The Stranger (10 page)

I
t was me. Me, as I would be in the future.

“I knew you were coming,” the future Rachel said. “After all, I
was
you. Once I stood right where you stand now, and looked just like you look now, and saw myself as I am today.”

She sounded perfectly calm. But her eyes flickered quickly to Ax, then back to me.

Visser Three shook his head in amusement.

I felt strangely calm. I mean, considering what was happening. I was face-to-face with Visser Three — who was now Visser One. I was face-to-face with my own future.

“You're a Controller,” I said to the older me.

“Of course,” she said. She smiled. A cruel smile, not at all like me. “We won. You all led us on a nice chase, but in the end, we won. This planet is Yeerk territory. The human race has achieved its destiny as hosts for the Yeerk race.”

“If you know so much, how did we come to be here? In the future?” Marco asked.

Visser Three said. the
future. Soon he will return you to your own time.>

“What choice did we make?” I asked.

The older Rachel smiled her cruel smile. “The right one, obviously. Everything has worked out perfectly.”

“Yeah?” Jake said defiantly. “Maybe not. The Ellimist brought us here to help us make a choice. So what if we go back to our own time and decide to accept the Ellimist's offer? Then Rachel won't be around to be turned into a Controller. She'll be with the rest of us on whatever planet the Ellimist takes us to.”

I watched closely for any reaction by my older self. Nothing. Not a flicker. And yet, there was something. She was trying to hide something.

“You know what we decided. But still, here you are,” I said. “So either you're here to change what I decided. Except … no, then it might change all of this. Or else you're here because your being here is what caused me to decide whatever I decided.”

Visser Three sneered.

“Let's leave,” Cassie said suddenly. “I don't like this place, and I don't like these two … creatures.”

“But, Cassie, I'm your best friend,” my older self said mockingly.

“No, you're not. Maybe Rachel is still alive in there somewhere. But what you are is a Yeerk.”

Cassie started to turn away. As she did, she tripped. She fell against me. Suddenly the older Rachel was there. She grabbed me and held my arm steady so I didn't fall.

But to Ax it must have looked like she was lunging at me. His tail whipped forward in the blink of an eye.

Ax's quivering blade was pressed against the older Rachel's throat.

Her eyes went wide with fear. She shot a glance at Visser Three. And to my amazement, Visser Three seemed frozen. He was confused. His main eyes narrowed. He looked from Ax, to the older Rachel, to me.

Suddenly I knew. “This wasn't in the script, was it?” I asked him. “This wasn't supposed to happen. Something has changed! It's Ax, isn't it? You said ‘six humans' before. That's what you expected to find. That's what Rachel told you would happen. But the future has changed, hasn't it? Something is different.”

Visser Three glared at me, and now he dropped the pretense of politeness.

Visser Three leaned close to me.

I really wanted to morph right then. I really wanted to become the grizzly and tear Visser Three a few new holes. But there were hundreds of Controllers around. And while I was morphing I would be vulnerable.

Ax still had his tail blade pressed against the older Rachel's throat. Ax said.

“Good point, Ax,” Jake said. He met my gaze. He had a dangerous, angry look in his eyes. “He can't hurt us. But the reverse … well …”

“Excellent point,” I agreed. I focused my mind on the grizzly bear. “So, Visser Three. You killed my friend Tobias and roasted him over a fire.”

I was beginning to change. So was Jake.

Visser Three said.

“So call them,” Marco said. “Maybe one of them will get careless with a Dracon beam and kill one of us. How do you suppose that will change the past? Hard to tell, isn't it?”

Claws had sprouted from my fingers. Coarse brown fur was covering my body. I could feel the surge of power as I became more bear than human.

“Visser,” the older Rachel said tersely. “What do we do?”

Visser Three said. <
We
do nothing. I retreat.>

Visser Three began backing away. But I wasn't about to let him go. I had him. After all the pain he had caused, I had him. After all the damage he had done, he was now powerless.

I did not wait until the last of my human features was submerged. I was bear enough. I charged.

Bears are very large and look sort of clumsy. But they can be very fast.

I barreled toward him. He turned to run. But he had turned too late.

I hit him. Eight hundred pounds of fast-moving bear hit Visser Three in the flank and brought him down hard.

I drew back one huge claw and swung with all my might.

My hand slapped the trunk of a tree. My human hand.

“
Owww!
”

I was human again. I was in the woods behind Cassie's farm. The others were all there as well. Tobias, once again a hawk, perched in a branch overhead.

“No! I'm sick of this!” I yelled. I slammed the tree again in sheer frustration. “I'm sick of this! I
had
him!”

Cassie came over and put her arm around my shoulders. “It doesn't matter. That's a Visser Three who doesn't exist yet.”

“I'm so sick of this,” I said again, a little more softly. “What's the point? What's the point in anything? We know the future now. We know what happens if we decide to stay and fight.”

I felt lost. The last ounce of energy just seeped away from me. It was too much. Too many things to deal with. And what was the point? What did it even matter what I did?

I flopped down onto the grass and pine needle–covered ground, and rested my head in my hands. I was done. Done trying to make sense of a world where I could be jerked back and forth like a puppet.

The six of us just lay there on the floor of pine needles for a while. Staring. Thinking. Letting it all sink in.

