ANIMORPHS #31: THE CONSPIRACY
nothing but a roach in a cuff.
hi hello and welcome back to the world’s most niche gossip blog, animorphs weekly. i know it’s been awhile since we last saw each other. i didn’t forget about you! i’m just mentally ill and the world is crumbling.
wanna read a book?
WHEN THEY SAY “IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD,” BELIEVE IT. . . .
ominous!
this has got to be the clunkiest cover we’ve come across. an absolutely fucked up parabola. today, i’m feeling like a four: not a boy, not yet a bird. certainly smaller than i should be and also bigger.
it’s a jake book!
SUMMARY
if memory serves, this is the first jake pov book we’ve gotten since he got shot in the revolutionary war (which is an absolutely batshit sentence i would not have believed when i started this project). a lot has happened since we last got a jake book, really: everyone got sick and cassie had to perform brain surgery on ax, jake famously died and they all traveled through time, and jake and cassie nearly blew up in the last book and survived only because they were roaches. things are really starting to weigh heavy on our fearful leader, which is evident by this sentence:
or check in with any one of us in the small hours between night and morning, when the nightmares come, the nightmares of twisting bodies and mutating minds.
yeesh!
he monologues for awhile about the war the animorphs are fighting alone against the yeerks. it’s…dark. he describes in detail what it’s like to have a yeerk inside your body (“trapped, helpless, begging for the nightmare to end”) and to know that you have absolutely no control. he talks about the time the yeerk who used to infest big brother tom showed him the memories of Real Tom being dragged, kicking and screaming, to the yeerk pool. and he also says he understands how people fighting in the civil war felt, brother against brother, and then reflects on a memory of his great-granddad.
my family had driven eight hours to visit him in his cabin in the woods. he and i were sitting on the dock at the lake, watching the fish snatch mosquitoes off the water’s glassy, mirrored surface.
and it was so quiet.
i was about to leave when grandpa g said, “you know, i see myself in you, jake. you’ve got an old soul.”
a damning thing to say to a child, but jake understands now. he does feel old! he’s seen a lot of death and destruction and has been responsible for some of it. he’s the leader. someone has to be, he says, and he is okay with bearing the burden. but most importantly, jake knows, a leader won’t ask anyone to do anything he wouldn’t do himself.
that one came home to haunt me.
because in three days, my brother tom was either going to kill or be killed.
and it was up to me to decide.
remember when we were all like haha the animorphs! what a wacky fun series that will be fun to explore!
:/
jake comes home from school to find a taxi parked out front. his mom comes bursting out of the house, suitcase in hand, sobbing. jake is in instant panic mode: something’s happened to dad, or maybe big brother tom. jake intercepts his mom and asks what happened. through tears, she explains that grandpa g has died. she’s flying out to her parents’ house, and when jake’s dad clears his work schedule, jake, his father, and big brother tom will join them all at grandpa g’s cabin. rip.
jake goes inside to find big brother tom yelling at his dad. big brother tom CAN’T go to the cabin this weekend! he promised everyone’s favorite volleyball cult, The Sharing, that he’d help out this weekend. jake’s dad is like well, The Sharing is supposed to be about family values, and your family valued grandpa g, so we’re going to the cabin. jake is trying to figure out why big brother tom is throwing such a fit, and then he asks his dad how long they’re going to be gone.
“it depends on the funeral. i’ll write notes so you’ll be excused from school through tuesday of next week—”
“what?” tom’s eyes bulged in shock. “tuesday? dad, no way! four days? i can’t stay away for four days!”
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
famously, a yeerk can’t survive past three days without kandrona rays. and there is NOTHING around grandpa g’s cabin, not a taco bell and certainly not a giant football-field-sized pool filled with those sweet sweet k-rays. there’s a moment where big brother tom looks furious. jake thinks he might even attack their dad. playing the younger brother role, jake pokes fun at big brother tom, the two of them sniping back and forth about being a baby and having a life. jake’s dad is like what the fuck is going on someone is dead i’m going to change we’re going to order pizza everyone chill the fuck out
when he leaves, jake and big brother tom are left alone. jake knows the yeerk inside big brother tom is panicking. either it can keep tom or it can keep its life. jake goes to the backyard to think. will there ever be another opportunity like this? probably not. obviously, he’s going to take it.
dinner is, obviously, awful. big brother tom does all he can to try to get out of going, but jake’s dad is firm. they’re going. after dinner, jake goes for a walk. he really wants to talk to cassie, but she and her parents are out at an animal rescue seminar. he wants to talk to cassie because she understands nuance and emotion, better than anyone else. if he wanted to talk strategy, he’d go to marco, but he knows he’s too close to the situation to only talk shop.
still, the universe has other plans.
“yo, jake man! i was just on my way over to your house.” marco, jogging toward me. “i need your english notes.”
they body-check each other (boys) and jake asks when marco started saying yo.
