Chapter Text
Tom's yeerk was trapped. Under pressure. Squeezed. It wasn't ready for this turn of events. Didn't know how to play it out. Didn't know what to do.
...Supper was awful. He begged. Pleaded. Complained. Sulked. He even tried reasoning. My father didn't budge.
I finished and bolted. I needed to think about what was gonna happen and I couldn't do it with Tom around. I hit the sidewalk, automatically heading for Marco's, but I really didn't know where I was going.
— Jake, The Conspiracy p. 15
Mom heaved her duffle bag into the trunk of the car, dusting off her hands. “Emergency cash?”
“Check,” I said.
She slammed the trunk. “If you need anything, you contact...?”
“Aunt Ellen.” As if.
Mom nodded. “Her number is...”
“On the fridge. And saved in my phone.”
“And if you need to reach me and Dad?”
We wouldn’t. “I call Santa Ynez rangers, who can have someone out to the cabin in twenty minutes.” I held up my phone again, to forestall Mom’s next question. “With speed dial, also saved in my phone. Welcome to the twenty-first century.”
Mom sighed. She rubbed her hands over the legs of her jeans, making no move to actually get in the car.
“It’s three days, Mom,” I said. “I think Jake and I can get by for three days with no adult supervision.”
“Two and a half, if you think about it.” Jake stuck his head around the side of the car.
Jake looked at me. I raised my eyebrows. He nodded.
Mom and Dad had been five minutes from leaving for the past hour and a half. And trying to throw them into the minivan by force would probably not have the desired end result.
Mom reached up to smooth Jake’s hair out of his face. “Remember to take your meds, yes? And be sure you’re eating something with vitamins in it. And don’t drive anywhere at night, and if you need us to come home for any reason, any reason at all, even if you just want us back, you’ll call Aunt Ellen and tell her to come get us?”
“Mom,” I said.
“Yes,” Jake said. “We will.”
Dad leaned out the passenger window of the car. “You know the number for nine-one-one?”
Oh come on. “Yep,” I said.
“And how a microwave works?”
“Yep.”
“See, Jean?” Dad beckoned her toward the front of the car. “They’re good to go.”
To be fair, it was their first time leaving either of us alone overnight since the war had ended. And it was their first time ever deliberately leaving us for an entire weekend.
“There won’t be cell service at the cabin,” Mom said, like this was news. “It’s very far away.”
“Just over an hour north as the raptor flies,” Jake said. “We won’t even need to bother Aunt Ellen, if it comes to that.”
“See?” I smiled at Mom. “Fine.”
She nodded, but continued to not get in the car.
I spun around, looking at Jake in mock-consideration. “So, we having Cheetos or Mountain Dew for dinner? All I have to pay for it are these wooden nickels I took from a stranger in a van, and technically I invested them all in Enron stock, but—”
“Mom.” Jake stepped between us to put a hand on her shoulder. “I promise we’ll be okay.”
“We know you will,” Dad said out the window. “We still worry.”
“Just focus on relaxing.” Jake was smiling that reassuring smile. Shit like this was the reason I was never gonna be the favorite kid. “A little pizza and Nintendo won’t kill us.”
“Yes,” Mom said. “But if something goes wrong, and seriously if you want us back for any reason, any reason at all...”
He kept listening gravely to Mom, all the way through shepherding her into the driver’s seat and gently shutting her door. And then he smiled and waved, until she took the hint and pulled out of the driveway. “We’ll call from the road!” she yelled back from the corner, and finally they were gone.
“Thank the stars,” I muttered.
Jake spun, stalking back into the house. “You were no help. Wooden nickels?”
I stepped in after him, shoving the front door shut with my hip. “No sass or you’re grounded.”
Jake ignored this. “Maybe we should’ve gone with them.”
“You’re right, an entire weekend of picking through crap Grandpa G looted off Nazi corpses in the Land of No Wi-Fi is exactly my idea of a fun getaway,” I muttered.
Jake slowly turned to look at me. He didn’t bother schooling his expression.
I took a breath. “Sorry.” Jake had been a lot closer to Grandpa G than I ever was. And I was a giant asshole. “Sorry.”
“Most of it isn’t WWII stuff,” Jake said quietly. “And it was just the one knife.”
