  Look for other
  titles by K.a. Applegate:
1 The Invasion
2 The Visitor
3 The Encounter
4 The Message
5 The Predator
6 The Capture
7 The Stranger
8 The Alien
9 The Secret
  less-than MEGAMORPHS greater-than
1 The Andalite's Gift
AN APPLE
PAPERBACK
SCHOLASTIC INC.
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Cover illustration by Damon C. Torres/the
l-Way Company
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be
aware that this book is stolen property. It was
reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher,
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pay
ment for this "stripped book."
No part of this publication may be reproduced in
whole or in part, or stored in a retrieval
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sion of the publisher. For information regarding
permission, write to Scholastic Inc., 555
Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
ISBN 0-590-99730-0
Copyright
[*copy]
1997 by Katherine Applegate. All rights
reserved. Published by
Scholastic Inc. APPLE PAPERBACKS
and the APPLE PAPERBACKS logo
are registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
ANIMORPHS is a trademark of
Scholastic Inc.
12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
789/9012/0
Printed in the U.s.a, 40
First Scholastic printing, September 1997
For Erek King, and all the fans
  And for Michael
Even the book morphs!
Flip the pages
and check it out!
  My name is Marco.
  People call me Marco the Magnificent.
Mar-velous Marco. The Amazing Marco.
  And of course, all the girls just call me ...
gorgeous. Okay, maybe I've never actually
heard
anyone call me gorgeous, but I am confident that
someone, somewhere, must have called me gorgeous at some
point.
  Or not.
  But definitely cute. I've heard "cute" with
my own ears.
  And I'll soon be hearing it a lot more because
I've made a major change. I've cut my
hair. Or at least my stylist, Charise, cut it
for me. That's right, Charise. And according to Charise, my
cuteness quotient has risen from a nine to a defi
nite ten.
Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes. I was telling
you that my name is Marco. I can't tell you my last
name. I forgot it.
No, not really, I'm kidding. I know my last name.
I'm just not going to tell you. And I'm not
going to tell you the complete names of my
friends or where I live.
What I will tell you is the truth.
All except for
that part about "magnificent" and "marvelous."
Everything else I tell you will be true. I know it
will seem incredible. But it will be the absolute
truth.
Let's start with the reason why I won't tell you
my last name: I have enemies. We all sorta do.
But these guys are very powerful, very dangerous
enemies. Not like the guy in your class who keeps
calling you "dork-wad." And if they knew who I
was, I'd be dead so fast I wouldn't even
know I was dead. The Yeerks don't play games.
The Yeerks don't worry about pity or kindness.
They don't care that I'm just a kid. The Yeerks
plan to enslave or destroy the entire human
race.
They won't hesitate to roll right over little old
me.
The Yeerks aren't just
my
enemies, though.
They are the enemies of every human being. The enemies
of Earth itself. And they are everywhere.
They're a parasitic species. Think
tapeworms.
That's what they are, when you get right down to
it: intelligent tapeworms.
They are slugs, just a few inches long. They enter
the human body through the ear canal. Once inside,
they flatten themselves out and
wrap themselves around your brain. They squeeze into all
the folds and wrinkles of your brain and
tie into your thoughts.
They take over. They make you into what we
call a Controller. A human machine. A body
whose own, true mind is shattered and
helpless.
That's the special horror of the Yeerks. They
don't just take over your mind and eliminate you.
You continue to be aware. You continue to be conscious.
You sit there in your own head watching the Yeerk open
your memory, watching the
Yeerk fool your friends and family, watching the
Yeerk turn the people you love into the same kind
of slave you've become.
You try to move your hand, but you can't. You try
to make your mouth speak, but you can't. You don't even
control what your eyes look at. That's
what it's like.
My mother is one of them. A Controller.
For a long time, we thought she had died. I
believed she had drowned. But I learned later
that she was still alive.
A very powerful Yeerk had taken her body. I
don't even know how long she was a Controller
before she disappeared. I don't know how many times her
good-night kiss was the action of a Yeerk trying
to pass as a human.
  She is Visser One now. A Visser is a
sort of Yeerk warlord or general. Visser One
launched the secret invasion of Earth.
Visser Three is now in charge.
  Visser One, in my mother's head, took off after
faking her death by drowning. She's somewhere now . . .
maybe millions of miles away.
  No one knows about my mom but me and my best friend,
Jake. I don't want the others to know. I
don't want their pity.
  The Yeerks are here. Everywhere. Not just my mother, but
maybe yours, too. Maybe your teacher, maybe your
best friend, maybe everyone around you. When you get together
with family and friends, you may be the only one in the
room who is not a Controller.
  That's why we fight them. We Animorphs.
  I made up that word, by the way. Pretty cool,
huh? Animorphs. Just popped into my head.
Animal morpher.
  See, not every alien in the universe is a Yeerk.
The universe has its heroes, too. It was one
dying, doomed Andalite who gave us our power
to acquire the DNA of any animal and then
to become that animal.
  His name was Elfangor. He, and a lot of other
Andalites, died trying to save Earth from the
Yeerks.
So for him, and for all the people of Earth, we
fight, hoping to slow the Yeerks down enough so that the
Andalites will have a chance to come
again and save us all.
Who is "we"? Well, there's me, Marco the
Magnificent.
Then, there's Rachel-who-thinks-she's-Xena.-
Warrior Princess.
And there's Tobias, the Bird-boy. And
Cassie, the tree-hugger. And Ax, our
resident Andalite.
And of course, our fearless leader, my boy,
Jake.
My way-too-serious best friend Jake.
Responsible, practically adult Jake.
Jake, who grinds my nerves with his total
refusal to just have a good time.
"Look," I said to Jake, "it's not a crime or
anything. There is absolutely no law against dogs
going to outdoor concerts. They don't have a
ticket for dogs."
"You know, Marco, the point of morphing is not for us
to get into concerts," Jake said.
We were walking down one of the streets of our
subdivision. We'd shot some hoops down at the
outdoor basketball court, and now Jake
was
dribbling the ball as we walked.
"Nine Inch Nails. Alanis. Offspring," I
said.
He stopped and stared at me. "Marco?"
  "Yeah?"
  "What happened to your hair, man?"
  "You're just noticing? Looks cool, huh?"
  Jake just stared. "Offspring?" he asked.
"You're sure Offspring will be there?"
  I could see him weakening. He was dribbling slower.
"I hear they are so great live. They kick. They
dominate. They crush all opposition under foot.
They rule. They -"
  "Marco, after I've criticized Rachel and
Cassie for using morphing for personal reasons,
I can't just -"
  "Who's going to tell them?" I argued. I ran
my fingers through my new, shorter hair. It was
cool-looking. I wasn't even going to pay
attention to the way Jake just stared at it. It looked
cool.
  "I'd be a hypocrite," Jake said.
  I thought for a moment. "You know, Jake . . . I
have long suspected that Alanis may be a
Controller. And, as a Controller, think of the
damage she could do by leading young, impressionable kids
like us astray. Oh, I hate to even think of it!
We have a duty, Jake. We have a sacred
duty to
go to that concert and to find out once and for all whether any
of these major stars are Controllers."
  Jake smiled his slow smile. "That is easily
the most pathetic excuse you have ever come up with."
I laughed. "Get serious. I've come up with
lots of more pathetic excuses than that."
  We were almost at Jake's house, so we stopped.
Jake's brother Tom is one of
them
-
a Controller. We don't talk inside his house.
  "You know," Jake said, "the only possible way
I could go along with this is if I found out
you
were going to this thing anyway. Then, see, I'd have to go
along -- reluctantly -- just to watch your back."
  Jake may be responsible and all, but he
isn't a total forty-year-old.
  I grinned. "Jake, I'm going to this concert,
whether you like it or not."
  "Then I guess I'd better go, just to cover your
butt," Jake said. "You'll have to figure out how
to cover that hair."
  I made a face. "Real funny."
  "I thought so," Jake said, grinning at his own
wit. "I'm going to morph Homer, I guess.
You're right. Dog is the way to go. No one will even
think anything about us being there, since there are always
dogs at outdoor stuff. And dog hearing is great.
You need to acquire a dog morph."
  "Already have," I said smugly. "An Irish
setter. Girls love Irish setters. Heh,
heh, heh."
  I laughed my "evil" laugh and gave Jake a
look, and he laughed, too.
  There are these moments in your life that
seem totally innocent at first, you know? Like normal
everyday life. But then it's like you stepped
off a cliff, and before you know it you're falling.
Suddenly you realize your innocent little decision has
gone spinning out of control.
I had decided to sneak into a concert. I had not
decided to uncover one of the greatest secrets of
human history, or become the person
who would decide the fate of an entire
race.
I just wanted to hear some music.
It should have been no big deal.

here are a couple of big problems with mor-
phing. First of all, there's the two-hour time
limit. If you stay in morph for more than two
hours, you stay forever.
Second, there is the fact that all of the ani
mal's basic instincts come along with the body.
Sometimes when you jump into that animal brain it's like
grabbing onto a power line.
Finally, there is the total creepiness factor.
I mean, major,
Stephen-King-meets-Ann-Rice
creepy.
The concert was taking place at this big outdoor arena
that's at one end of the city park. We needed a
private place to morph, but that turned
out not to be so easy. There were people every-
where. Thousands of people. Kids in black T-shirts.
Displaced Deadheads with little granny sunglasses
and dreadlocks. Parental units carrying babies
and trying to look cool in their Dockers.
And hardcore punk rockers with pierced every-
things.
Across from the park there was this little street with coffee
shops and restaurants and an ecology bookstore.
There were alleys behind the restaurants, and we headed
there.
Down one alley we found a little dead-end area
stuffed with Dumpsters.
"Wonderful," Jake muttered. "The two of us
and the garbage. This is already fun."
"Come on, let's do it," I said. I was
impatient.
I could hear a warm-up band racing through a
power set.
"You haven't morphed a dog before, have
you?" Jake asked me.
"No."
He smiled. "Don't get
too
happy," he said.
I didn't really pay any attention to him. I
looked around and saw some hippie girls walking
by. They couldn't see us. I removed my outer
clothing and stripped down to my morphing suit.
I stuffed my clothes and shoes into the bag Jake and
I had brought along and shoved it behind the
Dumpster.
I focused on the dog I had acquired. I saw
it
in my mind. And as I focused, I felt the
changes
begin.
I've morphed much weirder things than dogs.
But every morph is strange. Every morph is un
predictable. You really never know how it's going
to go.
I expected the first thing to be fur. It wasn't.
The first thing that happened was the tail. I felt it
just sort of spurt out of the base of my spine.
I turned to look back over my shoulder. "Oh,
guh-ross!"
The tail was sticking out. But it had no fur
yet. It was just this kind of grayish, chicken-
skinned whip.
I looked back at Jake. His face was bulging
out like something was trying to climb out of his
mouth. At the same time my own muzzle started
to grow. There was a weird grinding sound from inside my
head as the bones of my jaw stretched
outward.
I felt an itching in my mouth as my teeth
grew
bigger and rearranged themselves.
I saw my fingers shrink up inside my hands.
At the same time, the little stubs of fingers grew these
gray-black nails. My palms became thick
and calloused.
I felt the bones in my legs and arms stretch-
ing, changing directions, and I began to grow
slightly smaller. Suddenly, I couldn't stand up
anymore. I fell forward onto my calloused
pads.
Only then did the fur begin to grow. It was a
good thing, too. I was one ugly animal without fur.
The reddish fur sprouted quickly, like the
world's fastest grass. It just seemed to explode out
of my skin, long and silky.
less-than Cooleagreater-than I said to Jake in
thought-speak. less-than Check out this fur. Every
girl in that concert is going to want to pet me.
greater-than
He said something back to me, but right then
the dog senses kicked in.
I've morphed a wolf, so I was prepared. I
knew the hearing would be amazing. I knew the sense of
smell would be incredible.
But what I didn't expect was the dog's mind.
It was not like the wolf. The wolf was a cool, in
telligent, ruthless killer.
The dog was just a big goof.
You remember that old song, "Girls Just Wanna
Have Fun"? That could be the theme song for dogs.
Dogs just want to have fun.
That's what fooled me. The Irish setter's brain
didn't feel like some strange animal. It felt
like it was just tapping into a part of my own mind. It
was a perfect fit with the goof ball part of my own
brain.
I looked over at Jake through my slightly dim
dog vision. He had become his dog, Homer. I
lolled out my tongue and panted. Jake/homer
panted right back at me.
"RUFF!" I barked, for no reason. I did a
little
dance. Sort of like I was going to run away, but then
I stopped suddenly and crouched down on
my front legs and grinned like an idiot at
Jake.
I was inviting him to play.
I tore off down the alley at a run.
less-than Marco, wait upffgreater-than
less-than Catch me! Hah-hah! Like you even
couldffgreater-than
I scrabbled away at top speed, my nails
click
ing on the concrete, my floppy ears flying, my
tail
held high and wagging.
I raced down the alleyway, totally ignoring the
rich, wondrous smells of rotting garbage.
I turned toward the park and raced across the
street. Jake fell back, caught up in a
small knot
of people.
  SCRRREEEEECCCCHHH!
A car slammed on its brakes and missed me
by a couple of feet. A couple of feet! I
mean, if
the driver had been one millisecond slower to hit
the brakes, I'd have been roadkill. But my
complete dog-brain reaction to that near-death expe
rience was, "Cool! I smell something!"
I'm totally serious. The fact that I smelled
some other dog's pee on a curb was about ten thousand
times more interesting to my dog brain than the squealing
car was.
  The driver got out and started yelling. I gave
him a happy dog grin and trotted on my way.
  less-than Marco! Would you wait up8greater-than
  Suddenly I was surrounded by people. But they were totally
different from the people I'd seen before when I was still
human.
  For one thing, I wasn't really
looking at
these people. I was
smelling
them. What they looked like was so totally not
important. But the smells!
  I smelled sweat, I smelled shampoo, I
smelled bad breath, I smelled what they had been
eating, I smelled what they had stepped in, I
smelled laundry detergent, I smelled everyone
they had touched or shaken hands with.
  And I could smell all their animals. The
humans might as well have been wearing big neon
signs that said i own a dog, or i have cats. I
could not only smell who owned dogs, I could smell
whether the dogs were male or female, young or old,
fixed or not. Just by sniffing the people walking past, I
knew if their dogs ate canned or dry food.
  I mean, when you hook up to that dog nose
it's like you've been walking around with cotton balls
up your nostrils all your life and suddenly
you take them out and wow! Wow! You're into a
whole new experience of life.
I'd been a wolf in the forest. Now it was like I
was a wolf in civilization. The information from
my nose was so complex. So full, so rich, so en
joyable.
"Hey, boy!" someone said. A girl! I was sure
she was a girl. But was she a cute girl? I
tried to
make my dog eyes focus, but it was like sight was
just irrelevant. I could see pretty well, but
my
dog brain was way too busy smelling and hearing.
I did notice the scent of patchouli oil, though.
The girl reached out a hand and stroked my head.
Instantly a warm wave of pleasure washed over
me. Then she scratched behind my ear.
This was almost too good. This was sublime. This was
probably the best thing I'd ever felt in
my life.
I think I could have just stood there and let her scratch
behind my ear forever. But then she was joined by a guy

a guy who owned a cat,
incidentally
-
and she started in on my ribs. I
lay down and rolled on my side. The scratching of
my ribs felt like tickling. I was so happy. I
was
beyond happy.
See, dog happy isn't like human happy.
Human happiness always has this little voice in the
back of your mind going, "Don't be
too
happy.
Keep your guard up. Something bad could still
happen."
But dog happy is just pure, distilled essence of
happiness. I just lolled my wet tongue out and
slapped my tail against the grass, and then it started.
My leg started going all on its own.
"Hah, I love it when dogs do that," the guy
said. "That's so funny!"
His girlfriend scratched away on my ribs and my
back leg just motored away, out of control,
and I was in heaven. That's when Jake found me.
less-than That's nice,
Marcoeagreater-than Jake said. less-than Very
digni
fied. What's next? You going to lick
yourself8greater-than
"Oh, it's another dog," the girl said. "He's
even cuter!" She leaned forward to pet Jake.
That brought me to my senses. No way was Jake a
cuter dog than me.
less-than 0kay, okay, that's enough playing
aroundeagreater-than I said. less-than Come on,
Jake. Let's get closer to the
stage. greater-than
We took off, tails wagging, leaving the nice
hippie couple behind.
less-than See? I told you, Marco. Don't
get too happy. A happy dog is almost
too
happy. greater-than
less-than Why n8greater-than I asked, a little
wistfully. less-than Why
not just get happy8greater-than
Then something stunning happened. There had been no
music for a few minutes, and all at
once, Offspring climbed onstage and unloaded.
They ripped into a song and I cowered a little.
The impact on my dog ears was shocking. But it
wasn't just that it was so loud. It was that I could
hear everything. Everything.
less-than Hey! I can understand the lyrics
noweagreater-than I
said.
less-than Cooleagreater-than Jake answered.
We trotted closer, into a thickening crowd of
humans. The smells were just overwhelming.
And not always in a good way.
Suddenly, I saw him. He was passing out flyers.
He was walking through the crowd and pass
ing out handbills.
A breeze caught one of the sheets and it fluttered
to the ground in front of me. I forced my dog eyes
to look at it. I couldn't read the fine print, but
I could see the two big words at the
top.
The Sharing.
The Sharing. The front organization for Con
trollers.
less-than Jakeeagreater-than I said. less-than
That guy. He's handing out flyers for The Sharing.
greater-than
less-than Yeah. You know what? Does he
look familiar,
or is it just my imagination8greater-than
He had brown hair, just a little over his ears. He
was maybe five feet tall, but he managed to
look taller. A slightly shorter version of
Jake, strong and confident-looking. less-than
Yes, he's familiar.
His name's Erek King. He transferred out of our
  school like a year ago. greater-than
  Erek was coming closer, smiling and handing
  out flyers to anyone who would take one.
  He knelt down and smiled at me. He reached
  out to pet me, but I pulled back. Erek shrugged
  and walked on his way, handing out flyers.
less-than Jake, did you notice t8greater-than
less-than 0h, yeaheagreater-than he said.
less-than Definitely. greater-than less-than
0h, maneagreater-than I said. less-than There
is something very,
  very wrong with Erek. greater-than
He
didn't smell," I said.
  "What do you mean, he didn't smell?"
Rachel demanded.
  "I mean that he didn't
smell.
He had picked up some odors off other people, off the
ground, off dogs, whatever, but he had no smell
himself. None. Like a black hole of smell. Like
nothing there, nobody home."
  It was later that same evening. Jake and I had
left the concert shortly after encountering Erek. We'd
called a meeting, and now everyone except Ax was in
Cassie's barn.
  Cassie's barn is actually the Wildlife
Rehabilitation Center. It's a sort of
hospital for messed-up wild animals.
Cassie's parents are both
veterinarians. Her mom works at the Gardens, this
big combination zoo and amusement park.
  Her dad (with a lot of help from Cassie)
takes in every sick or injured wild animal they
come across. The barn is lined with wire cages filled
with raccoons, foxes, opossums, eagles,
rabbits, geese, badgers, crows, squirrels
... I mean, you name it. It's animal central.
  "Maybe you just didn't notice it," Rachel
suggested.
  "Rachel, you've been in wolf morph," Jake
said. "You know how good your sense of smell
is? Well, the dog's sense of smell is almost that
good."
  Rachel shook her head. That's what she does
when she's frustrated.
  She was standing in the middle of the barn floor,
looking immaculate, as usual. Rachel is one
of those girls from the cover of
Seventeen.
Beautiful, fashionable, way too tall, far too
many bright white teeth, massive quantities of very
clean blond hair. But beneath all that fashionable
clothing and perfectly applied makeup there is a
sword-swinging Amazon warrior just trying to break
out.
  Rachel's like one of those terrible elf-maidens in
Tolkien's
The Lord of the Rings
-
beautiful and dangerous.
  Jake is her cousin and Cassie is her best
friend. Cassie actually experiences normal human
emotions like fear and doubt. I approve of this because
I sure experience plenty of fear and doubt myself.
I've experienced more fear and doubt since I
became an Animorph than most people
experience in about ten lifetimes.
  Cassie has never met a dress she liked.
She does not subscribe to
Teen
or
YM.
She's much more likely to buy a magazine like
Smelly Animals of America.
You know, the kind of magazine that would have articles like
"How to Give Suppositories to Raccoons,"
or "Let's Examine Owl Vomit!"
  If you want to picture Cassie, think of a
short, cute girl with very short black hair,
wearing overalls and big muddy boots and looking
totally capable of giving a tetanus shot to an
angry bear.
  Cassie is our animal expert, and our
resident ecology nut. I'd say she likes
animals better than she likes people, except that
she really likes Jake. As in
likes.
  Actually, she and Jake
like
each other, although neither of them will admit it, of
course. The only time they'll act that way
is when we're about twelve seconds away from doing
something insanely dangerous. Then they'll kind of
give each other these pathetic sad looks.
  It's so lame.
  The last original member of our group was
perched in the high rafters overhead. Tobias had his
talons sunk deep into the wood to give himself a
firm hold. And with his hooked beak he was preening the
feathers of his right wing.
  Tobias is a red-tailed hawk. That's what
he's been since he stayed too long in morph.
He lives as a hawk now, mostly. I mean, he
hunts and eats like a hawk. Not that he has much
choice. I don't think the school is really
interested in a Hawk-boy as a student.
  Tobias lives in the woods, along with Ax.
Ax is an Andalite, the brother of Elfangor,
and the only free Andalite within a billion miles
of Earth.
  Ax doesn't come to the meetings, usually. He
has a human morph, but he doesn't like
to overuse it. Besides, he basically figures
Jake is his "prince," and he'll do whatever his
prince tells him has to be done.
  So, that's our little group. Rachel, standing
in the middle of the room, looking like someone was shining a
spotlight on her. Jake, pacing back and forth and
looking far too intense. Cassie, cradling a
duck in her arms while she changed its bandage.
Tobias, preening his feathers and looking around with that
eternal hawk glare. And me, lolling back on a
bale of hay.
  "Shh," Jake said suddenly. "I thought I
heard something."
less-than lt's just a squirrel up on the
roofeagreater-than Tobias assured him in
thought-speak.
  "You sure?" Jake asked.
  Tobias stopped preening and stared down at
Jake. His hawk stare grew even more intense.
less-than Am I
sure?
I
do
know what a squirrel sounds like. greater-than
  Jake nodded and looked a little embarrassed.
Hawks not only have amazingly good eyes, their hearing
is better than human, too. And Tobias knows
the sounds that prey make. He has to. Asking
Tobias if he recognizes squirrel
sounds would be like asking Einstein if he knows how
to add two plus two.
  I tried to bring us all back to the topic. "So,
what does it mean if a kid doesn't smell like
a human?"
  "There are plenty of times when you don't smell
human," Rachel said with a smirk. "But then,
maybe that's because you have a small monkey living on
top of your head."
  Cassie made a snorking sound as she tried not
to laugh.
  "Next time you decide to get a haircut,
talk to me first," Rachel said.
  I ignored them both. We had important
business, and I was not going to lower myself to trading
insults with Rachel. Besides, I couldn't think of
any.
"He doesn't smell,
and
he's handing out flyers for The Sharing," I said.
  "He must be connected to the Yeerks," Rachel said
with a shrug.
  "But how?" Cassie asked. She was pushing the
duck back into his cage. "I mean, Yeerks
infest various species -- humans,
Hork-Bajir, Taxxons. But that doesn't
change the fact that a human with a Yeerk in his head
should still smell like a human. You know?"
  "Chapman is a Controller. He still smells
human," I pointed out. "And by the way, I can't
believe I'm even talking about how the vice
principal smells."
  Jake shrugged. "I guess we need to find out
what's going on with Erek."
  "But how do we find him?" I asked.
"Infiltrate a meeting of The Sharing?"
  less-than like could do surveillance of his
schooleagreater-than Tobias said.
  "Or maybe we could go back to where the concert was and
look for clues," Rachel said. Then she winced.
"Wow, that sounded so Nancy Drew."
  "Maybe Ax can try and tap into the Internet and
get past all the security buffers and locate
him," I suggested.
  Cassie held up her hand like she was asking a
question at school. "Those are all fine plans, but how
about if we just look him up in the phone book?"
  We all just stared at her.
  "Or we could just look him up in the phone
book," Jake said sheepishly.
  Cassie headed for the house to get a phone book.
  "You know, she is just not getting the whole superhero
thing," I said to Jake. "Does Wolverine look
things up in the phone book? Does Spider-man?
I don't think so."
  "Yeah, well, Wolverine has a big
advantage over us," Rachel said dryly.
"He's not real."
  Then she snapped her fingers. "That's what that
hair of yours reminds me of: a wolverine. I
knew it was something."
  "Oh, yeah?" I shot back. "Well, how about
your . . . your ..."
  "My what?" Rachel asked coolly, with the
absolute confidence of a girl who never looked
less than perfect.
  "Your tallness," I said lamely. "You're . .
. tall. Way tall."
  Somehow this brilliant comeback did not cause
Rachel to break down in tears.
  Cassie came back carrying the white pages,
already open to the "Knowledge's." "There are twenty-
seven 'Kings" listed. But you said he transferred
to Truman, so there are maybe six "Kings" that
are in that part of town."
  "We work our way down the list," I said.
"Although he still could have an unlisted phone."
  "I can't hang out tonight," Jake said. "I have
got
to write that English paper."
  "Here's a clue on the English paper. Don't
say "I have got to,"" I teased.
  "I could go tomorrow, maybe," Rachel said. "But not
tonight. My dad is in town just for tonight. He's taking
me and my sisters to Planet Hollywood."
  Cassie looked at me. "I'm free," she
said.
  less-than l'm good till it gets
darkeagreater-than Tobias volunteered. Hawks
aren't much use at night.
  "Fine. Me and Cassie and Tobias till it
gets dark," I said. "Shouldn't be too hard. Our
mission: to find the boy who doesn't smell."
  "Maybe he just showers a lot," Rachel said.
"Did you think about that?"