“i was going to yell, ‘hey, handsome,’ but i thought you might prefer ‘yo.’”
it’s been so long since i’ve gotten to look directly into the camera
jake tells marco that his grandpa g died. marco’s like, damn, that’s rough buddy. he was in world war II, right? you know, so were we! and that’s true!
jake and marco start to walk back to jake’s house. when they get back, jake’s dad’s car isn’t in the driveway. adrenaline starts pumping. they cross the front lawn as jake explains they’re going to be gone for four days. marco instantly catches on. if anyone understands what it’s like to have a family member being driven by yeerks, it’s marco “mommy issues” no-last-name. he points out (no blame, no judgement) that jake left big brother tom and his dad alone. jake bursts into the house.
the house is silent. jake runs through the house. no one’s there. he runs into the kitchen, searching for a clue as to where they’ve gone. his mom had left a note on the fridge but it’s gone now. jake checks the trash: there. on the bottom of the note is a new addition in his father’s handwriting.
jake: went to a sharing meeting with tom to explain why he can’t help them out this weekend. be back soon.
love, dad.
Y O I N K S
jake starts to panic. big brother tom is going to force his dad to become a controller. he can’t lose his dad, too. definitely not. marco, the reliable voice of reason, starts to cover their tracks. he puts the note back in the trash, puts the magnet back on the fridge. jake doesn’t know what to do. he goes to call the chee from the house phone, but marco stops him.
“jake, listen to me.”
“what? WHAT?”
“you’re the boss, jake. you’re the fearless leader. but not right now, okay? you’re too messed up over this. let me call the plays.”
i knew he was right. i said nothing. i hated marco right then. hated him because he wouldn’t have made the mistake i’d made. he would have seen…
hated him because he’d already lost his mother and he knew what the inside of my head was like, because he knew i was scared and just wanted to cry.
:(
marco leads jake to a pay phone. they call ancient erek, who informs them there are no scheduled Sharing meetings. maybe, ancient erek suggests, big brother tom called an emergency meeting. jake tries to think. his dad always carries a cell phone. he could just call and ask where his dad is. marco and ancient erek shoot that idea down right away: the yeerks are on high alert. if jake calls and asks where his dad is, and then the meeting gets broken up by the animorphs, the yeerks could put two and two together. visser one already discovered they were human. visser three, while an idiot, isn’t that stupid.
ancient erek offers a compromise: jake will call the phone, ancient erek will tap into the frequency, and the chee technology will triangulate jake’s dad’s location. jake won’t have to talk and they’ll still be able to rescue him. they do this all the time on criminal minds!
of course, big brother tom answers jake’s dad’s phone. marco snatches the pay phone out of jake’s hands before he can totally ruin the mission, waits, and then hangs up. they call ancient erek. unfortunately, not even the chee technology is perfect: he’s only able to narrow it down to a six blocks by six blocks area in the northern part of town. seventy-five private homes, a mini-mall, a hardware store, and an auto body shop. based on the sounds in the background of the phone call and a two-word phrase (“normal hours”), they have to narrow it down. ancient erek’s best guess is the mini-mall. jake tells ancient erek to get ahold of rachel and tell her and the others to check out the other locations. he hangs up. (rude.)
he runs back to his house, stripping down to his morphing outfit. he starts to morph falcon. it’s gross! always. jake tells marco he’ll meet him there.
yeah. okay. but jake?
what? i snapped.
i expected him to say, “don’t do anything stupid.”
you’re not alone, man, marco said.
:’)
friendship
i love these little dudes, man. they’ve come so far!
anyway, jake starts booking it as a falcon. he’s not fucking around. he compares himself to a race car driver, and says, “one wrong twitch of the wheel and i would spin out of control.” yikes! he loses marco in the air and makes it to the mini-mall. he demorphs in the shadows behind the mini-mall, which is just absolutely reckless! there are so many yeerks here pal and you don’t know where they are! applegate describes, in disgusting detail, what it’s like as jake demorphs. bulging, gurgled, and sloshed are all words she uses.
:/
jake quickly starts morphing into tiger. he’s ready to start tearing into buildings. marco finally catches up and starts to demorph. he’s like, jake, chill! i will forcibly remove you from the premises! it’s tense.
