Riona (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rionaleonhart) wrote2015-07-30 11:53 pm
rionaleonhart) wrote2015-07-30 11:53 pm
Entry tags:
Fanfiction: Extreme Team-Building Exercises (The Last of Us, Animorphs AU)
I was a little worried about writing a Last of Us AU with no apocalypse; is it possible to make Ellie and Riley feel right in a pre-apocalypse setting? Well, I seem to have written this anyway, so I suppose the answer will have to be 'I certainly hope so!'
I don't know if I'll write any more in this universe, but there are definitely more stories to explore here.
Title: Extreme Team-Building Exercises
Fandom: The Last of Us
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: slight Ellie/Riley
Wordcount: 7,500
Summary: My name's Ellie. The girls turning into flies are Riley and Sarah. And we are fighting a war that's way too big for us. (Animorphs AU)
Let’s get the facts out of the way first. Earth’s being invaded. It’s not the kind of war you can see, but it’s happening right now.
There are these aliens called Yeerks. They just look like big slugs, nothing scary. But they climb into your ear, they read your mind, and they control everything you do. They can pretend to be you so perfectly that nobody who loves you could ever guess you’re trapped inside your own head.
Hi, by the way. I’m Ellie.
We don’t know if we’ll win. If you’re betting on who gets Earth when all this is over, you probably don’t want to put your money on us. But we’re fighting.
Who are we? Well, there’s Riley, my best friend. Sarah, the captain of our school soccer team. And me.
Three kids. Three of us against the entire Yeerk army. We don’t know exactly how many Yeerks there are, but we have a feeling it’s more than three.
But, hey, one of us is pretty good at soccer, so I guess the Yeerks don’t stand a chance.
Maybe you’re wondering how we know about this whole ‘secret invasion’ thing. An alien told us. Not a Yeerk. Something different.
His name was Elfangor. I don’t want to go into a lot of detail about the night we met him. We saw him die. It’s kind of personal.
But... okay, I’m gonna back up a bit.
We were just ordinary kids. Actually, forget that; Riley’s never gonna forgive me if I call her ordinary. But I was an ordinary kid. And I guess Sarah was, too. I didn’t really know her that well, back before it happened, but I don’t think she did much turning into animals.
It was just coincidence that all three of us were there that night. Normally it would’ve just been me and Riley walking across that construction site, on our way back to the orphanage. If the spaceship had crash-landed on any other night, Sarah wouldn’t be one of us and the world would be thirty-three percent more screwed.
But I’d been paired up with Sarah for a school assignment. Like I said, I didn’t really know her, but we were in the same class. Riley’s two years older than me, so she wasn’t an option. And Sarah insisted we were actually going to do the work, so she was tagging along with us. I’d usually have been talking with Riley on the way home, but everything was kind of awkwardly silent with this girl we didn’t know around.
Me and Riley would sometimes meet up with a kid named Sam to walk home; he went to another school nearby. We hadn’t seen him much lately, though. We guessed he just had a lot on his mind. His brother had hit adulthood and moved out of the orphanage, and we knew he was trying to arrange to take Sam with him.
So it was just me and Riley and Sarah when the spaceship slammed into the ground in front of us.
It fixed the ‘awkward silence’ problem, at least.
So, yeah, the short version: Elfangor came out, and even before we knew what he was we could see he was badly hurt. He told us about the Yeerk invasion. He told us his people, the Andalites, were coming to help, but we’d have to hold back the Yeerks ourselves until then. When I say ‘we’, I don’t mean humanity. I mean us. Three kids.
He gave us a power. Andalite technology. We could touch any animal, and concentrate – ‘acquire’ its DNA – and then we’d be able to turn into that animal. Or that’s what he said, anyway. I don’t know if I really believed it back then, even though I was talking to a blue alien centaur.
And we could use this to fight the Yeerks. We could turn into mice and nibble on those aliens’ ankles until they begged for mercy. Or something. The only catch, if you don’t count the ‘having to fight a big, secret, incredibly dangerous war’ thing, was that morphing has a time limit. You stay a mouse for two hours, you’re a mouse forever.
I’ve had a lot of nightmares since then. The ones about the time limit are the worst.
Then Elfangor told us to hide before one of the Yeerk leaders showed up, a guy called Visser Three, and... look, I don’t want to talk about this. If you really have to know what happened, you can look at the history books thirty years from now. Or ask the alien slug that’ll probably be in your head by then. It’ll know.
-
We didn’t talk about it for two days.
It probably sounds weird. I guess I was trying to convince myself it hadn’t happened. The turning-into-animals part, that sounded cool, and if it had just been that I’d probably have been talking about it to Riley non-stop. I’d definitely have tried it out with the next animal I saw.
But watching Elfangor die? Hearing that there were aliens controlling people all over the place, and we were the only ones who could fight them?
I told myself it was a dream.
I skipped school for the next couple days, so I wouldn’t see Sarah. Riley wasn’t saying anything, and that was fine by me. I couldn’t be sure Sarah had got the invitation to our denial party.
The afternoon of the second day, I was lying on top of my bedcovers, clothes on, just staring at the ceiling. I’d been doing a lot of that lately.
My door creaked open.
I sat up. I was expecting Riley, or maybe Sam, even though we hadn’t spoken in a while. I’d forgotten about the guy who’d just started working at the orphanage.
Yeah, the doors to our rooms in the orphanage? No locks. Marlene would always knock and tell you it was her and wait for you to invite her in before she opened your door, so at least you could kind of feel like you had some privacy. But a couple weeks ago she’d brought in this new guy. David.
“Ellie,” he said, softly. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” I said.
“Your school called.” He sat down on the end of my bed. I pushed myself off it. “Seems you weren’t in today or yesterday.”
“Yeah, I was sick,” I said, leaning against the wall by the door. “I’m fine now, though.”
He just watched me for a moment, frowning a little. “Did anything happen on Tuesday?”
Did anything happen on Tuesday? Let’s think. I did pretty well on the math test. An alien put the entire fate of the world on my shoulders. Other than that, not much. “Apart from me getting sick?”
“Did you see the news about the construction site?”
Suddenly, I actually did feel sick. I shook my head.
“Someone was stabbed,” he said. “We’re worried someone here might have seen it, as it was so close. I’m a qualified counsellor, you know. If you saw something that upset you; if you want to talk through it...”
“Seriously, it was just food poisoning or something,” I said. “I’m okay. I’ll go back to school tomorrow.”
He went quiet.
“Okay,” he said, after a moment. “Come by my room any time, Ellie.”
-
I was going to have to talk to Riley about this. It was getting really hard to keep pretending nothing had happened on Tuesday.
There was still a part of me saying, you know, maybe it wasn’t real. If the news said someone was stabbed, maybe that’s actually what happened. I saw someone get stabbed, some normal human guy, and it messed me up so badly that my mind made up some weird thing about alien invasions to hide it.
Maybe.
-
Riley got back from school a couple hours later and came up to our room, and I managed to hold out for a whole four seconds before I said, “David came to say hi.”
“Creepy David?” Riley asked, slinging her bag into the corner. “What’d he want?”
“He wanted to know if I’d been at the construction site on Tuesday.”
Riley stared at me.
“He said someone had been stabbed.”
“Yeah, I saw it on the news,” she said. “It didn’t happen. It was the same time we were there. Someone’s trying to cover the crash up.”
And that was it. I couldn’t pretend any more. Riley remembered the crash.
I took a breath. “Yeerks?”
“Guess so,” Riley said. “You think David’s one of them?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” God, I really didn’t want this to be real. David wasn’t a friend or anything, but it wasn’t good news if people really were being controlled. I looked down at my hands. “We’ll have to do something, won’t we?”
“Hey,” Riley said, ducking her head to look into my eyes. “It’ll be fine. You and me, working together? The aliens are gonna beg for mercy.”
I tried to smile. “I guess we should talk to Sarah, if this is really happening.”
Riley shrugged. “Why bother? Easier if it’s just the two of us. We know how we work as a team.”
Time alone with Riley isn’t something I ever really want to turn down, but, well, stopping an entire alien invasion seemed like a big job for two people. Three people probably wasn’t going to be much better, but it was something.
“If the Yeerks get her, we’re in trouble, right?” I asked. “Elfangor said they could see your memories. She knows we were at the construction site. At least if we stick together we can watch out for her.”
There was a pause.
“Damn,” Riley muttered. “You’re right. And we don’t know her. How do we know we can trust her? What if she’s not as brave as us?”
I wasn’t feeling all that brave. An alien had told us that we were the only ones who could stop the entire planet being taken over by brain-slugs, and then we’d seen him get fucking ripped apart. I was pretty much crapping my pants. But it was Riley, so I tried to put my brave face on.
“I mean, what if we’re all on some kind of mission and she bails when things get dangerous? You and me, we know we’ll look out for each other. We’re nothing to this Sarah girl.” She shook her head. “It should’ve just been us.”
Hey!
A voice, suddenly, in my head. The way Elfangor had spoken.
Hey! Ellie! Riley! That’s you, right?
I looked at Riley. She’d definitely heard it too.
Over here. Out the window.
Slowly, we both turned to look through the window.
There was a big brown-and-white bird perched in the branches of the tree outside. A bird of prey, like a hawk or something.
