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There are no more five-person meetings at the Swan household. They're a circle: Bella-Andi-Robin-Ethan-Trouble-Bella again. They meet in twos, threes, pass around information, get it all down in Bella's cipher in Bella's notebooks. They have a list of members of the Sharing, mostly procured by Ethan and to a lesser extent Trouble, but no safe way to learn if these people's behavior has changed; they have seen no more aliens, observed no more disintegrations, caught no one ducking into anything that is an alien hideout.
The twins try to behave normally with their father or his pod person, whichever the person who calls them is, for a value of "normally" that involves adamantly continuing to want nothing to do with the Sharing.
And sometimes crying and refusing to tell Renée what's wrong.
School proceeds. No one's grades see more than a minor downturn as a result of all the alien business.
Andi and Robin play music. Andi's getting pretty good on the drums, although her teacher moves away and she has to hunt up another one, who she sticks with for four lessons before deciding to go self-taught.
Bella tightens up her cipher. It began as a letter substitution and since then has evolved to include plenty of personal shorthand - she turns the ratio of shorthand to straightforward letters up as far as she can and still read the thing herself. She abbreviates, she leaves out spaces, she names things in roundabout ways, she refers to things many notebooks ago that she can find easily that anyone else could spend hours hunting for, if she has to record names she finds ways to describe the spelling without ever placing all of the characters in sequence. Maybe the aliens have super-cryptanalysis and super-OCR and can eat her notebooks in one bite and know everything they know; but maybe not, and maybe if she's careful enough she'll look like she's writing her paranoid diary and not like she's taking notes on the quiet invasion.
Trouble comes over a lot. He stays over a lot. Renée has a quiet conversation about him with Bella, in which Bella is vague, pretends ignorance, suggests that maybe he just likes it here, maybe his folks are allergic to gluten and won't eat his baked goods? Renée leaves it alone.
May begins.
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"I know you and being told to do stuff have a kind of difficult relationship. I know you could have figured out that getting caught is bad without being told. Can you understand that I don't want to bet all our lives on my ability to figure out what you have and have not figured out? Do I need to apply complex problem-solving to 'how to communicate about alien-related operations to Trouble without setting him off' or can you work with me sometimes telling you stuff? That's an honest question - we aren't Marines or something, we aren't trained, there is not an actual chain of command here, if I have to do something complicated and weird to make the five of us work functionally I will figure out something complicated and weird, but every minute I spend making sure we don't self-destruct is a minute I can't spend figuring out things about aliens or experimenting with morphing or keeping up appearances for the outside world."
"Huh? I'm not even - I haven't been ordering people around. I said 'consensus' a minute ago, I said there's no chain of command."
palmofyourhand
"I abstain," says Ethan. "Look, I said Chairman, not General. You're not giving orders but you are acting rather as though the entire success or failure of this ridiculous operation is your, personal problem, to you all the minutiae of administration, to you all the cat-herding, to you all the responsibility for making sure Trouble doesn't morph into a complete idiot and betray us all. Not that I'm volunteering, you understand."
"...That's not far wrong, anyway. If something bad is going on I can either try to fix it or I can figure it's someone else's problem. The second option might work sometimes, I'm willing to delegate if people are willing to be delegated to and I can expect that to actually lead to the delegated thing getting done, but by default given tools and a problem I will work on the problem. Not because anyone assigned me the problem, but because if I don't solve it then it may not get solved. If someone else wants the job - if someone else could do the job better - I will hand it over."
hold-infinity
"Which is why I'm perfect for the job," she says cheerfully. "I don't have to do anything."
aeskhyne
"Yeah, I was thinking about it, and then I got distracted by the comedy duo here," he says, gesturing at Ethan and Robin. "It's... not simple. And I'm guessing you won't just let me take responsibility for myself."
"There's no 'just' in there anymore. You have my life and my twin sister's life, plus Robin's and Ethan's lives - and our un-Yeerked status - in the palm of your hand. One of the things I need to function is to keep the best track I possibly can of what risks are being run with those things. I'm sure you'd hold up brilliantly under conventional interrogation, but the Yeerks don't need to conventionally interrogate you if they get ahold of you. So - what do you need so that we can, jointly, function?"
aeskhyne
"If you just want me to not run off and do stupid shit that might get you killed without telling you first, I can do that," says Trouble.
aeskhyne
"I could use some, but I'm not sure it'll do the job," says Trouble. "...How about we talk about this... later?"
pandion
"Is it just me or is not having somebody in charge a recipe for disaster? I don't think armies and stuff do it that way just because they couldn't decide which number of uniform stripes looked prettiest and they wanted an excuse to use them all."
pandion
"Well, for one thing, when Bella turned into me that was one thing but I bet if we turn into butterflies or whatever we can't talk to each other, so we have to be coordinated in advance if we're gonna do stuff in morph."
aeskhyne
"Elfangor talked," says Trouble, thoughtfully. "Bet you I could talk too, if I morphed him."
aeskhyne
"...And the Visser talked. When he was still the what'd-he-call-it, he made that crack about taking a bite out of your enemies. So is that because he was an Andalite to start with, or running one at least, or is it because morphing lets you do that?"