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cassie

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Even with Finch here, John hasn't found a way to really relax.

Then again, he doesn't feel as if Harold is particularly relaxed either. If nothing else, he's at least sleeping in the apartment provided to him because Harold has convinced him he should, although he doesn't especially like it and spends most of his days out and about in Darrow, trying to establish what's really happening here or how they might get out, but even after all this time he's yet to come up with anything. If they're being watched, which he's sure they are, he hasn't yet found evidence of who or what might be doing the watching.

So he explores the city. He does it all under the guise of a well meaning detective, affable and prone to smiling. It's a role he doesn't have any real problem taking on, even though whenever people leave him on his own, the smile slides away and his thoughts stray back to everything that's just so terribly wrong about all this.

Today he's in a less populated area of the city. There are still people around here and there, but for the most part the streets are empty. People who live here are at work and there isn't much in the way of any businesses lining the streets, so he's more or less on his own.

A sound distracts him and he pauses, listening, unable to pinpoint what it might be, then decides to follow it. It's as close to a lead as anything else he's seen or heard today.

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Stupid! Stupid stupid stupid! I couldn't believe it. The person had shown up in the knick of time, and snapped me out of my excited puppy mind. I couldn't believe it had been almost two hours already! I could barely remember what I'd been doing during all this time.

The morph was just a test, really. I'd never morphed a dog before. Jake had his Homer morph, and I had my wolf morph, but I didn't really have the experience with it that Jake did. And this was extra new: for the first time ever, I'd copied what Ax had done. He'd called it the Frolis Maneuver, I remembered, and he'd used it to make his own special human morph out of the DNA he'd acquired from each of us. I'd managed to do it with the DNA I'd acquired from the two dogs I'd met at the dog park earlier.

My black and red fur was dirty from playing outside for the last two hours, and when I heard the person, I panicked and ran into one of those big pipes that looked like something the city was using for storm drains, or something.

Ah, it was too small! This morph was a combination of two kind of big, fluffy dogs, and I couldn't get my bulky frame into the drain far enough to morph safely. But I had to morph. I had to, or I'd be trapped like this!

My doggy instincts were reacting to my human panic, and I whimpered. The sound was loud and pronounced in the pipe.

He follows the sound toward a storm drain where he realizes it's a dog, the whimpering echoing out of the drain and toward John as he carefully descends the slope toward the ditch, then stops several feet away and drops into a crouch to look into the drain. There's a flashlight on his phone, but he knows if he uses it now, he'll only startle the dog, possibly into retreating further and getting stuck.

John likes dogs. When he'd first seen Bear, he had known he was going to take him, not just because he had been such a beautiful dog, but because he was clearly being mishandled. He has no patience for anyone who can't treat animals well.

"Hey," he says, his voice low and gentle. "You're alright. Just come on out now."

I froze. That was the worst possible thing to do, really. Demorph! I screamed at myself. I felt my hackles raise and tried to slink further into the pipe.

I felt my back scrape against the top of the pipe, and I let out a long, groany sound. There was nothing I could do. I was too close to the two hour limit. I had to demorph.

<Turn around!> I said.

Thought-speak was kind of an odd thing for people that didn't know what it was. I remembered the first time I'd heard it. It was in my ears, but it wasn't. And it was only one way. I could talk to this man like this, but he couldn't answer with anything but his mouth. And I hoped he didn't pass out, but I needed him to stop watching me. This was going to be weird enough as it was, but maybe if he wasn't watching, I could morph something else really quickly, and he would never see my face.

John blinks in surprise, but almost without thinking, he obeys and turns around, looking for someone over his shoulder. He expects there to be someone standing there, someone who was speaking to him, demanding that he turn around, but there isn't anyone here, no one but him and the dog in the drain pipe.

It had felt as if the voice was inside his head and he takes a deep breath as he scans the horizon. Finding people, spotting them even when they're trying to stay out of sight is one of his talents, but he doesn't see anyone there.