I held up both hands in a no-contest gesture. “Sorry. I just...”
I had no interest in going back to Grandpa G’s cabin ever again, after last time. Obviously. But the fact remained that someone had to clean it out for sale. Mom had planned on doing it after the funeral, but then I’d ended up in the hospital and the whole thing had been put off indefinitely.
Hence, this weekend. I’d made one request — one excruciatingly polite request — to stay here instead of going up to the cabin. Only to have Dad agree immediately, tripping over his own eagerness to avoid an argument. So I was left feeling like a shit-stain for having protested at all. Fucking Essa 412. Fucking yeerks.
“Yeah.” Jake stuffed both hands in his hoodie pocket, turning away. “I wasn’t exactly looking to go back either.”
“So.” I pulled the emergency cash out of my pocket, fanning it through the air. “Pizza?”
“Mom said there are leftovers in the freezer,” Jake pointed out mildly. Dutiful little shit.
Speaking of which...
“You remembered to take your meds, right?” I asked.
Jake pivoted back around, eyebrows raised. “Are you actually going to try and babysit me for real? Is that seriously what’s happening right now?”
I pushed past him into the kitchen. “I’ll take that as a no.”
The pill bottle was in the same cabinet as always; I reached it down and tossed it to Jake.
“You know,” he said loftily, “if you’re ever in the same room as Alanis Morrissette, you’ll have to tell her that the actual definition of ‘irony’ is you and Mom and Dad all nagging me non-stop to eat real food and nagging me non-stop about the crap whose side effects include…” He made a show of holding the bottle up to the light. “Nausea, dry mouth, sexual whatsits, oh and look, ‘suppression of appetite.’”
“If I guilt-tripped you, would that work better?” I made exaggerated puppy-dog eyes at him. I had, in fact, seen what happened the last six or seven times Jake concluded he didn’t need the Prozac anymore.
Jake flipped me off, but he swallowed the pill.
That done, I grabbed my coat from the hook next to the back door and slipped it on. “Alrighty, have fun. I’ll be back sometime tonight.”
“Awww, is it time for you to sneak off and meet a girl already?” Jake grinned. “And here you had me worried for a second.”
“I am off to do a favor for a beautiful lady,” I said coyly.
I grabbed his car keys from the top of the fridge and held them up in a silent request; Jake made a go-ahead gesture.
“National Enquirer thinks that I’m too young for her,” I continued. “But Us Weekly’s extremely scandalous photo of us walking out of the same building at the same time wouldn’t lie.”
“Ugh. Sorry I asked.”
“Does this mean I have to tell Eva you disapprove?” I slipped on my shoes, and — after a glance at the clouds outside — grabbed an umbrella for good measure. “Because if so, she might stop loaning you her kid every time you lose an entire bank account.”
“I didn’t lose a bank account,” Jake said stiffly, “I lost my ability to access it, and Marco is just coming over to help me figure out how.”
Rather than dignify that with a response, I saluted and stepped out the back door.
The technician looked down at the device sitting on his counter, and then slowly back up at me.
I looked back.
He blinked first.
“Sir,” he said at last, very slowly. “This is a Cell Phone City.”
“Uh-huh.” I pointed at the device. “And that’s a cell phone.”
He looked back at it, then at me. “Is it, though?”
“The technical name in Galard is rshthalansh, which approximately translates to ‘personal communication thing you carry in your pocket,’ which more accurately translates as ‘cell phone.’” I gave the device a little nudge closer to the clerk. “And you guys jail-break cell phones.”
The clerk blew out a breath. He sat back down in his chair, still looking at the comm on his glass countertop. “We jail-break human phones. Made by humans. At human companies. Where human people work. That’s, what?” He squinted at the blue-and-grey bubble of plastic I’d given him. “Yeerk tech? Andalite?”
“Andalite design, yeerk manufacture.”
“Well, if they ever finish rebuilding the mall they might just put in a Yeerks-R-Us, but this is a Cell Phone City.” The clerk nudged the device back toward me. “We don’t handle tech that yeerks stole from andalites.” The you dumbass was implied, but only just.
I shrugged. “Worth a shot.”
“Was it, though?” the guy muttered.