  1 saw Jake the following day in the school
cafeteria.
  I was wolfing down the Goo of the Day, drinking
milk, and trying to write
my
English paper at warp speed. See, I kind of
had some homework due, too. But I'd spent
yesterday evening cruising around in owl morph looking
for Erek's house.
  "English paper?" Jake asked as he sat down
across from me.
  "Yeah."
  He laughed. "You're good for me, Marco.
Compared to you, I'm so responsible. You have a
topic?"
  I looked up at him and thumped my finger
down on the paper. "I've already written three
pages. What do you mean, do I have a topic?"
But Jake knows me. "So," he said.
"Do
you have a topic?"
"A topic will . . . emerge. I'm going to just
write until I discover a topic. The topic will
rise
from these pages. It will reveal itself to me. I just have
to keep writing."
He nodded and made a face at the Goo of the
Day on his tray. "This food is blue. Food
should not be blue. Hey, here's a topic for
you
-
the use
of total bull in the writing of English papers."
I grinned. "I am the master of bull. Three
pages
so far and I haven't actually said a single thing."
"S. Did you guys happen to find our friend?"
I shot a glance left and then right. No one was
seated near enough to overhear us. Besides, the cafeteria was
so noisy from yelling and laughing
and clashing dishes and scraping chairs that no one could
hear much of anything.
"Yeah. We found out where he lives. Saw him through
a window. Too bad, though. One of the other King
residences we checked out had this girl living there who
was amazing."
"You weren't window-peeping, I hope."
I gave Jake my best shocked-and-outraged
look. "How could you even say that? What kind of
person do you think I am?"
Jake nodded. "Cassie wouldn't let you, huh?"
"I am trying to write a paper here," I said.
"On the topic of
...
?"
"On the topic of how to write a thousand words and
say nothing. Zero.
Nada.
Squat."
Jake lowered his voice to just above a whisper.
"We need to check Erek out. Definitely something
wrong there."
I put down my pencil. "You mean get inside
his house?"
Jake shrugged. "Not yet. Get Tobias to watch
him when he's outside. But Tobias will need some
help."
I shrugged and went back to my paper. "I'll
help. I'll have plenty of time. I'm dropping out
of
school this afternoon. Right after the teacher
gets done laughing at this paper."
"Topic
-
the use of rhetoric to obscure a lack
of content," Jake said.
I froze. I looked up. "That's brilliant!
It means
the same as "the use of total bull"
...
but it sounds so much better!"
"Eat your Goo. I gotta go."
He left and I saw him head over to the spot
where Cassie was sitting.
It's one of our rules. We can never start look
ing like a "group." In school or in public
places,
we keep our distance. We only reveal the
relationships that already existed before we became
Animorphs.
I happened to see Chapman coming in through the door of the
cafeteria. He grabbed some kid who was running and
told him to slow down. Then he gazed around the
room, looking for troublemakers, like any normal
vice principal would.
  But Chapman isn't normal. Chapman is a
Controller. The Yeerk in his head is high-ranking
enough to speak directly with Visser Three.
  For about a second, Chapman's eyes locked
on mine.
  It was nothing. But it sent a shiver up my spine.
  Chapman runs The Sharing. The flyers that Erek
had been handing out at the concert had been about The
Sharing.
  Erek had never been some major friend of mine. He
was just this kid I'd say hi to in the hallway.
Except that he had been there for my mother's funeral.
  A funeral without a body.
  Some other kids from school had come, so I
didn't think anything much about it. Still, it was a nice
thing for him to do.
  And now he was working for The Sharing.
  The Sharing is a front organization for
Controllers. On the surface, it's a sort of
club. Kids join it and go on camp-outs and
field trips and stuff. Adults join it and
supposedly do business deals together and take
weekends at ski resorts.
And probably most members of The Sharing never even
know what's really going on. But the Controllers who
run The Sharing are always on the lookout for some
person with problems.
  See, the Yeerks don't just spread by forcing themselves
on people. A lot of people become Controllers by choice.
I guess they want to feel like they're part of something
bigger. Or maybe it's the secrecy they think is
cool. I don't know.
  All I know is that the Yeerks would rather have a
voluntary host. They'd rather have you surrender
your mind than have to take it by force.
  They work you up slowly through the levels of The
Sharing, till they decide you're ready. Then they
make promises and tell you lies, and the next thing
you know, you're a slave inside your own mind, all
the more easily controlled because you
let
it happen.
  I shoved the tray away from me and picked up my
pencil again. I stared down at the paper. But I was
seeing a funeral service. Singing. Flowers. Some
priest talking about how great my mother had been. He
hadn't even known my mother.
  I remember turning around in my pew to look at
the church. A lot of people had come. A lot of sad
faces. A lot of tears. Most people just looking
solemn because that's the way you had to look at a
funeral.
  Erek had been three rows back. He was wear-
ing a suit that was probably scratchy and
uncomfortable. But he didn't look solemn. He
looked angry. And he was shaking his head slowly,
barely, from side to side, as if he was
unconsciously disagreeing with everything the priest said.
  At the time I figured he was mad because
he had to dress up. I understood that.
  And now Erek had reappeared. The boy who
didn't smell human. The boy who worked for The
Sharing.
  "Well, Erek," I muttered under my breath,
"we'll have to see about you. We will definitely have
to see."

  I here may be something in this world cooler than flying
on your own wings, but I can't imagine what it is.
  Rollerblading? Hah! Surfing? Big deal.
Skydiving? Closer, but not halfway to actual
flying.
  Nothing is as cool as flying.
  It was after school that same day. I'd finished the
English paper exactly nine seconds before the
teacher came around to collect it. Then I'd gone
to history and been assigned another paper. That's the
nature of school: It never really ends.
  But finally the bell rang and blessed freedom! I
was outta there and looking for a private place
to morph. I wanted to check up on Erek.
Remembering the funeral and all had made it seem
even
more important, although I wasn't sure I
knew why.
  I climbed up onto the roof of the gym. Of
course, no one is supposed to go up there, but hey,
it was for a good reason. I morphed into an osprey.
It's a bird, a kind of hawk that usually lives
right near the water.
  I spread my broad wings and I flew away from
school.
  Tell me you haven't sat there in some boring
class, while some teacher went on and on (and on and
on) about how x equaled y but only if you
multiplied it by pi, and wished you could just fly right out
the window. Zoom! Good-bye!
  Well, I can't fly right out of class because if
I morphed in class there would be a lot of screaming
and hysteria. But I can come close to doing it.
  Kids were still piling onto the buses as I caught
a nice little headwind and used it to go airborne. I
zoomed high above all the kids heading for their
buses, and all the teachers heading for their cars. People were
just ovals of black, brown, blond, and red hair
to me. That's mostly what a person looks like from a
hundred feet up. A hair oval.
  I have never felt as totally alive as when I'm
in a hawk morph. Tobias doesn't have
it all that bad, in some ways. There are so many
worse animals to be.
I felt a thermal, a pillar of warm air,
billow up
beneath my wings and I went for it. Zoom! Like riding
an elevator to the top floor! Up and up. The
warm
air
currents swept me higher and higher.
less-than Yah-Hahffgreater-than
Now the hair ovals were just dots, and the buses were
bright yellow toys pulling slowly away
from the school.
But even from five hundred feet up in the air,
as high as a fifty-story building, I could still see
faces behind the school bus windows. With the osprey's
eyes, it's like wearing binoculars.
I floated up there, wings spread wide, my tail
fanned out to catch every bit of lift, my talons
tucked back against the underside of my body.
Air
rushed over the leading edge of my wings,
making a slight fluttering sound. Wind flowed
over my streamlined head, and I kept my hooked
beak pointed forward to maintain every ounce of
momentum.
I rode that thermal as high as it would carry me.
I'd learned that from Tobias. See, the thermal
will
give you altitude for almost no effort,
and you can turn that altitude into distance. It's like
soaring to the top of a mountain, then skiing
down the slopes in whatever direction you want
to go.
Still, it did eventually require some hard
wing-flapping to get to Erek's neighborhood.
I spotted Tobias from far off, when he would
have been invisible to any human eye. He was
riding the wind, just like me. Maybe with a little
more style, since he'd had so much more experi
ence.
When I got close to enough to try thought-
speak, I called to him.
less-than Tobias? Can you hear me8greater-than
less-than like can hear you and see you, Marco. I've
been
watching you for twenty minutes. greater-than
less-than No way. I just spotted you.
greater-than
less-than You have to know what to look for,
Marco. By the way . . . when I count to three, you
need to
bank a very sharp, very fast left turn. greater-than
less-than Turn? Why8greater-than
less-than Just do it! One. Two.
THREEFFGREATER-THAN
I raised one wing, lowered the other, skewed
my tail, and cut a sudden, sharp left.
FWOOOOM!
less-than Aaaahhhhhffgreater-than
A missile blew past me, doing what seemed
like a thousand miles an hour! Only it wasn't coming
from the ground upward, it had fallen
from the sky down! And this missile had gray
feathers.
The wind from its passing nearly knocked me off
balance. It was half a mile away, down and
south, by the time I could even try to think about
focusing.
I saw swept-back, slate-gray wings and a
tight
tail. It was diving away from me so fast it made
me look like I was standing still.
less-than What the
...
What was
thatl backslash greater-than
I yelled.
less-than Heh, heh, hen. Welcome to my
worldeagreater-than To
bias said. less-than That's a peregrine
falcon. You know, like Jake's morph. They
usually prefer to knock off a tasty pigeon or the
occasional duck. It must
have been the way you were flying. He probably
thought you were a big old clumsy duck. greater-than
less-than Jeez. What did I ever do to make
him mad8greater-than
less-than Shake it offeagreater-than Tobias
advised. less-than He missed,
right? I know that bird. He's not as good as he thinks
he is. He's taken a shot at me before. He
must be hungry. greater-than
Suddenly flying didn't seem nearly as fun.
less-than Yeah. I'll shake it off. That should be
easy,
since I'll be shaking for at least another hour.
greater-than
less-than lt's not all just about riding
thermalseagreater-than To
bias said dryly. less-than Come on, you want
to see our
boy Erek8greater-than
I moved closer to Tobias. Much closer. This was
his world up here in the air. He knew what he
was doing. less-than By the way,
thankseagreater-than I said.
less-than Always remember to look
upeagreater-than Tobias advised. less-than The
danger is usually above you. But on a
lighter note . . . that's Erek right there. He
walks
home from his school. See him? Coming to the
corner8greater-than
I spotted the oval of hair below me. less-than
Yeah, I
see him. greater-than
less-than like watched him this morning on his way in.
I watched him play soccer during gym
-
greater-than
less-than They play soccer? They play soccer
during gym? Man, we never get to play soccer.
greater-than
less-than Now he's heading home. I'm
going to let you
take over because I am hungry. And I am also
bored with looking at the top of his head. greater-than
less-than Did he do anything weird or
different8greater-than
less-than He scored a goal in soccer. Does
that
count8greater-than
less-than Hey. Look. greater-than I had
noticed three guys closing in behind Erek. Something
in the way they moved caught my attention. From high
up, it looked almost as if they were hunting Erek.
less-than Hmmm. That's not goodeagreater-than
Tobias said.
We both spilled air from our wings and dived,
wanting a closer look. I could see the face of
one
of the guys behind Erek. It was an expression I
had seen before: the idiot, giggling sneer of a
bully.
Suddenly, the guys raced forward. Erek spotted
them and started to run.
It was a street on the edge of a development. There
was a lot of traffic to Erek's left and a stone
wall to his right. The stone wall ended about
fifty
yards away, where it opened for the entrance to
the subdivision.
less-than lf this guy is a Controller, these
punks are making a serious mistakeeagreater-than
I said. less-than They may get him today, but they
might regret it later. greater-than
  less-than Maybe I'll just give that one jerk
a little talon haircuteagreater-than Tobias said.
  Tobias hates bullies. Back when he was
human, he was the kid most likely to be pounded
on. Jake met Tobias when Tobias's head was
just about to be flushed in the toilet. Naturally,
Jake helped him.
  less-than Tobias, I don't think
comgreater-than I started to say, but it was too late.
Tobias was in a stoop and aiming for the biggest guy's
head.
  It all happened in a flash.
  Erek ran. He tripped. He sprawled
forward, out into the street. He slammed into the broad
side of a passing bus.
  WHAM! I could hear the impact from up in the
air.
  And then . . .
  And then ... for just a second, Erek wasn't there
anymore. Something else was where he had been.
  Something that seemed to be made of patches of steel
and milk-white plastic.
  Then, in the next split second, Erek was
back. A normal boy, lying winded on the
sidewalk.
  The bullies ran off. The bus driver never
even noticed and drove on.
Tobias opened his wings and nearly stopped in
midair.
  less-than Did you see t8greater-than Tobias
asked.
  less-than Yeah. I sure did. greater-than
  less-than What was t8greater-than
  less-than like don't knoweagreater-than I said.
less-than But 1 know what it
wasn't.
It wasn't human. greater-than
less-than We need to talk to Axeagreater-than I
said to Tobias.
  less-than Definitely. That was not human. That
was seriously not human. greater-than
  less-than So you did see it, right? I'm not
crazy8greater-than
  less-than Yes, you're crazy. But I
did see
xeagreater-than Tobias said. less-than Very
weird. greater-than
  Below us, Erek climbed up off the sidewalk,
dusted himself off like nothing had happened, and resumed
walking toward home.
  less-than Hang a righteagreater-than Tobias
said. less-than We'll get some good updrafts
off the road. Whatever your friend Erek is, I
don't think he's from around here.greater-than
  We flew hard and fast toward home. Tobias
split off to round up Ax. I demorphed and headed
home to check in with my dad and let him know I still
existed. Then I called Jake.
I got Tom instead.
  "Hey, Tom. Is Jake around there?"
  "I don't know. JAKE!" he yelled. "He
said he's coming."
  "Cool."
  "Haven't seen you around here much," Tom said.
"Keeping busy?"
  I felt a little chill. It's weird, talking
to Controllers when you know that's what they are. It was
Tom's voice, and it acted like Tom, but it
wasn't Tom. Tom was cowering helplessly in a
corner of his own mind.
  I was talking to a Yeerk.
  "Yeah, I guess so," I said.
  "Uh-huh. We're going up to the lake, do some
waterskiing."
  "You and Jake?"
  "Yeah, right. No, me and The Sharing. You know
Jake's too much of a social misfit to join,"
Tom said with a totally human, big-brother laugh of
derision. "It's just that we have too many girls going
and not enough guys."
  A lie, of course. A lie that was supposed
to entice me. Why was Tom suddenly trying to get
me interested in The Sharing again? He quickly gave me
the answer.
  "S. I heard your dad was back at work. That's
cool."
  "Yeah, I guess so," I said. My father had
gone
through a bad time after my mom "died." Now he was
back at work. He's an engineer, but he's
heavily involved in computers, too. He had been
working with the new observatory on ways to design
software that would aim the telescopes bet
ter.
He was also working on some projects he
couldn't even talk about. Projects I figured
must involve the military.
"You could bring your dad," Tom said as ca
sually as he could. "I mean, not like anyone wants
their fathers along, usually, right? But I
mean, maybe he's ready to get back out there in the
world and all. The Sharing is a good place to make
business connections, you know?"
"Yeah, I'll ask him," I said.
"Do that, okay? Your dad could probably use some
down time to relax, take it easy, meet some
people."
S. They were after my father now. I felt something
burning inside me, like I'd taken a gulp of
lava. I wanted to reach right through the
phone and take a baseball bat to the evil
creature
in Tom's head.
"Here's Jake," Tom said. There was a scuffling
sound as he handed the phone off. Then
Jake's voice.
"Hey, Marco. What's up?"
I went off. "What's up?! What's
up?
Those
scumbags are after my father, that's what's up!
How do you live with that? How do you look at
that piece of crap every day? He's all like, "Bring
your dad to The Sharing, do a father-son bonding thing, and
oh, by the way, would you mind if we
stuck a
-
?"
"Shut up," Jake hissed.
I shut up. But my hand was squeezing the receiver so
hard I could have snapped it. Jake let
me calm down for a minute. He made "uh-huh"
noises in the phone, like he was listening to me
talking. He made a couple of laughing sounds. I
guess Tom wasn't far away from the phone.
I knew Jake was right. We don't talk
secrets
over the phone. There's no way of knowing who
might be listening in.
"Okay, I'm cool," I said. I wasn't
cool, but I
was under control again.
"That sounds good to me," Jake said, still
pretending to have a conversation.
"We have to get together," I said. "It's a nice
day out."
That was the signal that we should meet in
the woods.
"Okay. Later," Jake said casually.
He hung up.
I took a couple of deep breaths. Then I
took a
couple more.
The Yeerks had taken my mother. They weren't
getting my father. Before that happened I'd tell him
everything. Before I'd let that happen I'd take
Tom down, no matter what Jake said.
  I'd take Tom, I'd take Chapman,
I'd take every Controller I knew of before I'd
let them have my father. I had power. Deadly
animals lived inside me. Their DNA swam with
my own.
  I could feel the rage flowing through me, the blind,
violent rage that became little films in my head --
little head-movies of revenge and destruction. I
pictured the things I would do to Tom ... to Chapman
. . . someday even to Visser Three. I would do
terrible things to them. Terrible, violent things.
  It was a sick feeling. It was sick, and I
knew it, and yet I ran those images over and over
in my head.
  Rage is addictive, you know. I guess it's
sorta like a drug. Anger and hatred get you high.
They get you high, but like any addiction, they hollow
you out and tear you down and eat you alive.
  I guess I knew all that. But all I could
think of was that they were
not
getting my father.
  So I ran the scenes of violence over and over in
my head. I rode that rush of fury till at last
it burned itself out and left me feeling empty and
beaten.

