[that question gets rachel like a needle. an odd surprise -- she's used to being bludgeoned, slashed up, shot at with laser-based weapons. needles feel like an afterthought.

she remembers for entirely the wrong reason that jake might think. her expression drops. she isn't so hard to read, sometimes.]

We were on the Pemalite ship, bottom of the sea trench, [she says. intellectually, she knows that jake can't possibly know, this can't really be why he's acting so weird, but it's an... awkward moment, to say the least.] We'd stopped the Crayak from... influencing the timeline, changing the fate of the Iskoort. We went on the mission in squid morphs. On the ship, the Drode was talking to me, and I told him to go fuck himself.

[she didn't quite use those words because of the constraints of her genre, but she doesn't know that. the bigger point, the one she isn't saying, is that the drode had asked her to kill him— to kill jake. to earn her way into the legions of the crayak.

she hadn't been tempted. not for a second. but she knows it hadn't meant anything good, that she was the one that the drode had chosen to try to tempt. she blows a lock of stringy, blood-matted hair out of her face. she actually remembers, too, seeing tobias later. but she thinks that he means the last mission. after all, he's jake. worthy of the andalite title, even if he doesn't want to be a prince.]

Listen, Jake. [why does he look so pale?] The Crayak's not gonna win. I've got your back.