I pulled my normal-ass Radio Shack phone out of my pocket. “This gets a wi-fi signal and takes pictures because of tech that yeerks stole from andalites.” I pointed at the display of cameras behind the counter. “Those are waterproof and drop-proof because of tech that yeerks stole from andalites. I got a tennis ball out of our drain pipe last night using tech that yeerks stole from andalites. Excuse me for figuring you might know a thing or two.”
The clerk frowned. “Tennis balls were invented by andalites?”
“What? No. Morphing was invented by andalites. And my brother’s dog keeps trying to bury tennis balls in every open hole in the ground because he’s too lazy to dig them himself, so you have to get a snake up in the pipe to—” I took a breath. This was not the most productive conversation I’d ever had. “Anyway. Can you at least take a look at it?”
“Fine.”
Hallefrigginleujah.
He grabbed a tool set from under the counter, selecting a tiny screwdriver and something that looked like a dentist’s scraper. “How does it even open?”
“It doesn’t.” I pointed at the blue circle. “That’s a touch-screen.”
He set the screwdriver down. “How do you keep it from constantly getting pressed on when it’s in your pocket, then?”
“It has a lock.”
“Keypad?”
“You have to press the screen in a pattern known only to the user, and then use a voice print.” I flipped the device over. “Only, see, this is a late-1997 model. So the password that should open it got rendered obsolete by a security update that took Edriss 562 — the owner — out of the system.”
“Huh.” At least now the clerk was leaning forward, looking at the device with real interest. “And it was never re-issued to a new owner?”
“Nope.”
“So you need me to try and convince it to unlock long enough to accept a new user.”
“Or to push through a security update,” I said. “If it had security from fall of 1999 or later, then I’d be able to bypass the lock because the head of security at the time had a universal override tied to host biometrics. But right now, it’s a paperweight.”
The clerk picked up the comm, rolling his thumb across the screen to watch how it reacted. Incorrect passcode, it told him, the way it had Eva and I the last several times we’d attempted.
“But there’s technically no correct passcode,” I said. “So in theory…”
We stood there in silence for a few seconds while the guy drummed his fingers on the countertop and stared at the device. He poked it experimentally, first with his fingertip, then his dental tool. He had me press my thumbprint against it, and hummed in interest when it gave me an additional annotation: Incorrect passcode, please contact device owner.
At last the clerk sat back in his chair. “Yeah, I’m not gonna be able to help.” He sounded more regretful now, and less like he was talking to a particularly stupid toddler. “Although…” He straightened up. “I could recommend someone you can call, if you want.”
I smiled. “Please.”
“Sure.” He dug around in one of the many drawers of his desk until he came up with a stack of business cards, paging through them. “My best friend’s sister Leighann was a controller, and she says they’re the best for any kind of yeerk-related stuff. Paperwork, tech, you name it.”
Another ray of hope, then.
“Here we go!” He grabbed a card out of the stack and held it out to me.
There was a very familiar logo of a stylized bird on the front. And an even more familiar phone number.
Matter Over Mind, the card read. Ex-hosts helping ex-hosts.
“Call them up.” The clerk tapped the card. “Leighann said they know all kinds of stuff for helping yeerk hosts.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll be sure to… do that.”
I left.
Outside the store, I pulled out my human phone again, and dialed our home number.
Marco picked up. “Matter Over Mind,” he chirruped, “this is Tom. How may I direct your call?”
“You realize I violently murdered the last person who stole my identity, right?” I asked brightly.
“You realize you’re a walking-talking party pooper, right?” he said.
“Can you put Jake on?”
“Yeah, yeah, gimme a sec.”
There was a click, and a sound of someone yelling in the background.
I strolled out between the lines of shops, which were drawing more than their usual late-Friday-morning crowd. The mall getting blown up had been good for business, in this part of the city. There were stray raindrops starting to fall, however, which meant people would probably be diving into one of the nearby diners soon.
Jake picked up. “Tom? What’s up?”
“Hi, yeah, do you have contact information for Alloran?”
“Alloran?” he echoed.
“Alloran.”
“As in, War-Prince Alloran-Semitur-Corass?”
“No, as in the other guy we know named Alloran.”
“Why?”
Long story. I set off walking through the plaza along the far row of shops, enjoying the last of the sun as it filtered through the gathering clouds. There was a term for that, rain and sunshine all at once, but I could never remember what.
