Chapter One

I'm Jake.

Just Jake. You don't need to know my last name, and I can't tell you, anyway. My story is full of small lies. I've changed people's names. I've changed the names of places. I've changed small details here and there.

But the big stuff is true.

All of it.

The Yeerks are here. On Earth. That is true.

The Yeerks have made Controllers of many humans. They have inserted their gross, sluglike bodies into people's brains, and made them into slaves - Controllers. That is true. Controllers are everywhere. My town. Your town. Everywhere.

They can be anyone. The policeman on the corner. The teacher in your school. Your best friend. Your mother or father. Your brother.

I know. Because my brother Tom is one of them.

Tom is a Controller. A slave to the Yeerk in his head. If he knew who I really was - what I really was - he would have me killed. Or turned into a Controller, like him. That's what my world is like now. A world where the enemy is everywhere. Even sitting across from me at the breakfast table on a Saturday morning, which is when this part of the story begins.

"Hey, midget, what's up?" Tom asked as I sat down. That's one of the things he calls me. Actually I'm kind of big for my age. Almost as big as Tom. But it's a joke we've had for years. You know how it is.

"Not much," I said. "What's up with you?"

"Oh, I'm going to a meeting."

"The Sharing?" I asked, trying to sound casual. The Sharing is this group that tries to pretend like it's some kind of combined Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. It's really a front organization for Controllers. The leadership council of The Sharing is made up of high-ranking Controllers.

"Yeah. We're doing some cleanup in the park.

You know, do our part for the community and all. Then we're having a barbecue afterward." He gave me a serious look. "You really should join, you know. We'd get to spend more time together."

I felt a wave of sickness. I tried not to show it. It wasn't Tom talking. It was the Yeerk in his head. The Yeerk who wanted to take my body and use it as a host for one of his fellow slugs. As I sat there across the table from him, I was trying to decide something. I was trying to decide whether I would have to ever destroy him. Destroy my brother, who was not my brother. Not anymore.

"Maybe I will join some day," I said. Like when hell freezes over, I added silently. I poured myself some Wheaties and milk. "So you'll be out for a while?"

"All morning. Mom and Dad are out playing tennis, you'll have the house to yourself. Throw a party."

"Uh-huh," I said, and spooned up some cereal.

It was hard not to just yell at him. To let him know that I knew all about him. What he was. What he was doing.

At least, some of what he was doing. I had been spying on my brother. He was rising fast in the leadership of The Sharing. He was a very loyal Controller. The Yeerk in his head had been promoted.

And he was involved in some new plan. A very big new plan.

A plan I had to stop. Even if ...

"Well, take it easy, midget," Tom said, sounding just like he'd always sounded.

"You, too."

I waited till Tom was gone. I was alone. It was time.

I went through the house, room by room, making sure no one was there. Then I got the little matchbox I'd hidden in my desk drawer. I could hear a scrabbling noise coming from in side. I slid the matchbox open.

I shuddered.

It was a nice, big cockroach. Brown and glossy and about an inch long. Its antennae waved eagerly. The roach tried to force its way out of the box, but I held my hand over it.

I could feel the roach antennae tickling the bottom of my palm. It was pushing, trying to get away.

I focused on the roach. Thought about it. Pictured it.

The roach stopped moving and lay still. Not dead, just quiet. The way animals always get when you "acquire" them.

I slid two fingers into the box to get a better contact with the roach. It felt hard and dry. I shuddered.

I absorbed the cockroach's DNA pattern. It was becoming part of me. The DNA - the genetic pattern - of many animals was a part of me now. Tiger. Dolphin. Flea. Falcon. Trout. Green anole lizard.

I have the power to morph. To become any animal that I can touch. The power was given to us, to me and my friends, by an Andalite prince moments before he was murdered by the Yeerks. I have flown through the sky on my own out stretched wings at more than a hundred miles an hour. I have been a dolphin locked in deadly battle with sharks. I have felt the awesome power of the tiger, and experienced the terrible loss of self, the emptiness and horror of becoming an ant. It was the gift of the dying Andalite. A powerful weapon for us to use in resisting the Yeerks. It was also a dangerous, deadly curse. Like any weapon, I guess.

And now I was preparing to become a cock roach. It would be the ideal way to infiltrate The Sharing's new headquarters building. The leadership meeting was in a couple of days. I wanted to be there. But the Yeerks had grown cautious lately.

