
But I wasn’t feeling at all like an expert. I was feeling like a fool. This was all my fault. It had been my decision to go ahead. I was the one.
He was drifting off.
We formed a circle around him, the three of us, with Tobias drifting overhead and the big humpback resting alongside.
Then Marco began to change. Arms sprouted from his flippers. His face flattened down, with his wide, grinning dolphin mouth shortening to form Marco’s own lips. His skin turned pink and his morphing suit appeared.
His shattered, injured tail split in two. Legs formed from the halves, toes appeared. Human toes. At the end of human legs.
“Yeah, I did it. And now I’m drowning!”
He wrapped his arms over my back, and I held him up to the air.
Then I noticed something strange. It was like the ocean floor was rising to meet me.
No. It was the humpback. He had dived beneath us, and was rising slowly, slowly to the surface.
But at that moment the most incredible part of an incredible day happened.
My mind, human, dolphin, both minds, opened up like a flower opening to the sun.
And a silent, but somehow huge, voice filled my head. It spoke no words. It simply filled every corner of my mind with a simple emotion.
Gratitude.
The whale was telling me that it was grateful. We had saved it. Now it would save our schoolmate.
The humpback rose beneath a sputtering Marco. The broad leathery back lifted him up. And when I looked again, I saw Marco, sitting nervously on what could have been a small island, high and dry above the choppy waves.
Tobias fluttered down and rested beside him.
The whale called me to him.
Listen, little one,
he commanded, in a silent voice that seemed to fill the universe.
I listened. I listened to his wordless voice in my head. I felt like it went on forever.
Tobias said later it was only ten minutes. But during that ten minutes, I was lost to the world. I was being shown a small part of the whale’s thoughts.
He had lived eighty migrations. He had many mates, many mothers, who had died in their turn. His children traveled the oceans of the world.
He had survived many battles, traveled to the far southern ice and the far northern ice. He remembered the days when men hunted his kind from ships that belched smoke.
He remembered the songs of the many fathers who had gone before. As others would remember his song.
But in all he had seen and all he had known, he had never seen one of the little ones become a human.
Marco, I realized. He means Marco. And
little ones?
Is that what the whales call dolphins?
We are not truly … little ones.
No. You are something new in the sea. But not the only new thing.
I wasn’t sure what he was telling me. He spoke only in feelings, in a sort of poetry of emotion, without words. Part of it was in song. Part of it I could only sense the same way I could sense echolocation.
Something new?
He showed me a picture, a memory. It was a broad, grassy plain, with trees and a small stream. All of it underwater. And across the grass ran an animal that was part deer, part scorpion, part almost human.
Where is it?
I asked him in a language of squeaks and clicks and mind-to-mind feeling.
And he told me.
Suddenly I woke up. That’s how it felt, anyway. The whale released me. It was like coming out of a dream.
I heard Marco say something, but he was speaking normally now, not in thought-speak, so it was hard to make it out with my ears under the water.
I stuck my head up and saw him begin to resume his dolphin shape.
Halfway through, he slipped off the side of the whale and back into the water. His fins formed. His beak.
And his tail. Perfect and healthy and undamaged.
We headed for shore, tired but alive.
I felt strange, leaving the whale. But when we were a mile away, I heard his song—slow, mournful, haunting notes.
I smiled inwardly. And of course, since I was a dolphin at the moment, I smiled outwardly, too.
13
T
he next day I went to see Marco at his home.
He and his dad live in a garden apartment complex. One of the older ones, on the far side of the big neighborhood where Jake and Rachel both live. I’d only been over there a couple of times. I think Marco is kind of embarrassed because he doesn’t have much money.
He used to live in a house just down the street from Jake. But that was when his mother was still alive, and before his father had a breakdown and quit his job.
I knocked on the door. From inside I heard Marco’s
voice. “Dad, there’s someone at the door. Put on your bathrobe, okay?”
There was a delay, and then the door opened. Marco looked annoyed.
“Cassie. What are you doing here?”
“I wanted to talk to you.”
“To me? What about?”
“About yesterday,” I said.
He hesitated. “Look, I’m spending the day with my dad, okay? We’re thinking maybe we’ll … you know, do something together.”
“That’s good,” I said. Over Marco’s shoulder I could see his father. He was wearing a bathrobe and sitting on the couch. He was staring at the TV. That was normal for any dad, I guess, on a weekend morning. But I had the feeling that Marco’s dad was always sitting right there in front of the TV.
“Look, Marco, I just want to talk for a minute. Can I come in?”
“No, no,” he said hastily. He stepped outside onto the concrete breezeway. Down below us was a swimming pool. It was drained and closed. Leaves covered the bottom.
“Marco, I wanted to talk to you about yesterday.”
“What about it?”
“You could have been killed. It would have been my fault. This whole mission was my idea. Jake
asked me if we should do it and I said yes.”
Marco rolled his eyes. “That’s it? Look, it wasn’t your fault. It’s this whole thing we’re doing, this whole Animorph thing. I mean, it’s been dangerous right from the start. It’s insanely dangerous. What else is new?”
I shrugged. “What’s new, I guess, is that the other times it was always someone else’s idea.”
“Oh, I get it. You don’t like responsibility?”
I winced. Was that it? Was I afraid of taking responsibility? “I don’t want to get my friends killed.”
“And let me assure you your friends don’t want to get killed, either,” Marco said with a laugh. “I am completely opposed to getting killed.” He grew serious, even sad. “But you know what? Sometimes bad things happen. That’s the way it is.”
I leaned against the rail, looking down at the dismal empty pool. “I see things die all the time,” I said. “Animals, I mean. Sometimes you can’t save them. Sometimes we even have to put them down — end their suffering. But my dad makes those decisions. Not me. He’s the vet. I’m just his assistant.”
“Look, here I am, all alive,” Marco said, tapping his chest. “Get over it. I didn’t have to go. It was my choice.”