-L hooked up with Jake and the two of us
rode our bikes to Cassie's farm. He didn't
say anything about my conversation with Tom. Jake
knew how I felt. We've all felt it before.
From Cassie's farm we walked across the
fields to the edge of the forest. There's a place we
meet there, deep enough in the trees that no
one is likely to see us.
Rachel and Cassie were already there. Cassie
was on her knees in the pine needles, looking into a
burrow hole. I have no idea what was in
there, but she seemed fascinated. Rachel was
sitting on a fallen log.
"Tobias is off finding Ax," Rachel said as we
approached.
"I think there are three of them," Cassie said. I
guess she was talking about whatever was in that burrow.
  "So? What's the big panic?" Rachel asked.
  Before Jake or I could answer, I heard something
crashing through the brush.
  He leaped into view, sailing over the log
Rachel was sitting on.
Aximili-Esgarrouth-lsthill.
  "Hey, Ax," I said. "Very dramatic
entrance."
  Of course, any appearance by Ax was going to be
dramatic. Ax is an Andalite. The only
Andalite to survive when their Dome ship was
destroyed by the Yeerks in high orbit. He's an
alien.
  You know how on
Star Trek
the aliens are always just humans with a little nose putty
and some bad outfits? But they basically
look human and act human and speak English?
  Well, Ax isn't like that. You take one look
at Ax and you know he isn't from around here.
  Picture a sort of big, blue-and-tan deer.
Only instead of a deer neck and head, you have a
semi-human chest with two weak arms, topped by a
head that is definitely unusual. Ax has no
mouth and four eyes. Two of his eyes are in the
usual location, but his other two eyes are mounted on
stalks on top of his head. The stalk eyes can aim
totally independently. Ax can look right at you with his
two main eyes, and still be looking be-
hind him with one stalk and off to the right with
his other stalk.
It's kind of unsettling, till you get used to it.
But not nearly as unsettling as his tail. The tail
makes you think scorpion. It curves up and
over, so that the razor-sharp blade-tip is usually
poised somewhere above his sloping shoulders.
That tail is fast and dangerous. Very fast, very
dangerous. Basically, Ax could slice-and-dice a
human into bite-sized chunks in about two
seconds.
  Fortunately, Ax is on our side.
less-than Hello, Prince Jake.
Hello Marco, Rachel.
Cassie? Did you lose something8greater-than
Cassie stood up. Then, as an afterthought,
she brushed off her knees. "Baby opossums,"
she said, by way of explanation. "Too big for the
pouch, not ready to leave the den."
"Don't tell Tobias," I said. "He'll
eat "em."
less-than like already know about themeagreater-than Tobias
said.
I looked up in surprise. He was in the tree
above me. I hadn't heard him arrive.
Cassie shrugged. "Tobias is a hawk. He
has a right to be a hawk." Then she looked up at
Tobias
and smiled. "Of course, they are awfully cute."
less-than 0h, maneagreater-than Tobias
groaned. less-than 0kay, okay, this
litter is off-limits. Happy now8greater-than
"You're a sweetheart, Tobias," Cassie
said.
less-than We should move while we
talkeagreater-than Tobias suggested. less-than
There are some kids playing soldier just about three
hundred yards west. Let's stay well out
of range. greater-than
  We all started walking east, and Tobias went
up again to scout ahead for any danger.
  "Okay, Marco," Jake said after a few
minutes. "This is your party. What's up?"
  I told them all what Tobias and I had
seen. Tobias came back and added some details.
Then I looked to Ax.
  "So, Ax, you're the official alien. What
does this sound like to you?"
  Ax turned his head toward me, making eye
contact with his main eyes. less-than Marco?
Something has happened to your hair. I believe it
has become shorter. Are you suffering from some sort of
illness8greater-than
  "That does it!" I yelled, as the others all
broke up giggling. "It'll grow out, all right?
It'll grow out. Besides, it's easier to take care
of. Man! I make one little change!"
  less-than Have I said something
wrong8greater-than Ax wondered.
  "No," Jake assured him. "Not at all.
Marco is just a little sensitive. Go ahead, Ax.
What do you think about this Erek person?"
  less-than like do not know. It ... it
doesn't sound like any species I know of.
greater-than
"What? Dude, you're the expert on aliens," I
pointed out.
less-than Marco, even we Andalites don't know
every species in the galaxy. greater-than
I swear he sounded embarrassed. Although since he
was using thought-speak, maybe
"sounded" isn't the right word.
"You don't recognize the description?" Jake
asked.
less-than No. greater-than
"The way you guys describe it, it sounds more
like a robot or something," Rachel ventured.
"But how does it pass for human?"
less-than 0h, that is technologically
possibleeagreater-than Ax
said, relieved to be able to add something to
our speculation. less-than lt's probably a
holographic projection. Like your primitive
TV, only three-
dimensional caret
"Primitive
TV? Hey, we have cable at my
house," I said. Ax didn't think it was
funny, but
Cassie smiled.
Tobias swooped low over our heads and came
to rest on a branch. less-than So when Erek
gets hit by
the bus, he drops the hologram for just a split
second. greater-than
less-than The power supply may have been inter
rupted or overloadedeagreater-than Ax suggested.
less-than But that's
the interesting question: What power supply? It
would take a great deal of power to maintain such a
hologram, hour after hour, day after day. greater-than
"Hey, maybe Erek is nuclear-powered," I
said.
Ax laughed. Then I guess he realized I
wasn't
joking. less-than like don't think nuclear power is
likelyeagreater-than he
said, still sort of giggling like I was the primitive
moron of the universe. less-than like think it would
take something much more advanced. greater-than
"Is there any way to see through this holo
gram?" Cassie asked.
"We could hit him with something as big as a
bus," Rachel suggested.
"Now, there's a classic Rachel suggestion," I
said with a laugh. I was feeling better, hanging
with my friends.
"Marco found out The Sharing is having a lit
tle waterskiing thing up at the lake," Jake said.
He bit his lip and added, "Tom told him. Erek
is
in The Sharing. He'll probably be there, too.
Per
fect chance for us to get a good look at him.
That's the 'where." Now we just need the "how.""
Ax thought for a moment as we ambled
through the woods. less-than The hologram is meant
to
trick humans. It would be tuned for
human
sight.
Hawk eyes are better than human, but still see
similar wavelengths of light. Maybe a totally
dif
ferent sort of vision would be able to penetrate the
hologram. greater-than
My heart sank. I knew what was coming next.
Some gross morph.
  "Unusual vision is our specialty,"
Rachel said with a careless laugh. She slapped me
on the back like life was just one big adventure.
  Sometimes Rachel really grinds my nerves.
  "No bugs, okay?" I said. "All I'm
saying is, no more insect morphs. Is that too much
to ask?"
J. guess it
was
too much to ask, as I found
out a couple days later.
"What do you mean, we're going to draw straws?"
I asked suspiciously.
"To see who morphs our new morph," Rachel
said. "Ax is in, regardless. We need his
expertise in aliens. One of us has to go in with
him."
"What's the morph?" I asked suspiciously.
"Spider," Cassie said.
We were at Cassie's barn. It was Saturday
morning. On Friday I'd found out I'd gotten
a B
on my English paper. How cool is that? I'd
stayed up watching TV with my dad and been late for
this meeting.
This was the kind of insanity they cooked up
when I wasn't there.
"Excuse me? I must have something wrong with my
ears." I tapped the side of my head with
my palm. "Because, see, I thought I heard you
say the word "spider." And I remember saying
"no
insects.""
Cassie held her hand out to me. And in that
hand was a spider. "It's not an insect. Arachnids
have eight legs and two body segments. Insects have
six legs and three segments."
I swear, I took a look at that spider and almost
passed out.
"Since I knew we were doing this today, I decided
to do some reading. This is a wolf spider. It has
pretty good eyesight. In fact, it has eight
eyes."
Cassie said this like having eight eyes was a
good thing. Like eight eyes was something everyone should
want.
"Go away, Cassie. Go away. Go away, go
away,
I am

going to morph a spider!
You
can morph
a spider. I don't like spiders."
Jake gave me a look. "Marco, Cassie
always
gets stuck doing the new morphs. Besides, this is more
your mission than anyone else's."
"What? Why?" I demanded angrily. "Why is this
my mission more than yours or Rachel's?"
Jake shrugged. "Erek is your friend."
"My friend? When did I ever say he was my friend?
He's not my friend. I barely know the guy!"
  "Marco, you're such a wuss," Rachel said.
  "Hey,
you
want to be a spider?"
  Rachel shuddered slightly. "Sure." She was
lying. I just knew it. "If I draw the short
straw, I'd love to go spider."
  Then she grinned. She couldn't keep a straight
face.
  "Look, you don't
have
to do this," Jake said. "It's just that we're
going to be infiltrating a meeting of The Sharing. The
Yeerks are totally on alert for animal morphs.
We have to fit into the environment of the lake. Whatever
morphs we use have to belong there. We can't be showing
up there as lions and tigers and bears."
  "Oh, my," Cassie interjected.
  "We need good vision, but not standard mammal-type
eyes. And we can't all go in the same way. I
want two people to hang back as a rescue squad in
case we get into a mess. Ax has to go because we
need him to see if he can figure out what Erek
is. Ax is going in as a spider, and we need
someone to go with him."
  "Has anyone told Ax about this?"
  "He was here earlier. While you were sleeping in
late. He said he thought a spider's body was much
more sensible than a human's body,"
Cassie said. "His exact words were, "Ah,
good. With eight legs it won't fall over like a
human.""
  "Be glad we waited for you at all," Rachel
growled. "Just draw a straw."
  Jake had five pieces of hay in his fist.
There was no way to tell which was the shortest one.
  "Hah. I know how to beat this," I said.
"It's mathematical. If I choose first, my
odds are just one in five. The next person to choose
has odds of one in four, then one in three, and so
on. So the safest thing to do is choose first."
  I took a deep breath, reached out, and yanked
up a straw.
  I took another deep breath and looked at the very
short straw. "Really, it made perfect sense
mathematically," I said.
  I felt like crying.
  Rachel rolled her eyes. "You know, if you're
going to be a big baby, I'll do it."
  I should have just said "okay." That's what I should have
said. What I
did say
to Rachel was, "Don't condescend to me, oh
mighty
Xena.
Just because I'm not a reckless idiot doesn't mean
I'm a wuss. I've never chickened out on a
morph yet. And if Ax is in, so am I. You
can hang around and be the backup, Rachel. I'm
going where the action is."
  To which Rachel replied with a very calm, "Okay."
See, this is why guys and girls should not be
in combat together. Because it's much harder for a guy to be a
coward when some girl is watching. Especially when
she's all gung ho. If it had just been Jake and
Tobias, I'd have been weeping and groveling on the
ground.
  Cassie held out the spider. "It's not bad,"
she said. "I morphed the spider yesterday, just to see
what it was like.
Charlotte's Web
was one of my favorite books."
  "It would be," I muttered. Well, that was the
clincher. Rachel was ready to go, and Cassie had
already done it.
  I reached out a finger to touch the spider. It was
shaking. My finger, not the spider.
  I touched the spider's back. It tried to get
away but Cassie closed her hand around the spider
and the tip of my finger.
  The spider became very still as I acquired it.
Thanks to the Andalite technology that had
transformed me, the spider DNA entered my
system.
  Maybe the Yeerks were right. Maybe the
An-dalites were just the big meddlers of the universe.
I know one thing: At that moment, as I touched
the spider's bristly body, I really wished the
Andalites had found someone else to give this power
to.

  lake is in the mountains. It's a long way from
where any of us live. And if we'd had to walk it
would have taken several days. Fortunately, we
didn't have to walk.
  We have our own little airline. TWA: Travel
With Animorphs.
  It was a beautiful day. Just a few puffy clouds
in a blue sky. Bright sun. A canopy of
trees spread out beneath us as we flew toward the
mountains.
  With my osprey wings spread wide and the sun
toasting the ground so it sent up elevators of warm
air, it was as perfect as life can get.
  If you overlooked the fact that we were head-
ing toward utter, unspeakable grossness and certain
destruction.
  less-than Time to split upeagreater-than
Tobias said. less-than The lake is just over that
next ridge. greater-than
  We had not been flying close together because that would have
looked massively suspicious. Two
ospreys, a harrier, a bald eagle, a
peregrine, and a red-tailed hawk, all flying together?
Not in the natural world. But we were all within a mile
of each other, and all heading in the same direction.
  Tobias went into a lazy upward spiral,
hanging back. Rachel and Cassie split off,
too. The Yeerks would have heavy security around the
meeting of The Sharing. The Yeerks know all about
morph-+. They would be on alert.
  Ax, in a harrier morph, Jake, in his
peregrine falcon morph, and I flew on toward
the lake, though still far apart.
  less-than You know, one of your kind tried
to kill me the other dayeagreater-than I said to Jake.
  less-than Tobias told meeagreater-than
Jake said. less-than Gotta watch out.
Falcons rule. greater-than
  less-than Yeah, well I noticed he
didn't try it a second time. greater-than
  less-than Don't diss falconseagreater-than
Jake said.
  less-than 0ne-on-one in a fair fight, an
osprey would kick your butt. greater-than
less-than As ifeagreater-than Jake sneered.
  less-than Excuse meeagreater-than Ax
interrupted. less-than ls there some special meaning
to this conversation that I don't understand8greater-than
  less-than Yeaheagreater-than I said. less-than
The meaning is that Jake and I are scared, so we're
babbling in a desperate effort not to think about it.
greater-than
  less-than Ah. I am frightened, too. I
don't really like morphing tiny animals. I keep
thinking about all the rest of my mass. greater-than
  less-than Your what8greater-than I asked, not
really caring. I was focused on the morphing ahead.
  less-than My mass. When you morph something
smaller than yourself, your body mass must go somewhere.
So it goes into Zero-space. Zero-space is the
space that ships travel through when they are going faster
than light. It's not very likely to happen, but
sometimes a ship traveling in Z-space will
intersect with a temporarily parked mass.
greater-than
  This got my total, complete attention.
  less-than Wait a minute. Are you telling me
that when we get small, all the leftover . . .
stuff ... all the extra flesh and guts and bones
go bulging into Zero-space like some big balloon of
human tis-sue8greater-than
  less-than 0f course. Where did you think all
the mass went8greater-than
  I shuddered. less-than like really didn't think
about it. greater-than
Jake was no more thrilled than I was. less-than
So right now there's a big bag of Jake floating
in Zero-space? And it's possible some spaceship
will zoom along and hit it and splatter it all
over8greater-than
  less-than No, no, of course neagreater-than
Ax said.
  I breathed a huge sigh of relief. Too
soon, it turned out.
  less-than 0f course no ship would actually
hit a
floating masseagreater-than Ax said, talking to us like
we were nitwits. less-than The ship's shielding
systems would disintegrate the mass. That's what
troubles me about doing small morphs. It very
seldom happens. The odds are millions to one.
But it
could
happen. greater-than
  Jake and I thought about this for a while. About a
spaceship "disintegrating" some big wad of
our mass. It was not a pretty picture.
  less-than Hey, Ax8greater-than Jake said.
less-than You know how we wanted you to be honest with
us? To tell us everything you know8greater-than
  less-than Yes, Prince Jake. greater-than
  less-than Small change. In the future,
don't tell us things that will scare us silly just as
we're going into possible battle. greater-than
  less-than A big wad of Marco in
Zero-spaceeagreater-than I muttered. less-than
Like hanging your butt out of a car window, waiting
for a truck to come along and sideswipe it off.
greater-than
Just at that moment, I topped the crest of the ridge.
Tall pines nearly scraped my belly. And there,
spread out before me, sparkling in the sun, was a large
lake nestled between the surrounding hills and mountains.
  less-than 0kay, boyseagreater-than Jake
said. less-than This is where I peel off. Just
one final word. I know spiders eat bugs, so do
not, I repeat, do
not,
eat any flies. I'll have enough to worry about in fly
morph. greater-than
  less-than Remind me ageagreater-than
I said. less-than Why are we doing this instead of
staying home and sleeping in late8greater-than
  less-than We're saving the worldeagreater-than
Jake said.
  less-than 0h, yeah. Great. My mass is
hanging out in the Zero-space highway and I'm about
to become Spiderman. I knew there had to be a
pretty good reason. greater-than
here were probably two hundred people around the lake below
us -- boys, girls, older people. Some were swimming.
Some were water-skiing. Some were grilling burgers and
hot dogs over charcoal fires. A lot were just
milling around and talking and laughing.
  You'd swear it was some kind of big community
picnic. From the air they all looked so normal.
And probably most of the people below us were normal. But a
lot of them were Controllers. And one of them was Erek,
who was certainly not normal.
  We stayed well back from the lakeshore and
dropped down into the trees. We came to rest on the
ground, inside a cluster of tall bushes.
My osprey vision and osprey hearing had revealed
no one within a hundred yards. But I was tingling with
nervousness, just the same.
  less-than Shall we
demorph8greater-than Ax asked.
  less-than Not yet. Tobias said he would
swing back over, once we were on the ground.
greater-than
  So we waited there, looking a bit weird, two
birds of prey just hanging out inside a bunch of
bushes at the edge of the forest. I could hear the whine of
power boats out on the water, and closer, little
snatches of human laughter.
  less-than 0kay, guys. greater-than
Tobias's thought-speak voice suddenly spoke in
my head. less-than Looks clear to me. You've
got a guy and a girl maybe a hundred yards
off. But I think they're making out, so they should be
busy for a while. greater-than
  I quickly began to demorph. One of the limitations
on morphing is that you can't just morph straight from one
form to another. You always have to return to your own body
in between.
  In Ax's case this meant returning to his
An-dalite form. That had to make him nervous. There
were dozens of Controllers just a few hundred feet
away. Yeerks might overlook one kid sneaking
around. They wouldn't overlook an An-dalite.
  less-than Are you ready to morph
ag8greater-than Ax asked me, once we were back
in our normal bodies.
"I'll
neverbe
ready to morph a spider," I said. My teeth were
chattering, and it wasn't cold.
  less-than like have to morpheagreater-than Ax said.
less-than like can't stay here in Andalite form.
greater-than
  "Yeah, yeah, I know. I know. Okay.
Okay, I'm going to do this. But I'm going to keep
my eyes closed."
  I focused my mind on the spider. But I lost
concentration, mostly because even the image of that wolf
spider grossed me out. Then Ax started to change.
I knew still couldn't just stand there and watch. I knew
I had to morph.
  "It can't be any worse than morphing a fly,
right? Or an ant?" I asked no one. Not that I
wanted to think about the ant morph. We'd had a very,
very,
very
bad time in ant morph.
  I closed my eyes and focused again. This time I
kept my concentration.
  I felt myself starting to shrink. Shrinking is always
a little weird, but now I was also thinking about some big,
disgusting balloon of Marco mass suddenly bulging
out into Zero-space.
  Whatever Zero-space was.
  I could feel myself getting smaller. I could
feel very strange things happening inside me: sudden
feelings of emptiness where organs were simply
disappearing.
  And there was a distracting squishy sound that came up
my spine and through my skull.
The sound of bones turning to marrow, and of marrow sort
of oozing away.
  I wouldn't be needing any bones, I guess.
  I kept my eyes tightly shut, not wanting
to see what was happening. And I held on to my
fears with a death grip of determination. I mean, if
there's anything worse than being a spider, it's being
some disgusting mix of half human, half spider.
  But then . . .
  POP! POP! POP!
  I could see! I tried to close my eyes, but
no! I didn't have eyelids. It's very hard
to close your eyes when you don't have eyelids.
  Eyes were popping open in my forehead.
Eyes were erupting out of my head like zits.
  I almost lost it right then. I would have screamed if
I'd had a voice any longer. But I was already
half spider. And I was staring at Ax as he
underwent a change very similar to my own.
  I was watching him with vision that was half human and
half the shattered, broken-mirror vision of the
spider's compound eyes.
  Something horrifying was growing from the place on
Ax's face where a mouth should have been. Something huge
and bulging and foul. Two monstrous, swollen things
like . . . like nothing I'd ever seen before. They were
jaws, but huge and
outsized. From the end of each one, a wicked, curved
fang grew.
  Sometimes you really, really need eyelids. There
are definitely some things you don't want to have
to see.
  I knew the same thing was happening to me. My
bulging jaw parts grew till they entered my own
distorted field of vision.
  Fortunately, I didn't have to worry too long
about the jaws. See, I became distracted when
legs suddenly exploded from my chest.
  SPROOOT!
  Four new legs, two on each side, just shot
out of me, like I was a tube of toothpaste someone had
stomped. They sprouted all Gumby-unformed, then
began to form joints. Way too many joints.
  My human legs and arms were changing to match these
first spider legs. I fell forward, no longer able
to stand erect.
  It wasn't much of a fall. I was already pretty
small. The pine needles beneath me already seemed to be
as big around as a human finger.
  Not that I had any fingers left to compare with.
  All the while, new eyes kept opening suddenly
where eyes absolutely did not belong. Some were
compound eyes. Some weren't.
  Then, as if the extra legs, and the mix "n"
match eyes, and the huge jaw-and-fang combo weren't
enough, some new leglike things came sprouting out of
my ... well, out of where my neck used to be. They
were like extra legs, only they weren't. I had no
idea what they were. But they moved. Much later,
I found out they're called
pedipalps.
A sort of cross between a mouth part and a leg.
  My head was swelling, compared to the rest of my
body. It was gigantic ... in a small
way. My entire body was now divided into two
big chunks: a sort of bulging head and an even
bulgier body.
  I was almost entirely spider now. The pine
needles that had seemed as big as fingers were now as
big as two-by-fours.
  As the last touch, strangely soft hairs began
to grow from everywhere on my body.
  It was the hair that seemed to trigger the awakening of the
spider brain.
  The wolf spider has good eyes for a spider. But
it's all the thousands of tiny hairs that really get the
spider brain's attention. They sense every subtle
clue in the wind. Every minor movement in every
direction.
  And all of a sudden it felt like the whole world was
moving: leaves, pine needles, the dirt beneath my
claw-tipped eight legs, bugs in the dirt,
moles under the ground, birds in the air.
All of it seemed to be hardwired into the hairs that
covered my spider body.
  With all that sensory overload, the spider brain
woke up. I had been afraid it would be like the
brain of an ant: a mindless machine. Or that it would
be the terrified, fearful, panic-stricken
mind of a prey animal.
  But oh, no. Definitely no.
  They didn't call it a wolf spider for nothing.
  This guy was tiny, no more than two inches from the end
of one outstretched leg to the end of the farthest back
leg. A toddler could easily crush him underfoot.
  But I guess it isn't size alone that makes
a predator, because as soon as I felt the edge of that
spider brain I knew this boy was trouble.
  The wolf spider was a killer.