I begged my dad to take me to this raptor show yesterday, the bird said. It sounded a lot like Sarah. I got to touch an osprey. This is amazing, you guys. Have you tried it yet?
-
Have you ever tried to catch a bird?
Catching a bird is impossible. All these pigeons and seagulls around, you’d think one would stay still long enough to let you grab it, but no.
After a couple hours, Riley and I were grumpy and sweating and still zero percent bird DNA. I still definitely wanted to try out flying, but I was starting to think this wasn’t the best way to get started.
“Let’s just find someone with a pet bird,” I said. A fly landed on my wrist. I twitched it off. “I think that lady’s about to call animal protection on us.”
The fly came back and landed on my wrist again, apparently thinking that maybe this time I’d be happy to see it.
And guess what? It was right.
-
Have you ever been a fly?
Okay, stupid question.
It’s awesome.
You can run straight up a wall. You can hang out on the ceiling. But obviously the big thing is that you can fly.
Flies can zip across a room in a couple seconds, right? Have you ever thought about how many times the length of the fly’s body that is? Because you think about it when you’re fly-sized.
Have you ever put on rollerskates and strapped rockets to your legs and fired yourself down the street? Neither have I, but I’m pretty sure it’s something like being a fly.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was gross. I wanted to stick my little fly snout in every pile of dog crap in the state. I wanted to land on all the sweaty dudes we passed. It was creepy, creepy, creepy.
But it was also incredible.
-
Of course, the problem was that we didn’t just have these powers so we could turn into bugs and race each other. (I won. You know, if you’re wondering.) We had them because humanity was slowly being enslaved, and we were probably going to have to do something about that. Or at least work out where to start.
Which meant following David.
Maybe he wasn’t a Controller. (You’ve probably guessed this already, but a Controller is someone who’s being controlled by a Yeerk.) Maybe he was just a creep. But he was the best lead we had right now.
“Saturday,” I said, when the three of us were together and back in our own bodies. “No school. We can stake him out all day.”
“I can’t do Saturday,” Sarah said. “I’m going out for lunch with my dad.”
Riley rolled her eyes. “Oh, right, I forgot your dad’s so much more important than fighting the alien invasion.”
“That’s not what I—”
“It’s fine. We’ll do it without you. Probably get more done that way, anyway.”
“Riley,” I said, quietly, “don’t be a dick.”
Sarah hesitated. “I could cancel.”
“You realise your dad could be one of them, right?”
“Riley,” I hissed.
“No, seriously,” Riley said. “What if her dad’s a Controller? What if he notices she’s always mysteriously cancelling plans and going out right before weird animals start harassing his friends?”
“Okay,” I said. “So you and me watch him on Saturday, Sarah goes to her lunch thing, and that means she has an alibi.”
“I want to help,” Sarah said.
I shook my head. “Riley’s right. We need to make sure no one guesses who we are. And, hey, if you stay out of this one, you can take over from us if we both get swatted.” I tried to make it sound light.
Sarah shifted. “Well, I can still be there in the morning.”
I looked over at Riley.
“Fine,” she said.
-
Sarah showed up early on Saturday morning, and we had a quick strategic discussion. It basically came down to ‘don’t be an idiot and let David hear your thought-speak, don’t forget to watch the time so you don’t get stuck as a fly forever’.
The plan was that I’d keep lookout while the others changed, as the door to the bedroom didn’t lock. Once Riley and Sarah were flies, I’d open the door (have you ever tried to open a door as a fly?) and hide under my bed to morph, and then we’d head out to find David.
Riley stripped down to a leotard. Sarah was already wearing hers, as she’d come over here as an osprey. (There are clothes we can wear for morphing – I mean, clothes that will morph with us and still be there when we change back to human – but they have to be skintight. Remind me to tell you sometime about all the awkward nudity we had to deal with when we were figuring that out.) I leant against the door. And then they started to change.
Riley’s always been kind of... I guess compelling is the word. You want to watch her do things. But trust me: you don’t want to watch anyone turn into a fly. The wings grew first on her, and I could deal with that – it was kind of cool, actually – but then the weird fly mouth grew out of her face and I had to look away.
There was a knock on the door.
Fuck.
I looked back at Riley and Sarah. They were mostly fly now, except they were about the size of rabbits, and Sarah’s front legs were still little human arms.
“It’s Marlene. Can you let me in?”
Okay. Marlene was okay. I mean, she’d probably still have questions if she saw two giant flies in my room, but she wasn’t David.
“Yeah, just a second,” I called.
It’ll be fine, Riley said in my head, shrinking fast. I couldn’t answer. You can only use thought-speak when you’re in morph.
I opened the door as soon as Riley and Sarah were a non-terrifying size.
“Hey,” Marlene said. “Is Riley with you? I need to talk to both of you.”
I shook my head. This was probably about breaking curfew again.
Marlene shrugged. “All right. That’s not a problem.”
She pointed something at me.
It looked like some kind of gun.
“Stay quiet and co-operate,” she said, “and you won’t be harmed.”
Marlene’s always been kind of a hardass, but this? This was new.
Fuck! Riley exclaimed in my head.
I put my hands up. My first thought was okay, she’s a Controller, and then I thought I couldn’t let her know I knew about Controllers – I had to act scared and confused – and then I realised that wasn’t actually going to be that tough, because I was definitely scared and confused right now. There’s a difference between being told that there are mind-controlling aliens walking around and actually getting held at gunpoint by your mom’s best friend.
“The other one isn’t here,” Marlene said, raising her voice slightly and half-glancing back at the doorway. “She’ll be enough for now.”
Someone stepped into the room.
I fucking knew it, I almost said aloud, but I managed to stop myself in time. Seriously, Ellie, you don’t want them knowing you know about the whole alien invasion thing.
David. Fucking David.
Turn into a fly! Get out of there! Riley yelled at me, and then, Wait, fuck, no, don’t do that. It takes too long. They could just kill you while you’re morphing. Shit, what do we do?
What could I do? Run? Marlene was still pointing a gun at me; I didn’t know whether it could fire bullets or alien death rays or what, but I knew I wasn’t going to like it. Morphing, yeah, would take too long, and maybe they’d wonder if Riley could do the same thing after they’d killed me, and I couldn’t make her a target. There were two friends in the room with me, or at least two people I was pretty sure were on my side, but they were both tiny insects. What were they going to do: fly up Marlene’s nose?
So I did the only thing I could: I swore like crazy as David wrenched my arms behind my back.
It didn’t really make me feel any better.
Marlene went out to check the corridor, and David dragged me along behind her.
Okay. Okay, Ellie. You can hear me, right? I’m following you. I’ll get you out of this. Somehow. Shit.
-
There was a shed in the grounds of the orphanage. It used to be for storing basketballs and things, but a few years ago it had been locked up. Nobody knew why. We’d joke that Marlene was growing drugs in there, or using it to hide bodies.
Well, we were going to find out the truth now.
No drugs. No bodies. But there was a trapdoor leading to a narrow path, winding down through earth and rock, and after a few minutes that path opened up into the biggest underground cavern you can imagine.
That’s a Yeerk pool, right? Riley muttered. God, this can’t happen.
Elfangor had told us about Yeerk pools, although I hadn’t realised they’d be so huge. You’ve probably guessed they’re pools with Yeerks in them. Every three days, a Yeerk has to go back to the pool to swim around and soak up nutrients before going back into its host.
There were cages lining the sides of the pool. I wasn’t close enough to see yet, but I guessed that was where the hosts were being kept.
Of course, some of the Yeerks in a pool don’t have hosts yet.
They’d brought me here to make me their puppet.
Sarah?
Silence.
Sarah? You here? Riley asked. Guess not. Stayed back to save your own skin, huh? Fine. I’ll save Ellie on my own.
I’m here. Uh, sorry. I’m here, Sarah said. She sounded a little shaky. Sorry I didn’t say anything. I was...
A few seconds passed.
Freaking out? Riley asked.
Freaking out, Sarah muttered.
Okay. You can freak out later. Right now, we’re making sure Ellie doesn’t get Yeerked.
I did kind of feel better, knowing Sarah was still there. I didn’t really know her yet, and I didn’t trust her the way I trusted Riley, but when you’re being dragged along by aliens it’s good to know you have more than one person on your side. She hadn’t bailed the second I was in danger. That was something. Maybe we really would be able to work together.
You know, if I got out of this without a Yeerk in my head.
What do we do? What do we do? Sarah asked, and then, Wait! You know ospreys eat fish?
Sarah, Riley said, that’s great, but they’re gonna put an alien in Ellie’s brain.
I mean an osprey’s probably pretty good at grabbing things out of water, right? Sarah asked. Or sludge, or... whatever that is.
That’s your plan? Grab all the Yeerks out of the pool? Pretty sure we don’t have time for that.
Maybe it’d distract them, Sarah said. I can go after the Yeerks, Ellie could try to run away...
That sounds like a really great way of getting you both killed, Riley said. There’s gotta be something else.
There was a pause. Sarah’s plan probably was going to end up with both of us dead, but it was sounding better with every step toward that pool.
You really think you can get Yeerks out of there? Riley asked.
I think so. I mean, I can try. I think I’d only be able to get one at a time.
One’s all we need, Riley said.
Another pause.
Are you serious? Sarah asked.