“look,” marco said finally, quietly. “i know you’re freaked out but if we make this a rescue mission, we’re all dead. all of us. everyone. the yeerks aren’t idiots. they go after your dad and suddenly the animorphs attack a minor meeting? they can add two plus two, jake. you let the yeerks know who you are, jake, how is that gonna help your father?”
these are middle schoolers
at the beginning of the series, marco would have used the phrase “we’re all dead” in reference to how grounded they were all gonna be. now he’s is literally talking about dying. i try to tell people about these books and i just end up speechless because there is no way to succinctly explain that applegate is not fucking around.
but, because marco is number one, he already accounted for jake not being in his right state of mind. totally cool. marco’s got a plan. he starts to morph gorilla, and tells jake to morph back to falcon. he’s gonna need those eyes.
this is also a big moment for marco! coming to terms with his role on the squad, marco knows he’s the one who’s good at getting from point a to point b. he can compartmentalize. just like rachel had to come to terms with being the most aggressive, and jake had to come to terms with the fact that one day he could make a call that will get one of his friends killed. they’re growing up so fast. how do you possibly recover?
jake knows that marco is right. his judgment is slipping, and that’s dangerous. so he acquiesces.
my father and brother were close by. one predator, the other prey. both, in different ways, in mortal danger.
and if they were to be saved, it was up to marco. not me.
say what you want but miss applegate knows how to end a chapter
marco heads into the mini-mall parking lot and just starts dropping cars. i mean, causing a full ruckus. there are a lot of caps used here.
WaaaaAAAAAAaaaaaAAAAAAaaaaaAAAAA!
that is verbatim
marco finds assistant principal controller chapman’s car and straight up punches it. then he puts a huge dent in the hood of jake’s dad’s new car. once he’s caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages, he runs to the shadows and starts to morph. just in time, too, because a bunch of angry people start to come out of the computer store, the starbucks (product placement!), and the antique store. including jake’s dad, and big brother tom. jake’s dad literally falls to his knees at the sight of his damaged car. tough break, dude. marco’s already down the street, but jake stays behind, studying his father’s face. has his dad been turned?
[big brother] tom gave me the clue i was hoping for.
“c’mon, dad, calm down,” he said, going over to him. “we can call and report it when we get home if you want to. let’s go back inside, okay? the meeting just started and a lot of important things are gonna happen tonight. you don’t want to miss it. trust me?”
jake’s dad is like you will have to kill me to get me back inside that building my car has been HURT i am going home and calling our INSURANCE AGENT, joe johnson! big brother tom’s like >:( well i’m STAYING for the meeting. jake’s dad tells him he expects him home by ten. satisfied, jake flies towards marco, and the pair head home.
jake? that’s round one. you know that, marco said, after a moment.
yeah, i said, i know.
the fight to save my father had only begun.
rad
later that night, all the animorphs meet up at cassie’s barn. rachel is particularly pissed: she’d been shopping at the mall when she’d gotten the call from ancient erek, and in her haste to make it to the others in time, she shoved all of her purchases into a mall locker—but she didn’t lock it. when she got back, her things had been stolen. i’d be pissed too!! she points out that there’s no real victory for the animorphs/the greater good here. keeping jake’s dad safe is a big deal, of course, but there’s a lot of parental trauma in this group. as if to illustrate this, tobias asks why big brother tom doesn’t just tell his dad he’s not going.
what? he asked, sounding defensive. i used to do that whenever one of my aunts or uncles wanted me to go somewhere i didn’t want to. they never made me go. he was quiet a moment. then, abashed, he said, oh, duh. they didn’t care what i did.
tobias :(
still, there are other issues with the defiance route. big brother tom could get grounded, which would definitely keep him from kandrona rays. and if he acted really shitty, his parents would probably think The Sharing was a bad influence on him. the yeerks have a choice: infest jake’s dad to keep big brother tom, or withdraw big brother tom’s yeerk and kill Real Tom to keep him from talking.
“there’s another choice,” rachel said.
…
“if the yeerks can’t make his father into a controller soon enough, they could just kill him. as an orphan tom’s cover isn’t affected. might even be enhanced,” rachel said. and then, looking me straight in the eye, she said, “and tom would probably be the one to do it.”
she’s got a point!
also for those of you really curious at home, ax does ask rachel if she’s going to the funeral, and she says no—grandpa g is jake’s mom’s grandpa, and rachel and jake are related on his dad’s side. family!
the team agrees: the best move is to keep watch over jake’s dad til they leave for the funeral on saturday. jake can and will handle most of it, but the others will provide backup when they can. the next morning, jake calls himself out of school due to a death in the family and starts to morph cockroach. there is a really long paragraph here about how haunting and horrendous it is to morph into a cockroach that ends with, “morphing may be a great weapon. it is also a horror beyond imagining.” too true!!!
once a roach, jake zips to the garage, where his dad is hurriedly getting into his car. he’s in such a hurry that he drops a glass jar of smucker’s raspberry preserves an inch away from jake! there’s a harrowing action sequence where jake narrowly avoids getting killed by his own father that ends with jake hiding in the cuff of his dad’s pants. as a roach. even if i knew it was my son, i’d have a hard time recovering from that.
