My name is Cassie Price. And I was tired.

You know that kind of tired you get after you've pulled an all-nighter at school? Now imagine doing that for three years solid. Oh, and combine that with constantly being as scared as you've ever been and as miserable as you can imagine.

But we won.

My name is Cassie Price, and I am an Animorph.

There were six of us to start with. Me. Jake. Marco. Ax. Tobias. Rachel.

Now there were only five.

It sounds insane, right? We started out as five kids—just kids. Thirteen year olds, being edgy, cutting through a construction site to show how cool and brave we were. Then, we met a dying Andalite, an alien who told us about an invasion and gave us the power to fight it. The power to turn into any animal.

Later, we were joined by Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill—we call him Ax—also just a kid of his own species.

Six kids against an army. Who would you bet on?

But we won. We won, and we negotiated terms, and Jake kept his promises. To the Yeerks, to the Taxxons, to the Hork-Bajir. I should have been happy, ecstatic about that.

Or maybe I should have been sobbing. Rachel, my best friend, Jake's cousin, was dead. Dead on a suicide mission to kill Jake's own brother. And we jettisoned seventeen thousand Yeerks into the vacuum of space to do it.

But mostly I was just tired.

The press conference had taken a really long time. Needless to say, if you announce the defeat of an alien invasion, the media has a few questions. Mostly Jake and Ax dealt with that, with assists from Marco. Tobias flew off partway through, and I envied him for it.

I think it was Marco who finally called an end to it. Jake probably would have kept going, but Marco's good at knowing a crowd. 'Keep them hungry for more,' he'd have said. I do remember it was the Hork-Bajir who did crowd control. Peaceful or not, no reporter is going to get pushy against a line of Hork-Bajir.

Apparently my parents got there at some point. Probably they were at the press conference, but I don't really remember. It's funny, from the time we evacuated them, we Animorphs mostly saw our parents as people who had to be protected for their own good. But I remember my mom looking at some five-star general and telling him she'd take me from there, and glaring at him until he let me go with them.

Humans are funny. You never know what we'll do until we're pushed into a corner.

When we got to the hotel, I just remember lying down and being too tired to even undress. The last thing I remember is my mom tucking me in. Like I was still a kid, like we were still home.

It felt nice.

I woke up slowly, and at first I mostly noticed that I was actually comfortable and warm for once. We'd been living in the woods for months, ever since the Yeerks realized what we were and came after us. We were lucky to live in California instead of somewhere that gets snow regularly, but we'd still all been hungry and cold a lot.

I could hear my parents talking nearby too. We shared a tent, so it wasn't unusual for me to hear them in the morning, although it was unusual for them to be up first. The nightmares are usually bad, and there's always stuff for us to do, so I'm usually out of the tent before dawn.

I figured that if I moved, I was probably going to wake up in my cold cot instead of in a warm dream bed, so I stayed still, and tried to block out the voices so I could go back to sleep.

"Do you remember her first day of school?" That was my mom's voice, and I heard my dad laugh in response.

"She stormed home, furious because the teacher read a book where a knight killed a dragon, and she was angry that they hadn't at least tried to negotiate with it." Her father, amused, although she heard the sad note in it too. "It's—it's hard to believe that she got pulled into all this."

That annoyed me, almost enough to move, but not quite. We were there, the five of us, when Elfangor's ship crashed. Were we supposed to ignore it because it was hard? Let the world be taken over and pretend we didn't know? Or maybe I was annoyed because I wished the same sometimes. Remembered the days when the biggest thing I was worried about was my next math test, or whether Jake liked me…

Memory returned. Jake. Rachel. The press conference.

I sat up suddenly, gasping as the shock crashed over me like a cold bucket of water. God, Rachel, no. No. But I knew it was true. I knew it had happened.

Someone grabbed me and I lashed out hard with an elbow, calling up the wolf form in my head on instinct, feeling my bones shift, my mouth lengthen. I was halfway into wolf morph before I registered my mother sitting on the floor, looking shocked, my father staring at me.

Right. Not a threat.

I demorphed, feeling like a complete idiot. "Mom, I'm sorry. Are you okay?"

She smiled a little as my dad helped her up. "I'm fine, Cassie. You've got a good elbow on you now."

I nodded a little, not trusting myself to speak, and carefully walked into the bathroom, trying to ignore the looks on my parents' faces. Fear. Fear of me.

I walked into the bathroom, closed the door, and stared at myself in the oversized mirror.

I was still in my morphing clothes, which were honestly filthy. One time, Rachel said that I'd have worn my barn coveralls to school, covered in animal dung, if she wasn't around, but that wasn't quite true. I didn't mind being dirty when I was working, and I certainly never cared about fashion, but I did like to clean up when I was done. But it hadn't been a high priority the last few months, and clean drinking water mattered more than laundry. At any rate, it was looser now that it was before. I'd lost weight, I guess—and not in the turning-to-muscle way people like. Mostly I just looked thin. It occurred to me, almost distantly, that I had apparently gone through an entire press conference being watched by millions of people in nothing but a leotard and bike shorts. Someone had gotten me shoes at some point, evidently, although they didn't really fit.

I stared at my face in the mirror. I was dirty, and my hair was escaping its braids a little. Most of the stains you get when you fight in morph stay with the morph, but some things come back with you. Blood under your fingernails. Matter in your teeth. Mostly I looked at my eyes. They looked—hard. They looked cold.

They looked like Rachel's eyes.

I had to get out.

I called up the image of the fly, turning away from the mirror so I didn't have to watch it.

There was an air vent in the bathroom, and my fly mind could tell it led to fresh air. Of course, my fly mind was mostly interested in fresh air because it led to places with garbage and rotting meat.

But it still could take me where I was going. And I the fly and I both agreed that we wanted out of this stuffy indoor place.