Lightless. The whale's senses quickened. The whale did not hear, but it did anticipate. We'd soon be entering the hunting grounds. Where my prey sometimes fought me and won. <Hey, Rachel, did you know that not only do sperm whales eat squid, but some people think squid eat sperm whales?> Tobias said helpfully. <No one really knows what giant squid eat,> I said. <Except for the fact that they are cannibals.> <0h, good. Well, we both did our research.> <Yeah. I feel so much better now.> From my memory I called up the brief bit I'd read about squid. They had sharp, parrotlike beaks and eight arms covered with grasping, needle-toothed suckers. And two long, powerful tentacles that worked to grab prey at a distance and draw it toward the arms and mouth. It occurred to me that I didn't know how whales killed squid. But I could more than imagine how squid killed whales. Still, we powered down into the darkness. Falling, falling forever through darkness. The whale did not fear what was going to happen. It hunted to eat every day. Someone would win the battle, someone would lose. The whale had accepted this fact since birth. I

"You're kidding," I said. "That's it? We're beat?" "We have till ten p.m.," Jake said. "What's that? Eight hours? Not exactly enough time to go whale hunting. Cassie?" She held up her hands, helpless. "That was my one idea: squid. The Pemalite ship is just too far down." "And time is too short," I said. "The alternative is trying to bust into that nuclear facility and get the Chee out. The safe is too strong for us. And one other huge problem: The guards there are normal humans, as far as we know," Jake said. "We can't exactly go busting in and just kick everyone's butt." "Anyway, that only solves the problem of that one Chee," Marco pointed out. "What about the others? We can't just leave them sitting around as stiff as lawn ornaments." But in the end, it looked like that was our only choice. We broke up and headed home with no hope. It was depressing. I mean, we'd messed up missions before, but we'd never been lame enough to fail before we'd even started. Now the Chee would be lost and the Yeerks would possess technology that would stump even Ax. Atmospheric pressure, our own Earth force, had beaten us. Cassie headed toward her farm. Jake and Marco headed to Erek's to tell him the bad news. Tobias and Ax melted back into the woods. I walked home alone. My neighborhood looked normal. Kids playing street hockey. Adults sweeping driveways. Gossiping about the gorilla who'd been at the mall. "And by the time the news van arrived, the gorilla was already gone," one woman said. "Someone said they saw him abduct a child," the other woman said nervously. "I'm afraid to let my kids out of my sight." I kept my face carefully blank as I

the scene." The burrito lodged in my throat. I swallowed hard. The reporter was standing on the beach. And behind him was a massive, wrinkled wall of whale. I didn't hear much of what the reporter was saying. Something about volunteers and the whale surviving. "What kind of whale is that?" I croaked. My mother glanced up from her paperwork. "Hmmm? Oh, they just said it was a sperm whale." And then the camera zoomed in, and suddenly the whale and I were looking straight at each other. His dark, solemn gaze locked onto mine. I pushed back my chair.