It was over.

The war was done. And we had lost.

Ax said halfheartedly.

“No,” I said flatly. “You know it's not a trick, Ax. At least not the way you mean. If the Ellimist wanted to force us to do something, he has more than enough power.”

“We need to think this through,” Jake said wearily.

I shrugged. “You think it through. I'm tired of thinking. I was just about to vote when the Ellimist dragged us off for his little show-and-tell. I was about to be good old Rachel and vote no. I was going to be tough, one more time. But I'm changing my vote. I'm not going to end up as a Controller. That's not going to happen. Not to me. If that means I'm running away, too bad. I change my vote.”

You know what? At that moment of surrender, I felt good. I wish I could say I didn't. But I felt a wave of relief wash over me. No more hard decisions. No more danger. No more having to be brave.

“That makes it Cassie, Rachel, and me, in favor,” Marco said. “Three to two, unless Ax is voting.”

Ax said.

Tobias began.

“Are you changing your vote, Tobias?” Jake asked him.

We all just sat there, staring at nothing. We were going to do it. We were going to abandon the fight. We all knew it.

Jake hung his head. “Ellimist?” he said softly to the air, “We have decided. The answer is yes.”

The Ellimist had said we would be transported immediately, once we decided. I expected my next breath to be drawn on some distant planet.

But nothing happened.

Nothing at all.

I
can't tell you how weird it was, going to school the next day. Sitting in class, trying to pay attention while my teacher, Ms. Paloma, talked about what led up to the Second World War.

“Maybe if the United States had been ready to fight earlier,” she said, “the war would have ended earlier and fewer people would have been killed. But our country wanted peace.”

I just kept looking at her and wondering,
Was that your skeleton draped across the desk?

What was the point of going to school? What was the point in anything? I had seen the future. I knew how it all turned out. The human race was done for. Finished. That was where all our long history led — to a Yeerk pool.

“Because we were so devoted to peace, we may have actually made the war worse,” Ms. Paloma droned on. “We'll never know for sure, of course. You can't really second-guess history.”

You can if you're an Ellimist,
I thought.
If you're an Ellimist, you can look ahead and see it all.

“Why not?”

It was Cassie's voice. I glanced across the room at her. She had that same look of confusion I'd seen the day before. The frustrated look, like she sensed something she couldn't quite grasp yet.

“Why can't you second-guess history? I mean, if you
could
go back and change things so that the U.S. was ready to fight earlier …”

Ms. Paloma sat on the edge of her desk. “Because events are intertwined in ways we cannot always see, Cassie. Sometimes small things can make huge differences. You know, they say that a single butterfly, beating its wings in China, may affect the way the wind blows here in our country. A single butterfly beating its wings may make a tiny change that becomes a bigger change that becomes a tornado. The world isn't like arithmetic. It isn't just one plus one equals two. It's more complicated than that.”

And then the oddest thing happened. Ms. Paloma looked right at me. Right into my eyes.

“Much more complicated than that,” she said. “A single butterfly … a single butterfly … a single butterfly …”

The hair on the back of my neck was tingling. Everyone was looking at her like she was crazy.

Suddenly Ms. Paloma shook her head, like she was popping out of a trance. She smiled a confused smile. “Okay, well, anyway, you all have the reading assignments.”

The bell rang and I practically jerked up out of my seat.

Cassie threaded her way through the kids who were rushing out of the room.

“Okay, tell me
that
wasn't weird,” Cassie whispered.

“I thought maybe I was imagining it,” I said. “Besides, who knows what's weird anymore? I'm sitting there waiting for the … you know who … to suddenly zap us out of here.”

Cassie nodded. “So why hasn't he?”

Out in the fast-moving crush of bodies in the hall, we made our way to our lockers.

“I don't know,” I said as I spun my combination lock. “We decided to say yes. We're giving him what he wants.”

I popped my locker door open.

“Unless …” Cassie said.

“Unless maybe that wasn't the answer he wanted,” I finished her thought.

“But it's nuts,” Cassie said, frowning. “Everything he did made it look like he wanted us to say yes. He appears the first time right as we're about to be swallowed by a …” She looked around to make sure no one could overhear. “Just as we were about to be swallowed. I mean, come on. Obviously he must have figured we'd want to bail.”

“We might have,” I said. “Except we saw that dropshaft. So we thought we could escape. Otherwise …” I stopped talking. I stared at Cassie. She stared back.

“He
showed
us the dropshaft!” Cassie said.

“Why?” I wondered aloud. “Why? What is he doing with us? He appears when we're desperate. He says he doesn't interfere and gives us a choice. Then he lets us see a way out. What's that all about?”

“Then he gives us another chance. He shows us the future. He shows us … you, basically. You in the future. So we
know
for sure that we must have decided to stay and fight. And we
know
we lost. And all of that means we have to say yes and let him take us away. So why have I been feeling like I was missing something?”

The warning bell for next period rang.

“This is insane, as Marco would say.”

Cassie laughed. “Yeah. I have gym next period. At any moment I might suddenly be swooped away to another planet, but in the meantime I have to go play volleyball.”

I watched her walk away. Then I hurried to my next class.

A single butterfly,
I thought.

But how is the butterfly supposed to know when to beat her wings?