tobias follows the car from above, and ax is waiting at jake’s dad’s place of work. there’s a guy with a beard who looks pissed and suspicious, but he doesn’t make any moves, and jake and his dad make it inside without any issues. i don’t know if we already knew this, but jake’s dad is a pediatrician! and it’s ear-infection CENTRAL. jake spends a lot of time waiting, and thinking. (he does demorph and remorph in an DIY out of order toilet stall.) being on the defense is hard and stressful. so he thinks about his dad.
his dad is a good guy, jake thinks. not just because he’s his dad, but because he’s kind and he does his work as well as he can. jake hopes he’ll be like that when he’s older: a good family man, good at his job, and kind. “maybe that’s not a huge, ambitious goal, but it would be enough for me.” it’s enough for me, too!!!
of course, the work day eventually comes to a close. and tobias has some bad news: the angry bearded guy is waiting by the elevators. it’s too late for jake to demorph and remorph into something, so unless the bearded guy is deeply afraid of roaches, he’ll be useless if it comes to a fight. ax is nearby, but he won’t be able to demorph out of sight, and if a full on andalite comes onto the scene to protect jake’s dad, their cover will be blown.
what should i do?
lose everyone?
or just my father?
damn
jake’s just a roach in a cuff!!! ax and tobias give him updates: jake’s dad is approaching his car. the bearded man is four feet behind him. he might be a roach, but jake still has a human brain. he scampers up his dad’s pant leg, onto his jacket, and then to his shoulder, and then cracks open the roach’s wings and flies straight for the bearded man. for those lucky few of you who have never had a roach fly straight at you, it is a truly horrifying experience that lives with you forever. jake lands on this man’s MOUTH!!!! his lower lip!!!! he’s scurrying all over this man’s face when tobias comes down and grabs his toupee off his head!!!! humiliation abounds. jake is like DROP THE TOUPEE we can’t ATTACK!! tobias does drop the toupee. jake’s dad tries to soothe the screaming man, who turns his fury onto jake’s father and asks, “IS THAT YOUR CAR?!”
jake’s dad is like, huh? yeah. the bearded man says that jake’s dad is parked in his spot!! he’s not a controller!! he’s just a weird asshole who thinks he owns the parking spot. only a momentary relief, and even then, it just makes jake feel worse. he’d frozen when tobias and ax had asked him what to do, and then he’d made the wrong call. he’s tired, and so are his friends. but the yeerks have a seemingly unlimited supply of energy, and they still haven’t made any moves. the attack is still to come.
jake tells tobias and ax to go home and rest—and to tell the others to rest, too.
why? i don’t know. maybe i wanted to handle it myself. that way there would be no orders to give. and no second-guessing.
jake demorphs behind the garage and scrambles inside, getting into his bed and faking sick. big brother tom opens the door! jake didn’t know he was home! they have some tense brother banter, and then they all sit down for dinner. jake’s dad tells them they’re leaving at nine tomorrow, so everyone needs to pack tonight. the funeral is on monday, and they’ll leave for home tuesday morning. tom storms off from the table. jake’s dad goes to water the lawn, and after rinsing the dishes, jake goes up to his room. from there, he sees tobias circling in the sky above.
jake decides he’ll do a quick, five minute aerial surveillance. he morphs into falcon in his room, then joins tobias in the sky. jake asks tobias how he’s doing, and tobias complains about the air quality (a typical tobias answer). tobias asks jake how things are going in the house, and jake answers honestly: it’s really tense. tobias doesn’t respond.
tobias?
chapman! it is him. i couldn’t be sure in this light. six blocks from your house. him driving, some other guy in the passenger seat.
i followed the direction of his gaze. a dark car, large, four-door. i focused my gaze. was the passenger holding something?
i don’t like the feel of this, i said.
no, tobias agreed.
my dad—
gun! tobias yelled. the passenger. he’s got a gun!
A GUN???
jake soars down towards his house, just barely managing to land on the roof. he starts to demorph—on the roof, in daylight, when assistant principal controller chapman is literally driving to his house!!!! tobias tells jake how stupid of an idea it is, but plays lookout anyway. jake starts to fall off the roof, right in front of the kitchen window, where big brother tom is on the phone. thankfully, his back is to the glass, so jake is able to drop to the ground without being seen. he does overhear big brother tom say, “perfect timing, he’s out front alone, go for it” which is a particularly harrowing sentence to hear. jake scrambles to the front yard where his dad is still watering the lawn.
i am going to take a brief pause here to say that this wouldn’t be happening if america wasn’t so obsessed with the waste that is lawns and if you have questions about it i highly recommend you google it lawns are stupid
anyway
jake’s like hey dad!! don’t ask why i’m so out of breath i’m just here to be a good son! let me water the lawn! the car pulls onto their block. jake’s dad is like, well, i’m not gonna look a gift horse in the mouth i’ll go pack! he turns and walks back towards the house. too slow. the car reaches their house. the window is down. the gunman is staring at jake’s father—and jake turns the hose, spraying the side of the car with water. the gunman jerks back and jake’s dad makes it inside the house. jake even goes so far as to say, “hey, mr. chapman!” which is a bold fucking move but a good one. the car pulls away.
jake can feel big brother tom glaring at him through the living room window. jake knows that big brother tom would have had both his father and jake killed, if that’s what it took. he also knows that Real Tom would have had to watch, helpless to do anything.
i don’t know how this war will turn out. don’t know if we’ll win or lose or even, somehow, compromise and make peace. but i know one thing: i will kill the yeerk who has done this to my brother.
i will kill him.
