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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.
palmofyourhand
"If she's in, I'm in," sighs Ethan. "You can't just starve him out and let him loose, they're bound to give him another one. Or kill him. They probably have an entire division for it; anyone sensible would."
"Right. I'm going to guess the guy Robin saw murdered was a fleeing host. My best guess on a workable plan, right now, is that we fake Charlie's death and he goes into hiding; maybe we cube him and he adopts another identity or something. If we're lucky his Yeerk got him in position to see all kinds of stuff and Charlie will be able to tell us more after we get it out of him."
"Don't have that part figured out yet. If we're going to cube him we could potentially - I don't know how much it takes to render morphing impossible like it was for Elfangor, but morphing heals, which means there's lots of evidence we could leave without actually killing him, if nothing else you can get blood out of a person without hurting them too bad or killing them, we could do it in a few stages. I don't know how much of more solid evidence-leaving he'd go for and I'm still contemplating staged causes of death. It might be better to follow him to wherever the Yeerk soaks up its rays and spring him while it's doing that, but that alerts the other Yeerks, so I'd rather think more on the 'fake his death' plan."
"...I'm reluctant to suggest this because you already have two morphs and we don't know how many you can get," Bella says, "but since that seems like such an appealing prospect, you could maybe turn into Charlie and leave lots of evidence, once you know your tolerances. Maybe one of the others of us figures out how to get our hands on a bear. There's bears near Forks."
"Okay. Bear tracks, miscellaneous Charlie possessions, plenty of blood, maybe a hand or something, I bet the Yeerk is carrying his gun everywhere so maybe we fire a few slugs into a tree trunk, me and Andi sit at home until it's been long enough that we get worried, we 'try his phone', we call his co-workers, they find that a bear has mauled our fishing father and dragged him into the river, meanwhile Charlie himself is off safely elsewhere and his Yeerk is - I don't know if it'll be a useful bargaining chip later to have one on hand but we can't feed it, so probably just squished."
aeskhyne
"Could be useful to keep it even squished," says Trouble. "In case one of us wants to be a Yeerk sometime for some reason. Can you acquire from dead stuff? I already know you can acquire from blood..."
"One of us grabs it pre-squish, then we let Charlie do the honors if he wants or I will if he won't and we find out."
pandion
"Well, at least he can't sneak out at night, I'd wake up. I mean, he can't sneak out without us knowing, anyway. I don't know what we do if he's trying to leave and we don't want to let him."
"Yeah. A loitering bear would attract a lot of attention around the house. Maybe get him away from the house? It's trying to pass for Charlie; if we tell it we want to go kill a weekend in Olympic National Park it can't very well say boo. Take his phone - Andi, do you remember how to unload his gun? - siphon the gas out of the cruiser, bear."
"So Ethan needs a bear, maybe Robin should also have a bear for backup since you have to morph out every two hours to avoid lifetime bearhood and it might take longer to turn into a bear than it did for me to turn into the relatively more similar Andi - I think I'll try a bug, see how long that takes to get a range on the timing so we aren't surprised by a fifteen-minute morphing process later or something. Getting into the zoo to get a bear could be hard. I can catch a butterfly; I don't think any of us can catch a crow or pigeon or something similarly unobtrusive and aerial, and butterfly flight speed is nothing to write home about, morphing on-site carries exposure risk..."
pandion
"And the bear might be mad. But when you acquired me I was kind of - sedated? For a little while."
"Okay. I still don't want any of us filling up on morphs too greedily, and as long as we don't know the limit diversity could be important, but you're bear bait, you sedate the bear for Ethan, then you both get out of there. Me and Andi should probably also have combat-capable morphs in case things get hairy. I'd want us all to be the same bear if I knew we could be as many things as we wanted - the last thing we want is for the Yeerks to notice us and then be able to count us, way better if they never notice us and if they have to notice us they should at least think we're a small surgical strike force from some unknown large pool of morphers. Since we don't know that we can be an unlimited number of things and don't know the limit me and Andi should pick up something else. Elephants maybe, raw blunt force and some fine-manipulation capability. I think if the limit were very small - fifteen, twenty - he'd have thought to mention it - but he was kind of dying at the time. I wish I'd asked."
"Yes." Bella blinks, then writes something down. "Also, the cube has to be hidden someplace, and someplace is not this house, at least after tonight."