Yeah, it’s a terrible plan, Riley said. But maybe we can all get out of here alive.
I really wanted to know what this terrible plan was, but of course I didn’t have any way to ask, so I just had to keep shuffling along. Maybe you’ve already figured it out and you’re wondering how I could be so clueless. Sue me. I wasn’t just sitting there, reading this story; I was being dragged down to have a mind-controlling alien put in my ear. I kind of had a lot on my mind.
It has to be me, Riley said.
I’m definitely not arguing with you, Sarah said. Can you see someplace we can hide and... morph out? Demorph?
Stop being flies? Riley suggested.
Yeah, that.
Okay, I think I have somewhere, Riley said, after a moment. Follow me. Then something about her ‘voice’ changed; I think maybe she was speaking to me privately. Got your back, Ellie. I’m not gonna let anything happen to you.
And then they went quiet. No voices talking in my head. I was on my own, David pulling me along way too roughly, and now I didn’t have anything to distract me from what was going to happen. All I could do was drag my feet, hope I could buy the others some time to carry out whatever they were planning.
Nothing happened. The pool just kept getting closer, slowly, and I couldn’t see Riley or Sarah anywhere, and the only thing I knew was that I was seriously, seriously screwed.
“Walk faster,” David muttered, shaking me by the arm.
“Yeah, I’m dying to do whatever you want,” I said.
And then he put one arm across my back and the other behind my legs and swept me up in a fucking bridal carry. I tried to struggle at first, but Marlene pointed her gun-thing at me again and I was pretty sure she was losing patience.
Okay. This was bad news. I don’t like people picking me up in general and I really don’t like creepy alien-controlled guys picking me up, but the bigger issue was that we were now covering ground a lot faster. If I didn’t—
And then David stopped moving. “What...?”
I twisted around to look, just in time to see a brown-and-white bird dive and snatch something out of the pool. A big brown-and-white bird. A big, familiar-looking brown-and-white bird.
TSEWWWW!
Turned out Marlene’s gun-thing fired beams of red light. She wasn’t shooting at me, which was good. I mean, it wasn’t good that she was shooting at Sarah, but David was still holding me; I wouldn’t exactly have been able to dodge.
The first beam missed Sarah and hit the roof of the cavern with a bigger explosion than I want a weapon that’s been pointed at me to cause, thanks. Marlene fired again, but the bird had already swooped out of sight behind a long, low building.
Marlene swore. I mean, I think she swore. She said something in some probably-alien language, and it didn’t sound like the word for ‘oh, good, one of us is getting eaten by a bird’.
“Andalite?” David asked. I could feel how tense he was.
“An exceptionally foolish Andalite, if so,” Marlene said. “Finding a way into the pool to seize just one of us? A hostage?”
“There may be more.”
“There may,” Marlene said. “Put the girl down; we could need your weapon.”
So David set me down and pulled out his own laser gun. He was still holding my wrist, so I couldn’t just walk away, but this was a definite improvement. For one thing, we weren’t moving toward the big scary pool of aliens any more; Marlene and David were just standing there with their guns in their hands, scanning the air for birds.
Was the plan to create a distraction so I could get away and morph? I appreciated the effort, if that was it, but we kind of needed something bigger.
“We need to get her to the pool,” Marlene said, after a minute or so. “Keep your hand on your Dracon beam.”
Okay. Moving again. I tried not to freak out, but it was getting hard when we were practically on the pier by now.
TSEWWWW!
I looked up, startled. The osprey was back. Sarah.
The beam – the Dracon beam, apparently? – hit the roof with a distant BOOM (yes, distant; I told you this was a really big place, right?), and another shower of stone chips and dust rained down into the pool. Sarah was going into a dive, and I thought for a moment she was aiming for the end of the pier, for the giant blade-covered monster forcing a man’s head down into the Yeerk-filled sludge – but she flared her wings at the last second, skimmed the surface of the pool right by the pier and soared away.
Riley, you’re in! Sarah called. I’m gonna get out of sight. Everyone’s shooting at me.
This is so weird, Riley’s voice said in my head. And so gross. And so weird. Ellie, you okay?
‘No, not really, and where the hell are you?’ was what I wanted to say, but obviously that wasn’t really an option. All I could do was look around, trying to spot Riley without letting David know anyone was thought-speaking to me.
She’s okay, Sarah said. Not exactly true, but, again, I couldn’t exactly correct her. She’s on the pier. There are two people ahead of her. I’ll tell you when she gets to the end.
Okay. I’m pretty sure I’m still by the pier. I can tell when someone’s head is nearby, I think. Is this really gonna work?
I don’t know, Sarah said. Ellie, when it’s your turn, can you turn your head so it’s just your left ear in the pool? This’ll probably be easier if there’s only one target. Otherwise a real Yeerk might get in your other ear.
‘Wow,’ I couldn’t say. ‘This is an unbelievably stupid plan.’
Riley must have guessed what I was thinking, though, because I heard her voice in my head. You’ll be fine, Ellie. I swear.
And I know they were just words, but they still kind of made me feel better.
Not that much better, though, because there was only one person ahead of me now. A woman, dark-haired, struggling and swearing at the guys dragging her along. She’d been pulled out from the cages, so she must have been infested already; her Yeerk was just taking a break.
She kept fighting even after they passed her to the Hork-Bajir at the end of the pier, which was impressive because... have you ever seen a Hork-Bajir? They’re aliens. They’re seven feet tall and they’re covered in blades. I mean, covered. Head, arms, legs, tail: blades everywhere. I’d seen some before; they’d shown up with Visser Three at the construction site. They’re fucking terrifying.
Elfangor had told us that the Hork-Bajir were actually gentle. Kind of weird to imagine when they looked like murder machines. The blades were for cutting bark off trees; that’s what they ate. But the Yeerks had taken the whole species over and turned them into weapons.
“Hey! Hey!” the woman yelled, twisting around to look at the people in the cages, at me, at the guys who’d brought her down here and David and Marlene. “Any of you get out of this, you come find me and you get this fucking thing out of my head! My name’s Tess—” and the Hork-Bajir shoved her head down into the pool.
She was quiet and calm when she stood up again.
I think that’s when it really, really hit me, what was happening to these people. Tess was probably still screaming inside her head. But she looked like any normal woman now, just going about her business that... happened to be in this huge underground cavern full of aliens. She didn’t have any control over her body any more.
And that was what was going to happen to me, if the plan went wrong.
Ellie’s next, Sarah said.
I’m here, Riley said. I’m ready.
David handed me over to the Hork-Bajir. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.
I held my breath and tilted my head and let him shove my face down into the pool.
I felt it almost straight away: a touch on my ear, and then the Yeerk was starting to work its way inside and oh fuck please tell me...
Okay, Ellie, it’s me, Riley said. It’s me. You’re safe. Don’t freak out.
Well, screw Riley. I was being held down by something that looked like a dinosaur had mated with a truck full of swords, and my best friend was crawling up my ear to look at my brain. I was going to freak out if I wanted to.
I was expecting it to be painful, and it was, at first, but then my ear kind of went numb.
Oh, this is weird, Riley muttered. I don’t want to break anything.
The Yeerk should know what to do, right? Sarah asked. You can use its instincts. It’s what I do when I’m flying. The osprey knows when to pull out of a dive.
Okay. Okay. I think I’m in. So, uh, now...
My muscles went slack. All of them. I didn’t have any control over it. I’d have fallen face-first into the pool if the Hork-Bajir hadn’t dragged me back upright.
Crap, Riley muttered, and then, after a moment, Okay, I’ve got this.
The Hork-Bajir let go of me. I took a couple of awkward, wobbly steps back up the pier. Or Riley took those steps, with my body. I couldn’t do anything.
We were definitely blowing our cover, right?
“Your first human host?” Marlene asked.
It seemed like there was a moment before Riley figured out how to nod.
“Register your name and your host’s name before you leave,” Marlene said. “And watch for animals. There’s an Andalite trying to take hostages.”
Uh, what do I say to that? Riley asked in my head, but Marlene had already turned away. Apparently I wasn’t interesting any more.
Could I talk to Riley? Could she hear my thoughts? I couldn’t thought-speak, but now that she was actually in my brain...
Yeah, I can hear you, she said.
The others ahead of me just walked off, I thought. As soon as the Yeerks were in their heads.
Okay. Hold on, Ellie; we’re getting you out of here.
Riley walked me back up the pier, past a couple other people waiting to be infested. She’d taken a few steps, getting steadier, before a kid was dragged onto the pier by two Controllers.
Shit. Oh, shit. I’d have said it out loud if I’d had control of my own body.
The kid was Sam.
He stared. I stared. Or Riley stared with my eyes, I guess, and I didn’t really have any options other than staring along with her.
“Ellie,” he said, quietly, and then, “No. Get out of her!”
I tried to lunge at the guys carrying him. I couldn’t.
Riley! We have to do something!
What are we supposed to do? Riley demanded. I’m not getting you killed!
Something! They’re gonna put a Yeerk in his head!
You want to save all the people in cages as well? Your best weapon is a fly. We don’t have a plan. We’re lucky to be alive.
My feet moved. Sam was going to be controlled by an alien, and Riley was fucking walking me away.
You’re gonna do fucking nothing? I yelled in my head.