“I need to borrow Visser Three’s cell phone,” I said. “Or pretty much any comm from any single-digit visser that got a security update after fall 1999.”
“Why.”
Ugh. Classified was not the kind of answer Jake would take kindly to. “Do you have it?”
Jake blew out a long breath. “Honestly, I could get it. But most of the ways I know of to find that information are, uh…”
“Slightly less than legal?” I suggested.
“Something like that.”
“Yeah, I dunno if it’d be worth it then.”
I could hear Marco ask a question on the other end of the line. Jake covered the receiver long enough to give a muffled answer, and then I heard him bring it back to his face.
Fine. Time to spill a few more beans. Jake wasn’t the type to cooperate on faith.
“Last Tuesday,” I said. “Matter Over Mind gets a call. Turns out to be a request from, get this, the Dome ship EarthBlade. Short version, they want our help because they keep getting false alarms about yeerk tech pings. They’re hoping for a long-term solution.”
“Does this happen a lot?” Jake asked.
“Guess so,” I said. “And they’re getting fed up enough that they’re hoping to use yeerk tech to rule out — the latest is a gap that the computer insists is a stealth ship and the captain knows is probably space junk.”
“Probably space junk? How sure are they?”
I ran a hand over my hair. This was why I’d prefer not to give Jake too many details. He made worrying into an art form. “Eight of the last ten were space junk, one was a computer error, and one was — get this — the Dome ship’s own engine that caught the sensor at the wrong angle.”
Jake hummed acknowledgement. “And a visser’s comm…”
“Could send out a message to any craft within a tenth of a lightyear and get a read receipt. If the ping bounces off anything, it’s yeerk. If not, the captain’s spared from having to trek over and visually confirm it’s harmless. Anyway, Visser One’s cell is a bust because her access got revoked, and we can’t get back in. I’m at that Cell Phone City that jail-breaks phones —”
“The super sketchy one out by North Turnpike?”
I glanced back toward the storefront. It was kinda known for being the place to get a stolen phone wiped. “Yep. But no dice.”
“What did you think they would know that you didn’t already?” Jake asked.
Nothing, apparently. I guess he and Leighann were right about that one. “Point is, I need a visser’s phone,” I said. “And I’m not sure who else would have the codes and be up-to-date enough that Essa 412’s override would work.”
Jake was silent for a second. And then, “Frank Carrington.”
“Visser Two’s host?” I kept walking. It was technically a private conversation, but any passersby overhearing a snippet out of context didn’t worry me. “Isn’t he a big hoo-hah in the Army?”
“Navy.”
Hair-splitting.
“You can get ahold of Frank Carrington?” I said. “Isn’t he, like, a really big deal in… whatever?”
“Four-star admiral, yes. But I could call in a favor to get a meeting with him. If you think it’s important.”
“This particular moon rock that looks like a stealth ship is not that urgent,” I said. “But.”
But Jake knew a lot of what I wasn’t saying. That this whole situation was delicate, because pretty much any form of human-andalite relations was delicate. That it was actually pretty important we find a way to pull this off, because it’d be a good lever to use to try and get the flow of intelligence moving the other way. That Eva and I were out of our wheelhouse, no matter what that guy’s friend’s sister might’ve thought. That being able to provide help that andalites had asked for was potentially huge for Matter Over Mind and even the human species.
That Jake was definitely not supposed to know about this situation, and that he was not to tell anyone else about the situation. Including Alloran. Or Frank Carrington.
“Yeah.” Jake cleared his throat. “Gotcha.”
“So if you think you can make it happen by, say, early next week…” I glanced around myself again. “Then it’d be worth it.”
“I don’t know. I’d have to ask around to see what he’s even up to these days. But yeah, I have a better shot at him than Alloran.”
“That’s fine if—”
I stopped talking. Stopped breathing entirely.
The phone slipped from my hand and into my pocket, unnoticed.
She was thirty feet away across the square, facing away from me. The sharp gust of wind from the coming storm had caught her hood, yanking it off her face so that her long blond hair streamed free.
As she turned to jerk the hood of her jacket back into position, I had an unfiltered glimpse of her face.
Her eyes met mine. We both froze.
Then the thing that looked like Rachel turned and ran.