  Hunger.
  That was pretty much what the spider mind had
to say: hunger, it was hungry. It wanted to hunt.
It wanted to kill. It wanted to eat up a few
nice juicy bugs. It was hungry.
  Did I mention hunger?
  And it didn't care what kind of bug. Could be
beetles, could be grasshoppers, could be
crickets, could be a big mean mantis. The
spider didn't care. It ruled the world of bugs.
It was to bugs what a lion is to a herd of
antelopes. It was a shark among guppies.
  They could run from the wolf spider, but they couldn't
hide.
  Motion! Something moved, left to right across
my field of vision, and I was after it like a dog af
ter a rabbit.
Eight legs powered up and I blew across the
forest floor like a drag racer firing out of the start
ing gate.
The world was weird to my eight spider eyes. I
saw colors no human ever saw. It was like when
you mess with the color and tint knobs on the TV.
Things that should have been brown were blue,
and green was red, or whatever. From some an
gles the pictures were almost clear, but a second
later everything would shatter into bits and I'd be
watching a million tiny monitors at once.
I never could make logical sense out of it.
But mostly what I saw was movement. I was very, very
interested in movement. My eyes and
every hair on my disgusting little body were about
spotting movement.
And when the right thing moved, my body just
answered all on its own.
It was a rush, as they used to say in my dad's
day. A charge. It was like tapping into the main
pipe of adrenaline. It was electric. It was
nuclear.
I blew across pine needles and fallen leaves and
over patches of dirt and I kept that moving bug in
my field of vision and I knew what I was doing,
I mean, I knew I was Marco, a human in
morph,
and I knew I didn't really want to eat that
racing
bug, but man, I was too jazzed to stop.
The prey was running and I was the predator. I had
evolved for hundreds of millions of years to do
exactly this. When Tyrannosaurus rex was still
millions of years away from even thinking about
evolving, tiny arachnid hunters were killing and
eating. The entire history of Homo sapiens from
caveman to soccer mom was a blip in the history of
spiders.
  I was death on eight legs.
  It was a beetle. That's what I was chasing. A
big old beetle, much larger than I was.
Larger and slower. He grew in my distorted field
of vision. He grew and grew and I powered on.
  I wish I could explain why I kept on with the
hunt. Sometimes the animal brain takes over for a
while and sort of overwhelms the human mind. But
that's not what was happening to me. I wasn't
overwhelmed. I was just into it.
  A last burst of speed!
  My front legs touched the beetle. He
dodged left, but too slow.
  I clambered right up on his back.
  I positioned my jaws with their deadly fangs, and
-
  less-than Marco. What are you doing8greater-than
  It was Ax. I scampered down off the beetle,
feeling like I'd been caught doing something wrong. The
beetle ran on, relieved to have escaped. If
beetles can feel relief.
less-than Nothing. I was just letting the spider be a
spider. greater-than It was a pretty good answer,
I thought. less-than like guess its instincts kind of
carried me away. greater-than
  less-than Marco, I morphed the identical
spidereagreater-than Ax said.
  I felt a wave of guilt and shame suddenly
swell up inside me. less-than Ax, it was just a
cockroach. Who cares? Come on, we have a job
to do. greater-than
  less-than Sometimes humans worry
meeagreater-than Ax said.
  I didn't ask him what he meant.
Why had I gotten so into the hunt? Why hadn't I
resisted the urge?
  I flashed on the rage I'd felt when I
talked to Tom. Was that it?
  less-than like think it's this wayeagreater-than Ax
said. He took the lead and I saw him moving in
front of me, a spider scurrying effortlessly on
his eight legs.
  I fell in behind him. I was calm now. The
incredible, insane rush of the chase was over. Now the
spider was just a tool I was using.
  Suddenly, from the sky . . . something fell toward
me!
  It landed right between Ax and me. A grasshopper,
three, four times our size. It looked like an
elephant.
  Then . . . thwap! It fired its huge hind
legs and shot into the air. It disappeared as quickly as
it had arrived.
  We raced on through the forest, covering the
two hundred feet between us and the edge of the party. I
sensed the nearness of humans. I "heard" vibrations
that might have been speech, but the voices were too
garbled to make any sense out of.
  less-than Hey, Marco, Ax, you
guys around8greater-than
  It was Jake's thought-speak voice.
  less-than Yes, Prince Jakeeagreater-than
Ax answered. less-than We are here.greater-than
  less-than We're not pretty, but we're
hereeagreater-than I added.
  less-than Cool. I'm not exactly handsome
myself. I'm in fly morph. Haven't found our
boy Erek yet, though. greater-than
  Something massive and slow appeared in the air above
me. I scampered sideways. It landed slowly with a
loud WHOOOMPHHH!
  A human foot. A shoe. Nike.
  less-than You know, I'd been worrying someone
might step on meeagreater-than I said. less-than
But humans are so slow. greater-than
  less-than Be careful anywayeagreater-than
Jake said. less-than let me know if you find
Erek. greater-than
  less-than like don't know how I'm supposed
to recognize hmeagreater-than I complained.
less-than These spider eyes aren't good at seeing
distances. And human heads seem to be way up in the
clouds, from where I'm crawling down here.greater-than
  But Ax and I went on, skittering
swiftly through a forest of huge, slow-moving legs and
feet.
  Then, right in front of me, I saw it.
  It looked like a bare human foot. Except that
I
could see through the skin. Through the toenails. With my
eight strange, distorted spider eyes I could see
right through the electronic haze of the hologram.
  I could see what was beneath the hologram.
  I saw what looked like interlocking plates of
steel and ivory. The "foot" had no toes. In
fact, it wasn't shaped like a human foot. More like
a paw.
  It was not human. And everything in my tingling,
buzzing, hyper, spider's senses told me it was not
alive.
  less-than Ax8greater-than
  less-than Yes, I see it. greater-than
  less-than What is x8greater-than
  less-than like do not know. greater-than
  less-than lt looks like a machine, almost. Like
it's made out of metal. greater-than
  less-than Yeseagreater-than Ax said.
less-than like think your friend Erek may be an
android. greater-than
android8greater-than
less-than Yes. A robot. A machine made
to seem like a
life-formeagreater-than Ax said, as though it was just the
most common idea in the world.
less-than This is like something you know about,
Ax8greater-than
I asked, looking up at the thing called Erek.
less-than This is not a type of android I
knoweagreater-than Ax
said. less-than lt is not Andalite. I don't
think it is Yeerk.
I don't know who
...
or
what
...
it is. greater-than
My spider eyes could see the foot and most of the
way up the leg. It was like looking at a
double-exposure photograph. There was the out
ward appearance of a human leg and, way up
high, shorts. But beneath ail that there was this
machine made of what seemed like steel and ivory.
  It was thousands of interlocked plates,
almost like the chain mail armor knights used to wear.
Each of the individual links was roughly triangular
in shape. The "ivory" segments were a little larger
than the segments that looked like steel.
  The robot . . . android . . . whatever it
was, was smaller than the human Erek. The leg
I was looking at was oddly constructed. More like a
stretched-out dog leg than a human leg.
  The robot leg, along with its holographic
projection of a human foot, lifted off, as Erek
went on his way.
  less-than Jake8greater-than I called.
  less-than Yeah? Hey, I think I see our
guy. There's this person . . . it's hard with fly
senses, but I see this person who is kind of
shimmering all over, and it's like there's something hiding
underneath all the shimmering light. greater-than
  less-than Yep. That's hmeagreater-than I
confirmed.
  less-than Wait a minute! There's another
oneffgreater-than
less-than Whatl greater-than
  less-than Another one of
themeagreater-than
Jake answered. less-than like just buzzed
right past him. There are two of these things. greater-than
  less-than 0kay, northings have gotten
comgreater-than I started to say.
FWAP! FWAP! FWAP! FWAP!
  A hurricane of wind!
  The ground in front of me exploded as two big
taloned feet landed in the dirt.
  A shadow over my head! I ran.
  Two big black triangles came down from the
sky above me. They dug in, just in front of me!
Just behind me!
  Like a power shovel, the two triangles closed
together. I was inside. I was in darkness. Total
darkness. Some big, muscular thing was crushing me,
squeezing me.
  I couldn't breathe. I couldn't see. I was being
squeezed and pummeled.
  And then I realized . . .
  I was being swallowed.
  less-than AAAAAHHHHHFFGREATER-THAN I
yelled.
  There are two kinds of thought-speak. Private,
which is like whispering right in one person's ear, and
public, which is like yelling.
  I was yell ing.
  Every person near that lake heard me. Normal
humans, who probably wondered, "What was that?"
And Controllers, who knew it was thought-speak.
  But I didn't care. I was being swallowed.
  less-than Marcoffgreater-than Jake yelled.
less-than What's happening8greater-than
  less-than Marco! Everyone can hear
yffgreater-than Ax warned.
I tried to control my panic. I was being
swallowed, but I wasn't dead yet.
  less-than Something . . . something just grabbed
meffgreater-than I said, aiming my thought-speak at
Jake and Ax only.
  less-than like think it was a birdeagreater-than Ax
said. less-than like saw it. Very big and black. It
flew off. greater-than
  My spider legs were crushed against my side.
Two of them were broken. The hairs all over my
body were blind. My eyes were blind. There wasn't enough
air even for my spider body to live on.
  I was being forced down the gullet of a bird, flying
through the air, and seconds away from suffocating.
  less-than Tobias8greater-than I cried
desperately. less-than Can you hear
me8greater-than
  less-than Marco? What's happening8greater-than
Tobias answered. His reply came from far off.
  less-than A bird ate me. Black bird.
We're flying. Can you see . . . his
Helpffgreater-than
  less-than Marco, there are a dozen big crows
flying. I can't tell which one. greater-than
  I felt my mind beginning to fade. The spider was
dying.
What would happen if the spider
died?
I wondered, as my attention drifted away.
What would happen to the big wad of Marco
mass in Z-space?
  That thought did it. I was outta there.
Morph out!
  I tried to form a mental picture of my own
real self. A mental picture of a human named
Marco. But it was all confused. My mind was dying,
and as it sank it called up a thousand images.
Images of wolves and giant ants and
gorillas. Images of all the animals I had
been, all the minds I had lived in.
  I couldn't grab that human image and hold
onto it. But then, floating up in my
disintegrating consciousness, came the image of my
mother.
  I guess that's not a surprise. They say dying
soldiers on the battlefield often call out for their
mothers with their dying breaths. And I guess that's what
I was doing, too.
  But this was my real mother. The way she'd been when
she was truly alive. Not the Controller. Not the
Controller known as Visser One, but my own real
mom.
  She was smiling at me. She was much taller than
me, but she bent down to pick me up. I flew,
up in the air, up to her face. She kissed me.
  "You are going to grow up to be so cute," she said.
"My little Marco."
  Marco. The human boy. I saw myself clearly
then, like I was looking through her eyes at the little
toddler I'd been. Not the Animorph Marco, but
the little kid Marco.
  Suddenly . . .
The pressure was growing. Growing. I was squeezed
from all sides. I felt muscle tensing to restrain
me, but then, the muscle weakened and quivered.
  A ripping, tearing sound!
  Light! Light!
  I was demorphing. Demorphing and growing. I had
burst through the throat of the crow! And now, I was
falling!
  less-than Marcoffgreater-than Tobias yelled.
  Muddy, distorted vision showed me the crow falling
alongside me.
  I was falling. Falling through the air, a vile
mix of crippled spider and emerging human.
  I was the size of a baseball, I guess, and
getting bigger. I hate to even think of what I
looked like. I know I wasn't pretty.
  WHAMMMMM!
  I hit the ground. I bounced. I hit the ground
again.
  I lay there, not knowing where I was, or what I
was. But I knew one thing for sure. I was going
to demorph. I was getting OUT OF THAT
MORPH!
  If I'd had a mouth, I would have started screaming
and never stopped. But my mouth reappeared late.
Four of my spider legs withered and disappeared. My
remaining legs became human arms and legs. My
tiny claws became toes. My fangs and jaws
became teeth and lips.
My eight spider eyes shut down one after
another, leaving only two. And slowly, those two
eyes became fully human.
  I looked up through human eyes at a blue
sky. At the high branches of trees looming above
me.
  And then, I looked up into the face of my former
schoolmate, Erek.
  Erek the android.

  Marco?" Erek said. "Didn't you used to have
longer hair?"
  The hair thing again. Anyway, to my human eyes
Erek looked completely, one hundred percent
human. I knew it wasn't true, but even so, it
was almost impossible not to believe the holographic
projection that surrounded the android.
  Could I remorph into something powerful enough to ...
to make sure he wouldn't be a problem? Probably
not. There were Controllers all around the area. All
he had to do was yell for help.
  Just then, a girl came running up. She looked
down at me, then at Erek.
  "Who is this?" the girl asked.
"His name is Marco," Erek said calmly. "You
know the "Andalite bandits" Chapman is
always talking about? The ones who use Andalite
morph-+ technology to carry on a guerrilla
war?"
  "Of course," she said.
  Erek pointed down at me. "I think this human
is one of them."
  There it was: the end. The end of our existence as
Animorphs. We'd always known that if the Yeerks
ever discovered our true identities, or even that we
were humans, they would wipe us out within a matter of
days.
  I felt sick. Sick with fear for myself, and for the
others. I'd blown it. I'd given away our great
secret.
  Erek jerked his head toward the girl. "This is my
friend Jenny."
  I was not pleased to meet her.
  I heard the sound of people rushing through bushes.
  "Nothing over here," Erek said loudly. "Jenny
hurt her ankle. I'll help her. Keep
searching. I think I heard something over there."
  Erek must have noticed the extremely shocked and
puzzled expression on my face. He grinned.
"There are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt
of in your philosophy, Horatio.""
  "Shakespeare?" I said, amazed.
  "Yes.
Hamlet.
I saw the very first performance."
"But ... but that would have been like centuries ago."
  Erek nodded. "Do you know where I live?"
  I nodded, with my head still down in the dirt.
  "Morph into something small enough to escape from here,"
Erek suggested. "Come to see me at my house, you
and your friends. We have a lot to talk about."
  For some stupid reason I said, "You're not
human. We know you're an android."
  "And you're not an Andalite bandit," Erek said.
  "How do I know I can trust you?"
  Erek shrugged. "I could turn you in, right now.
I'd be Visser Three's new best friend. Even the
Visser knows how to reward those who carry out his
orders well."
  "Maybe you want to catch all of us at once,"
I said. Don't ask me why I was arguing with him.
Maybe it was the humiliating position I was in.
Maybe I felt like I had to act tough since I
was on my back in the dirt, wearing severely
unattractive clothing.
  Erek squatted down. "Marco, if I
gave you to Visser Three, he would get the names of
all your friends from you. I know you're a brave
person. You'd have to be, to do all you and your friends have
done. But you are not brave enough to survive the
Visser's torture. You would tell."
I took a couple of seconds to think about that. He
was right, of course. I had a healthy respect for the
kind of torture Visser Three could inflict.
  "We'll be there," I said. "I guess we
don't have a choice. You have us by the ... you have us
cold."
  Erek shook his head. "It's not like that. It will be a
meeting of allies, Marco. You see, we, too,
fight the Yeerks."