I’m gonna get you out of this place in one piece, she snapped back. We get the hell out of here, we get some better morphs, we survive. Then we can worry about Sam.
I was shouting so much at Riley that I almost missed the other voice that slammed into my head as we reached the sloping path up to the exit.
Don’t leave me behind!
Riley glanced back, using my eyes. The osprey – Sarah – was zooming toward us in a shallow dive, aiming to blow past above my head.
I’ll get in front of you, okay? Sarah was saying. Then they won’t be able to see—
TSEWWWW!
Suddenly my head was full of screaming. I don’t know if it was mine or Riley’s or Sarah’s.
Sarah’s left wing had been burnt off. She hit the ground so hard I swear I felt it.
“Kill it!” bellowed Marlene.
Riley froze for just an instant before she darted back, scooped Sarah up in my arms and ran.
-
Somehow it seemed ridiculous that it was still daylight, after everything that had happened. Riley stuck to quiet side-streets, because people tend to stare when a teenage girl goes charging down main roads with a wounded osprey in her arms.
I could hear how in pain and frightened Sarah was, and she seemed to be having trouble staying conscious, but she was trying to give us directions to her dad’s place; it wasn’t like we could stay at the evil alien orphanage any longer. Before we got there, though, Riley veered into a narrow, shadowed grassy band between two houses and set Sarah down carefully on the ground.
“We’re gonna morph out,” she said, with my voice. “I don’t know how long it’s been, but I’m not explaining to your dad why his kid’s stuck as a one-winged bird. And I’m definitely not getting stuck in Ellie’s head.”
Even if it’s pretty interesting in here, she added, so I was the only one who could hear it. She made a whistling noise in my mind. Ellie. You have got it so bad.
Fuck.
Shut up, I thought, trying not to sound like I was freaking out. It’s one thing trying to keep how freaked-out you are out of your voice; have you ever tried keeping it out of your thoughts?
It’s adorable! Is this seriously how much you think about me?
You’re in my head! You’re literally in my head. Pretty sure you’d think about me if you had me being a big gross slug in your brain.
Riley went quiet for a moment.
Pretty sure I’d think about you anyway, she said.
But Sarah was talking now. Hey, d’you... d’you know if... my arm...
“Look, just demorph,” Riley said. “We’ll find out.” She hesitated. “Good luck.”
Okay, Sarah said. She lay there for a moment, I guess doing whatever the bird equivalent of taking a deep breath to calm yourself down is. Okay.
We stood there, watching Sarah emerge from the osprey. Head. Chest. Legs. Right arm.
Left arm.
Sarah grabbed at it with her feathered right arm and said something. It was hard to make out when her mouth was still mostly a beak, but I think she was relieved.
Okay, now me.
Riley made me kneel down and tilt my head. I tried not to think about her squirming down my ear canal. It was impossible not to think about her squirming down my ear canal, obviously, especially when I could feel her squirming down my ear canal.
Riley plopped onto the grass. I shuddered. But at least it was me shuddering, and not someone else. Even when it’s someone you trust, there’s something incredibly uncomfortable about someone else being in control of your body.
I looked away while the Yeerk was turning back into Riley. I’d already been handed way too much screaming nightmare material for one day.
The first thing she said, once she had her own voice back, was, “Ellie, I’m sorry.”
I still couldn’t make myself look at her. I wasn’t angry any more. Freaking out about Sarah had kind of pushed the anger out of my head, and it wasn’t coming back now that I knew she was okay. I just... needed a moment.
“It was definitely Sam, wasn’t it?” I asked, even though I knew the answer. She’d probably saved my life by not letting me try to help him, but I still felt sick when I thought about it.
“Sam?” Sarah asked. She was sitting on the grass. I don’t think she felt ready to stand up yet.
“That kid who came on after Ellie,” Riley said. “He’s a friend.”
“Oh.” Sarah shifted, uneasily. I don’t think she knew what to say. I guess I wouldn’t have known either, in her shoes. “I’m sorry.”
Something had been bothering me. When I’d seen Sam, I’d assumed he was like me: he’d been grabbed and taken down to get Yeerked. But he’d seemed to know what was going on. He knew I was being controlled.
Marlene and David hadn’t been kind enough to explain the whole ‘we put a slug in your head, it walks you around’ deal to me. If I hadn’t already met Elfangor, I wouldn’t have known what I had coming. So how did Sam know? Had he already been a Controller? Was he just there so his Yeerk could have a snack?
“Did you guys see if he came straight from the entrance?” I asked.
Sarah hesitated. “I think they brought him out from the cages.”
Fuck. How long?
I knew Sam hadn’t been hanging out with us lately. I guess I thought he was trying to make saying goodbye easier. I mean, his brother had been trying to get custody of him. But no; apparently he was just being controlled by an alien that didn’t have time for things like friendship.
“We’ll save him,” Riley said. “We’ll work something out.”
-
“I’m sorry,” Sarah said, for about the fourth time. “I’d let you live with us if I could. It’s just I don’t think Dad’s ready for two new surprise kids.”
“What if one of us morphed into you and went to live with your mom?” I suggested, trying not to smirk.
Sarah burst out laughing. “Oh, God, that’s so creepy.”
“We’ll be fine,” Riley said. “We knew each other from the streets before Marlene tracked us down.”
“Yeah, and we didn’t have this morphing thing back then,” I said. “Could turn into someone’s cat, get a free meal...”
“Please tell me you’re kidding,” Sarah said.
Honestly, yeah, I was worried about the living situation. But I’d be with Riley. We’d be okay, somehow.
“At least stay over tonight,” Sarah said.
-
“Hey, Sarah,” Sarah’s dad said, opening the door. “I was starting to think you’d miss our lunch.” He paused, frowning slightly. “You join the gymnastics team or something?”
With everything that had happened, I hadn’t really registered how strange Sarah and Riley looked in their morphing leotards. It was a good thing the Dracon beam had cauterised Sarah’s wing. I don’t know what her dad would have said if I’d shown up with osprey blood all over my T-shirt.
“We were trying out,” Sarah said. “I don’t know if we’ll really have time to join, though.”
“You’re kids. You’ve got time,” her dad said. “These friends of yours?”
“Yeah, from school.”
I tried to smile. Tried to look like a normal kid who definitely didn’t fight any aliens. “Hey. I’m Ellie.”
“Riley,” Riley said, raising a hand.
Sarah’s dad nodded. “Good to meet you. You can call me Joel.”
“I was wondering if they could stay over tonight,” Sarah said.
“Tonight?” Joel echoed, scratching his chin. “Kind of short notice, isn’t it?”
“I’ll cook,” Sarah said, quickly. “And I’ll make up the guest room.”
Joel folded his arms.
“Well,” he said after a moment, giving me a small smile, “if you trust Sarah’s cooking...”
“Dad,” Sarah said.
Well, it was probably going to be better than cat food.
-
Sarah and her dad still had their lunch to go to, of course, so Riley and I hung out in a nearby park, climbing trees, not talking about how climbing trees didn’t really feel the same once you’d literally flown.
“Sarah really came through, huh?” I asked, when we were sitting together in the shade of an oak.
Riley smirked. “Are you trying to get me to say I was wrong?”
I shrugged. “I’m just saying.”
If I’m honest, I wanted Riley and Sarah to get along. They’d worked together at the Yeerk pool, and because of that they’d been able to save me. If all three of us could work together, maybe we’d stand a chance against the invasion. Or maybe we’d survive longer than eight seconds, at least.
“Okay,” Riley said, “I was wrong. She’s definitely brave enough.” She looked up at the sky, through the branches and leaves above us. “This could actually work. We could make a seriously kickass team.”
I was going to have to say it, wasn’t I?
“Riley, can I tell you something?”
“What, you think there’s a chance I’ll say ‘no’?”
Maybe she’d already seen it when she’d been in my head, but I had to get it out in the open. “I’m... not actually all that brave. I mean, I’ll fight, but I need you to know I’m gonna be scared out of my mind the whole time.”
Riley shook her head, but she was smiling. “You dumbass.” She took my hand. “That’s what bravery is.”
I looked down at our hands.
Yeah, maybe we were heading into a war we couldn’t win. But we were heading into it together.
I looked away, at the people walking past. Some with Yeerks in their heads, probably. I couldn’t look at Riley if I was going to ask this. “Can I...?”
“Can you...?” she echoed.
“Do you think this morphing thing works with people?”
She shrugged, and then I felt her hand tense up in mine. But she didn’t let go. “You want to acquire me?”
“I’m not planning to turn into you,” I said, quickly. “That’d be weird. I just...” I didn’t know how to explain it. “I just want to know you’re there.”
She laughed. “How romantic. Is that how you felt about the fly, too?”
“Shut up. Are you gonna let me do it or not?”
Riley hesitated.
“Yeah,” she said. “Okay.”
I closed my eyes and focused. Pictured Riley. Really thought about her. Not like that was difficult. It’s something I do kind of a lot.
“Oh,” Riley said. Her voice sounded... blurred around the edges, somehow, and all the tension was going out of her hand. “That’s... it’s kind of like falling asleep.”
I guess part of it was... maybe this is going to sound weird, but it was like taking a photograph, or something. A way to remember her, if something happened. Our lives had become a whole lot more dangerous. I couldn’t just pretend there wasn’t a chance she’d be gone one day. Maybe soon.
