I stared. It wasn't easy to see faces in the gloom. I could tell there were two people. One was wearing a uniform.
It was the Controller policeman. And he was rudely yanking someone along with him. I could see that it was a girl.
I didn't really want to see any more.
'Tobias,' I said. 'I need you to use your hawk's eyes,'
Tobias fluttered over and stood on my shoulder. He peeked his fierce head out into the hall and then drew back.
<Yes,> he said. <It's her.>
I felt like the floor had opened underneath me. Marco grabbed me because I looked like I was about to fall over.
'They have her!' I whispered. 'The Controllers. They have Cassie!'
CHAPTER 22
'Who has Cassie… now?' Rachel stammered.
'That policeman. The Controller, the one who came out to Cassie's farm. The one who was at The Sharing meeting. He has her. He saw her at the meeting trying to get close to the full members.'
Rachel let go a few choice words.
We hadn't even started and already everything was a disaster.
'Okay,' I said grimly. 'We go ahead, like Rachel said. We figure there are too many Controllers for all of them to know each other. I mean, they add new bodies all the time, right? So maybe we're new Controllers, right?'
'Oh, man,' Marco moaned.
'You have a better idea?' I snapped.
'No,' he said. 'I think we go ahead. We take our chances. Let's rock and roll.'
'Okay, then, everyone act cool.' I looked at Tobias. 'Too late for you to morph back now. But try not to let them see you.'
Rachel, Marco, and I stepped out into the dark hallway. My legs were stiff. My knees were rickety. I was walking like Frankenstein trying to look casual.
We headed for the janitor's closet. Fortunately, no one else was in the hallway.
We entered the tiny room and stepped inside. I tried to recall the sequence for opening the door. Faucet to the left, then twist the second hook around right.
The door swung open.
There was more noise than there had been the other day. Or maybe it was just that my human ears heard it better than my lizard ears had.
There was a deep sloshing, swooshing sound, almost like gentle surf breaking on the shore. But that was the nice sound. The other sounds were horrifying — despairing cries, terrified screams, shouts, shrieking triumphant laughter.
'You sure this is just the Yeerk pool?' Marco said in a nervous, shaky voice. 'I see a guy with horns and a pitchfork and I am outta here.'
I stepped into the opening. The stairs were steep and there was no rail, so you felt like you were about to pitch forward with every step.
We descended together. The door closed automatically behind us.
At first I guess I expected there to be maybe a couple dozen steps. But the steps never ended. We just kept walking, and there were always more steps. The walls were dirt, then quickly became rock as we went down, down, down. It felt like those stairs would never end.
'Some superior aliens,' Marco whispered. 'You'd think they could have put in an elevator.'
We all giggled a little. Very little.
Suddenly, the rock walls widened out. We had emerged into a huge cavern.
And when I say huge, I mean huge. They could have played the Superbowl in there and had room left over for a couple of malls. It was like a giant bowl turned upside down, all carved out of solid rock. At the very top of the bowl was the faint outline of a hole. I thought I could see stars through it.
All around the outer edges of the cavern I could see other stairways, like ours. They seemed to come from every direction, appearing out of the rock walls, and leading down to the floor of the cavern.
We clustered closer to the center of the stairway. It was a sheer drop off the side of the stairs. 'This is gigantic,' Marco said. 'This isn't just under the school. This is under half the town. Those stairways must lead up to a dozen secret entrances.' He shook his head. 'Jake, they have this entire area set up with secret passageways. Oh, man. This is worse… this is so much worse… So much bigger… '
I felt the same despair. We were fools. This wasn't some little group of alien bad guys we were dealing with. To build this underground city, these guys had power we couldn't even imagine.
That's almost what it was. A city.
There were buildings and sheds all around the rim of the cavern. And we could see yellow Caterpillar earthmovers and cranes at work on the far side of the cavern. They seemed weirdly normal in this incredible place.
And there were creatures everywhere. Taxxons, Hork-Bajir, and other things I couldn't even begin to guess at.
But mostly, there were humans. A lot of them.
At the very center of the cavern was a pool, like a small lake, maybe a hundred feet across, and perfectly round. Only the water wasn't exactly water. It moved more like melted lead, and was about the same color. The sloshing sound we could hear was the liquid of the pool being rippled and splashed by hundreds of fast-moving things below the surface.
I knew what they were. Yeerks. Yeerks in their natural, sluglike state. They were swimming and cavorting in the pool like kids on a hot day.
Near the edge of the pool were cages. In the cages were Hork-Bajir and human beings.
Some of the humans screamed for help. Some cried silently. Some just sat and waited, all hope lost. There were adults there. And kids. Women and men. More than a hundred, packed ten to a cage.
The captive Hork-Bajir were kept in separate, stronger cages. They paced and howled and slashed at the air with their bladed arms.
I almost lost hope. I felt like my heart had stopped. This was a place of unimaginable horror. And we were so few, and so weak.
Below us on the stairs I could see the Controller cop and Cassie. He was dragging her roughly whenever she stumbled. They had reached the bottom of the stairs.
'I'm going to morph,' I said. 'I'm going to get Cassie away from him.'
Marco put his hand on my shoulder. 'Not time yet, dude. Be cool.'
<Cassie's okay, Jake,> Tobias said. <She isn't hurt. Just scared,>
'He'd better not hurt her,' I said. 'Keep an eye on them, Tobias.'
There were two low steel piers built out over the pool. On one, Hork-Bajir-Controllers politely guarded a line of humans and Hork-Bajir and Taxxons.
This was the unloading station.
One by one the people knelt down, bent over, and dipped their heads toward the slimy surface of the pool. The Hork-Bajir helped them.
As we watched, a woman calmly bent over, her head just inches above the lead-gray pool. A Hork-Bajir held her elbow gently, to help her keep her balance.
Then we saw the thing dribbling, sliding, squirming, crawling out of her ear.
A Yeerk.
'Oh, no… ' Rachel moaned. She sounded like she might be sick. 'Oh, no. No.'
When the Yeerk was all the way out of the poor woman's head, it dropped into the pool and disappeared