  My dad made chicken for dinner that night. I'd
spent the afternoon with my friends, debating the mess with
Erek. We'd gone round and round, but in the end we
knew we would show up for the meeting. We had no
choice, really.
  Barbecued chicken, skin-on mashed potatoes,
roasted corn on the cob. This was the absolute
height of my father's cooking ability. So I had
to eat it. I had to.
  But man, there is something about popping out
through the throat of a bird that totally destroys your
appetite for dead bird.
  "How is it?" my dad asked.
  "Great," I answered.
  We were on the deck in our backyard. It was a
house like the house we'd lived in long ago when we
were a complete family. After my mom's "death" --
that's still how I thought about it- my dad had spiraled
down for a long time. He'd lost his job. We'd
moved out of the house and ended up living in a pretty
terrible apartment on the edge of a bad part of town.
  It was okay, really. I mean, having a lot of
stuff and a nice house is cool, but it wasn't being
poor that bothered me. It was being alone. My father had
been off in some world of his own for a long time. I'd
been the one who had to cook and clean and all that.
  It was nice to have a house and a yard and a barbecue
again. But it wasn't about the house. It was that my dad
was my dad again.
  I know that sounds corny, coming from me.
  "Another piece?"
  "Sure. Breast." I held out my plate and
tried not to think about exploding crows, or the fact that
I'd come very close to having beetle for lunch.
Sometimes my life was just too weird.
  I had questions to ask my father, but I wanted them
to sound natural. You know, like I was just making
normal conversation.
  "So, Dad. What are you doing at work
lately?"
  He shrugged and gave me a wink. "We're
finishing up the observatory project. I still can't
figure out what happened there. That software your
friend No accidentally created just sort of disappeared."
  My friend "No" was really Ax. There was a long
story behind all that. You could probably ask our
friendly neighborhood Andalite about it, but it
wasn't a story I could tell my father.
  "What'll you do then, after you get done at the
observatory?" I asked, trying to seem totally
casual by chomping on corn the whole time.
  My dad's eyes flickered toward me, almost
suspiciously. He shrugged. "A project I
can't talk about for this company called Matcom."
  I laughed, trying to stay very casual. "Building
a better bomb?"
  He didn't answer for a few seconds. Then,
in a strange voice, he said, "I've never done
weapons research."
  I was actually surprised. "Why not?"
  "You gonna eat that chicken or just tease it?"
He gave me a long look, like he was trying
to decide if I was old enough to hear what he was going
to say.
  I picked up the chicken breast. Chicken
wasn't crow, after all.
  "It was your mom," he said.
  I stopped eating.
  "The last year, year and a half before . . . you
know. Before. It was like this perfect time for us." He
smiled at some picture only he could
see. "We used to fight every now and then when you were
younger, like most couples. But then it was as if all our
problems were gone, settled. Maybe I had
changed. Maybe she had. I don't know."
  I felt cold fingers around my heart.
  "It was the best time of my life," he said. "It
was like we'd achieved some level of perfect peace and
perfect love. But at the same time, there were these
times when your mom would seem upset. Like she was
struggling with some problem she wouldn't tell me about."
  I had stopped breathing. I knew. I knew now
when the change had been made. The perfect love
my father was talking about was the Yeerk at work in my
mother's head. The Yeerk wasn't interested
in stupid little domestic battles. It wanted
peace so that it could focus on deeper goals.
  "Anyway, one day I woke up in the middle
of the night. Your mom was sitting up in bed, wide
awake. I knew she'd had a bad dream or
something. But it made the hair on the back of my
neck stand up. It was just. . ." He shook his head.
"It was so strange. She sounded like she was trapped in
a deep well, and trying to call out to me."
  There were tears in my eyes. I hoped my father
wouldn't notice.
"She said, They won't take you if you stay away
from the military." It didn't make any sense.
But the way she said it... like it was the hardest thing
she'd ever said . . . like it was the most important
thing she'd ever said."
  I had some idea just how hard it had been for my
mother to say that. Sometimes, when there is some terrible
need, the human being crushed beneath the Yeerk can force
its way out. It can seize control for a few
desperate seconds.
  They say the price the human host pays is
terrible. The Yeerk has mental tortures it can
carry on for weeks.
  My mother, my
real
mother, had struck when the Yeerk was distracted, and for a
few seconds regained control.
  "Anyway," my dad said, "I know it was just your
mom having a bad dream. But ever since then, whenever
an opportunity came up to do defense work, I just
got this bad feeling about it."
  I couldn't even pretend to eat any more.
  "Dad, are you thinking about taking on a military
project now?"
  He avoided my gaze. "There are some very
exciting things going on with this Matcom. The thing they
want me on isn't military in any way.
But... well, they do carry on some very secret work.
I guess some of what they do is probably
military."
There it was. The reason Tom was trying to get me
to bring my father to The Sharing. My father was working on some
project that the Yeerks wanted to control.
  My mother had warned him. It may have been the last
words that she, the real, human woman, ever spoke
to him.
  He was going to ignore that warning, and now the
Yeerks wanted him.
92
  We had decided to meet with Erek at his house.
We had not decided to trust him completely.
  Jake, Cassie, Ax, and I were going to the
meeting.
  Rachel and Tobias stayed outside as backup.
Rachel was all primed to use her grizzly bear
morph if we called for help.
  "I'll be within range of Ax's thought-speak,"
she said for the tenth time. "I can morph my bear in a
minute and go through that door about ten seconds later."
  "If you do that, try not to stomp over me in the
process, okay?" I said.
I glanced up and saw Tobias swooping down
to settle in the tree in Erek's yard.
  I could joke about it, but the truth was, it did
feel reassuring to know Rachel and Tobias were
ready to be the cavalry.
  We went up to the front door of the very
ordinary-looking house. I sent Jake a look that
said, "Man, I hope we're right about this." But
Jake was busy exchanging solemn glances with
Cassie.
  "So? Someone knock on the door," I said. I
glanced at Ax. He was in his human morph. His
human morph is made up of DNA
gathered at the same time from all of us except
Tobias. There's some of Jake and Rachel and
Cassie and me in Ax's human shape. In the end
result he's male, but almost as pretty as a
girl.
  Plus, he's annoying in human morph.
  "Knock? Knock on the door? Why?
Knockon. Knock-kuh."
  Andalites don't have mouths, and Ax can't get
over how fun it is to make actual sounds.
Plus, you don't even want the boy in the same
room with certain foods.
  Jake knocked.
  The door opened. I was surprised. It wasn't
Erek. It was his father, Mr. King.
  He nodded. "Come in."
  We stepped inside. I felt completely
dorky. It
was like we were coming over to ask if Erek could come out and
play. I mean, the house looked so normal
inside. Normal furniture and normal lights
and normal dishes displayed in a hutch. A
normal TV on "mute," showing pictures from
CNN.
  There were two dogs, a Labrador mix
and a fat little terrier. The Lab just lolled over on
its back. The terrier came running over to sniff
our shoes.
  "Is Erek here?" I asked.
  Mr. King nodded. "Yes. Would you like a soda
or anything?"
  "No thanks, Mr. King," Cassie said. She
bent over to scratch behind the terrier's ears.
  "You like dogs?" Mr. King asked.
  "She likes any animal," I answered.
"She even likes skunks."
  "But dogs, do you like dogs?"
  Cassie smiled. "If reincarnation were real,
I'd want to come back as a dog."
  Mr. King smiled, nodding as if Cassie had just
said something profound. "Would you all come with me?"
  He turned and led the way toward the kitchen.
Once again, the total normalcy of it seemed
jarring. There were little Post-It notes on the
refrigerator saying things like "dozen eggs, bell
peppers." Someone had left a box of Wheaties out
on the counter.
Mr. King opened a door. It led down to the
basement. We followed him down the narrow wooden
steps.
  At this point I started to wonder. I noticed that
Ax was morphing slowly out of his human shape,
returning to Andalite form a little at a time.
  Good old Ax. He sensed danger and he wanted
his tail available.
  I wanted his tail available, too.
  Mr. King paused when we all got down to the
basement. He watched with absolutely no
surprise as Ax finished transforming. He waited
politely for Ax to be done.
  Then, to my utter amazement, I felt a slight
dropping sensation. It took a few seconds
to realize what was happening. The basement was dropping
like an elevator. When I looked up I couldn't
see a roof overhead, just darkness.
  "Whoa," Cassie commented.
  "Don't be afraid," Mr. King said.
  It didn't last long. We may have dropped
four or five floors. At least that's what it
felt like to me. Then, with a slight lurch, the
basementst elevator stopped.
  "Is this the floor for men's clothing?" I asked.
  I was almost not surprised when one entire wall
of the basement, hung with tools and garden hose and a
rake and hoe, simply disappeared.
Where the wall had been was now a hallway lit with a
golden light.
  "My basement won't do this," I muttered
to Jake.
  "Have you ever tried?" he asked.
  "This way," Mr. King said.
  We followed him. It was way too late to start
worrying now.
  The hallway wasn't long, just fifty feet or
so. It reached a dead end, a blank wall. But then
that wall, too, disappeared.
  "Yah!"
  "No way!"
  less-than Strange. greater-than
  "This is just a hologram, right?" I said. But
somehow, I knew it wasn't. It was real.
Unbelievable, yet real.
  What was beyond the hallway was a vast, vast
chamber, lit in glowing gold light, soft and
buttery warm.
  I stepped out of the hallway onto springy
grass. And over my head, maybe a hundred
feet up, there was a glowing orb, like a sun. That's
where the yellow light came from.
  Stretched out before us, for more than the length
of a football field, was a sort of park.
Trees, grass, streams, flowers, butterflies
flying around jerkily, bees buzzing from flower
to flower, squirrels racing up and down the trees.
Walking here and there were androids. Androids in their
natural form, machines made of steel and something
white. The androids had mouths that were almost like
muzzles, clumsy-looking legs, and stubby fingers.
  But it wasn't the presence of half-dozen or so
androids that was really shocking. What was really shocking
was that there were hundreds, maybe even a thousand dogs.
Normal, everyday Earth dogs, every breed and
half-breed you could imagine, running in packs,
yipping, yapping, bowwowing, howling, growling,
ruff-ruffing dogs. They were chasing squirrels,
smelling each other, and generally having a great ole
dog time.
  Jake, Cassie, and I stood there with our jaws
hanging open like complete idiots. If Ax had
possessed a mouth, his would have been hanging open,
too.
  It was doggie heaven. Dogs and robots in a
huge, underground park.
  One of the robots came trotting toward us. As it
got near, a hologram shimmered around it.
A second later, it was Erek.
  "Welcome," he said. "I guess you're
probably a little surprised."

  e are the Chee," Erek said.
  Mr. King had left, and Erek had brought us to a
place beneath a large tree. A little stream trickled
by, just a few feet away. A wall of silence
had come down, as if someone had turned down the sound
of all the barking dogs. I could still hear them, but it was
as if the sound were far away now.
  less-than You are androidseagreater-than Ax
commented.
  "Yes."
  less-than You show a very high level of
technological sophistication caret Ax said.
  Erek smiled with what looked exactly like human
lips. "We are just the creation. It is our
creators who were the great builders."
"Why did you bring us down here?" Jake asked.
"Why show us all this?"
  "We want you to trust us," Erek said. "We know
that you're suspicious. You have to be. I'm sure
you've left some of your people outside, just in case we
betray you. I wanted us to be equal. I
wanted you to know our secrets, since we know yours."
  "We saw you at the concert," I started to say.
  He looked surprised, then nodded. "Ah,
yes. You were the two dogs, weren't you? I sensed
something odd about you. Tell me: What's it like
to actually be a dog?"
  "It's truly cool," Jake said. "You knew
we were the two dogs?"
  Erek shook his head. "We didn't know, but I
felt something strange. We've known there were
morph-capable forces on Earth. There is very little that
the Yeerks know that we don't also know."
  "You were handing out flyers for The Sharing. You were at a
meeting of The Sharing," I accused.
  "True. But maybe I should tell you our story.
Then you'll understand who we are. And why we are your
allies. And also why we ... or at least
some
of us ... would like your help."
  "That would be nice," Cassie said.
  You have to say one thing for Erek: The boy
knew how to tell a story. Suddenly, everything around
us dissolved. In its place there grew a
vast, three-dimensional picture. It looked as
real
as Erek.
We were no longer on Earth. There were two
suns in the sky, one small and almost red, the other
four times as big as Earth's sun and a
deeper gold.
The trees and flowers and grasses around us
were definitely not anything that had ever grown on
Earth. The trunks of the trees were green and smooth.
But instead of leaves, the branches just kept
splitting into ever smaller branches and twigs that
grew gradually from green to silver to a brilliant
shade of pink. These pink twigs were all
intertwined, so that from a distance the trees
looked like huge balls of pink steel wool.
The trees were no larger than Earth trees, it
seemed to me, but what was huge were the
mushrooms. At least, they looked kind of like
mushrooms. They were half as large as the trees
themselves. Messy nests of some leathery, leaping,
three-legged animal seemed to be perched
on each of the mushrooms.
There were other animals around, each stranger than the
last. But the main animal we
saw was a two-legged creature that stood may
be four feet tall. It had long,
floppy ears and a
muzzle.
It looked weirdly like a dog that could walk on its
hind legs. It looked, in fact, a little like Erek
when he dropped the hologram and showed his true
self.
  "Our creators," Erek said. "They were known as
Pemalites. A hundred thousand years before the
Andalites learned to make fire, the Pemalites
were capable of faster-than-light travel."
  I noticed Ax's tail twitch a little at that.
  "And of course, humans were just hairy apes when the
Pemalites first visited Earth. The Pemalites
were not interested in conquest, or in interfering in the
lives of other planets. They enjoyed life."
Erek smiled. "They loved to play. They loved
games and jokes and laughter. And they had been a
fully evolved race for so long that all the harsher
instincts were gone from them. They had no evil in their
hearts. They had no evil in their souls."
  I found this hard to believe. But as I watched the
hologram around me, it was possible to believe that on
this weird planet the Pemalites had found some
deep inner peace. There was just a sense of deep
calm about the place. Like one of those Zen
gardens or something. It just felt peaceful.
Peaceful, but not dead or tired or boring. In
fact, everywhere I looked, I saw Pemalites
jumping around, chasing, playing, and making
an odd
CHUK
CHUK CHUK that must have been
laughter.
The scene around me changed, like a movie
doing a flash-forward. Now, mingled in with the
Pemalites, were androids like Erek. The androids
looked vaguely like their canine creators.
"We were toys, originally," Erek said. "The
Pemalites made us to play with. They called us the
Chee. It's a word that means "friend." They
also had work for us to do, but they created us
mostly to be their companions. An artificial
race,
yes, but not a race of mechanical slaves."
Erek looked at us and I swear there were tears
in his holographic eyes. "We were their friends and
equals and companions. They taught us to
laugh and play. They loved it when they were able
to create androids who could tell a joke. There was a
celebration that lasted a year."
Then . . . ZZZZZZZAAAAAAAARRRRPPPP!
I jerked back. A monstrous beam of light
sliced the ground open right in front of us, like some
insane plow tearing up the earth. It inciner
ated the pink Brillo pad trees and the huge
mushrooms.
"Then the Howlers came," Erek explained. "They
suddenly popped out of Zero-space, thou
sands of powerful ships. They had come from clear
outside this galaxy. The Pemalites had no
idea who they were. And they never found out what the
Howlers wanted. The Howlers made no demands.
They just attacked. Maybe that's all they wanted:
to destroy."
  What Erek showed us next was like one of those
horrifying films from World War II.
Pe-malites hunted from the air. Pemalite
space stations blown apart. Pemalite ships
sliced open, and helpless Pemalites left
to drift through cold, dead space. The scenes of
massacre just went on and on.
  I noticed Cassie was crying. I think I was
crying, too. It was too horrible.
  "Almost the entire race of Pemalites was wiped
out," Erek said. "A few hundred Chee
and a few hundred Pemalites left the planet,
escaping in a single ship just seconds ahead of a
new wave of Howler attacks.
  "We escaped into Zero-space. We had no
plan, no idea what to do."
  "Why didn't you fight back?" I demanded.
"I mean, you talk about how advanced the
Pemalites were. If they could create androids,
they could create weapons."
  Erek looked at me and nodded, like he agreed.
"The Pemalites had forgotten the ways of conflict
and war. They were creatures of peace. They'd
forgotten that there could be such a thing as pure evil."
That answer just frustrated me. It made no sense.
But I let Erek tell the rest of his grim story.
  "As we ran for our lives through Zero-space,
we discovered that the Howlers had achieved a special
revenge. The Pemalites began to become sick.
They began to die. The Howlers had unleashed germ
weapons. The Pemalites were doomed. But we
Chee, we androids, were unaffected."
  The scene around us became the inside of a space
ship. A scene of Chee, looking on helplessly
while one of their creators writhed in pain.
  "Then we remembered a planet. A
planet similar to our own, but very far from our home
and the Howlers. It had only one sun and the light was
pale, but there were trees and grass and wonderful
oceans."
  "Earth," Cassie said.
  "Earth," Erek said. "The Pemalites had not
visited Earth in fifty thousand years, and in that time,
everything had changed. The wandering tribes of
primates had created cities. They had
domesticated animals. They were planting crops.
  "We landed on Earth with just six Pemalites still
clinging to life."
  The hologram disappeared, and the underground cavern was
back to its normal self -- a wide park of
Earth trees and Earth plants, with dogs everywhere.
"We could not save the Pemalites. They
would die. But we could try and rescue some
part
of them. We hoped we could keep their hearts,
their souls alive somehow. We looked for an Earth
species we could use to harbor the essence of
the Pemalites. Their decency. Their kindness.
Their playfulness and love."
"Wolves," Cassie said, once again way ahead
of me.
Erek looked surprised, but he nodded his
holographically projected human head. "Yes.
They looked most like the Pemalites themselves. We
grafted the essence of the Pemalites into the
wolf species. And from that union, dogs were cre
ated. To this day, most dogs carry within them the essence
of the Pemalites. Not all, but most.
Wherever you see a dog playing, chasing a stick,
running around barking for the sheer joy of life,
you see the remnants of the race of Pemalites."
"That's why all these dogs are here," Jake
said. "They're your. . . what, friends? Creators?"
"They are our joy," Erek said, "because they
remind us of a world without evil. The world we lost.
We Chee are all that is left of Pemalite
tech
nological genius. The dogs of Earth are all that
is
left of Pemalite souls."
i. don't think I would have believed any of it.
Except for the small fact that we were in a huge
underground park. And there were androids walking around.
  Plus, there was the fact that my entire life had
become one long, incredible, unbelievable story.
So who was I to laugh at Erek's story?
  "So you all pass as humans?" I asked
Erek.
  He nodded. "Yes. We live as humans.
We play the role of children and then grow older, and
eventually our hologram is allowed to "die"
and we start again as children."
  "How long has this been going on?" Cassie
asked.
Erek smiled warmly. "I helped to build the great
pyramid."
  "You designed the pyramids?"
  "No, no, of course not. We have never interfered
in human affairs. I was a slave. I helped
to quarry the stone. It was a challenge, because I was
new at pretending to be human. I had to hide my
real strength, of course. The Pemalite home world
had a gravity four times stronger than Earth's.
Naturally, we were designed for that gravity, which
means we are quite powerful by human standards."
  "And you stayed as a slave?" Jake asked. "You
could have taken over Egypt. You could have taken over the
world."
  "No. We are not the Yeerks," he said
coldly. "You see, when our creators made us,
they hardwired us for nonviolence. We are
not capable of hurting another living being. No Chee
has
ever
taken a life."
  Just then, I noticed a group of four Chee
walking quickly toward us.
  Erek saw them, too. Even though I know his
"face" was just a hologram, it seemed to me he was
annoyed.
  "What have you done?" one of the Chee demanded.
"What have you done, you fool?"
  The four Chee came up and glared at us with
robot eyes. "Humans? An Andalite? Here?
What have you told them?"
  "Everything," Erek said defiantly. "These are the
ones, these humans and this Andalite, who have been
resisting the Yeerks. They're the ones who can
morph." His voice rose. "They are the ones who
are fighting the battle
we
should fight."
  "We are Chee. We do not fight," one of the
androids said. It turned on its holographic
projector. A human body appeared. The body
of an old woman, maybe eighty years
old.
  "I am Chee-lonos. My human name for now
is Maria," she said. "I did not mean to seem
angry toward you humans, or you, my Andalite
friend. My dispute is with this Chee called Erek and
some of his friends."
  "We stood by helplessly as the Howlers
annihilated our creators," Erek said to Maria.
"We can't stand by helplessly and watch this world be
destroyed, too. Dogs and humans are intertwined.
They have evolved a dependency. Dogs cannot
survive without humans. If the humans fall to the
Yeerks, we, the last great masterpieces of the
Pemalites, and the dogs, their spirit-homes, will all
die, too."
  I gave Jake a look. That's why the Chee
wanted to help humans? To save dogs? Jake
shook his head slightly in amusement.
"We do
not
fight," Maria said heatedly. "We do
not
kill. You know that, Erek. Yet you bring these
outsiders here. You blurt the secrets we have kept
for thousands of years. Why? What good can come
from it? We cannot fight to save the humans."
  "That's where you're wrong," Erek said softly.
"We
can
fight. While you and the others merely hope everything will
work out, my friends and I have been infiltrating the
Yeerk organizations here on Earth. The Yeerks
even think that I am one of
them."
  Maria and the three unhologrammed Chee just stared.
  "The Yeerks have been busy. They control a
computer company called Matcom."
  It took me a couple of seconds to remember
that name.
  Erek went on. "The Yeerks are working on a
master computer to infiltrate and rewrite all the
software in all the computers on Earth. When they have
achieved sufficient force among humans, they will
launch this computer bomb, and in a flash, control
all computers."
  "What does this have to do with us?" Maria asked.
  "The heart of this system is a crystal the
Yeerks obtained from a Dayang trader. The
Dayang didn't know what he had. But the Yeerks
did. The crystal is a processor more
sophisticated than anything even the Andalites could
create. And it is more than fifty-thousand Earth
years old."
  "A Pemalite crystal!" Maria gasped.
  "Yes. A Pemalite crystal. If we had
it, we could rewrite our own internal systems. Do
you understand now? We could erase the prohibition against
violence. We could be free! Free to fight!"
  "A Pemalite crystal," Maria whispered.
"You can't do this, Erek. You can't!"
  But Erek just turned away. "If we can get the
crystal, there is very little we can't do. Our strength,
joined with these Animorphs? The Yeerks would have
to double their forces just to contain us."
  less-than How did you convince the Yeerks that you
are one of them8greater-than Ax asked him.
  Erek turned off his hologram and became a
machine once again. And then the front of his head
split open. Inside his steel and ivory head was a
chamber, just a few inches in diameter.
  And inside that chamber was a gray slug,
helpless, unable to escape. Tiny wires, no
thicker than hairs, wrapped around it.
  less-than Yeerkffgreater-than Ax hissed.
  "Yes," Erek said. "The Yeerks
believe I am human. I accepted infestation. But
of course the
Yeerk cannot make a Controller of me. I made a
place for him instead. He sees nothing. Knows
nothing. I tapped
his
memory, not the other way around. And now I can pass
among the Yeerks like one of them."
  I had two reactions. One, I was sick at the
thought of that Yeerk, trapped inside a steel cage.
As much as I hated Yeerks, it seemed harsh just the
same.
  But another reaction was much stronger. We had an
ally! A powerful ally. An android who could
pass as a Controller, who could enter Yeerk
society. And an android with many powers of his own.
  "How do you keep the Yeerk alive without
Kandrona rays?" Cassie asked.
  See, every three days a Yeerk has to return
to the Yeerk pool to absorb Kandrona rays. Without
that, they die.
  "I am able to use my own internal power
to generate Kandrona rays to keep this Yeerk
alive," Erek explained. "When I go to the Yeerk
pool I am able to trick the Yeerks
into believing that my Yeerk is swimming in the pool.
I generate a hologram of a Yeerk leaving my ear
and dropping into the pool. Later, I create a
hologram of it returning. The Yeerks never
notice that they don't encounter this Yeerk actually
in
the pool. Yeerks communicate very little in their
natural states."
"How do we fit into all this?" Jake asked. "I
mean, what do you want with us, Erek?"
  Erek resumed his human appearance. He stepped
toward us, eager, excited. "We could fight together
against the Yeerks. We could be allies. If only
... we need that Pemalite crystal. But the
Yeerks have created a maze of defenses like nothing you
can imagine. That crystal is in a room at the
heart of the Matcom building. There are
Hork-Bajir everywhere. Elite Hork-Bajir
warriors, the best.
  "And the crystal itself is guarded by an ingenious
system. It is concealed in a room of absolute
darkness. Absolute darkness. The slightest,
faintest light, ultraviolet, infrared, any
light, will set off alarms. Within the darkness are
wires that are set off by the slightest
touch."
  "So to get to the crystal you'd have to be able to find it
without seeing it, and avoid the wires that are also
invisible in the darkness," I said.
  "It's like finding a needle in a haystack when
you're blindfolded and can't touch a single piece of
hay. The walls, ceiling, and floor are all
pressure-sensitive, so you can't touch them. It
may be impossible," Erek said.
  "How are we supposed to do that?" I demanded.
"How can you find something you can't see? It's not like
it'll smell or call out to us."
  "Urn . . ." Cassiesd.
"Excuse me?" Jake asked in surprise.
  "It can be done," Cassie said. "I mean ...
if we
want
to."
  "Of course we want to," I said. "With these
guys on our side, we actually have a chance of
winning. Of
course
we want to. Animorphs and Chee together? Our
morphing ability, their strength and holographic
tricks? We'd kick Yeerk butt."
  "No," Maria cried. "You don't understand.
Chee do not hurt. Chee do not kill. No Chee
has ever taken a life." She grabbed my arm and
looked right in my eyes. "While humans and
Yeerks and Andalites and Hork-Bajir and a
million other species on a million worlds
warred and slaughtered and conquered, we remained at
peace. Would you end all that? Would you make us
killers, too?"
  "Yes, ma'am, I guess I would," I said,
a little coldly. "We're in a fight for our lives
here. Our parents, our brothers and sisters, our friends
-- they are all going to be slaves of the Yeerks,
if we don't win. So I'll do whatever it
takes. If you'd fought all those thousands of years
ago, the Pe-malites would still be alive. And you
wouldn't be living with dogs in a big underground
kennel."
  I didn't mention the sudden interest The Sharing had
in my father. I didn't want to make this personal.
Maria let me go, and Erek nodded.
  "A big underground kennel," Erek said
bitterly. "Exactly."
  "We'll get your crystal for you," Jake said.
"Tell us all you know about this Matcom, and
we'll get your crystal." He looked at the
Chee called Maria. "Sorry, but Marco is
right. The Yeerks have my brother. There's nothing I
won't do to get him back."