It takes him several long moments, but then he looks back at the drain, trying to peer into the darkness. "Come on," he says, his voice gentle. "Come on out, it's okay."

I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't that he would actually turn around! I focused on myself, how I knew I looked. It wasn't easy when I was panicky like this, but if I didn't, I'd be trapped in this morph forever, just like Tobias was trapped in his red-tailed hawk morph.

Come on, Cassie, you can do it!

I felt my paws lengthen, my claws shorten and grow flat. Yes! I hadn't missed the limit. My skin itched as the long black and gold fur drew back into it to reveal my own brown skin. I rushed through the demorph as quickly as I could and crawled deeper into the pipe once I was back in my own skin. I took a deep breath and let it out on a relieved sigh.

That had been too close.

I hid in the deep corners of the pipe and pondered my next move. I couldn't just stay here, hiding like this. This guy would find me eventually. And if I didn't morph back into my dog morph, then I might end up making him suspicious.

If anyone actually heard me thinking like this, they might think I was paranoid. But I was. The Yeerks could be anywhere, anyone, even this nice, quiet guy who was just looking after a stray dog on the streets of Darrow. If he was a Controller, and he saw that I could morph, then he'd do anything he could to kill me — or worst, infest me with my very own Yeerk and turn me into a Controller.

I had no choice. I took a moment, and then morphed back into the dog morph. It was easier than the last time, because I already had the morph. I slunk forward on my belly, just barely squeezing out of the pipe, to look at the man with plaintive doggie eyes.

John is about to consider going to find a street vendor somewhere so he can buy a hotdog or a soft taco to try and entice the dog out of the drain when it slowly crawls out on its belly, giving John the sort of look he's only ever seen Bear wearing when he wants something to eat. This isn't a situation in which he needs to exert his authority as an alpha, not when the dog already looks as if he's been rolling around in the dirt for some time already and is staring at him like that.

"It's alright," he says in a calming voice. He remains in his crouch, watching the dog. He holds a hand out toward him, but makes no other movement, not wanting to scare him. "It's okay, I'm not going to hurt you. Just don't want you getting stuck in that drain."

He smelled like another dog, and that made me feel really . . . jealous. I felt my tail wag, and let the dog's instincts bubble over me so I didn't feel weird about slinking up to a total stranger.

Something else my instincts told me was that this guy definitely had a very alpha-wolf personality. I remember that I'd had to explain to Marco once why he had to morph a female gray wolf. It was so he and Jake didn't end up duking it out over who got to be boss when the instincts got out of their control. Those same instincts — well, similar instincts, anyway — were telling me that this guy wasn't someone to mess with.

I sniffed his fingers when I was close enough to, and my tail wagged a little more. Alpha-wolf or not, this guy was definitely good. And he didn't have a weird, Yeerk smell that I'd come to be familiar with. I felt every part of me start to relax, but I stayed in the morph. No sense in freaking this guy out!

"Hey, that's a good boy," John says, his voice still low, and he lets the dog sniff his fingers, taking the wagging tail as a good sign to rub his hands over his head gently. His fingers slide down toward the dog's throat, looking for a collar, but he finds nothing, so he returns his hand to where it was before, giving the dog a gently ear rub, still moving slowly and taking care not to frighten him in any way. "Good dog."

No collar, which doesn't necessarily mean no owner, so John gently holds on ear in his hand and then the other, flipping them out to look for a tattoo. There isn't any, but there might be a microchip and the only way to find that is to take the dog to the city, to animal control. Which is a place John does his best to avoid. It's doubtful Samaritan has bothered having eyes in animal control, but he can't be certain about anything.

"No collar, huh?" he asks. "So what do we do with you now?"

"Woof!" I said. The animal caretaker in me — which was really most of me, doggie instincts aside — appreciated how thoughtful he was to look for any possible identification, and how gentle but firm his hands were. When he asked what to do with me, though, I struggled out of his grasp and bounded around him in a circle, just out of his reach.