“so, jake, what brings you to therapy?”
everyone—except for ax and rachel, who are watching jake’s house—meet at cassie’s barn. tobias tells marco and cassie what happened, and unsurprisingly, they’re both really upset. marco starts to drill into jake: he’s making dangerous calls, he’s freezing up, he’s demorphing in broad daylight on his motherfucking roof. jake’s like what is your problem!!! that is my dad!!! tobias cuts in. is it really worth exposing the animorphs and risking everything they’ve worked for to save one person?
marco tells jake he’s too close to the situation to be making the calls. jake points out that marco was making the calls when it was his mom. a fair point.
marco shrugged. “yeah, well, that’s me. if it’s any comfort to you, i’d like myself more if i was like you. but the question here is, how far do we go to protect your father?” marco said. “and who is going to make that decision?”
jake says he’s the leader, but marco thinks they need to vote. tobias says that ax won’t vote because it’s a human question. jake knows rachel will back him. which leaves it up to cassie and tobias. cassie is quiet. this devastates jake—does cassie doubt his ability to lead? tobias talks first. he makes a few points:
writing off a human life is something the yeerks would do, not the animorphs.
if the yeerks do get ahold of jake’s dad, there will be two controllers in his house, watching his every movement. that will be absolutely bad news for the animorphs. tobias doesn’t think it’s a question of should they save jake’s dad, but how.
the animorphs have been playing defense for too long. the yeerks aren’t going to let another coincidence slide.
his solution: create a big distraction that will take the yeerks mind off jake’s father until they leave for the cabin tomorrow morning. marco knows the vote has gone against him. he tries to shake jake’s hand and tell him it was nothing personal, but jake just leaves him hanging. the drama!!!!! this is a moment that will live in the gif hall of fame!!!!
jake comes up with a plan in a literal split second. he wants to prove to marco that he can do this, which i’m sure will cause no more issues. jake’s plan is simple: kidnap assistant principal controller chapman. marco stares, cassie gasps, and tobias laughs.
well, i’ll say one thing: this is going to make rachel happy.
it does! she’s thrilled. cassie and tobias stay behind to guard jake’s house, and jake, rachel, marco, and ax fly to assistant principal controller chapman’s street. it’s an absolutely batshit suicidal plan, but it has its merits: the yeerks will be forced to decide who a higher priority is, big brother tom or assistant principal controller chapman. the animorphs have about twenty minutes until their parents start to wonder where they are. no time for subtlety.
they morph behind a vacant house across the street from assistant principal controller chapman’s house. marco goes gorilla, jake goes rhino, rachel goes bear. ax goes vaguely human, and jake’s like, normally ax is super pretty when he’s in human morph, but he’d melted his features just enough so assistant principal controller chapman wouldn’t recognize him, so now he’s kind of ugly. ugly works! they cross the street, a weird little mini-circus, and hide. ax knocks on the door and asks for melissa in a totally normal and not weird way.
“she is my close friend and also classmate and thus this is a perfectly normal thing for me to do.”
close enough
as assistant principal controller chapman goes to get his very sad daughter (remember book two), ax relays what he sees in the chapman household. motion sensors camouflaged as a mirror, and a statue whose eyes are actually dracon beams. (that’s pretty sick and i’d love one of those.)
melissa steps out on the front porch. gorilla!marco leans over and yoinks her out of the way, covering her mouth with his huge fucking hand. THE MISSION IS A GO
it’s chaos. jake runs horn-first into the porch, barreling into the hallway. the dracon beam statue shoots him! rachel is right behind. jake crushes the statue underfoot, but not before it can get a good shot in at his underbelly. mrs. assistant principal controller chapman comes out of the kitchen with a dracon beam. she shoots jake right in his rhino face. he can feel himself dying. rachel smacks her with one grizzly paw and she’s down for the count. ax joins them, now in andalite morph, and they chase down assistant principal controller chapman. assistant principal controller chapman shoots marco with a handgun (lots of gun violence in this one) and marco falls to the ground. jake tells rachel to look after marco, and then he and ax charge after assistant principal controller chapman, who has escaped into the backyard.
