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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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Bella writes in plaintext on a blank page. "Pigeons, crows, bears, elephants, I'm getting a butterfly to check morph speed - I'd get a fly or something similarly unobtrusive, but if Renée catches a butterfly in the house she won't kill it, I can't say the same for a housefly. You might want to look into other bugs though, for non-practice spy morphing - small things we can get that are hard to see or hard to kill or both." She tears off the page and hands it over.
"School's out in like a week, and after that we can pretty much collect any cheap tickets to Forks we like. Are you three going to have trouble accompanying us?"
"The flight is longer than two hours, if you were thinking of hitchhiking in morph and pretending to have been somewhere else later instead of getting tickets and permission. Actually on reflection hitching might be a good idea regardless - put you in cargo, or on our persons to run to the bathroom every hour and a half... Then the Yeerks don't see an unusually large contingent going to visit Charlie followed by his accidental death. I don't know how much his Yeerk reports on his personal affairs to whatever organizational structure they have under the Visser, but it might be non-zero, they might notice that. Robin's convincing as an Andi-tagalong, I could maybe sell the Yeerk on Trouble too, but I don't think Ethan has ever been mentioned to Charlie at all and keeping the party small seems like the thing to do. So, Robin, ask your mom, Trouble and Ethan - make whatever excuses suit to be not-home, and wait for Robin's results on bug morphs."
"Depending on the timing for the flight up, it might be a good idea to first follow local known controllers in bug and/or stealth-bird morphs. See if we can find where they're getting fed, learn what we can about the organizational structure and their plans, see who's loitering around so we can expand our list if we recognize anybody, see if there are obvious targets for sabotage."
"Probably not the exciting loud kind of sabotage, at least until and unless our cover is already blown. More like fizzling the electronics in their ray generator."
"Please do not blow shit up without consensus. If one of us gets caught it will be relatively easy to find the others even if they don't stick a Yeerk in you."
"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."