"You're even less helpful than Bear," John comments, brushing his hands off on his pants as he rises from his crouch. "And I doubt he'd be happy if I brought you home."

Bear isn't an aggressive dog, not just for the sake of aggression, but he's an alpha. He responds brilliantly to John and Harold both -- and to Shaw, he thinks with a pang of regret -- but he's not likely to want to share his space.

I didn't know who Bear was, but it sounded like maybe this guy had his own dog. It made sense, really. He knew exactly where to look for ownership markings, and he was perfectly careful around my ears. But I couldn't head home with this guy, anyway! I needed to get back to my own shape so I could put my clothes back on and get back to grocery shopping.

My doggie instincts agreed that it was time to get going: this guy, nice as he was, didn't have food and so no longer held my interest on a doggie level. So I lowered my nose to the ground, found my own trail (and that was always weird, to me!) and then trotted off in the direction I could smell I'd come from.

I stopped at the edge of the construction zone and looked back at him. "Bark!" I said. Maybe he'd take it as the 'thanks' I meant for it to be.

John watches the dog go, his hands in his pockets, and he wonders for a moment if maybe he should follow. The dog seems well kept, though, maybe just lost, although it seems to know where it's going and he's sure someone is looking for it.

He'll come back here in a few days, make sure the dog hasn't simply gone back into the drain pipe, but for now he follows the dog toward the edge of the construction zone, intent on going back to the rest of the city.

"Maybe we're headed in the same direction," he says to the dog.

I woofed up at him and let my tail wag. The dog's instincts didn't mind him coming along, and I was comfortable to let them lead over my own for now. When we got closer to population, though, I actually ended up drifting closer to his side. I wasn't sure what Darrow's leash laws were — I didn't want someone reporting me to animal control!

I looked up at the man with a happy dog look. If I acted like I belonged to him, people wouldn't notice, right?

"Now we're friends now, are we?" he asks in a low voice, but he's smiling and he drops his hand to the top of the dog's head to give a quick rub.

"We'll have to do something with you eventually," he says. "I don't want you wandering all over the city in your own."

There are bad people out there, people who would happily take the chance to hurt a dog.

I appreciated his concern. I didn't think many people would actually care about a stray dog, but this guy did. If I ever became trapped in dog morph, I knew who to find, at least!

Speaking of trapped, I moved to his other side to take a look at his watch. Plenty of time. Good.

There were more and more people as we walked deeper into the city. The stimuli got my dog instincts revving like a car engine and I was having trouble keeping control. What was that smell? Who's that? Where'd that sound come from? Everything had me looking this way and that, floppy ears twisting independently like little radar discs. Now I knew why dogs were so excited all the time!

And then I saw it. It was like a movie: the little kid playing with a ball, or maybe it was a yo-yo. From this distance it was hard to tell. But what wasn't hard to tell was that the round, rolly object slipped through the child's fingers, right off the sidewalk and into the road.

Time felt like it slowed down. The kid followed the ball as easily and innocently as if there was no one else around, no cars driving a little too fast up to the intersection.

I yelped, because I didn't need to be able to see the future to know what was coming.

My hind legs bunched and I was off before I even realized what I'd decided. I was fast. But was I fast enough?

<Stay there! Don't move!> I said, focusing my thought-speak on both the child up ahead, and the kind man who just wanted to make sure a stray dog was okay.

"Hey," John calls, though he keeps his voice low. For a moment he doesn't move, strangely distracted, but then he's off after the dog, worried about the course its taking, certain a car is going to come out of nowhere.

He can see exactly where the dog is headed and that makes it worse somehow. If one of them doesn't get there in time, there could be real tragedy here today. He'll never outrun a dog, but that doesn't stop John from putting in an extra burst of speed.

"Hey!" he calls again, this time hoping to catch someone's attention, someone closer to the boy. "Grab that kid."

Before the dog runs into the street, he wants to add. Before the damn dog gets hit by a car.