jake knocks assistant principal controller chapman down. assistant principal controller chapman shoots him twice in the throat. jake tosses him halfway across the yard, and then gets ready to charge. he’s aiming to kill.
no, jake! rachel yelled. we need him alive! ax! stop him!
jake’s ready to do it, too, but the pain from his wounds becomes too much at the last second. he collapses to the ground. ax knocks assistant principal controller chapman unconscious with the flat of his tail blade. jake tries to demorph. he thinks of marco. is marco dead? somewhere nearby, melissa chapman is wailing, her already distant parents now rendered unconscious by the andalite bandits.
marco appears, healthy and alive. he demorphed and remorphed and is back in. he picks up the unconscious assistant principal controller chapman. jake demorphs back to human—so does rachel—and they move across the street, back to the vacant house. there, they tie up assistant principal controller chapman and blindfold him. jake fills a dirty coffee can with cold water and splashes it over assistant principal controller chapman’s face to wake him. ax begins to circle the tied up assistant principal controller chapman, using his best smug andalite voice.
we had to make him think he would be tortured. moments earlier i would have killed him. even now, i felt no pity for him. but that didn’t change the fact that we were trying to terrify another living, sentient creature.
if you’re the kind of person who gets off on that, you need help.
yoinks
ax continues to interrogate assistant principal controller chapman. he starts to talk about kandrona starvation, how awful it is, and that’s the straw that breaks the rhino’s back. jake has to leave. rachel and marco go with him. (ax stays behind to interrogate chapman and maybe “get rough with him,” which is such a dark picture!!!) what ax describes is what will happen to the yeerk inside big brother tom.
this is what i’d led us to. marco nearly killed. melissa chapman terrorized. and ax left to spin tales of horror for a helpless captive.
marco wouldn’t need to take another vote: i was done being the leader.
jake, dude, i get it
but we’ve got like, twenty books left
jake lays awake in bed all night, waiting for tobias to tell him the yeerks are coming. nothing. at 3:30 (a dangerous time to be awake, if ur as superstitious as i am), jake slips out of bed. his dad is asleep in his room. big brother tom, of course, is not. he’s probably out searching for assistant principal controller chapman with the rest of the yeerks. jake crawls back into bed and has a good ol’ fashioned spiral. did he make the right choice? what was Real Tom thinking right now? was his plan sturdy enough? if he can’t figure out how to save his own family, how can the other animorphs trust him? how can he trust himself?
as the sun rises, tobias tells jake that big brother tom has just snuck back in. jake sighs, weary atlas, and opens his window. it’s time to go check on assistant principal controller chapman.
y’all i cannot stress this enough: these kids are under duress
jake goes in falcon morph to check on ax. ax tells jake that he’s crunched over some glass, so once he leaves, he’s sure assistant principal controller chapman will use the shards to cut free of his bonds. he also tells jake that this is “not behavior suitable to a warrior” and he won’t be doing this again.
the human daughter of this controller has walked through the neighborhood crying for her father. i ahve heard her. as i have heard the terror of this controller. i will gladly fight this controller and even, in fair battle, kill him, but i am not a torturer.
i’d never heard ax this mad. not even close.
jake tells him that the responsibility lies on jake’s shoulder, as ax’s prince, but ax denies this. his actions are his actions and his responsibility. ax tries to apologize for expressing his anger, but jake won’t have it. ax is entitled to be upset. of course. the whole situation is unfair, and awful, and desperate. ax has to finish the charade. he does so in public thought-speak, so jake has to hear. once he’s finished, he morphs osprey and he and jake fly away from the house. ax tells jake that this will become a day of history in the yeerk books, and ax’s name “will become legend, synonymous with ineptitude.”
super sad but an absolute banger of a line
ax, i wouldn’t have asked you to do it if it wasn’t so important.
ax looked at me, fierce hawk eyes glittering. important to you, jake, or to the war effort?
jake doesn’t answer. he can’t. ax flies back to his woods to perform a cleansing ritual, and jake goes back to his house. he tells tobias that the family is set to leave at noon, so he’ll meet everyone at cassie’s barn at nine.
that, of course, is a lie. jake is tired of using his friends on this mission.
this was my family. my brother, the killer. my father, the target. and me, the fool in the middle.
if i read this line out loud to a stranger and was like “what do you think this is from” never in a million years would they guess the children’s book series, the animorphs. never.
a minor tangent: this is why these sorts of decisions make me so unreasonably angry when television shows and books try to make adults pull this kind of shit. it makes perfect sense to me that a child, brutalized by war, would continually try to isolate himself and handle the situation on his own. it’s not the right decision, not by a long shot, but when you’re a child growing up in an unhealthy situation (in this case, a worldwide war for humanity), you don’t know that! but as an adult you should know better. i h8 miscommunication as a trope it’s uninventive and not creative and an absolute copout. anyway
jake decides that if big brother tom tries to pull any shit (i.e. murder their dad), he’ll morph. the last thing his brother will see will be him and all his ruthless power. jake really, really wants to talk to cassie.