  We rode the fake basement back up, leaving the
eerie golden world of dogs behind.
  "S. Do we have a deal?" Erek asked. "You'll
help us get the Pemalite crystal? And then
we'll fight alongside you to defeat the Yeerks."
  "Sounds good to me," I said quickly.
  "Unless anyone has any objection -" Jake
started to say.
  That's when Cassie interrupted. "Erek, let us
talk it over. It's a big decision."
  I was surprised, but not as surprised as Jake
was.
  Then we heard a noise coming from directly above
us.
  "HhhhrrrAAAAWWWWRRRR!"
"Oh, man," I said. I knew that sound. We
all knew that sound.
  "Rachel," Cassie said under her breath.
  "We were down there a long time," Jake said.
"Erek, I think a friend of ours may have come
in to rescue us."
  Erek shrugged. "I don't think it's going to be
a problem."
  "You don't know our friend," I said.
  The basement had settled back into its normal
place. I tore up the stairway. "Rachel!
Chill!"
  I burst back into the utterly normal kitchen and
raced into the utterly normal living room.
  The front door of the house had been ripped off
its hinges. The couch was thrown against one wall. And
there, in the middle of the room, standing so tall its head
scraped the ceiling, was a full-grown grizzly
bear.
  "HhhhRRAAAAWWRRR!" Rachel roared in
rage and frustration.
  Frustration, see, because the Chee who passed as
Erek's father had her in a full nelson. His
human-holograph arms were wrapped around the
unbelievably massive shoulders of the grizzly,
and he was actually holding the great bear still.
  He had pinned a grizzly so powerful it could
literally turn a Toyota into an aluminum can.
  "Okay, now I've seen everything," I said.
  less-than You Chee are very
strongeagreater-than Ax commented.
This was the understatement of all time.
  less-than Where have you been8ffgreater-than Rachel
demanded. less-than like waited as long as I could.
I figured you were dead or something. And if you don't
have a good explanation, you
will
be deadffgreater-than
  "Oh, we have a story, all right," Cassie
said.
  Rachel had calmed down and stopped roaring when she
saw us. Now the Chee slowly released her, and she
began to change back out of morph.
  Jake looked embarrassed and started to pull the
couch back down. "Urn, Erek, this is our friend
Rachel."
  "It was smart of you to keep a reserve," Erek
commented. To Rachel he said, "I hope you weren't
hurt."
  "How come you can wrestle a grizzly if you have
to be nonviolent?" I asked Erek.
  "Of course, my "father" here knew she was not a
true bear. And he only held onto her. He
did not destroy her. If Rachel had been strong
enough to win, my "father" would have had no choice
but to allow himself to be destroyed."
  I laughed. "I see why you want to change that."
  I expected Erek to agree. Instead, he
looked a little sad. "Yes," he said. Just that one
word.
  We started to leave. I let the others get a
few steps ahead of me. I pulled Erek over.
"Hey,
Erek. You were at my mom's funeral. I don't
think I said thanks at the time."
  Erek looked away and bit his lip. "Marco .
. . there's something I have to tell you."
  "I think I already know. My mother isn't dead.
She's a Controller. She's Visser One."
  It was Erek's turn to be impressed. "You
guys have learned a lot."
  I shrugged. "Is that why you were at the funeral?
Did you know?"
  Erek nodded. "I knew. I might have been able
to save her... if."
  I met his gaze. "Too late to save her,"
I said. "But payback is going to be very painful for
those filthy slugs."
  On the way home, we filled Rachel and
Tobias in on what had happened. It
took a while. We were back at Cassie's barn
before we were done.
  "I say do it," Rachel said. "That Chee guy
held onto me like I was a baby. They're strong.
They have technology we don't. They've already
penetrated The Sharing. They would double our chances.
End of story."
  "No,
not
end of story," Cassie said, contradicting her friend.
"What right do we have to interfere and destroy the thousands
of years of peace this species has had? Didn't
you hear Maria? No Chee has ever taken another
life. You
want them to be saying a thousand years from now that no
Chee ever took a life till
we
made them killers?"
  I rounded on her, angry. "What I don't
want a thousand years from now is for people to be saying,
Too bad about the humans. They ended up as dead as
the Pemalites.""
  "Ax?" Jake asked. "You haven't said much."
  Ax was in human morph, of course, since we
were in the barn. "As you know, we Andalites
are not supposed to interfere in the lives of other
species. I am already breaking that law with you. And
I am proud to be breaking that law in this case. But
the Chee . . . Chee! It makes a funny sound,
doesn't it? Chee." He smiled with his human
mouth, then grew serious again. "The Chee are a
different species. Older than Andalites. I
feel . . . badly . . . helping another
species to become violent."
  Rachel said, "Look, no one likes violence.
All right? But we didn't ask for this war with the
Yeerks. When the bad guys come after you, when
they
start the violence, they leave you no choice: fight
or die."
  "Fight or die," I agreed. "And you want
proof? Look at the Pemalites. They didn't
fight, they died. All gone. No more. Scratch a
whole species. Now their 'essence," whatever that
means, is stuck inside dogs, and their robots
feed them
extra kibble. Yippee. That worked out real well for
them. And even that's better off than we'll be if
we lose to the Yeerks."
  "Law of the jungle," Rachel said.
"You eat or you get eaten."
  less-than Maybe seagreater-than Tobias said,
speaking up for the first time. less-than But still,
wouldn't it be nice if that wasn't the
law8greater-than
  "How can you take that attitude?" I demanded.
"You're a predator. You know how it is."
  less-than Yes. I know exactly how it is.
That doesn't mean I like it. Look, the
Pemalites were wiped out, maybe because they didn't
fight. Maybe they'd have lost even if they had
fought. We'll never know. But the Chee have lived for
thousands of years. I know they're androids, but
they're a species, too. They've survived without
killing. Doesn't something about that make you jealous?
Don't you wish we could say the same? Don't you
wish Homo sapiens could face the universe and
honestly say, "We do not kill? We don't
enslave. We don't make war"8greater-than
  "I don't make the rules," I said. "I
didn't start this war. Humans didn't start this
war. Look, I don't want to make this
personal, but I know the name Matcom. My dad
is involved in some work with them. And the other day Tom
..." I shot a glance at Jake.
"His brother was on me to come to The Sharing and bring
my father. The Sharing
is targeting my dad, and now we know why. So for
me, it's simple: If we take this Pemalite
crystal,
maybe my dad isn't involved with Matcom any
more. And maybe the Yeerks find someone else
to infest."
No one had an answer to that. I knew they
wouldn't.
Cassie walked down to the far end of the barn
and came back carrying a small cage.
"Total darkness, can't touch walls, floor, or
ceiling, and you have to travel through a room
strung with sensitive wires you can't even see."
She held up the cage. "Meet the animal that can
do all that."
It was no larger than a small rat with its leathery
wings folded back.
"Cool," I said. "First I'm Spiderman, now
I
get to be Batman."
I thought for once we'd get a chance to practice
with the bat morph. We were planning to go after the
Pemalite crystal the next weekend.
Plenty of time to plan and prepare.
  Yeah, right.
  "Marco?" My dad yelled up the stairs to my
room, where I was desperately trying to figure out
some math homework.
  "Yeah?"
  "Phone."
  ""X" equals point oh-three-nine," I
reminded myself so I wouldn't lose my place. I
went out into the hall to grab the upstairs phone.
"Point oh-three-nine. Yeah, who is it?"
  "Hi, Marco. It's me, Erek."
"Oh, hi, Erek, what's up?" I hoped he would
remember our phones could be bugged.
  "Not much," he said, sounding very convincingly human.
"I was just thinking, though, you know that thing we were going to do
next weekend? Why don't we just do it tonight
instead?"
  I knew what the "thing" was. And I knew
Erek wasn't calling on a whim. Something had gone
wrong. I swallowed my heart, which had jumped up
into my throat. "Okay. Maybe I'll call
Jake and see if he wants to do it, too."
  "That'd be excellent," Erek said. "Later,
man."
  I hung up the phone and thought seriously about
pretending I hadn't gotten the call. I mean,
I wanted to do this. It was important, life and
death. But it was like something out of
Mis
sion: Impossible.
And without planning or practice, it was beyond
impossible.
  Plus, I had homework to do.
  I picked up the phone and called Jake. Four
hours later, with all of our parents asleep in their
beds, we met at Cassie's barn. All of us,
including Ax. Erek arrived last.
  He didn't waste time with small talk.
"There's a problem. The Yeerks are putting in a
brand new security system on top of the existing
systems. I don't think it's active yet, but
I can't find out what it is."
less-than Fine. We can wait a few weeks
till you can get the detailseagreater-than Tobias
said.
  "The crystal is already so well protected that
any new system may put it beyond our grasp for
good," Erek said. "And don't forget -- the Yeerks
are racing to use this crystal to create a
computer system so powerful it can take over every computer
on Earth. They're not there yet. But the longer we
wait. . ."
  "Oh, man, this sucks," I said. "No
planning? No preparation? Just go in and hope for the
best?"
  "I'll tell you everything I know," Erek said.
"Listen carefully. It's not too complicated."
  For a few seconds we sort of teetered on the
edge. We weren't sure what to do. Erek wanted us
to go in, obviously. But he had his own interests, which
might not be the same as ours.
  It was the worst possible situation. Any one of
our parents could wake up and discover we were not at
home. That would mean frantic phone calls back
and forth from our folks to our friends' parents, calls to the
cops, probably search teams out beating the woods.
  "Go or don't go?" Jake asked.
  "Go," Rachel said, but with less enthusiasm than
usual. A lot less.
  "Go," I said. "But personally, I can't blame
anyone who wants to sit this one out."
Cassie gave me a dirty look. I guess
she took
it personally. "I say go," she said. "I
don't sit
anything out, Marco."
less-than l'm not in theagreater-than Tobias said.
less-than l'm useless
on this mission, so I don't vote. greater-than
less-than like go where Prince Jake
goeseagreater-than Ax said.
"Don't call me "prince,"" Jake said
wearily for the thousandth time. "Okay, we go."
Erek immediately began telling us all he knew about
Matcom and the security for the Pemalite crystal.
After about two minutes I was ready to
change my vote.
But by then it was too late. We'd made our
decision, and it was as if we were being swept toward a
waterfall
-
like a bunch of canoeists
who'd lost their last paddle. We'd survive
...
or
not
...
but one thing was sure. We were definitely going over
the edge.

