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Animorphs Volume 02
The Visitor
K.A. Applegate
*Converted to EBook by Dace K
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Chapter One
My name is Rachel. I won't tell you my last name. None of us will ever tell you our last
names. Whenever I do use a last name, it's a fake. Sorry, but that's the way it has to be. And
we won't tell you the name of our town, or our school, or even what state we are in. If I told
you my last name, the Yeerks would be able to find my friends and me. And if they ever find
us, it will be the
end.
They might kill us. Or worse.
Yes, there really is something worse than death.
I've seen it. I've heard the cries of despair from those doomed to be slaves of the Yeerks.
I've watched as the evil gray slugs writhe and squeeze in through the ear and take over what
was a free human being.
There are five of us. Just five: Jake, Cassie, Marco, Tobias, and me. Marco came up with a
name for us, for what we are now. He called us Animorphs.
I guess that's as good a name as any for what we are. Mostly, I still just feel like a nor mal kid
you know? But I guess normal kids don't turn into elephants or bald eagles. And normal kids
don't spend their free time fighting to save the world from the nightmares called Yeerks.
That day, the sun was bright. It warmed the earth below us. Warm air rose in an invisible
bubble, a thermal. The thermal pushed up beneath our wings and we circled higher and
higher and higher, till it almost seemed we could touch space.
Somewhere up there in cold space, up in orbit, was the Yeerk mother ship. Perhaps right over
our heads.
The Yeerks were parasites. In their natural state they were just big slugs who lived in a
sludgy pond called a Yeerk pool. But the Yeerks have the power to take over other bodies.
They have enslaved many races throughout the galaxy -- the Taxxons, the Hork-Bajir, and
others. And now they had come to Earth, looking for more bodies to control.
Who was there to try and stop them? Well, off in space, there were the Andalites. But the
Andalites were far away, and it would take them a long time to come to rescue the people of
Earth.
On Earth, no one knew of the Yeerks. No one but five kids who were having fun being birds
and riding the thermals.
I looked over at my friends. Some were a little way below, some were higher up. Jake was
flapping his wings a little more than the rest of us. He had adopted a falcon morph. Falcons