and maybe, when it was all over, i would.
but you should do it now!!!! little man you can’t solve problems by yourself!!!!!
the family gets loaded up into the car. for those of you wondering, applegate does tell us that homer, jake’s dog, will be staying with rachel. for eight hours, jake sits in the backseat of his dad’s car, staring at the back of big brother tom’s head. without him, he’ll become an only child. and jake doesn’t want to be an only child. the only reason he joined the animorphs was to save Real Tom. his enemy just happens to be living inside Real Tom’s head. so, jake has to keep his dad alive, and his brother alive, and kill the worm that threatens them both. easy pease!
nothing happens on the road, and the trio makes it to grandpa g’s cabin with no violent incidents. jake’s mom is there, as well as their grandparents. there’s a weird and tense moment where regular grandpa talks about grandpa g coming home from war, and big brother tom says, “some people just can’t deal with the reality of war, i guess,” and everyone’s like weird thing to say about a dead guy, tom!
jake’s like, yeah. weird thing to say, yeerk scum
later that night, big brother tom and jake are in their attic bedroom. i would have loved an attic bedroom in theory, but i’m sure in reality there are too many bugs for me to be comfortable. big brother tom is griping about the timing of the funeral, and jake starts poking around, looking at all of grandpa g’s old war stuff. he starts reminiscing on all the stories grandpa g used to tell them about war, about how exhausting it was, about how really the soldiers in both armies just wanted it to be over. jake’s like, grandpa g had honor. tom scoffs.
“honor and courage aren’t what matters, not in the real world. what matters is whether you win. after you win then you start talking about honor and courage. when you’re in battle you do whatever you have to do. honor and courage and all that? those are the words you say after you’ve destroyed all your enemies and anyone else who gets in the way.”
and then he pulls out a knife
not a bit! big brother tom finds a dagger, about eight inches long, and holds it up in the air. it’s an old nazi dagger, which big brother tom theorizes grandpa g took off a dead enemy. the attic is suddenly very small. jake’s like ha ha put the knife back! it’s not yours! they bicker a bit more about good and evil, but finally, big brother tom puts the knife back where he found it. they crawl into bed.
jake has a dream he’s in the trenches in WWII. it’s christmas. they sing silent night, and the germans join in, but they’re not really germans, they’re yeerks, and suddenly jake is getting stabbed with a nazi dagger. he wakes up! the room is dark, and big brother tom’s bed is empty. jake scrambles to the footlocker they were poking around in earlier—the dagger is gone.
jake shoots out of bed and runs downstairs. the pull-out couch where his parents were sleeping only holds his mother now. jake slips out onto the front porch and tries to listen. there! he can hear the sound of big brother tom and his dad. they’re sitting at the end of the dock, and jake sees his dad give big brother tom a hug, revealing the dagger wedged in his pocket. big brother tom reaches back and wraps his hand around the dagger. jake starts sprinting for the trees, morphing as he goes. he knows that once big brother tom sees him, he’ll realize jake is an animorph. and once big brother tom knows jake is an animorph, he has to die. but he doesn’t care.
he morphs tiger. he’s running towards the dock, but he’s only halfway there when big brother tom pulls the dagger out of his pocket.
suddenly, the dock COLLAPSES!! big brother tom and jake’s dad fall into the water!! jake’s dad is struggling to stay above water, which is unusual, because he can swim like a fish! and jake would know, because he’s swam as a fish! big brother tom is just splashing around!!
suddenly, a fin broke the lake’s surface behind tom.
shark? i thought blankly.
we’ve all been there
it’s not a shark! it’s a dolphin! the dolphin rams big brother tom in the back. big brother tom goes down!! jake’s dad, who has been dragged to the edge of the lake twenty yards away, starts hauling ass towards his son/would-be attacker. jake knows his dad won’t make it in time. but he could. tigers are good swimmers. but: he’s frozen.
brain locked around the simple fact that if tom died he would, at last, be free.
yoinks!
thankfully, jake is not alone. someone (unidentified by applegate) tells jake via thought-speak to demorph. he does, “glad for once to take orders rather than give them.” a dolphin pushes big brother tom’s body towards the edge of the lake, and now-human jake runs to drag him onto land.
his right leg flopped and twisted at a crazy, sickening, unnatural angle.
one more adjective in there, applegate, and then i think we’ll get it
something was wrong with his leg. there was a hinge where there shouldn’t be one.
gross!!!!