"Q rek was not going with us. But he would
be waiting outside Matcom when we came out.
Assuming we came out.
We flew from Cassie's barn to the Matcom
building. It was one of those boring-looking,
three-story glass and cement buildings you see in
industrial parks everywhere. Just a bunch of blue
glass rectangles with a big parking lot in back.
In fact, it looked so much like every other bor
ing square building in the industrial park, we had
trouble finding it. We flew around, a lost gang of
owls, for a good fifteen minutes before Rachel
spotted the Matcom sign.
We landed on the roof of the building. Erek
had assured us there were no cameras or guards
up there.
"Let's find that pipe," Jake whispered as soon
as we were all human again. Or, in Ax's case,
An-
dalite.
"Erek said southwest corner, right?" I said.
"Astost8st8west," Cassie said.
She sounded sure, so I decided to agree.
"Yeah, that was it. Which way is northwest?"
Ax laughed in thought-speak, till he realized I
was serious. less-than You can't find
directions8greater-than He sounded shocked. Like
he'd just discovered we had hidden tail blades.
less-than lt's that corner over
there. greater-than
The pipe was about three inches in diameter.
"I hope this works," I said. "I don't even
know if my Spiderman can make silk."
"Spiderwoman," Cassie said. "Your spider
morph is female. Wolf spiders don't make
webs, but they do make silk. It should work."
"Easy for you say. I don't even know how to
turn on the silk thing."
But Ax was already morphing into the wolf spider, so I
hurried to catch up. By the time Ax
and I were in spider morph, the others had all be
come cockroaches.
less-than Man, you two are ugly at this
scaleeagreater-than Rachel said. less-than
Jeez, I don't ever need to see another spi
der my own size again. greater-than
less-than We're ugly? You want to know what
you
look like right now? You look like
dinnereagreater-than I said, laughing evilly.
less-than Juicy cockroach. This spider morph
is hungry, and you look tasty. greater-than
  less-than Marco, get a gripeagreater-than
Jake said patiently. less-than lancet's do this.
greater-than
  less-than l'll demorph and step on your ugly
butteagreater-than Rachel growled.
  From where I was standing in the gravel of the rooftop, the
pipe looked like a round skyscraper. It extended
above the roof by about a foot, which is quite a distance when
you're half an inch high.
  I scampered around the pipe. One side had been
splashed with tar. It would be easy to grip. I raced
easily up the pipe to stand precariously on the
lip.
  I could feel a breeze blowing up from the
blackness beneath me. It was like standing on the edge of the
Grand Canyon. The pipe went down through all
three stories and an extra underground story. Four
floors. Bad enough when you're human size. A
million miles when you're a spider.
  Ax came crawling up to teeter alongside me.
  less-than 0ooookayeagreater-than I said.
less-than Now comes the fun part.
greater-than
  I tried to search the spider brain, looking for the
subtle, secret signals that would start me spinning
silk.
Fortunately, the spider wasn't exactly
Albert Einstein. It only knew how to do about four
things, one of which was spin silk.
  The spider body sort of... well ... pushed
out a strand of gooey white filament. It stuck to the
edge of the pipe.
  Ax did the same.
  less-than Well, this is certainly
disgustingeagreater-than I said. less-than Ready,
Ax8greater-than
  less-than Yes. greater-than
  less-than Then . . .
Yeeeeee-Haaaaahhhffgreater-than
  I sprang from the lip of the pipe into the darkness.
It was so totally Spiderman.
  I fell slowly down, down, down, twisting and
turning my way down the pipe. Behind me a long
white string grew. It braked my fall, so that I
was dropping in slow motion. The spider eyes were not
bad at seeing in the relative dark. A bit of
moonlight followed us down part of the way as
we dropped.
  And then it started being fun. I kicked away from the
side of the pipe and cartwheeled through the air. My
web looped around Ax's, and soon we were weaving a
weird silk rope.
  It was cool in a way . . . till I felt a
certain emptiness.
  less-than Ax! I'm running out of web.
greater-than
  less-than Yes, me, too. greater-than
  less-than How far do you think we've
dropped8greater-than
less-than like don't know. greater-than
  less-than You know which way is northwest but you
don't know how far we've dropped? We could still have
two stories to geagreater-than I said.
  less-than like think our plan has a minor
flaweagreater-than Ax said with his usual understatement.
less-than But we are very light, small
creatures. We should survive a fall. So should the
others in cockroach morph. greater-than
  less-than Maybe. See, the problem is,
there's only one way to find out if we'll
survive. By dropping. greater-than
  Ax didn't say anything.
  less-than 0h, maneagreater-than I groaned.
I cut the strand of web.
  And I fell. Down through the darkness, toward a
landing I could only hope wouldn't kill me.
It was a long drop.
  less-than Aaaaahhhhhhhffgreater-than
  less-than Aaaaahhhhhhhffgreater-than
  WHAP! WHAP!
  We hit something hard. We bounced. We hit
again.
  WHAP! WHAP!
  less-than You okay8greater-than Jake called
down.
  less-than 0h, yeah, I'm greateagreater-than
I said. less-than like fell about a billion feet
and landed on a steel trampoline. Couldn't be
better. greater-than
  less-than Sarcasmeagreater-than Rachel commented
coolly. less-than He must be okay. greater-than
  less-than Laugh now, Rachel. We'll see
how much you laugh when it's
your
turn. greater-than
The plan was for Ax and me to create a silk cable the
others in cockroach morph would be able
to climb down. That way, they wouldn't all have to go
spider. Not that it would have helped, anyway.
  less-than We're coming downeagreater-than Jake
said. less-than When we reach the end of the silk
we'll jump. If you two survived, we will.
Nothing kills a cockroach. greater-than
  less-than Why don't you stand right beneath me,
Marco8greater-than Rachel suggested. less-than
You can break my
  Ax and I scurried out of the way. A few
seconds later, after they had clambered down to the end
of our silk . . .
  WHAP! WHAP! WHAP! Three cockroaches
landed nearby.
  less-than Where are we8greater-than Jake
asked.
  less-than lt's pretty dark. Who
knows8greater-than I answered. less-than lt's a
heatingstair-conditioning vent, I guess. Erek said it
would be part of the furnace system. Supposedly we
go west a hundred feet or so, then drop down,
then go across the furnace, then down again, then right.
Then we're at the edge of the High Security
Room, where the real trouble starts. greater-than
  less-than Excuse me? Did someone
say furnace8greater-than Cassie asked.
  less-than Yeah. I said furnace. greater-than
  less-than Does it occur to any of you that the
furnace might actually come on8greater-than
Cassie said.
less-than Not till right this minuteeagreater-than
I said.
  less-than lt's not very cold oueagreater-than
Rachel pointed out.
  less-than 0kay, I've
seriously
changed my mindeagreater-than I said. less-than
Let's go home. greater-than
  Of course, no one listened to me. We scrabbled
along the steel floor, two spiders and three
cockroaches. Our rough claws seemed to make a
horrible din on the metal, scuffing and scratching.
But it probably wouldn't have sounded like anything to a
human.
  As we ran, there was more and more dust on the floor
of the vent. It was weird, like walking through dried
leaves. My eight legs kicked through it, and it
swirled behind me as I passed. Eventually the dust
became as thick as a carpet, although in reality it was
probably no more than a few
millimeters thick.
  Every ten feet or so there would be a grilled opening.
Through the massive upright bars I could see offices.
The light in the offices was very dim, just the glow of
computer screen savers and red or green function
lights. But it helped us to find our way through the
darkness of the vent.
  Then . . .
  less-than What's t8greater-than Rachel
yelled. She was the farthest back. less-than
Uh-oh. Something coming! I feel the vibrations!
Something bigffgreater-than
  She took off. I took off. We all took
off.
Now I could feel the vibrations, too. Quick,
confused-sounding footsteps. And a dragging sound, like
something was being hauled.
I ran. To my left, another spider. Ax.
Ahead of
me, two roaches, almost as big as I was.
Rachel
was just back to my right.
I couldn't exactly turn and glance over my
shoulder. I had no shoulder. And I had no
actual head to turn. So I paused,
spun around, and in
the dim light from a vent, I saw it.
Huge. Twenty times my size! A vast,
horrible
menace.
less-than Aratffgreater-than
I yelled. less-than lt's a RATFFGREATER-THAN
The thing I'd heard dragging was its naked tail and
furred abdomen. It was hungry, and it was after us.
And, unfortunately, it was faster than me.
  less-than Go! Go! Go! lt's
gainingffgreater-than I yelled.
We blew at top spider and cockroach speed.
Which seems really fast when you're an inch
long, but isn't really that many miles per hour. A
rat can do maybe five or six miles per hour.
A spider is lucky to break one mph.
less-than We'll have to morph backffgreater-than
Jake said.
less-than Not in hereffgreater-than Cassie
cried. less-than Not enough
room. greater-than
less-than Next venteagreater-than Jake said.
less-than We go out through the next vent. greater-than
The next vent was about ten feet away. I
couldn't turn around to look at the rat, but every hair
on my spider body told me it was just inches behind
me.
  Yet there was something else making my hair tingle,
too. Something about the breeze . . .
  less-than YAAHHHFFGREATER-THAN I heard
Jake yell.
  A split second later, my spider legs were
clawing air. It was like a Roadrunner cartoon.
I zoomed out into space, seemed to hang there with my
little feet motoring away, and then I fell.
  less-than 0h, yeseagreater-than Ax said
calmly. less-than Erek mentioned we had to go down
again. greater-than
WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!
  We hit steel again, and each impact sent dust
clouds swirling.
  less-than Keep runningffgreater-than Cassie
cried, and fortunately, for once, I didn't
argue.
  Buh-Booooom!
  The rat dropped behind us! It was still after us!
Fortunately, it was a little stunned by the impact,
whereas we were outta there!
  Suddenly, ahead of us, the steel floor
opened up again. But instead of a drop into darkness, there
was a weird, vast plain of jagged spires. Each
of the spires was steel, three times as tall as my
little spider body. Each metal spire opened at
the top. There were hundreds of them, all arranged in
perfect rows. A foul smell, something
my spider mind knew nothing about, came from this
field of spires.
  A weird, flickering glow lit the landscape.
In the eerie light, it looked like some awful
graveyard, with the spires like industrial-strength
gravestones or something. I mean, it was creepy.
  less-than What is th8greater-than I asked.
  less-than Let's just get going, all
right8greater-than Rachel suggested. less-than We
can sightsee some other time. greater-than
  I would never have walked into that "field" if the rat
hadn't been just two feet back and gaining again. I
didn't need spider senses to know there was danger
here. It screamed danger.
  I stuck out one spider leg and touched the top of the
nearest spire. Then another and another. I walked
from spire to spire, carefully, cautiously. The
cockroaches crawled and squirmed through the valleys
between spires. Unable to stand normally, they
had to drag themselves inch by inch.
  less-than What is th8greater-than I asked
again.
  less-than You don't want to knoweagreater-than
Jake said grimly. less-than lancet's just get out
of here, okay8greater-than
  Right then it hit me. From the tone of Jake's
thought-speak voice.
  less-than 0h, man. This is the furnace,
isn't it? These spires . . . the holes in the
tops of them . . . it's where the gas comes
ouffgreater-than
  less-than Not if no one turns on the
heateagreater-than Rachel said grimly.
Over my head now, I saw the source of the
eerie glow. It was the pilot light. It was a jet
of
blue flame as long as my body. I could feel the
heat from it, even though it seemed to be as far
above my head as the ceiling of a cathedral.
The rat, smarter than we were, decided to stop at
the edge of the furnace. But there was no going back.
We had to cross the furnace. We had
to hope the Matcom Corporation was into energy
conservation and didn't waste heat. We had
to
pray that no one had messed with the thermo
stat.
Because if the heat came on
...
  HISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!
  less-than Gasffgreater-than
The gas blew with hurricane force up through the tops
of the spires. In seconds the gas would
rise to the pilot light. In seconds the entire
land
scape would erupt in flame!
I thought I'd been moving as fast as I could
move.
I was wrong. I had a whole extra speed.
Ahead of me I saw Jake, Rachel, and Ax
all reach safety. Only Cassie and I were still
deadly inches away from safety.
  less-than RUN! RUN!
RUNRUNRUNRUNFFGREATER-THAN
  HISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!
  Then . . . WHOOOOOOSH!
Fuh-Wwwuuuummmp!
The whole world seemed to explode around
me. A wall of flame
...
a hurricane of hot air.
I was blown head over heels, somersaulting
through air as hot as an oven.
JL somersaulted backward, hit steel floor
again, and screeched like a skidding car. I plowed
straight into Jake, and a split second later,
Cassie plowed straight into me.
  less-than Cassie! Cassie! Are you
okay8greater-than Jake asked.
  less-than Yes, yes. I think so. Who can
tell with this roach body8greater-than
  less-than l'm okay, tooeagreater-than I said.
less-than You know, just in case anyone cares.
greater-than
  less-than like guess they like to keep this building
nice and warm, eh8greater-than Rachel said.
  less-than That was very close to being a
disastereagreater-than Ax said. less-than We should
thank the rat. If he had not chased us, we would have
been crossing those gas jets several seconds
later. greater-than
That was not a nice picture to think of. We would have
fried, sizzled, and popped open faster than we could
even try to think about de-morphing.
  less-than That would have left a big wad of
Marco mass floating in Z-spaceeagreater-than
I muttered. I could joke about it, but I was
quivering inside.
  The rest of the trip through the heating and air-conditioning
system was calm. But that just gave me time to think about
the close call. One second slower, and I'd have
gone out as a roasted spider.
  less-than There are walls up hereeagreater-than
Jake warned from the head of our little pack of singed
bugs. less-than No, wait, not walls. Like a
maze. Like Erek said. greater-than
  We traveled through a series of switchbacks,
around a steel panel, then back around another. It
was a light-blocking system. It would block out every
last photon of light that might come through the vent.
  Then we came to the edge of a drop. Beyond it, I
knew, was the High Security Room itself -- the
location of the Pemalite crystal.
  We were six feet up. We had to drop, and then
stay within two feet of the wall. Any movement
farther toward the center of the huge room, and we would
set off pressure sensors in the floor.
  By this time, we were used to falling.
  less-than Next I want to try
jumping out of a plane.
Without a parachuteeagreater-than I said as I stepped
into
the black void.
It is an eerie experience falling in total dark
ness. You have no idea where the floor is. It's
al
most like you're not falling at all. Until you hit
the bottom, that is.
less-than Stay close to the walleagreater-than
Jake reminded everyone. less-than Hug the wall
and demorph. greater-than
I was relieved to be human again. But my human
eyes were no better than spider eyes at pen
etrating the darkness. It was darker than any
night. Darker than hiding in a closet at
midnight.
This was the darkness of being buried alive.
"There could be six Hork-Bajir standing three
inches away, and we wouldn't know it," I said, in a
whisper that seemed to be deadened by the
darkness itself.
"That's a nice thought," Rachel said dryly.
less-than Even a single photon of light would
set off
the light sensorseagreater-than Ax said. less-than
This is complete
darkness. greater-than
"And according to Erek, if we stepped two feet away
from the wall, we'd run into a maze of
ultrasensitive wires. Any contact and the alarm
goes off. We have to travel forty feet without
touching a wire. Without touching the floor or ceiling
or walls," Jake reminded us.
"Let's morph. We'll be able to see then,"
Cassie said. "Or maybe not see, exactly, but
you know what I mean."
  What she meant was that we would be able
to echolocate. Kinda like the dolphin morph. We
would be able to make very fast, ultrahigh sounds that the
human ear would not even hear.
  Those sounds would vibrate off any solid
object and send back a sort of sound picture.
  At least, that's what we hoped. We had been
planning to practice and find out if it was true.
Instead, we were morphing without any knowledge of what we were
getting into.
  "Someday we'll think all this is funny," I
said. "You know, if we happen to live long enough."
  I focused my mind on the bat morph
we had each acquired. They aren't as creepy as people
think. Certainly not as creepy as morphing a
spider. This particular bat was very small, just a few
inches long. It looked like a mouse, with huge ears
and the face of a Pekinese dog. If you forgot about the
leathery wings, it was just another basic mammal.
  But this was one case where the weirdness wasn't
something you saw. I couldn't see anything. Nothing.
I couldn't see myself shrinking, the ground rushing up
at me. I couldn't see the way my legs shrank
to almost nothing and brown fur sprouted from my body.
I couldn't see the way
my fingers grew so long and a paper-thin leather web
filled the spaces between them.
  I saw none of it. I didn't even know I was
a bat, until my bat brain sent an order for
me to open my mouth and chirp out a pulse of sound.
  I fired a string of superfast sound pulses. Like
making a loud machine-gun sound, only a lot
higher, and way, way faster.
  And then . . .
  less-than Whoa, hoffgreater-than I said.
  The entire black, pitch-black, invisible
room, had just lit up.
  It wasn't like seeing, exactly. It was
like . . . like feeling, almost. Except it was like you were
feeling from a distance. I
felt
a vast room. I
felt
thousands of wires strung taut, up and down, left
to right, at angles.
  And, at the center of the room, beyond the maze of
wires, I
felt
a raised, flat surface, and a sort of pedestal.
There were curling wires coming from the top of the pedestal.
  All that came in a flash. Then it was gone. The
others each fired off their own echolocating blasts,
but I couldn't
feel
their sounds as clearly.
  less-than 0kay,
that
is cooleagreater-than Rachel said. less-than
That is way cool. greater-than
  less-than The wires seem awfully close
togethereagreater-than Cassie worried. less-than like
wish we'd had time to try out
these wings. I guess all we can do is
hope for the best. Trust the bat to do the flying.
greater-than
  less-than Abandon yourself to the Force, Cassie
Sky-walker caret I said.
  less-than Thanks, Darth. You first. greater-than
less-than Me
first? Oh. greater-than Suddenly, I didn't
feel at all like laughing. I licked my lips with
my little bat tongue. Assuming I had lips. I
wasn't sure.
  I opened my wings. I spread them wide and
thought,
Well, this should be interesting.
I tested the wings cautiously. They moved
differently than bird wings. More like I was reaching out
with each stroke to grab the air and push it behind me.
  less-than 0kay. Here goes. greater-than
  I fired an echolocating burst and took off.
  Fired again! There were tight strings all around me!
  Left!
  Left again!
  Down!
  No, up!
  Right, left, right, right, straight up!
  Again and again the high-pitched sound machine
gun fired. Again and again I dodged, millimeters
from a wire.
  It was insane! It was so fast my human brain was
three steps behind. It was instantaneous. It
was impossible! The speed, the agility, the instant
translation of the echolocating blasts.
  And suddenly, I was through! I was through the wires.
  I landed on the table in the center of the room. It was
all over in ten seconds of lunatic flight.
  less-than 0kay, now
that
is a roller-coaster ride! Yesffgreater-than I
said, incredibly jazzed from having made it.
less-than Yesffgreater-than
  The others came, one by one. I could watch them
fly, seeing them in my echolocating flashes.
  Everyone made it. And we were feeling pretty good
about it, too. It was a rush.
  less-than We did xffgreater-than I said.
  less-than These bats can flyffgreater-than
Rachel added.
  less-than ls that the crystal8greater-than
Cassie asked.
  Ax fired a burst and said, less-than That must
be it. greater-than
  It was no bigger than a grape. It rested on a
small pedestal. Wires -- not the sensor wires,
but curling electrical-type wires, edged in all
around it. But the crystal itself was not attached to anything.
It just lay there, where anyone could grab it.
  It made a low sort of humming noise. I know
it makes no sense, but it was almost like that crystal was
alive.
  less-than Um ... I have a stupid
questioneagreater-than I said. less-than How do we
grab this thing8greater-than
For about ten seconds, no one said a word.
  less-than We don't have handseagreater-than
Cassie said, pointing out the obvious.
  less-than We can grab it in our
mouthseagreater-than Rachel said. less-than Right?
Bats eat moths and stuff. They must have pretty
strong jaws. Strong enough to get that crystal back to the
air vent. greater-than
  less-than 0h, duh. Of courseeagreater-than
Jake said, sounding relieved. less-than l'll do
it. greater-than
  less-than like believe that may not workeagreater-than
Ax said.
  less-than Jake8greater-than Cassie
said. less-than Jake? If you have a crystal in
your mouth, how do you fire the echolo-cating
burst8greater-than
  At which point we were suddenly no longer fee I
ing so good.
  less-than like believe our plan now has somewhat
of a flaweagreater-than Ax said quietly.
  less-than See? We should never get
cockyeagreater-than Cassie said. less-than lt's
tempting the irony gods. greater-than
  less-than Irony gods8greater-than Ax
asked.
  less-than Yeaheagreater-than Cassie said.
less-than The bitter spirits who wait around till you
get cocky, then hammer you. greater-than
  less-than These are
real8greater-than
  less-than No, of course neagreater-than
Cassie said impatiently. less-than How do we
get out of here with that crystal8greater-than
  less-than We power our way oueagreater-than
Rachel said.
  Ax said, less-than Erek's opinion was that there
were many guards here in this building. greater-than
  less-than We didn't see any on
our way through the shaftseagreater-than Jake remarked.
less-than But Erek's been pretty
accurate so far. I have a feeling if he says there
are guards here, there are
guards
here.greater-than
  less-than No choiceeagreater-than Rachel said.
less-than We morph whatever we have that's big,
mean, and nasty, then slam our way out of this place.
greater-than
  less-than Speaking of irony godseagreater-than
I muttered.
  less-than What do you mean8greater-than Rachel
asked.
  less-than like mean, we came here to get this
Pemalite crystal so the Chee could be free to be
violent. And now, despite all our clever
planning, all our sneakiness and subtlety, we're
stuck in the end going for total Schwarzenegger.
greater-than
  less-than Rachel's righteagreater-than Jake
said. He sighed. less-than We're looking at a
fighting retreat. greater-than
  Cassie said, less-than like think there's a door
over there. Try echolocating. You'll see
a raised rectangular outline. I think it's a
door. greater-than
  less-than Yepeagreater-than Jake agreed.
less-than Morph out, keep that direction in mind.
Remorph, and be ready to haul butt for that door.
Head for any way out of this building. Don't stand and
fight, just try to force your way past anyone who comes
after us. greater-than
  It was times like this I was glad Jake was our
so-called leader. We all knew what we had to do,
but someone had to actually
say
it. And boy, was I glad it wasn't me.
  less-than like have such a bad feeling about
theagreater-than I muttered.
Have you ever watched those old war movies where the
Americans would be heading for some enemy beach? You
know, they'd be in a little boat, riding through the surf,
getting ready to jump out on a beach that was going to be
chewed up by machine-gun bullets and mortars?
  That's what this felt like. Like we were pretty calm
now, but in a few seconds it was going to be life and
death. Things would happen very fast. And none of it was
going to be good.
  I morphed back to human. Then I
focused my mind on the morph I liked for
fighting.
  It was still absolutely dark, so I didn't see
my body grow big and hairy. But I could feel
my shoulders bulk up beyond anything any
bodybuilder ever even dreamed of. I could feel the
strength. Strength like no human could ever possess.
It was comforting to think that I was stronger than three,
four, maybe five strong men. But not even the
gorilla is invincible.
  less-than Everyone ready8greater-than Jake
asked.
  There in the darkness, near enough to touch, but invisible, was
enough power to shred a small army. Jake was in his tiger
morph. Cassie had gone wolf. Rachel was one
of the few animals mightier than my gorilla:
She was a full-grown, massively powerful
grizzly bear. And Ax ... well, Ax was Ax.
And trust me, when you've seen an
Andalite in battle, you know that tail is all he
needs.
less-than Ready? Why, I'm looking forward
to xeagreater-than I
said, trying to sound like I wasn't scared silly.
less-than l'll go firsteagreater-than
Rachel said. And before anyone had time to object . .
.
  HHHRRRRRAAAAWWWWRRR!
Rachel barreled past me, hitting me and
practically spinning me around like a top.
A microsecond later. . .
ScreeEEEEET! ScreeEEEEET!
ScreeEEEEET!
The alarm was deafening.
The others barreled after her. I hesitated for
just a moment while I felt in the dark for the Pe-
malite crystal. Aside from Ax, I was the only
one with hands.
Then I went after them. I plunged wildly into
total darkness with a tiny crystal in my massive
fist.
Rachel tore a path through the alarm wires, and I
could feel where she had gone. I slammed
into Ax, then bounced into Jake, then sud
denly
-
WHAM!
-
hit the wall.
ScreeEEEEET! ScreeEEEET!
ScreeEEEET!
Ka-Rrrrunch! A loud, screeching, tearing
noise.
Sudden light! I could see.
Man, it was a relief to be able to see some
thing at least.
Dim light came through the door. Or what was left
of the door, after Rachel had given the door a thousand
pounds or so of mad, ready-to-fight grizzly.
The door was splinters. It was steel, and it was
still
splinters.
  I saw a flash of orange and black, moving
fast but almost delicately -- Jake, in tiger
morph. Cassie the wolf followed him. Right behind
her was the one animal that wasn't from anywhere on
Earth.
  There was a hallway outside. Jake said
less-than Leftffgreater-than and we went left.
  Past doorways, past offices, past normal
things like copiers and computers and fax machines and
desks and cubicles, we ran. Rachel was in the
lead, a huge, lumbering truck on four legs.
Her roars mixed with the endless scream of the alarms.
  ScreeEEEEET! ScreeEEEEET!
ScreeEEEEET!
  Suddenly, another door, a dead end. Rachel
hit it with her shoulder, and the door was gone. There was a
big room beyond. High ceilings, open space, a
lobby sort of room. Windows! I could see faint
stars through the tinted glass.
  Escape was just a hundred feet away.
  Freedom! Life!
  And all that stood in our way was twenty men:
human-Controllers, armed with automatic rifles.
  And behind them, two dozen or more Hork-Bajir
warriors.
Rachel's bear had very poor vision, especially in
this dim light. less-than
Hork-Bajir8greater-than she asked. less-than
Yepeagreater-than I said. less-than How
many8greater-than less-than Too many. Way too
many. greater-than