It wasn’t creepy. I wasn’t planning to turn into her and stare at myself in the mirror if she died, or anything.
Or maybe I was. I don’t know.
She’ll probably outlive me, anyway. She’s Riley.
I don't know if I'll write any more in this universe, but there are definitely more stories to explore here.
Title: Extreme Team-Building Exercises
Fandom: The Last of Us
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: slight Ellie/Riley
Wordcount: 7,500
Summary: My name's Ellie. The girls turning into flies are Riley and Sarah. And we are fighting a war that's way too big for us. (Animorphs AU)
Let’s get the facts out of the way first. Earth’s being invaded. It’s not the kind of war you can see, but it’s happening right now.
There are these aliens called Yeerks. They just look like big slugs, nothing scary. But they climb into your ear, they read your mind, and they control everything you do. They can pretend to be you so perfectly that nobody who loves you could ever guess you’re trapped inside your own head.
Hi, by the way. I’m Ellie.
We don’t know if we’ll win. If you’re betting on who gets Earth when all this is over, you probably don’t want to put your money on us. But we’re fighting.
Who are we? Well, there’s Riley, my best friend. Sarah, the captain of our school soccer team. And me.
Three kids. Three of us against the entire Yeerk army. We don’t know exactly how many Yeerks there are, but we have a feeling it’s more than three.
But, hey, one of us is pretty good at soccer, so I guess the Yeerks don’t stand a chance.
Maybe you’re wondering how we know about this whole ‘secret invasion’ thing. An alien told us. Not a Yeerk. Something different.
His name was Elfangor. I don’t want to go into a lot of detail about the night we met him. We saw him die. It’s kind of personal.
But... okay, I’m gonna back up a bit.
We were just ordinary kids. Actually, forget that; Riley’s never gonna forgive me if I call her ordinary. But I was an ordinary kid. And I guess Sarah was, too. I didn’t really know her that well, back before it happened, but I don’t think she did much turning into animals.
It was just coincidence that all three of us were there that night. Normally it would’ve just been me and Riley walking across that construction site, on our way back to the orphanage. If the spaceship had crash-landed on any other night, Sarah wouldn’t be one of us and the world would be thirty-three percent more screwed.
But I’d been paired up with Sarah for a school assignment. Like I said, I didn’t really know her, but we were in the same class. Riley’s two years older than me, so she wasn’t an option. And Sarah insisted we were actually going to do the work, so she was tagging along with us. I’d usually have been talking with Riley on the way home, but everything was kind of awkwardly silent with this girl we didn’t know around.
Me and Riley would sometimes meet up with a kid named Sam to walk home; he went to another school nearby. We hadn’t seen him much lately, though. We guessed he just had a lot on his mind. His brother had hit adulthood and moved out of the orphanage, and we knew he was trying to arrange to take Sam with him.
So it was just me and Riley and Sarah when the spaceship slammed into the ground in front of us.
It fixed the ‘awkward silence’ problem, at least.
So, yeah, the short version: Elfangor came out, and even before we knew what he was we could see he was badly hurt. He told us about the Yeerk invasion. He told us his people, the Andalites, were coming to help, but we’d have to hold back the Yeerks ourselves until then. When I say ‘we’, I don’t mean humanity. I mean us. Three kids.
He gave us a power. Andalite technology. We could touch any animal, and concentrate – ‘acquire’ its DNA – and then we’d be able to turn into that animal. Or that’s what he said, anyway. I don’t know if I really believed it back then, even though I was talking to a blue alien centaur.
And we could use this to fight the Yeerks. We could turn into mice and nibble on those aliens’ ankles until they begged for mercy. Or something. The only catch, if you don’t count the ‘having to fight a big, secret, incredibly dangerous war’ thing, was that morphing has a time limit. You stay a mouse for two hours, you’re a mouse forever.
I’ve had a lot of nightmares since then. The ones about the time limit are the worst.
Then Elfangor told us to hide before one of the Yeerk leaders showed up, a guy called Visser Three, and... look, I don’t want to talk about this. If you really have to know what happened, you can look at the history books thirty years from now. Or ask the alien slug that’ll probably be in your head by then. It’ll know.
We didn’t talk about it for two days.
It probably sounds weird. I guess I was trying to convince myself it hadn’t happened. The turning-into-animals part, that sounded cool, and if it had just been that I’d probably have been talking about it to Riley non-stop. I’d definitely have tried it out with the next animal I saw.
But watching Elfangor die? Hearing that there were aliens controlling people all over the place, and we were the only ones who could fight them?
I told myself it was a dream.
I skipped school for the next couple days, so I wouldn’t see Sarah. Riley wasn’t saying anything, and that was fine by me. I couldn’t be sure Sarah had got the invitation to our denial party.
The afternoon of the second day, I was lying on top of my bedcovers, clothes on, just staring at the ceiling. I’d been doing a lot of that lately.
My door creaked open.
I sat up. I was expecting Riley, or maybe Sam, even though we hadn’t spoken in a while. I’d forgotten about the guy who’d just started working at the orphanage.
Yeah, the doors to our rooms in the orphanage? No locks. Marlene would always knock and tell you it was her and wait for you to invite her in before she opened your door, so at least you could kind of feel like you had some privacy. But a couple weeks ago she’d brought in this new guy. David.
“Ellie,” he said, softly. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” I said.
“Your school called.” He sat down on the end of my bed. I pushed myself off it. “Seems you weren’t in today or yesterday.”
“Yeah, I was sick,” I said, leaning against the wall by the door. “I’m fine now, though.”
He just watched me for a moment, frowning a little. “Did anything happen on Tuesday?”
Did anything happen on Tuesday? Let’s think. I did pretty well on the math test. An alien put the entire fate of the world on my shoulders. Other than that, not much. “Apart from me getting sick?”
“Did you see the news about the construction site?”
Suddenly, I actually did feel sick. I shook my head.
“Someone was stabbed,” he said. “We’re worried someone here might have seen it, as it was so close. I’m a qualified counsellor, you know. If you saw something that upset you; if you want to talk through it...”
“Seriously, it was just food poisoning or something,” I said. “I’m okay. I’ll go back to school tomorrow.”
He went quiet.
“Okay,” he said, after a moment. “Come by my room any time, Ellie.”
I was going to have to talk to Riley about this. It was getting really hard to keep pretending nothing had happened on Tuesday.
There was still a part of me saying, you know, maybe it wasn’t real. If the news said someone was stabbed, maybe that’s actually what happened. I saw someone get stabbed, some normal human guy, and it messed me up so badly that my mind made up some weird thing about alien invasions to hide it.
Maybe.
Riley got back from school a couple hours later and came up to our room, and I managed to hold out for a whole four seconds before I said, “David came to say hi.”
“Creepy David?” Riley asked, slinging her bag into the corner. “What’d he want?”
“He wanted to know if I’d been at the construction site on Tuesday.”
Riley stared at me.
“He said someone had been stabbed.”
“Yeah, I saw it on the news,” she said. “It didn’t happen. It was the same time we were there. Someone’s trying to cover the crash up.”
And that was it. I couldn’t pretend any more. Riley remembered the crash.
I took a breath. “Yeerks?”
“Guess so,” Riley said. “You think David’s one of them?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” God, I really didn’t want this to be real. David wasn’t a friend or anything, but it wasn’t good news if people really were being controlled. I looked down at my hands. “We’ll have to do something, won’t we?”
“Hey,” Riley said, ducking her head to look into my eyes. “It’ll be fine. You and me, working together? The aliens are gonna beg for mercy.”
I tried to smile. “I guess we should talk to Sarah, if this is really happening.”
Riley shrugged. “Why bother? Easier if it’s just the two of us. We know how we work as a team.”
Time alone with Riley isn’t something I ever really want to turn down, but, well, stopping an entire alien invasion seemed like a big job for two people. Three people probably wasn’t going to be much better, but it was something.
“If the Yeerks get her, we’re in trouble, right?” I asked. “Elfangor said they could see your memories. She knows we were at the construction site. At least if we stick together we can watch out for her.”
There was a pause.
“Damn,” Riley muttered. “You’re right. And we don’t know her. How do we know we can trust her? What if she’s not as brave as us?”
I wasn’t feeling all that brave. An alien had told us that we were the only ones who could stop the entire planet being taken over by brain-slugs, and then we’d seen him get fucking ripped apart. I was pretty much crapping my pants. But it was Riley, so I tried to put my brave face on.
“I mean, what if we’re all on some kind of mission and she bails when things get dangerous? You and me, we know we’ll look out for each other. We’re nothing to this Sarah girl.” She shook her head. “It should’ve just been us.”
Hey!
A voice, suddenly, in my head. The way Elfangor had spoken.
Hey! Ellie! Riley! That’s you, right?
I looked at Riley. She’d definitely heard it too.
Over here. Out the window.
Slowly, we both turned to look through the window.
There was a big brown-and-white bird perched in the branches of the tree outside. A bird of prey, like a hawk or something.
I begged my dad to take me to this raptor show yesterday, the bird said. It sounded a lot like Sarah. I got to touch an osprey. This is amazing, you guys. Have you tried it yet?
Have you ever tried to catch a bird?