jake stays by big brother tom’s side until a medevac helicopter comes and takes him away. he’s flown to the hospital back home, supposedly the only one in the area equipped to deal with the absolute bonkers break in big brother tom’s leg. also back home are plenty of controllers and access to kandrona rays, but hey, at least no one’s dead.
jake goes outside to talk to the other animorphs. i’m not gonna quote the whole thing, but here are some bullet points just so you know the absolutely crazy shit they pulled to save jake’s dad:
tobias “kept endless watch” (which sounds like a LOTR quote) and told everyone when jake’s dad and big brother tom left the house
cassie morphed whale in the lake to break the dock (MVP award for absolute fastest morpher)
rachel and ax were the dolphins who broke big brother’s tom’s leg and dragged him and dad to safety (so who is watching homer???? rachel’s single working mother??? she has ENOUGH on her plate!!!!)
ax tells jake they’ve been staying in a decrepit cabin nearby, filled with rats and spiders. tobias had fun, at least! then jake realizes that marco isn’t there. he asks where marco is, and cassie tells him marco’s waiting nearby. “he didn’t know if you’d want to see him right away.” jake calls for marco to come out from the trees, and marco does. obviously, this whole plan was his idea. he even got the chee involved, who were the ones flying the medevac helicopter that got big brother tom and his floppy, horrific leg out of there. jake realizes that an injury would have been the perfect excuse to get big brother tom to stay home.
“i was too close to it,” i said. “you were right. i was too close to see things clearly.”
marco didn’t argue. he didn’t gloat, either. i guess we each have our strengths and weaknesses. marco’s strength is the ability to see the way to the goal, even when it means disregarding consequences and feelings and basic right and wrong.
the thing about becoming a team to save the planet, and also the thing about being a person in relationships (platonic or otherwise) with others, is that everyone has strengths and weaknesses so one person doesn’t need to bear all of the weight. we are, by nature, community based. we have in us the instinct to care for one another. capitalism has tried to force us to believe that we do not need one another. individualism is a powerful isolation tool. but we, like jake, need our friends. we need people who are willing to care for us—and we need to learn how to be cared for, in return.
jake takes marco away from the others so they can have a Best Friends moment among the trees. jake says, “if you ever tell me i’m losing it, getting too involved,” he’ll listen. and then he’ll kick marco’s butt. they laugh. they’ve been best friends since childhood!!! as they’re walking back to join the others, jake asks another question.
(Ext. Woods near Grandpa G’s cabin. Nearby, RACHEL, AX, TOBIAS, and CASSIE can be heard, quietly laughing amongst themselves, relieved by a mission gone okay. JAKE stops MARCO.)
JAKE: this whole plan worked because tom came outside and made himself vulnerable. what would have happened if he hadn’t?
(MARCO doesn’t look at JAKE.)
JAKE (cont): you had to keep me from blowing it. your top priorities were preserving the security of the group and…keeping me alive. but what if…you hadn’t been there in time? what if—
(Quick cut flashback: BIG BROTHER TOM’S hand around the handle of the dagger.)
MARCO: it was like chess. tom takes dad, jake takes tom, we’re exposed and we lose. so we couldn’t let that happen. the only expendable piece was tom, but if anything was going to happen to him, it would have to look natural. we couldn’t be involved, and neither could you. so if it came down to that—
JAKE: no. (JAKE shakes his head. He doesn’t want to know. Silence. They used to talk about whether Batman could beat Superman. Now…)
JAKE (cont): what happened to us?
(MARCO doesn’t respond. He doesn’t have to. They both know the answer.)
the animorphs say their goodbyes, and jake goes back inside the cabin.
the next day is the funeral. because grandpa g was a veteran, there’s a lot of military procedures, including a bugler. jake knows, now, what it’s like to be in the middle of war. grandpa g only ever talked about his time as a soldier twice.
when my war ends, if i survive, i probably won’t talk about it much, either.
:/
jake cries at the funeral, and then it’s time to go home. nothing changed, really. the yeerk still lives inside Real Tom. jake’s dad is still alive and unyeerk’d. everyone has suffered, but “in war any time you wake up to see the sunrise it’s a victory.” too true!
REVIEW
4/5. honestly a very emotional book and one that sets us up i think for the next chunk. we’re in the endgame now, folks!!
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
who is the marco to your jake? the one person you trust to tell you when you’re too close to a situation?
will melissa chapman ever recover from the horrors of her childhood
PREDICTIONS
if television has taught me anything, it’s that no one is dead unless a body is seen (and even then only sometimes), so marco’s mom is definitely coming back
i think if/when Real Tom gets rescued, he’s going to thank jake for dragging him out of the lake
that’s all i’ve got for you, folks! sorry for the radio silence for…months. it took a long time for my brain to circle back around to this. i’m going to try to be semi-consistent (at least one a month) and i can promise you this: we will be finishing these books together. drink some water, double mask it, and live to see another sunrise.