  DcreeEEEET! ScreeEEEEET!
ScreeEEEET!
  The alarm was howling. And then, a far worse sound:
  Cha-Klick!
  The human-Controllers had cocked their rifles,
chambering a round. If they fired, we'd be
blown apart before we could twitch.
  A human-Controller stepped out in front. She
was a nice-looking, middle-aged woman wearing
normal street clothes. She had bleached blond
hair. She could have been someone's grandmother.
  "S. The Andalite bandits," she said. Her
face was twitching with tension, but she tried to sound
calm. "You've done me a big favor. When I
turn you over to Visser Three he'll promote
me two grades. Maybe three!"
  less-than 0r he may decide to destroy you
for letting us get this fareagreater-than Ax said
coolly.
  "Surrender. You can't escape," the woman
snapped. "I'd rather take you alive, but the Visser
would still be happy to have your corpses."
  We stared at her. And we stared at the muzzles
of the twenty automatic rifles that were leveled at
us.
  I held up my hand. Between my thick, brute
fingers I held the Pemalite crystal.
  The woman turned as pale as her hair.
"Give me that."
  I shook my big gorilla head.
  "Lower those guns," the woman snapped.
  "What?" some guy behind her yelled. "We have them!
We have them cold!"
  The woman's jaw twitched again, but she stayed in
control. "What do you think a bullet would do to that
crystal?"
  "But the odds that a bullet would hit the crystal
... It's not going to happen."
  The woman smiled grimly. "That crystal is
worth more than the mother ship and everything in it," she said.
Then she started yelling. "You want to shoot? Go
ahead, fool! If you hit the crystal, you can
explain it to Visser Three."
  She got a grip on herself while the guy who
had spoken out decided he was not interested in
explaining anything to Visser Three.
  "All human-Controllers, back. Weapons
on safety," the woman snapped.
  The rifles faltered, then lowered toward the ground.
But I knew better than to breathe a sigh of
relief. See, I knew what was coming next.
  The woman looked right at me and smiled.
"Hork-Bajir, forward."
  The Andalite who'd given us our powers had told
us that the Hork-Bajir had once been a gentle,
decent race before they were all enslaved by the
Yeerks. All Hork-Bajir were Controllers
now.
  But it was hard to believe the Hork-Bajir had
ever been the sweethearts of the galaxy. They were death
on two legs: seven feet tall, eight, if you
counted the forward-raked blades that protruded from the
top of their snake-heads. They had blades at their
elbows, blades at their wrists, blades at their
knees. They had huge claw-feet like
tyrannosaurs, and a short, thick tail that ended in
cruel-looking spikes.
  They were walking razor blades. All sharp
edges and lightning speed.
  I've fought Hork-Bajir before. And I can
count. Two dozen Hork-Bajir was at least a
dozen more than we had any hope of defeating.
  Then, behind the Hork-Bajir, beyond the retreating
human-Controllers, outside the building,
staring horror-stricken through the glass, I saw
Erek.
  Erek, who could do nothing at all to help us. Who
was helpless to do anything but witness our slaughter. I
felt like throwing up. The fear was all over me. The
fear was surging through me, washing over me, drowning me
from inside and out.
  We were going to lose.
  We were going to die.
  And life, any kind of life almost, is so much
better than being dead.
  "Attack," the woman said. Her voice was
nearly a whisper.
  The Hork-Bajir leaped forward, a wall of
slashing, whirling blades.
  Right in front of me!
  SEEEEWWW!
  A huge Hork-Bajir slashed and a bright red
line cut across my black leather chest!
  I swung my fist and hit the Hork-Bajir
hard enough to fold him in two. But another leaped over
him and came at me. I blocked his arm, but he
kicked at me with his clawed foot.
  I fell back. I looked down and saw a
hole in my stomach.
  A hole! I could see the gorilla's insides!
My insides. My insides!
  less-than Ahhhhhffgreater-than I screamed in
thought-speak, as the gorilla bellowed in agony.
The Hork-Bajir leaped on top of me. I
swung again and knocked his legs out from under him. He
toppled down, but landed beside me. My left
hand went to his throat and I squeezed. I
squeezed with all the strength I had. The
Hork-Bajir slashed at me again and opened a gash
in my hairy arm. But I kept my grip tight.
  I screamed as the Hork-Bajir twitched and
scrabbled wildly and began to jerk
uncontrollably.
  The battle raged all around me.
  Screams. Cries. Bellows of animal
rage. The garbled roars of the Hork-Bajir. Even
the guttural roar of the human-Controllers, who
watched and cheered the Hork-Bajir on.
  I saw Jake leap through the air and close his
jaws around a Hork-Bajir's face.
  I saw Rachel swing her paw and open up a
Hork-Bajir like someone cleaning a fish.
  I saw Cassie dodging swiftly, biting,
backing away, lunging to bite again, red foam flying
from her muzzle.
  And Ax, striking again . . . again . . . again with the
deadly speed and perfect accuracy of his Andalite
tail.
  But we were losing. It would be over in a few
seconds. We were losing.
  less-than 0h, Godffgreater-than
someone screamed. Maybe it was me, I don't know.
less-than Help! Help! Get him off
meffgreater-than
  less-than Look ouffgreater-than
  less-than No! Noooooffgreater-than
  It was all one combined thought-speech scream.
  And still the alarm howled its screeEEEEET!
  I felt my grip weaken on the throat of the
Hork-Bajir. But it didn't matter anymore.
It was safe to let him go.
  My vision was red. Red and fading.
  I felt a sharp stab as another Hork-Bajir
sunk a blade into my gorilla heart.
  None of it mattered, though. It was all coming to an
end ... all coming to an end. . . .
  Through a red mist I saw a face on the other
side of the glass. Erek. Somehow, in the battle,
I had ended up not far from the wall of windows.
  Erek was just a few feet away. Just on the other
side of the glass.
  I felt something hard in my palm. The crystal.
  I crawled. A vicious Hork-Bajir
kick, and I went sprawling right against the glass.
  less-than 0h . . . noeagreater-than I said.
I could see the damage the kick had done.
I was dead. I could feel my brain shutting down.
  Human-Controllers were closing in around me,
hammering me with the butts of their rifles.
  With my last ounce of strength, I rammed my
fist through the glass.
I felt strong fingers pry open my hand. I felt
the fingers lift out the crystal.
And then . . . later, much later, someone
slapped my face.
"Morph back, Marco. Morph back! Do it!"

  -L woke up on the ground. Not a floor, the
ground. Dirt and leaves.
  I sat up very fast. I looked at my body.
  "Human!" I said. I wanted to cry from the sheer
relief of being myself again. Myself and alive.
  I looked around. Jake. Cassie. Rachel.
Ax. All there! All human! Except for Ax,
of course.
  Tobias was perched in the tree above us.
  Someone else was there, too. I heard a voice
sobbing.
  "You okay, Marco?" Jake asked.
  "Yeah. Yeah. Oh, man. Man, I was so
close to being dead!"
"You were," Jake said solemnly. "He gave you
an electric shock to start your heart again."
  "Who did?"
  Jake jerked his head toward the source of the crying.
It was Erek, sitting in the dirt with his head down.
  "Where are we?" I asked.
  "Little bunch of trees, just down from Mat-corn.
Or what's left of Matcom."
  "How did we get here? How did we get out of
that place? We were toast!"
  Cassie came over and sat beside me. "You saved
us by getting the crystal to Erek. He used it. He
rewrote his programming. He's the one who . .
." She looked away. "He . . ."
  "He took care of the Hork-Bajir," Rachel
said. "I saw some of it. I was still conscious."
  I was confused. "How did Erek take care of the
Hork-Bajir?"
  less-than He destroyed them alleagreater-than
Ax said.
  I almost laughed. "Erek took out two dozen
Hork-Bajir?"
  No one laughed with me. Erek had stopped sobbing.
I thought,
Why would a robot cry?
  less-than AII the Hork-Bajireagreater-than
Ax said. less-than AII the
human-Controllers. All of them. greater-than
  I stood up. I could see the Matcom
building. It was only a few hundred yards
away. There was a big hole in the front glass.
I had a very bad feel-
ing about what was on the other side of that glass.
  All I could think of to say was,
"All
of them?"
  "It lasted about ten seconds," Rachel said.
She closed her eyes, trying not to remember what
she had seen. But I guess the images weren't
easily shut out. She opened her eyes again, and to my
utter amazement, I saw tears.
  That's what brought the horror home to me --
Rachel's tears.
  less-than lt was extremely
brutaleagreater-than Ax said. less-than Very
brutal, and very swift. He carried us here. He
revived you. He even reattached my arm.
greater-than
  I saw a scar on Ax's left arm.
  "He hasn't said anything since then,"
Cassie said sadly. "He won't talk to any of
us."
  "He saved us, though, right?" I said.
  "Yeah," Cassie agreed, smiling a deeply
sad smile. "He saved our lives. And lost his
own soul."
  I went to Erek. I wanted to thank him. I
wanted to tell him he'd done what was right. He'd
beaten the bad guys. Saved the good guys.
  He stood up as I came over.
  "You okay, man?" I asked him.
  He looked at me with holographic human
eyes. Maybe he had to
choose
to make them cry. Maybe he had to choose to give
them that empty, hollow look. I don't know what
the connection is
between the android Chee and his projected human body.
But his expression answered my question.
  No. Erek was not okay.
  "You saved our lives, Erek," I said.
  "How do you . . . how do you live with the memory?"
he asked me.
  I knew what he meant. See, win or lose,
right or wrong, the memory of violence
sits inside your head. It sits there, like some lump
you can't quite swallow. It sits there, a black hole
that darkens hope, and eats away at everyday
happiness like a cancer. It's the shadow you take
into your own heart and try to live with.
  I shrugged. "I guess I try not to think about
it. I try and forget. And after a while, the
nightmares don't happen as much."
  Erek put a finger to his head. "Android," he
said. He made a bitter, ruined smile. "I
can't forget. See? I can never forget . . .
anything."
  I looked at him. Already in my own human
mind, the memories of that night's horror were
fading. The flash of blades and the pain and the sickening
feeling of my fist closing around the
Hork-Bajir's throat . . . they were being covered
over by scar tissue.
  What if I could never forget?
  What if all those memories were fresh forever?
I realized then why the Pemalites had forbidden their
creatures to kill. The Chee lived forever. Forever was
a long time to remember what Erek had done.
  "I'm sorry," I said.
  Erek nodded. "Yes." He held out his
clenched fist, palm down. I knew what he was
doing. I didn't want it. But I held out my
own hand, and took the Pemalite crystal from him.
  "I've changed my programming back," Erek
said. "We ... I ... maybe at times I can
tell you things. Information. But I'll never fight
again. I can't join this war, my friend."
  He walked away. We went to our homes and
crawled into beds our parents never knew we'd
left.
  I was beyond exhausted. But I couldn't sleep.
Too many images. Too many memories. And I
was afraid of the nightmares.
  There are evil things in life, and I guess there
are times when a human being has to fight those evils.
  I closed my eyes and wandered lost and afraid
through my nightmares.
  And already, my mind was forgetting.
Teah! Yeah! Go boy!"
  Homer ran flat out, kicking up divots of sand
as the Frisbee soared over his head. With a burst of
speed, Homer got out in front of the Frisbee,
jumped, pivoted in midair, and snatched the disc
out of the air. His jump carried him to the water's edge
and he landed in the surf.
  "Yeah! Good boy!" Jake said.
  "Not bad," I said. "He's not quite that Frisbee
dog we saw on TV, but he's not bad."
  "Hey, that was a
professional
Frisbee dog. Homer's just in it for the sport.
Homer doesn't even have any endorsements."
  Homer came trotting back across the sand with the
Frisbee in his mouth.
It was a week after our battle for the Pemalite
crystal. Jake and I were at the beach. Tobias was
high overhead, riding the thermals. I didn't know
where the others were.
  And my hair had finally grown out a little. But
I'd gotten used to having it shorter. I decided
to keep it that way, just to spite everyone.
  There weren't that many people on the beach because it was a little
too chilly for lying out. Instead, people came down and
flew kites, or walked along, looking for sand
dollars and shells. And they played with their dogs.
  Jake knelt down and tried to take the
Frisbee from Homer. But Homer, like just about every dog
in all of history, refused to give it up.
  "They just don't get the point of this whole
game," I said. "You throw, they catch,
they bring it back for you to throw again. Why is that so
hard to figure out?"
  Jake scratched right behind Homer's ear, and
Homer dropped the Frisbee. "Oh, they know how
to play the game, all right," Jake said with a laugh.
"For them, the game is "I throw, they catch, they
bring it back, they get a good head scratch,
then
they give up the Frisbee.""
  But just then, Homer lost all interest in the
Frisbee. Two dogs were trotting by, tails in
the air. Homer jogged over to greet them. They
sniffed each other by way of introduction, then took
off,
running like the giddy, happy, always-excited, dog
goofs they were.
  It made me smile to watch them.
  "It must have been a nice place," I said.
  Jake knew exactly what I was talking about.
"Yeah. A planet where the people were as sweet and
decent as dogs. Yeah, that would have been okay."
  "I ran into Erek at the 7-Eleven yesterday,"
I said. "I think he was looking for a place to
"accidentally" run into me. Anyway, he gave
me a phone number. He says it's an
absolutely safe phone. He says the Yeerks
couldn't tap it or trace it if they tried."
  "Yeah? So?" Jake asked.
  I shrugged. "So, he says if we ever need him
we could leave a message at that number. And if
he has something to tell us, he'll record a
message for us."
  "Huh," Jake grunted. "Think anything will ever
come of it?"
  "I don't know," I said honestly. "But I
think the Chee are going to go on fighting the Yeerks.
They'll just be doing it in their own way."
  I reached into my pocket and drew out the small,
diamondlike crystal. "I still have this, by the way.
I don't know what to do about it. Erek didn't even
want to talk about it. But this is the
most powerful computer ever created. It could rewrite
the Ghees' programming. It could take over every
computer on Earth. The Pemalite crystal. We
almost died getting it. What am I supposed to do with
it?"
  Jake and I stood there, looking down at more power
than any human had ever held in his hand.
  Suddenly, I realized we weren't alone.
  Homer and the other two dogs were standing right
in front of us, watching us. I know this sounds
crazy, but I swear some flicker of intelligence
appeared in those laughing dog eyes.
  The three of them looked at us, and we looked
back.
  I held out my hand, palm up, to show the dogs the
crystal. Homer scarfed the crystal out of my hand as
if it were a dog biscuit. But he didn't
swallow it, just held it in his teeth, where it
glittered like a diamond.
  The three dogs turned and ran down the beach.
They ran into the surf and splashed out into the water,
paddling for a dozen feet or so.
  Then they came back to shore, and had a glorious
time shaking themselves violently and spraying water all
over two old ladies who were hunting shells.
  Maybe someday the Pemalite crystal will wash
back up on some beach somewhere. Maybe
by the time it does, we'll be as wise as the race that
created it.
  "Homer!" Jake yelled. He threw the
Frisbee.
  And all three of the dogs, happy, silly,
loving fools that they were, went racing after it.
Don't; miss
TM
8:42 P.m.
  It was crowded inside the Bug fighter.
Especially because Ax takes up a lot of room.
  But we huddled together and looked over Ax's
shoulders as he worked the controls. And we looked
past Ax, out through the transparent panels at the
front of the Bug fighter.
  less-than This ship is very difficult
to handleeagreater-than Ax said. less-than The
design is strange. Some controls are
psychotronic. But others require physical
handling. Unfortunately, those controls are designed
for Taxxons. They have more hands than like. greater-than
  "Can we do anything to help?" I asked.
  less-than Someone should take the weapons
stationeagreater-than Ax said.
  "Cool," Marco said. He leaped forward, but I
was closer.
  I slipped into the area beside Ax. Ax's pilot
"seat" wasn't a seat at all, of course.
Taxxons are like huge centipedes, so they can't
really sit. Which was good, because Ax doesn't sit,
either.
  But the weapons station was built for
Hork-Bajir. Hork-Bajir are seven feet
tall and have thick, spikey tails, but they do sit.
  "No
way
you should handle the weapons," Marco said, leaning over
my shoulder. "I kick your butt in video
games."
  "Yeah, right," I said. "In some alternate
universe, maybe."
  "Grab the joystick," Marco suggested.
  As strange as it seems, there actually was a
joystick. It was for much bigger hands than mine, and the
two buttons on it were clumsy to reach. But it was a
joystick.
  "Maybe I should test the weapons," I said
to Ax.
  less-than Yeseagreater-than he said tersely,
distracted.
  We were rising up through the atmosphere. We were
above the clouds already. I could see brief flashes
of the lights of the city down below, but mostly it was
clouds and more clouds.
  But we weren't rising as fast as I would have
expected. Ax was definitely working to control the
ship.
  I looked ahead, saw nothing in the way, and
pressed one of the buttons on the joystick.
Nothing.
Ax glanced over. less-than That was the safety.
The Dracon beam should be armed now. See the screen
before you? The red circle is how you aim. Use a
combination of moving the joystick, but also use your mind.
greater-than
  Marco put his hand on my shoulder. "Phasers
on full power!" he said in a Captain Picard
English accent. "Arm photon torpedoes! If the
Borg want a fight, we'll give them one!
Make it so!"
  I moved the joystick and watched the target
circle track across the screen. It still showed nothing
but starry sky. That should be safe enough.
  I squeezed the second button.
  TSEWWWW! TSEWWWW!
  Twin red beams of light fired forward, converging
too far away for me to see.
  "Yes! Most splendid!" Marco yelled.
  "Okay, that
was
cool,"
I admitted, trying not to cackle like an
idiot with his first video game.
  "Boys with their toys," Cassie teased gently.
  less-than Prince Jake8greater-than Ax said.
less-than like must apologize. greater-than
  "Why?"
  less-than like did not at first realize: This Bug
fighter's cloaking field is not working. greater-than
  It took a few seconds for me to track on
that. "You mean . . . people can see us?"
  less-than The clouds will hide us from people on the
groundeagreater-than Ax said. less-than But
human radar will observe us. In fact, they have already
observed us. greater-than
"Uh-oh. Maybe we better get higher," I
suggested.
  less-than Yes. But we are rising slowly. I
don't know why. And there are two objects
approaching us. greater-than
  "Probably just airliners," Rachel said.
  less-than The objects are moving at
one-and-a-half times the speed of soundeagreater-than
Ax said.
  "Okay, that's not a passenger plane," Marco
said.
  I groaned. "Military jets. Oh,
man, it's the Air Force after us. They're "good
guys." They're on our side. We can't shoot
them down."
  Suddenly . . .
  SWOOOOOSH!
  SWOOOOOSH!
  Two pale gray jets blew past us. The
backwash rattled the Bug fighter.
  less-than like can access their radio
signalseagreater-than Ax said. And a second later
we heard the voice of one of the pilots.
  "Urn . . . Base Control, I ... um
... Bogie is of an unknown type. Say again,
unknown type."
  "Definitely unknown," the other pilot said.
"Way unknown."
  "We're coming around for another pass."
  I looked at Ax. "We really don't want
to get shot down by a couple of F-sixteens."
  less-than No, Prince Jake. That would be
embarrassing. I believe I now know how to increase
comgreater-than
FAH-WHICH 0000000 M!
  Suddenly, we were outta there. Out of the clouds. Out
of the atmosphere.
  "Yes! This thing can move!" Marco exulted.
"We need to buy this game."
  We heard a fainter, crackling voice over the
radio. "Did you see that? Did you see that thing
move, Colonel? Did you see that? What the -"
  Then we were out of range, still zooming straight up
into black space. Below us I could see the
curvature of the earth. It looked just like one of those
pictures the shuttle astronauts take from up in
orbit.
  "That's so beautiful," Cassie said. "Look
at that! You can see daylight coming up over the Red
Sea."
  less-than Excuse meeagreater-than Tobias
said, less-than but I don't think the Red Sea
is exactly on the way to Washington, D.c.
greater-than
  "Yeah, I guess not," I said. Although it was such
a wonderful sight that I almost didn't want
to worry about where we were going. "Ax, maybe we'd
better slow down, get some idea of where Washington
is and -"
  less-than No! Noffgreater-than Ax snapped.
  I was shocked. Ax is always polite.
  less-than No, Prince
Jakeeagreater-than he said, a little more calmly.
less-than We cannot slow down. greater-than
  "What's the matter?" Cassie asked him.
Ax pointed at one of the view screens before him.
On the screen I saw stars. Then the moon came
into view, a vast gray-and-white lightbulb.
  And silhouetted against the glowing moon was a shape.
It was like some medieval battle-ax. The rear half
was a two-headed blade. From the middle, like an ax
handle, extended a long shaft. At the end of the
shaft was a triangular head, very much like an arrow's
point.
  It was black on black. And even if you had
never seen it before and had no idea what it was, you'd
know right away it was death.
  I
had seen
it. I stggnew what it was.
  "The Blade ship," I whispered.
  The Blade ship of Visser Three.






 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