<Move!> I cried. The kid was looking around, afraid and confused. And not moving out of the road.

I heard the driver of the car curse through the open window, heard the stomp of his foot on the pedal. I shoved my wide doggie chest against the kid just in time.

Another yelp ripped from my throat when something heavy and unforgiving struck my side. But the little kid was alright. A few scuffs from hitting the pavement, but otherwise unharmed.

I sprawled on the asphalt and coughed a little. That hurt. A lot.

The kid is crying, but unhurt from what John can see, and it's mere seconds before his mother is there, scooping him up, exclaiming over him. There's the slam of a car door as the driver jumps out, hurriedly trying to explain, trying to tell anyone who'll listen he just hadn't been able to see, hadn't been able to stop in time, but John is ignoring him.

With the child safe, it's the dog who matters now.

"You're okay," he says, though he doesn't know if it's true. Dropping into a crouch again, he holds out his hands, first as a question, then running his fingers gently over the dog's side. "Let me see if anything is broken." Either way, he'll have to get the dog to a vet. It's just a matter of whether the dog will be walking or if John will be carrying it.

His hands were surprisingly knowledgeable about broken bones, but that didn't mean it didn't hurt while he was probing. I yelped again, but it trailed off into a whine and I felt my tail wag. My back wasn't broken at least.

I reached out with a paw and rested it on his knee.

<The boy?> I asked. I figured it was too late, by this point. He'd already heard me. If he were a Controller, I'd already be dead or captured.

"He's fine," John answers instinctively, although it takes him a moment or two to catch up with what's just happened. There's a voice, someone has asked him a question, but it hadn't been aloud. The question had come from inside his head and it hadn't felt like something Samaritan might have done.

Looking down curiously at the dog, he doesn't say anything else. Instead he runs his hands over the dog's ribs, down the dog's legs, then sits back, satisfied nothing is broken.

"You're alright," he says. He doesn't know what to make of what he's just heard. "Come on, let's see if you can walk."

I tried to stand, but pain shot through my side and down my leg. I whimpered and leaned against him. With a deep breath, I tried again.

The dog is listening to him, there's no doubt of that, and John doesn't think that's possible, not in the way it seems to be happening. Bear is extremely well trained, but he's still a dog and he doesn't respond to John quite like this.

If he talks to the dog openly like he expects it to respond, someone is going to notice, so instead John crouches, wraps his arms around the dog and lifts.

"You'll be okay," he says again and suddenly it feels like he needs to really mean it. He'll take the dog somewhere safe and figure out what this is.

I rested my chin on his shoulder. It was weirdly soothing, hearing someone bigger and wiser than me telling me I'd be okay. I knew it was true, but sometimes I needed to hear it from someone else.

Once we were out of earshot of the bulk of the people, I used thought-speak to say, <Thank you for helping me.>

While it seems like it should be absolutely insane, it does seem as if the dog is speaking directly to him. John doesn't particularly like it or trust it, it feels a little bit too easy, like Samaritan finding a way to whisper in his ear, but it's still a dog. He can't just leave the poor thing lying injured on the road.

Of course, now that the dog is in his arms, he isn't entirely sure where to go.

It takes him a few moments, a few alleys, but eventually he finds out that leads to what appears to be a deserted building. The lock on the door has been broken already and repaired clumsily, so John only has to give it one good kick before the door flies inward and he's able to step into a dusty maintenance room where he can carefully set the dog down on the floor.

"Have I gone crazy?" he asks, staring straight at it.

<No,> I said. <I'm sorry. I didn't mean to scare you.> Once I was laying down, my aching body felt like it let out a sigh of relief. I felt a little bad, because I was just going to scare him more.

Morphing was different every time. Body parts changed in different orders. I could control it, to an extent, which was good, because morphing wasn't usually pretty.

My face started changing first. I remained covered in fur, but the dog muzzle shrank back into my face and slowly became a human mouth and nose. My brown eyes moved closer together and shrank a little bit.

