#the weakness

I think it's down to her being the most variable, and the most able to justify to herself when she does bad things. If there's anyone who could choose to work for Crayak because they've rationalized the reasons it's bad but necessary, I think it'd be her.

To be clear: Marco and Ax especially cross tons of ethical lines that Rachel would never. But Marco knows where the line is, knows what is right... he just chooses to work around it sometimes, based on what's expedient. Marco's the guy whose first impulse is ethical, who then rationalizes himself into being ruthless. Ax doesn't have that strong a gut-level moral compass, but he does have loyalty. In spades. For Ax, the idea of abandoning his team and striking out on his own is anathema, and he would never entertain a possibility of killing Jake for the good of humanity.

Rachel, on the other hand...

Rachel is most ethical in her second thoughts. Her first impulse often misleads her.

She's angry on behalf of the victims, to the point of wanting to annihilate every yeerk alive to get revenge for them.

She's sensitive to injustice, but her definition of "injustice" can be distorted from context to context.

When Jake and Cassie are around, she's ride-or-die for them. When they're not around, she tends to get tunnel vision and lose sight of what they're fighting for.

She's willing to do the hard thing for the good of the team — as #26 proves, that includes killing Jake.

Do we ever hear anything else about Cassie's sibling? It gives some context to her family life that she has a brother or sister who's >10 years older and out of the house.

The 'hero, warrior, king' mantra really gets me here because that feels like a pre-David Ax problem. Andalite honour and glory and at that same point in the series Rachel was going "it doesn't matter how you win so long as you do win" while the others laughed it off a little. But that's not wanting glory, it's caring about winning the fight. Rachel at this point in the series is not the same leader she could have been right at the start. She understood she was in the role of tank, and she cut out all distractions to that. Her actions in this book make sense, it's her purported motivations that don't.

The war has given everyday Rachel a lot more aggression, less tolerant of minor inconveniences. But Rachel doesn't want to be a HERO, she just is. Especially not the "bad leader, prioritising my own glory" kind. If she does now, that's a recent change, and it doesn't feel justified by her having temporary command.

Rachel isn't the person who's fighting for glory, she's fighting to get her friends out alive. Sure, anything is worth fighting for to her, but it's not about her looking cool. Jake says it at the end: how many animorphs did you start with? And how many did you finish with? The implied ego that the book wants her to wrestle with just isn't her. Glory often means you were the lone survivor of a terrible battle, and Rachel will always try to be the lone casualty if anyone must. Jake knows his team's strengths and weaknesses (he also already knew the outcome of the book, but that's besides the point) he can rely on Rachel to fight until everyone else is safe.

The fast strikes make sense as a Rachel choice though (it's a little weird that we don't see another use of the cheetah cover morph actually, that's fairly thematic). The plan also does read pretty well as a Rachel plan — a big overall to-do list because she had the time to make it and then everything else being fast, think in the moment, no time to check if it's wrong (not brave, just blind).

The power clash with Marco even makes sense, even if the way they're arguing is much more early series. They have much more respect for each other as the right and left hands at this point, and the insults just feel a little too petty and weird. The only moment of sympathy Rachel gets for 'yeah, this isn't your job' is when Marco refuses to take it from her, and if they really wanted to Cassie or Tobias could have talked to her sooner (should have) even if Rachel didn't want to take it.

This is definitely one of the weaker books in the series, but I wanted to share the section that made the whole thing worth it: " 'Maybe. But how do you make decisions that get your friends hurt? That maybe someday will get us killed? How do you keep it from getting inside your head and just eating away at you?' Then I saw something strange on his face. For just a fleeting moment it was the face of a terrified kid on the edge of tears. It shocked me. I knew what I was seeing. It was my face when I'd realized the old man had died. My face when I thought I'd lost Cassie forever. But then the mask came down. And he was Jake again. 'I don't think about it,' he lied."