Bella is memorizing the map of Phoenix.
He plonks the bags down beside it. Stacks of Tupperware containers inside them shift and collapse, scattering all over the kitchen floor. He grabs one teetering on the edge of the table, sits down in a chair, and starts eating the lemon tart inside with total concentration and a look of bliss.
"I'll give you two minutes to crawl out of there or I crack his skull, peel you out myself, and have a new test subject for my interesting notions of chemical warfare. They won't be pleasant minutes; feel free to get out quicker. Start morphing and I'll kill you both if I have to."
She's seen Ethan do this. She knows Trouble can take it.
She just doesn't think this is Trouble.
She brings the hammer down on his shoulder.
"Her name's Aspret," he adds. "I actually kind of feel sorry for her. The only way I could think of not to spill anything to her early was to think about something really distracting, and I've got a head full of really distracting shit, and not all of it is cake recipes." He waves vaguely at the baked goods all over Bella's kitchen. "So she's been baking for like a day straight, because that's the only way she knows how to shut me up on the rest of it. I'm not even sure why she hauled it all over here, except I guess she saw in my memories that I do that a lot."
"...yeah," he says. "Unless - I don't know. Her only job was to do whatever Reggie tells her and not break cover the rest of the time. I'd be screwed when her feeding cycle came up - she's due tomorrow evening - but I could fake it, until then, it wouldn't be hard. And if I'm gonna disappear, I shouldn't disappear out of your house if we can avoid it, right?"
"Is there a way to talk to her when she's like this? And - let's go down to the basement at least -" She puts the hammer back where it belongs, checks the floor for blood, there isn't any. "Renée won't notice the mixing bowl gone, we're all going to Olive Garden tonight." She picks up Aspret's bowl.
"That won't teach us her native language," Bella says. "I mean, we may as well acquire her - we'll call the others, we can meet after the Olive Garden trip when Renée's out at the movies - but I don't think it would let us understand whatever sounds or other communications she can emit right now."
"Eeeh - if Renée comes back you got lemon tart on your clothes and you're down here sorting through the Goodwill box looking for the least objectionable thing," Bella says. Since he does in fact have lemon tart on his clothes, this should be believable. "I'll go put stuff in the fridge, assuming Aspret didn't, like, poison any of it."
"I won't swear it's all my best work, but none of it's poisoned," he says. "You can trust it as much as you'd trust, well, anything baked by a frantic sleep-deprived alien who keeps having trauma flashbacks. You're probably gonna have to scoop me up and put me in the bowl after I morph; do you wanna do that now, or come back and do it after you put stuff in the fridge, or what?"
He starts to morph.
The first thing to go is his skin, turning from warm brown to greenish-grey and slimy. Then his limbs slurp into his body and he collapses onto the floor, a Trouble-sized squirming grey tube trapped in his own shirt and pants, with a perfectly human head. His hair melts away, then his face; his head is now a blunt grey blob settled on an absence of neck. Two long feathery-looking tendrils unroll out of the approximate prior location of his mouth, followed by assorted other bulges in the sluglike body still half-hidden by his shirt.
Last of all, he shrinks down to a proper Yeerkly size.
<Kinda slow. I mean, I can talk to her, but I can't get anything complex back. So far we've determined that she doesn't want to starve, doesn't want to be bleached to death, doesn't ever want to hold me still for Reggie again, doesn't really want to go back to the rest of the Yeerks...>
<How about you wiggle distinctively or something and I'll take you out and you can demorph, and then I can put her away before Renée gets back? I can probably wrangle you an invitation to Olive Garden, then we call the other two and talk about how to deal with her.>
And when Renée and Andi are home, all three of them go and eat pasta and bring home the leftovers and investigate the presents Trouble left for dessert, and Renée goes to meet her friends at the movie theater, and Bella tells Andi what happened, and then it is eight.
"Well, I mean, the idea would be to get Aspret out of you first, but yes. Any comments before we go render the captive Yeerk suitable for interrogation? The three of us," Bella gestures at her sister and Trouble, "also acquired her, and you may as well do the same."
"Yeah, I know. It doesn't completely make sense. Just... one big scary Andalite who looks a lot like Visser Three and would totally take my head off if I made a break for it is plenty intimidating, but when there's two of them and I read one as pretty much gonna hang back no matter what, it kind of, I don't know, dilutes the scary."
<Aspret, this is Bella. We're going to put you back in Trouble so you can talk. If you don't come out as soon as any of us tells you to, staying's going to be unpleasant, and if you start to morph or otherwise make sudden movements likewise. The possibility of a complete lack of unpleasantness exists but we need to determine if there's any way we can trust you.>
"He's in charge of this—of the invasion of Earth, I mean," says Aspret. "There's no Yeerk I could talk to about, about you guys, that wouldn't lead me back to him eventually." She shivers. "Which is the last place I ever want to be. There are regulations against wastefully killing subordinates, but nobody dares to remind him about them anymore. I've heard rumours—" She bites Trouble's lip, then shakes his head, shivering again. "Some people try to get close to him, soak up the glory, stay on his good side. Not me. I'm done."
"...Y...es..." she says tremblingly, and then shakes Trouble's head. "No! Not if I had to go anywhere near another Yeerk! Turn me into a, a bird, a migrating bird, I'll give you... everything I know that isn't something only I know, and I'll just fly away. Be a bird forever. I love birds..." She trails off with a sigh.
This does not happen.
Eventually, she opens her borrowed eyes.
"Trouble says," she relates quietly, "that probably the best way to make sure no one suspects you is for him to either keep me, or pretend to, for a few more days. My next feeding is tomorrow. If I go at an unpopular hour, no one will bother me. And if he stays away from all of you for a while before he disappears, or at least makes sure not to leave evidence that you're in contact, then when they start looking for us, they won't start with you. But I don't think they'll look very hard. I was assigned to this apparently worthless host as a punishment." (She glances up at Bella, then looks away.)
<Hmmm,> says Bella to the general audience, and, privately only to Trouble-and-Aspret (she's not sure if it's even possible to target only one of them, right now) <Tuck his hair behind his ear if the idea is that you don't want to get anywhere near his stepfather but he's willing to go back for final helpings if it diffuses suspicion when he vanishes.>
<He'll be able to maintain cover if something unexpected happens, take immediate advantage of access to ducks, etcetera. But,> Bella says, <I don't think you should stay longer than it takes to make the disappearance look good. And Trouble, for hiding out, you'll probably want a morph that can get into and out of private places for demorphing, remorphing, and sleeping, with or without someone's help. Does anyone else have input before Aspret goes out again to let Trouble confirm everything she's said and I go fetch the box?>
"So - Aspret leaves, Trouble tells us if she was making stuff up, you bring the box, Aspret touches it, we trust her not to - I don't know, acquire Trouble and make off in his likeness? - for the next few days and in that time he finds her a duck and she flies away and Trouble hides?"