Schloop! My ears sucked into my scalp, then crawled down the sides of my head. My arms changed next, forelegs shortening and pulling my elbows down to where they belonged. Fwoop! My tail disappeared! My spine shortened, sucking it back up into my body. I was almost completely human-shaped, and still covered in the pretty black-gold-white fur of my Frolis Maneuver dog morph. I pushed myself up slowly so I could sit up properly, and the fur started to suck back into my skin, sort of rippling as it did.

The other good thing about morphing? It healed all injuries. All of the pains from getting hit by that car were gone. It was pretty handy, and I was really glad I'd been in morph when it happened.

Once I was sitting there, in my morphing suit, I looked up at the man, a bit apologetically.

". . . Hi."

John watches it happen, not disconnected from it, not entirely disbelieving, but at the same time he can't quite make sense of what he's seeing. There's a girl instead of a dog suddenly and he looks at the suit she's wearing and wonders when the military would weaponize something like that. How long it would take before they were sending squirrels and mice across enemy lines, how long before there was a hundred girls just like her taking orders from a stone-faced general.

It makes him ill just to think about it, but he knows if anyone were to see this, if it were to get out, it would happen in an instant.

"Hello," he says cautiously. He wants to tell her to run, to hide. If Samaritan sees something like this, it will track her to the ends of the earth and in a place like Darrow, there really isn't anywhere to hide. Instead he stays silent and waits for her to explain a little more.

I hesitated, feeling weirdly reassured. I knew that Yeerks were tricky creatures, but the expression on his face is really reassuring. He isn't hateful towards me, or suspicious. He just looks concerned.

"My name is Cassie," I said. "I can't tell you my last name, or where I'm from. But I promise, I won't hurt you."

That almost makes him laugh, though he manages to control himself, to keep his reaction to a brief twitch of his lips. If she can turn into animals, his safety should be a priority, she could turn into a bear, for all he knows, rip him to shreds, but he's been thinking about her and her safety instead of his own.

Finch would claim that's nothing new, of course.

"Hello, Cassie. I'm John." Technically he can't tell her his real last name either, but he leaves that part alone. "No one in government knows you can do this, right? No, they can't. I don't think you'd be out here if they did."

"I don't think so," I said. "I hope not, anyway." I couldn't imagine if the Yeerks had managed to get someone into the government! They'd been trying, I knew that much, but if they actually succeeded, then it might be too late. "It's— it's a secret, that I can do this. I'm not the only one, but. It's complicated. No one is allowed to know. I shouldn't even have let you see me, but, the car, and I got hurt, and—"

I shrugged helplessly, feeling a little lost.

"I'm sorry! I shouldn't have gotten you involved."

"Good," he says. It would be best if it were kept that way, but he doesn't say that part. It's clear Cassie knows as well as he does that keeping what she can do a secret is of the utmost important.

"It's fine," he tells her. "I'm very good at keeping secrets, you don't have to worry about me." John can withstand the kinds of torture that would have most people screaming within moments and while he's sure there's someone out there who would be able to break him, he's yet to meet that person.

"Are you alright, though?" he asks. "It sounded like that car hit you pretty hard."

"It did," I agreed. "But I'm okay, now. Morph— I mean, changing shapes like that, it makes all of my injuries disappear, like they never happened at all." I thought it was pretty cool!

There are so many questions John wants to ask, but he doesn't feel entirely comfortable with that either. The less he knows, the better. The less likely someone will ask anything of him if they find out about her.

The less he can tell someone interrogating him, the better.

"How old are you?" he asks instead.

"Sixteen," I said, feeling a bit shy. "It's okay, I've been doing this for a . . . awhile." I stared up at him, then let out a weak, shaky sigh. It felt so good to not be the only one to know I could do this. I wanted to tell Miles, but I was positive he wouldn't understand. He was so normal! He didn't need my stupid baggage, right?