They knew we were out here. They believed, wrongly, that we were a group of Andalite warriors, but they knew that morph-capable enemies were hunting them. Opposing them. Hurting them.

Sometimes hurting them very badly.

Tom. My brother. Could I destroy my own brother?

"You don't have to make that decision yet," I said aloud. "All you have to do now is try out this roach morph."

All I had to do now was become a cockroach.

Cockroaches are not my favorite animals. But I knew a cockroach would be ideal for penetrating a guarded building. Roaches can go any where.

You may have noticed that fact.

I put my dog, Homer, out in the yard. I closed the curtains in my bedroom, making it dark as possible.

"Oh, man, the things I do with my spare time," I muttered. I thought of calling Marco and asking him to come over. Marco is my best friend. He's the one who actually came up with the word

"Animorph."

"No," I said. "Do this yourself."

The others were all tired. We'd had a rough time lately. Too many close calls. We needed a rest. Time to deal with normal stuff, like school. Our grades had been suffering since we'd be come Animorphs.

Besides, this had to be my decision. Tom was my brother.

I took a deep breath. I braced myself. I took another deep breath.

"Okay, Jake," I said. "Let's do it."

The first mistake I made was standing in front of a full-length mirror. It was dark in the room, but there was still enough light for me to see the changes. Big mistake. Morphing is never pretty. It is always unpredictable. In fact, if you saw it happening and didn't know what was going on, you'd end up screaming for about two weeks straight.

The first feeling was of shrinking. It's exactly like falling. Like you're falling forever. I watched myself shrink in the mirror. It didn't look as bad in the mirror as it felt. But what really did look bad was my skin as it began to be covered by an armor plate of brown cockroach shell.

"Aahhh!" I yelped in surprise.

My fingers melted together and formed a single, many-jointed bug leg. Antennae jumped out of my forehead. They seemed to stick out forever, then curl back, like they were being blown by a wind.

My waist was squeezed, and the lower part of my body swelled, forming a swollen insect abdomen. Swollen and brownish yellow with ripples, sort of like the Michelin man. Then, when I was about a foot tall, I felt the last of my bones dissolve. I could actually hear it happening. My spine had been grinding as it shrank. Then, suddenly, I heard a squishy sound, as all my internal organs lost their bone support.

My skull melted away. It was the last sound I heard clearly, as my ears and human sense of hearing faded.

I was a bag of loose guts. Almost deaf. Half-blind, as my human eyes shrank and the lenses became distorted.

My exoskeleton got harder and stiffer and stronger. My wings, glossy and crisp, covered my back. They overlapped at the edges, like the metal plates of a suit of armor. Extra legs suddenly sprouted from my chest. Only it wasn't exactly a chest anymore. I was a stunted, six-inch-long bug, with a few disintegrating strands of brown hair and shrunken, but still somewhat human, eyes.

Not attractive. Not even slightly.

Then I lost my eyes. It took a second to even realize that I could still see. Then, oh yes! Yes, I could see. But not the way I saw with human eyes.

A weird, wavy mountain seemed to wrap all around me - my clothes. They looked different, blue and green and gray. Kind of. It's hard to describe, exactly. I couldn't see very far, just a few feet. And what I could see was shattered into dozens of little images. I saw little bits of vast fibrous walls - my socks. And dark tunnels made of thick slabs of what could have almost been wavy, corrugated concrete - the legs of my jeans.

The fibers of the carpet looked gray-green to me, and as big as ropes. My hairy, jointed roach legs would catch in the fibers as I tried to move.

I felt the roach brain surfacing. I'd been through it before. It's different each time, depending on the animal.

Sometimes it's a bunch of raw energy and fear that takes over your own mind so you think you're going crazy.

But not the roach brain. I didn't feel great hunger. I didn't feel great fear. The roach was . . . calm. Confident. Unworried.

I laughed. I mean, in my head I laughed, be cause I no longer had a mouth or a throat or any thing at all that would make a laugh.

I was so tensed up, expecting the cockroach to be a bundle of energy and fear. But mostly it just felt like resting.

The roach brain wanted to take a nap.

Cool, I thought. It's gross. It's disgusting. Marco and the others will hate the idea, but when I tell them how easy it is to handle VIBRATION!

Get ready. Get ready. What was it? Get ready.