Catching a bird is impossible. All these pigeons and seagulls around, you’d think one would stay still long enough to let you grab it, but no.
After a couple hours, Riley and I were grumpy and sweating and still zero percent bird DNA. I still definitely wanted to try out flying, but I was starting to think this wasn’t the best way to get started.
“Let’s just find someone with a pet bird,” I said. A fly landed on my wrist. I twitched it off. “I think that lady’s about to call animal protection on us.”
The fly came back and landed on my wrist again, apparently thinking that maybe this time I’d be happy to see it.
And guess what? It was right.
Have you ever been a fly?
Okay, stupid question.
It’s awesome.
You can run straight up a wall. You can hang out on the ceiling. But obviously the big thing is that you can fly.
Flies can zip across a room in a couple seconds, right? Have you ever thought about how many times the length of the fly’s body that is? Because you think about it when you’re fly-sized.
Have you ever put on rollerskates and strapped rockets to your legs and fired yourself down the street? Neither have I, but I’m pretty sure it’s something like being a fly.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was gross. I wanted to stick my little fly snout in every pile of dog crap in the state. I wanted to land on all the sweaty dudes we passed. It was creepy, creepy, creepy.
But it was also incredible.
Of course, the problem was that we didn’t just have these powers so we could turn into bugs and race each other. (I won. You know, if you’re wondering.) We had them because humanity was slowly being enslaved, and we were probably going to have to do something about that. Or at least work out where to start.
Which meant following David.
Maybe he wasn’t a Controller. (You’ve probably guessed this already, but a Controller is someone who’s being controlled by a Yeerk.) Maybe he was just a creep. But he was the best lead we had right now.
“Saturday,” I said, when the three of us were together and back in our own bodies. “No school. We can stake him out all day.”
“I can’t do Saturday,” Sarah said. “I’m going out for lunch with my dad.”
Riley rolled her eyes. “Oh, right, I forgot your dad’s so much more important than fighting the alien invasion.”
“That’s not what I—”
“It’s fine. We’ll do it without you. Probably get more done that way, anyway.”
“Riley,” I said, quietly, “don’t be a dick.”
Sarah hesitated. “I could cancel.”
“You realise your dad could be one of them, right?”
“Riley,” I hissed.
“No, seriously,” Riley said. “What if her dad’s a Controller? What if he notices she’s always mysteriously cancelling plans and going out right before weird animals start harassing his friends?”
“Okay,” I said. “So you and me watch him on Saturday, Sarah goes to her lunch thing, and that means she has an alibi.”
“I want to help,” Sarah said.
I shook my head. “Riley’s right. We need to make sure no one guesses who we are. And, hey, if you stay out of this one, you can take over from us if we both get swatted.” I tried to make it sound light.
Sarah shifted. “Well, I can still be there in the morning.”
I looked over at Riley.
“Fine,” she said.
Sarah showed up early on Saturday morning, and we had a quick strategic discussion. It basically came down to ‘don’t be an idiot and let David hear your thought-speak, don’t forget to watch the time so you don’t get stuck as a fly forever’.
The plan was that I’d keep lookout while the others changed, as the door to the bedroom didn’t lock. Once Riley and Sarah were flies, I’d open the door (have you ever tried to open a door as a fly?) and hide under my bed to morph, and then we’d head out to find David.
Riley stripped down to a leotard. Sarah was already wearing hers, as she’d come over here as an osprey. (There are clothes we can wear for morphing – I mean, clothes that will morph with us and still be there when we change back to human – but they have to be skintight. Remind me to tell you sometime about all the awkward nudity we had to deal with when we were figuring that out.) I leant against the door. And then they started to change.
Riley’s always been kind of... I guess compelling is the word. You want to watch her do things. But trust me: you don’t want to watch anyone turn into a fly. The wings grew first on her, and I could deal with that – it was kind of cool, actually – but then the weird fly mouth grew out of her face and I had to look away.
There was a knock on the door.
Fuck.
I looked back at Riley and Sarah. They were mostly fly now, except they were about the size of rabbits, and Sarah’s front legs were still little human arms.
“It’s Marlene. Can you let me in?”
Okay. Marlene was okay. I mean, she’d probably still have questions if she saw two giant flies in my room, but she wasn’t David.
“Yeah, just a second,” I called.
It’ll be fine, Riley said in my head, shrinking fast. I couldn’t answer. You can only use thought-speak when you’re in morph.
I opened the door as soon as Riley and Sarah were a non-terrifying size.
“Hey,” Marlene said. “Is Riley with you? I need to talk to both of you.”
I shook my head. This was probably about breaking curfew again.
Marlene shrugged. “All right. That’s not a problem.”
She pointed something at me.
It looked like some kind of gun.
“Stay quiet and co-operate,” she said, “and you won’t be harmed.”
Marlene’s always been kind of a hardass, but this? This was new.
Fuck! Riley exclaimed in my head.
I put my hands up. My first thought was okay, she’s a Controller, and then I thought I couldn’t let her know I knew about Controllers – I had to act scared and confused – and then I realised that wasn’t actually going to be that tough, because I was definitely scared and confused right now. There’s a difference between being told that there are mind-controlling aliens walking around and actually getting held at gunpoint by your mom’s best friend.
“The other one isn’t here,” Marlene said, raising her voice slightly and half-glancing back at the doorway. “She’ll be enough for now.”
Someone stepped into the room.
I fucking knew it, I almost said aloud, but I managed to stop myself in time. Seriously, Ellie, you don’t want them knowing you know about the whole alien invasion thing.
David. Fucking David.
Turn into a fly! Get out of there! Riley yelled at me, and then, Wait, fuck, no, don’t do that. It takes too long. They could just kill you while you’re morphing. Shit, what do we do?
What could I do? Run? Marlene was still pointing a gun at me; I didn’t know whether it could fire bullets or alien death rays or what, but I knew I wasn’t going to like it. Morphing, yeah, would take too long, and maybe they’d wonder if Riley could do the same thing after they’d killed me, and I couldn’t make her a target. There were two friends in the room with me, or at least two people I was pretty sure were on my side, but they were both tiny insects. What were they going to do: fly up Marlene’s nose?
So I did the only thing I could: I swore like crazy as David wrenched my arms behind my back.
It didn’t really make me feel any better.
Marlene went out to check the corridor, and David dragged me along behind her.
Okay. Okay, Ellie. You can hear me, right? I’m following you. I’ll get you out of this. Somehow. Shit.
There was a shed in the grounds of the orphanage. It used to be for storing basketballs and things, but a few years ago it had been locked up. Nobody knew why. We’d joke that Marlene was growing drugs in there, or using it to hide bodies.
Well, we were going to find out the truth now.
No drugs. No bodies. But there was a trapdoor leading to a narrow path, winding down through earth and rock, and after a few minutes that path opened up into the biggest underground cavern you can imagine.
That’s a Yeerk pool, right? Riley muttered. God, this can’t happen.
Elfangor had told us about Yeerk pools, although I hadn’t realised they’d be so huge. You’ve probably guessed they’re pools with Yeerks in them. Every three days, a Yeerk has to go back to the pool to swim around and soak up nutrients before going back into its host.
There were cages lining the sides of the pool. I wasn’t close enough to see yet, but I guessed that was where the hosts were being kept.
Of course, some of the Yeerks in a pool don’t have hosts yet.
They’d brought me here to make me their puppet.
Sarah?
Silence.
Sarah? You here? Riley asked. Guess not. Stayed back to save your own skin, huh? Fine. I’ll save Ellie on my own.
I’m here. Uh, sorry. I’m here, Sarah said. She sounded a little shaky. Sorry I didn’t say anything. I was...
A few seconds passed.
Freaking out? Riley asked.
Freaking out, Sarah muttered.
Okay. You can freak out later. Right now, we’re making sure Ellie doesn’t get Yeerked.
I did kind of feel better, knowing Sarah was still there. I didn’t really know her yet, and I didn’t trust her the way I trusted Riley, but when you’re being dragged along by aliens it’s good to know you have more than one person on your side. She hadn’t bailed the second I was in danger. That was something. Maybe we really would be able to work together.
You know, if I got out of this without a Yeerk in my head.
What do we do? What do we do? Sarah asked, and then, Wait! You know ospreys eat fish?
Sarah, Riley said, that’s great, but they’re gonna put an alien in Ellie’s brain.
I mean an osprey’s probably pretty good at grabbing things out of water, right? Sarah asked. Or sludge, or... whatever that is.
That’s your plan? Grab all the Yeerks out of the pool? Pretty sure we don’t have time for that.
Maybe it’d distract them, Sarah said. I can go after the Yeerks, Ellie could try to run away...
That sounds like a really great way of getting you both killed, Riley said. There’s gotta be something else.
There was a pause. Sarah’s plan probably was going to end up with both of us dead, but it was sounding better with every step toward that pool.
You really think you can get Yeerks out of there? Riley asked.
I think so. I mean, I can try. I think I’d only be able to get one at a time.
One’s all we need, Riley said.
Another pause.
Are you serious? Sarah asked.
Yeah, it’s a terrible plan, Riley said. But maybe we can all get out of here alive.