"I really shouldn't have let you find out," I said. "But . . . I think part of me really wanted you to know. Or, maybe not you, exactly, but someone else. Someone besides just me. My friends . . . the people I do this with, the people I fight with . . . they're not here. They're all back home."

John nods his understanding, because he finds himself missing his friends more and more often, even Root, who would probably only use Darrow to find some way to drive him crazy.

"And now someone knows," he says, then smiles. "Someone who's very good at keeping secrets, so you won't have to worry about anyone finding out from me."

He studies her for a moment longer, then says, "I guess you can't go walking around the city in that suit, can you?" Which means she'll have to turn into something else and John can't deny the chance to see that again is rather interesting to him.

I blushed a little and let out a shy laugh. "You're right," I said. "It'd be kind of weird." I was wearing just a short sleeved leotard that Rachel had helped me pick out, and some Lycra bike shorts over it for the sake of modesty.

We'd learned early on that we couldn't morph clothing. If it was too bulky or loose, it sort of just slid off and billowed up around us — or ripped to shreds! But tight clothing like what I was wearing morphed with us, which was a huge relief.

"Maybe I should start leaving clothes around the city," I said thoughtfully.

"That might help," John agrees with a small smile. He doesn't have cards yet, having made no attempt to join the police force in Darrow at this point, still not entirely certain he even wants to, but he reaches into his pocket and finds a receipt, turning it over to scribble his number onto the back.

"But if you need anything or find yourself in a tight spot, you can call me," he tells her, passing her the paper.

"Oh," I said. I took the receipt and read over his information. "Thank you. I don't— I've never had help from anyone but my friends." It felt . . . kind of weird, but also kind of cool, to have someone offer their outside help. Even if I didn't ask, even if he wasn't serious, it was nice.

I wasn't entirely sure where to stick the paper just yet, though. My morphing suit didn't really have pockets, after all! I set it on the floor. "Um, one second," I said.

I focused on a fresh morph, something that I was familiar with. In a moment, my mouth and nose sort of melted together and pushed outward. My upper lip curled down into a ripping beak, and my fingers began to stretch and flatten into primary feathers. While this was happening, my feet started to change. Some of my toes shrank back and vanished, and the remaining toes lengthened while the bones of my feet shortened. My toenails grew black, then elongated and curled sharply, becoming ripping, gripping talons.

As my body continued to change, my skin sprouted white and brown feathers that unfurled like fresh spring leaves.

And then I began shrinking. Fwoom! I wasn't moving all that fast, but it felt like I was falling off a building! The world grew bigger as the ground drew closer, and if my insides hadn't been squishing into new shapes and sizes, my stomach might have flipped.

The morph was nearly complete. My eyes changed from chocolate brown to bright gold, my beak became hard and black. As my tail feathers unfurled and fanned out, I could feel the familiar osprey instincts bubble up under my own mind. There.

John makes no effort not to watch. What she can do is absolutely fascinating and he knows he's made her a promise, but he can't help but wonder what Finch might say to this. He watches as she shifts into a bird, an osprey, he believes, then takes a step back and gets to his feet.

They'll have to part ways, John can't fly along with her, so he opens the door they'd come through and steps back into the daylight.

"Keep yourself safe," he says. "And don't hesitate to call if you need."

<Thank you,> I said. I lowered my head and pecked at the paper with his number on it, then bird-walked forward and grabbed it in my talon. <I'll try not to. Usually the kind of trouble I get into . . . I wouldn't want someone involved in.>

I didn't mean to sound so ominous. But John seemed like a nice guy, and I didn't want him to get hurt. If the Yeerks were here, then he'd be a perfect target, I thought.

I flapped my wings a few times, trying to get some lift. It wasn't easy, in this warehouse, so I hop-flapped forward, until I'd made it to the door. Once I had, I transferred the paper from my talon to my beak so I could properly push off the ground. Once I was in the air, it was easy to catch a thermal and ride it straight up.

<Be safe, okay?>

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