I really wanted to know what this terrible plan was, but of course I didn’t have any way to ask, so I just had to keep shuffling along. Maybe you’ve already figured it out and you’re wondering how I could be so clueless. Sue me. I wasn’t just sitting there, reading this story; I was being dragged down to have a mind-controlling alien put in my ear. I kind of had a lot on my mind.
It has to be me, Riley said.
I’m definitely not arguing with you, Sarah said. Can you see someplace we can hide and... morph out? Demorph?
Stop being flies? Riley suggested.
Yeah, that.
Okay, I think I have somewhere, Riley said, after a moment. Follow me. Then something about her ‘voice’ changed; I think maybe she was speaking to me privately. Got your back, Ellie. I’m not gonna let anything happen to you.
And then they went quiet. No voices talking in my head. I was on my own, David pulling me along way too roughly, and now I didn’t have anything to distract me from what was going to happen. All I could do was drag my feet, hope I could buy the others some time to carry out whatever they were planning.
Nothing happened. The pool just kept getting closer, slowly, and I couldn’t see Riley or Sarah anywhere, and the only thing I knew was that I was seriously, seriously screwed.
“Walk faster,” David muttered, shaking me by the arm.
“Yeah, I’m dying to do whatever you want,” I said.
And then he put one arm across my back and the other behind my legs and swept me up in a fucking bridal carry. I tried to struggle at first, but Marlene pointed her gun-thing at me again and I was pretty sure she was losing patience.
Okay. This was bad news. I don’t like people picking me up in general and I really don’t like creepy alien-controlled guys picking me up, but the bigger issue was that we were now covering ground a lot faster. If I didn’t—
And then David stopped moving. “What...?”
I twisted around to look, just in time to see a brown-and-white bird dive and snatch something out of the pool. A big brown-and-white bird. A big, familiar-looking brown-and-white bird.
TSEWWWW!
Turned out Marlene’s gun-thing fired beams of red light. She wasn’t shooting at me, which was good. I mean, it wasn’t good that she was shooting at Sarah, but David was still holding me; I wouldn’t exactly have been able to dodge.
The first beam missed Sarah and hit the roof of the cavern with a bigger explosion than I want a weapon that’s been pointed at me to cause, thanks. Marlene fired again, but the bird had already swooped out of sight behind a long, low building.
Marlene swore. I mean, I think she swore. She said something in some probably-alien language, and it didn’t sound like the word for ‘oh, good, one of us is getting eaten by a bird’.
“Andalite?” David asked. I could feel how tense he was.
“An exceptionally foolish Andalite, if so,” Marlene said. “Finding a way into the pool to seize just one of us? A hostage?”
“There may be more.”
“There may,” Marlene said. “Put the girl down; we could need your weapon.”
So David set me down and pulled out his own laser gun. He was still holding my wrist, so I couldn’t just walk away, but this was a definite improvement. For one thing, we weren’t moving toward the big scary pool of aliens any more; Marlene and David were just standing there with their guns in their hands, scanning the air for birds.
Was the plan to create a distraction so I could get away and morph? I appreciated the effort, if that was it, but we kind of needed something bigger.
“We need to get her to the pool,” Marlene said, after a minute or so. “Keep your hand on your Dracon beam.”
Okay. Moving again. I tried not to freak out, but it was getting hard when we were practically on the pier by now.
TSEWWWW!
I looked up, startled. The osprey was back. Sarah.
The beam – the Dracon beam, apparently? – hit the roof with a distant BOOM (yes, distant; I told you this was a really big place, right?), and another shower of stone chips and dust rained down into the pool. Sarah was going into a dive, and I thought for a moment she was aiming for the end of the pier, for the giant blade-covered monster forcing a man’s head down into the Yeerk-filled sludge – but she flared her wings at the last second, skimmed the surface of the pool right by the pier and soared away.
Riley, you’re in! Sarah called. I’m gonna get out of sight. Everyone’s shooting at me.
This is so weird, Riley’s voice said in my head. And so gross. And so weird. Ellie, you okay?
‘No, not really, and where the hell are you?’ was what I wanted to say, but obviously that wasn’t really an option. All I could do was look around, trying to spot Riley without letting David know anyone was thought-speaking to me.
She’s okay, Sarah said. Not exactly true, but, again, I couldn’t exactly correct her. She’s on the pier. There are two people ahead of her. I’ll tell you when she gets to the end.
Okay. I’m pretty sure I’m still by the pier. I can tell when someone’s head is nearby, I think. Is this really gonna work?
I don’t know, Sarah said. Ellie, when it’s your turn, can you turn your head so it’s just your left ear in the pool? This’ll probably be easier if there’s only one target. Otherwise a real Yeerk might get in your other ear.
‘Wow,’ I couldn’t say. ‘This is an unbelievably stupid plan.’
Riley must have guessed what I was thinking, though, because I heard her voice in my head. You’ll be fine, Ellie. I swear.
And I know they were just words, but they still kind of made me feel better.
Not that much better, though, because there was only one person ahead of me now. A woman, dark-haired, struggling and swearing at the guys dragging her along. She’d been pulled out from the cages, so she must have been infested already; her Yeerk was just taking a break.
She kept fighting even after they passed her to the Hork-Bajir at the end of the pier, which was impressive because... have you ever seen a Hork-Bajir? They’re aliens. They’re seven feet tall and they’re covered in blades. I mean, covered. Head, arms, legs, tail: blades everywhere. I’d seen some before; they’d shown up with Visser Three at the construction site. They’re fucking terrifying.
Elfangor had told us that the Hork-Bajir were actually gentle. Kind of weird to imagine when they looked like murder machines. The blades were for cutting bark off trees; that’s what they ate. But the Yeerks had taken the whole species over and turned them into weapons.
“Hey! Hey!” the woman yelled, twisting around to look at the people in the cages, at me, at the guys who’d brought her down here and David and Marlene. “Any of you get out of this, you come find me and you get this fucking thing out of my head! My name’s Tess—” and the Hork-Bajir shoved her head down into the pool.
She was quiet and calm when she stood up again.
I think that’s when it really, really hit me, what was happening to these people. Tess was probably still screaming inside her head. But she looked like any normal woman now, just going about her business that... happened to be in this huge underground cavern full of aliens. She didn’t have any control over her body any more.
And that was what was going to happen to me, if the plan went wrong.
Ellie’s next, Sarah said.
I’m here, Riley said. I’m ready.
David handed me over to the Hork-Bajir. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.
I held my breath and tilted my head and let him shove my face down into the pool.
I felt it almost straight away: a touch on my ear, and then the Yeerk was starting to work its way inside and oh fuck please tell me...
Okay, Ellie, it’s me, Riley said. It’s me. You’re safe. Don’t freak out.
Well, screw Riley. I was being held down by something that looked like a dinosaur had mated with a truck full of swords, and my best friend was crawling up my ear to look at my brain. I was going to freak out if I wanted to.
I was expecting it to be painful, and it was, at first, but then my ear kind of went numb.
Oh, this is weird, Riley muttered. I don’t want to break anything.
The Yeerk should know what to do, right? Sarah asked. You can use its instincts. It’s what I do when I’m flying. The osprey knows when to pull out of a dive.
Okay. Okay. I think I’m in. So, uh, now...
My muscles went slack. All of them. I didn’t have any control over it. I’d have fallen face-first into the pool if the Hork-Bajir hadn’t dragged me back upright.
Crap, Riley muttered, and then, after a moment, Okay, I’ve got this.
The Hork-Bajir let go of me. I took a couple of awkward, wobbly steps back up the pier. Or Riley took those steps, with my body. I couldn’t do anything.
We were definitely blowing our cover, right?
“Your first human host?” Marlene asked.
It seemed like there was a moment before Riley figured out how to nod.
“Register your name and your host’s name before you leave,” Marlene said. “And watch for animals. There’s an Andalite trying to take hostages.”
Uh, what do I say to that? Riley asked in my head, but Marlene had already turned away. Apparently I wasn’t interesting any more.
Could I talk to Riley? Could she hear my thoughts? I couldn’t thought-speak, but now that she was actually in my brain...
Yeah, I can hear you, she said.
The others ahead of me just walked off, I thought. As soon as the Yeerks were in their heads.
Okay. Hold on, Ellie; we’re getting you out of here.
Riley walked me back up the pier, past a couple other people waiting to be infested. She’d taken a few steps, getting steadier, before a kid was dragged onto the pier by two Controllers.
Shit. Oh, shit. I’d have said it out loud if I’d had control of my own body.
The kid was Sam.
He stared. I stared. Or Riley stared with my eyes, I guess, and I didn’t really have any options other than staring along with her.
“Ellie,” he said, quietly, and then, “No. Get out of her!”
I tried to lunge at the guys carrying him. I couldn’t.
Riley! We have to do something!
What are we supposed to do? Riley demanded. I’m not getting you killed!
Something! They’re gonna put a Yeerk in his head!
You want to save all the people in cages as well? Your best weapon is a fly. We don’t have a plan. We’re lucky to be alive.
My feet moved. Sam was going to be controlled by an alien, and Riley was fucking walking me away.
You’re gonna do fucking nothing? I yelled in my head.
I’m gonna get you out of this place in one piece, she snapped back. We get the hell out of here, we get some better morphs, we survive. Then we can worry about Sam.
I was shouting so much at Riley that I almost missed the other voice that slammed into my head as we reached the sloping path up to the exit.
Don’t leave me behind!
Riley glanced back, using my eyes. The osprey – Sarah – was zooming toward us in a shallow dive, aiming to blow past above my head.
I’ll get in front of you, okay? Sarah was saying. Then they won’t be able to see—
TSEWWWW!
Suddenly my head was full of screaming. I don’t know if it was mine or Riley’s or Sarah’s.
Sarah’s left wing had been burnt off. She hit the ground so hard I swear I felt it.
“Kill it!” bellowed Marlene.
Riley froze for just an instant before she darted back, scooped Sarah up in my arms and ran.
Somehow it seemed ridiculous that it was still daylight, after everything that had happened. Riley stuck to quiet side-streets, because people tend to stare when a teenage girl goes charging down main roads with a wounded osprey in her arms.
I could hear how in pain and frightened Sarah was, and she seemed to be having trouble staying conscious, but she was trying to give us directions to her dad’s place; it wasn’t like we could stay at the evil alien orphanage any longer. Before we got there, though, Riley veered into a narrow, shadowed grassy band between two houses and set Sarah down carefully on the ground.
“We’re gonna morph out,” she said, with my voice. “I don’t know how long it’s been, but I’m not explaining to your dad why his kid’s stuck as a one-winged bird. And I’m definitely not getting stuck in Ellie’s head.”
Even if it’s pretty interesting in here, she added, so I was the only one who could hear it. She made a whistling noise in my mind. Ellie. You have got it so bad.
Fuck.
Shut up, I thought, trying not to sound like I was freaking out. It’s one thing trying to keep how freaked-out you are out of your voice; have you ever tried keeping it out of your thoughts?
It’s adorable! Is this seriously how much you think about me?
You’re in my head! You’re literally in my head. Pretty sure you’d think about me if you had me being a big gross slug in your brain.
Riley went quiet for a moment.
Pretty sure I’d think about you anyway, she said.
But Sarah was talking now. Hey, d’you... d’you know if... my arm...
“Look, just demorph,” Riley said. “We’ll find out.” She hesitated. “Good luck.”
Okay, Sarah said. She lay there for a moment, I guess doing whatever the bird equivalent of taking a deep breath to calm yourself down is. Okay.
We stood there, watching Sarah emerge from the osprey. Head. Chest. Legs. Right arm.
Left arm.
Sarah grabbed at it with her feathered right arm and said something. It was hard to make out when her mouth was still mostly a beak, but I think she was relieved.
Okay, now me.
Riley made me kneel down and tilt my head. I tried not to think about her squirming down my ear canal. It was impossible not to think about her squirming down my ear canal, obviously, especially when I could feel her squirming down my ear canal.
Riley plopped onto the grass. I shuddered. But at least it was me shuddering, and not someone else. Even when it’s someone you trust, there’s something incredibly uncomfortable about someone else being in control of your body.
I looked away while the Yeerk was turning back into Riley. I’d already been handed way too much screaming nightmare material for one day.
The first thing she said, once she had her own voice back, was, “Ellie, I’m sorry.”
I still couldn’t make myself look at her. I wasn’t angry any more. Freaking out about Sarah had kind of pushed the anger out of my head, and it wasn’t coming back now that I knew she was okay. I just... needed a moment.
“It was definitely Sam, wasn’t it?” I asked, even though I knew the answer. She’d probably saved my life by not letting me try to help him, but I still felt sick when I thought about it.
“Sam?” Sarah asked. She was sitting on the grass. I don’t think she felt ready to stand up yet.
“That kid who came on after Ellie,” Riley said. “He’s a friend.”
“Oh.” Sarah shifted, uneasily. I don’t think she knew what to say. I guess I wouldn’t have known either, in her shoes. “I’m sorry.”
Something had been bothering me. When I’d seen Sam, I’d assumed he was like me: he’d been grabbed and taken down to get Yeerked. But he’d seemed to know what was going on. He knew I was being controlled.
Marlene and David hadn’t been kind enough to explain the whole ‘we put a slug in your head, it walks you around’ deal to me. If I hadn’t already met Elfangor, I wouldn’t have known what I had coming. So how did Sam know? Had he already been a Controller? Was he just there so his Yeerk could have a snack?
“Did you guys see if he came straight from the entrance?” I asked.
Sarah hesitated. “I think they brought him out from the cages.”
Fuck. How long?
I knew Sam hadn’t been hanging out with us lately. I guess I thought he was trying to make saying goodbye easier. I mean, his brother had been trying to get custody of him. But no; apparently he was just being controlled by an alien that didn’t have time for things like friendship.
“We’ll save him,” Riley said. “We’ll work something out.”
“I’m sorry,” Sarah said, for about the fourth time. “I’d let you live with us if I could. It’s just I don’t think Dad’s ready for two new surprise kids.”
“What if one of us morphed into you and went to live with your mom?” I suggested, trying not to smirk.
Sarah burst out laughing. “Oh, God, that’s so creepy.”
“We’ll be fine,” Riley said. “We knew each other from the streets before Marlene tracked us down.”
“Yeah, and we didn’t have this morphing thing back then,” I said. “Could turn into someone’s cat, get a free meal...”
“Please tell me you’re kidding,” Sarah said.
Honestly, yeah, I was worried about the living situation. But I’d be with Riley. We’d be okay, somehow.
“At least stay over tonight,” Sarah said.
“Hey, Sarah,” Sarah’s dad said, opening the door. “I was starting to think you’d miss our lunch.” He paused, frowning slightly. “You join the gymnastics team or something?”
With everything that had happened, I hadn’t really registered how strange Sarah and Riley looked in their morphing leotards. It was a good thing the Dracon beam had cauterised Sarah’s wing. I don’t know what her dad would have said if I’d shown up with osprey blood all over my T-shirt.
“We were trying out,” Sarah said. “I don’t know if we’ll really have time to join, though.”
“You’re kids. You’ve got time,” her dad said. “These friends of yours?”
“Yeah, from school.”
I tried to smile. Tried to look like a normal kid who definitely didn’t fight any aliens. “Hey. I’m Ellie.”
“Riley,” Riley said, raising a hand.
Sarah’s dad nodded. “Good to meet you. You can call me Joel.”
“I was wondering if they could stay over tonight,” Sarah said.
“Tonight?” Joel echoed, scratching his chin. “Kind of short notice, isn’t it?”
“I’ll cook,” Sarah said, quickly. “And I’ll make up the guest room.”
Joel folded his arms.
“Well,” he said after a moment, giving me a small smile, “if you trust Sarah’s cooking...”
“Dad,” Sarah said.
Well, it was probably going to be better than cat food.
Sarah and her dad still had their lunch to go to, of course, so Riley and I hung out in a nearby park, climbing trees, not talking about how climbing trees didn’t really feel the same once you’d literally flown.
“Sarah really came through, huh?” I asked, when we were sitting together in the shade of an oak.
Riley smirked. “Are you trying to get me to say I was wrong?”
I shrugged. “I’m just saying.”
If I’m honest, I wanted Riley and Sarah to get along. They’d worked together at the Yeerk pool, and because of that they’d been able to save me. If all three of us could work together, maybe we’d stand a chance against the invasion. Or maybe we’d survive longer than eight seconds, at least.
“Okay,” Riley said, “I was wrong. She’s definitely brave enough.” She looked up at the sky, through the branches and leaves above us. “This could actually work. We could make a seriously kickass team.”
I was going to have to say it, wasn’t I?
“Riley, can I tell you something?”
“What, you think there’s a chance I’ll say ‘no’?”
Maybe she’d already seen it when she’d been in my head, but I had to get it out in the open. “I’m... not actually all that brave. I mean, I’ll fight, but I need you to know I’m gonna be scared out of my mind the whole time.”
Riley shook her head, but she was smiling. “You dumbass.” She took my hand. “That’s what bravery is.”
I looked down at our hands.
Yeah, maybe we were heading into a war we couldn’t win. But we were heading into it together.
I looked away, at the people walking past. Some with Yeerks in their heads, probably. I couldn’t look at Riley if I was going to ask this. “Can I...?”
“Can you...?” she echoed.
“Do you think this morphing thing works with people?”
She shrugged, and then I felt her hand tense up in mine. But she didn’t let go. “You want to acquire me?”
“I’m not planning to turn into you,” I said, quickly. “That’d be weird. I just...” I didn’t know how to explain it. “I just want to know you’re there.”
She laughed. “How romantic. Is that how you felt about the fly, too?”
“Shut up. Are you gonna let me do it or not?”
Riley hesitated.
“Yeah,” she said. “Okay.”
I closed my eyes and focused. Pictured Riley. Really thought about her. Not like that was difficult. It’s something I do kind of a lot.
“Oh,” Riley said. Her voice sounded... blurred around the edges, somehow, and all the tension was going out of her hand. “That’s... it’s kind of like falling asleep.”
I guess part of it was... maybe this is going to sound weird, but it was like taking a photograph, or something. A way to remember her, if something happened. Our lives had become a whole lot more dangerous. I couldn’t just pretend there wasn’t a chance she’d be gone one day. Maybe soon.
It wasn’t creepy. I wasn’t planning to turn into her and stare at myself in the mirror if she died, or anything.
Or maybe I was. I don’t know.
She’ll probably outlive me, anyway. She’s Riley.